Our Wednesday Morning Women's Bible Study group dipped a toe into the book of Ruth this morning, a short interlude after the relatively long look at Corinthians we've taken. As we did so, I was reminded again of the importance of knowing what kind of literature you're reading when you take up various parts of the Bible. We did a whole study on this last fall, for good reason!
The Bible invites you to ask questions. What is faith but an exploration of the wonderful, mysterious, and very big relationship we have with God? The Bible is the field on which that exploration takes place. If we never ask a question while traversing its pathways we miss out on its meaning. It'd be like visiting a new place, walking right through it, and never bothering to stop, examine, or wonder about anything. Why did you visit in the first place?
While the potential for questions in the Bible as a whole is limited, each section is set up to answer different sorts of questions. Careful reading--coupled with a little foreknowledge about what kind of literature you're reading--will reveal what questions each book will answer best. Questions outside the scope of the story being told will be answered poorly or not at all...usually because the story itself finds them beside the point.
Contrast Ruth with the stories about King David and Solomon that follow immediately after in Chronicles and Kings. The characters in these books are connected, as Ruth and Naomi end up being related to David and Solomon. But Ruth is a narrative story, like a play or television show. Chronicles and Kings are histories, much as you'd find in a school textbook. The distinction is critical.
In a narrative story events exist to serve the characters. Think of the Star Trek TV shows, for instance. Why did that big space creature show up right in front of the ship? Well, because our good captain and crew needed a peril to work their way out of! The creature's appearance has little or nothing to do with scientific principles, though some may be used as window dressing to make the story seem more realistic. But if you start asking questions like, "Hey, there's no air in outer space to conduct sound, so how are the people on the ship hearing that creature threaten them?" you ruin the story. We're never going to get a good answer to that question. Events happen to move the narrative and its characters along...telling the greater story.
The opposite is true in a history. Here the characters only exist to illustrate the events. Consider the movie "Patton" or a documentary on that fine World War II general. Yes, we'll see some personality from him in order to make him interesting and relatable, but those personality traits only exist to hold our attention while we're waiting for the parts about the commanding and the battles and the victories. If Patton--with the same personality and all--had been a dishwasher instead of a general we'd not be seeing this film! The whole purpose of the movie is to show what he did as a general and how that affected the flow of history around him. When we ask questions like, "What did this man really feel inside at this moment? And what was his wife thinking?" we once again divert the story. We'll never get a good answer to those questions because the people in this story exist only to bring life to the events.
Going back to our Bible books, Ruth is a narrative story like Star Trek and Chronicles/Kings are histories like our Patton documentary. Knowing this, we also know what kind of questions each book will invite us to ask and what kind of questions each book will fall silent on.
Ruth and Naomi lost all the men of their family to disease, had to go back to Naomi's home town of Bethlehem, and were forced to glean the leavings of grain out of the fields until they were redeemed. How did Naomi feel about this? That's a question a narrative story will answer! In the narrative itself she says, "Don't call me Naomi [pleasant] anymore, call me Mara [bitter]." The book of Ruth will talk to you about these things all day long and invite you to explore their ramifications. But the book will fall silent if you start asking, "Which disease was it that killed all the menfolk of that family? How contagious was it? How far was the journey back to Bethlehem and how did they provide for themselves along the way? What type of grain were they gleaning? How many bushels could be gleaned by the average beggar in a day when you factor in the time to thresh and transport the finished product?" We may be curious about these things but they're peripheral to the narrative.
David and Solomon, on the other hand, built a powerful kingdom, won many battles, erected a temple, fathered children, battled over a couple of successions. These histories will be really good at answering all of those questions that Ruth ignored. "How many men were in this battle? How far did they have to march from Point A to Point B? What was the geography like? What tactics did they use to win? How many years passed between this event and the next?" But if you start asking Ruth-like questions of Chronicles--"How did everybody feel about this? What did this expression of faith mean to King David?"--the book will give you few answers. Again, these aspects are peripheral to the story the book is trying to tell.
The classic example of this phenomenon comes in the book of Job. As you know, Job lost all his children in a great disaster, the result of a cosmic contest between God and Satan. He goes through trials but in the end all of his stuff is restored along with a whole new batch of children and Job lives happily ever after. The End.
Except that every parent in the audience is screaming, "WHAT?!?" The restoration at the end is nice and all, but children aren't commodities that can just be replaced. The book is claiming this resolution as happy but to us it seems hideous. And hideous it would be if it were meant to be a history. We'd have to ask questions like, "What were the names of the children and how old were they?" Then we'd mourn them forever. The book doesn't do any of that. We don't get a single name. It just mentions that they're there, then BOOM! They're gone along with equally-mourned camels and goats. Then later a new batch of equally-nameless children and livestock have taken their place and everything's fine.
But Job isn't meant to be a history. It's a cosmic tale of good and evil, suffering and redemption, played out in the life of our title character. All the events in the story, including the loss of the children, serve that purpose...to show who Job is and who God is. It's not a manual for living life. It's not an attempt to relay historical events. It's a narrative designed to teach us about our relationship with God.
If we treat Job like a history or a manual for proper living, we end up in odd and horrible positions. When somebody loses a child we're forced to say, "Well, God decides these things and He is so big and mighty who can understand or argue with him?" Either that or, "Just be patient and you'll end up with an even better replacement!" Neither one is very comforting, nor at all appropriate. But the book doesn't mean these things. We just asked it the wrong questions and tried to use it in a way it doesn't want to be used.
Every book, every word of scripture, has its time and place. All questions are explored somewhere. Discerning the time, place, and which questions are best asked is part of the fun (and discipline) of reading the Bible. Sometimes it addresses exactly the questions we wanted to ask. Other times it forces us to ask different ones, to think in a new way. That's one of its strengths...if we let it be. When we insist upon only asking one (or one type of) question over and over we end up misreading and misinterpreting scripture.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
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