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CHAPTER 1

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ABUNDANCE, STORY OF

A narrative genre (type of story) in which the main action focuses on the unusual fullness or even excess of something. Images of abundance are found throughout the Bible, and within that multiplicity is a group of stories that embody the principle of abundance. In the Bible, abundance can be either physical or spiritual. The creation story (Genesis 1) is the first story of abundance in the Bible, as the sheer quantity of detail, the energy of action, and the vocabulary of every and multiply lend an atmosphere of abundance to the story. This abundance continues in the story of life in Paradise (Genesis 2), where God "made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food" (v. 9), and where Adam and Eve were given "every tree of the garden" from which to eat (v. 16). The story of Abraham is the story of a man who would become "a great nation" (Gen. 12:2), in whom "all the families of the earth shall be blessed" (v. 3), and who would have descendants as numerous as the dust of the earth (Gen. 13:16), the stars in the sky, and the sand on the seashore (Gen. 22:17). Stories of abundance were a favorite of Jesus — he told parables of a hundredfold harvest, a mustard seed that becomes a tree reaching into heaven, and stewards who double their master's investment while he is on a trip.

In addition to full-fledged stories of abundance such as those noted above, there is a subgenre of "shorthand" stories of abundance in which we are given only a glimpse or plot summary of a larger story. When Jesus told his disciples that those who leave possessions and family for his sake "will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life" (Matt. 19:29), he gestured toward a larger story of abundance. In a similar way, when Jesus said, "I came that they may have life and have it abundantly" (John 10:10), he painted a miniature picture of the whole story of abundance that the life of faith entails. Some of the promises in the Bible are cast in the form of stories of abundance: "Give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap" (Luke 6:38).

The general effect of the stories of abundance in the Bible is to alert us to the nature of God (who is a God of abundance) and his desire to bless his people. This genre also expresses an essential feature of God's spiritual kingdom, which is an abundant kingdom. By way of contrast, an anthology of English or American literature does not yield an immediate list of stories of abundance.

ACROSTIC

An Old Testament poem in which the successive units begin with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet in consecutive order. The units might be lines, verses, or clusters of verses. In Psalms 9, 10, 25, 34, and 145, the first words of the unfolding verses begin with letters from the Hebrew alphabet in sequential order. The encomium in praise of the virtuous wife in Proverbs 31:10–31 follows the same principle. Psalm 37 consists of twenty-one stanzas (mainly, but not wholly, pairs of verses) arranged according to the sequence of the Hebrew alphabet, while in Psalm 111, each line (rather than each verse) begins with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet in sequence. The most elaborate acrostic poem in the Bible is Psalm 119. The poem is comprised of twenty-two eight-verse units. The units unfold according to the Hebrew alphabet, but in addition, all eight verses within each unit begin with the letter that the unit as a cluster highlights.

Of course, this feature of the original text does not survive in translation, but as English readers we can admire the degree of conscious artistry that we know that the poet imposed on the material. An acrostic is an instance of literary form contributing to the artistry and beauty of an utterance. Additionally, there is a sense of completeness when the entire alphabet appears (along the lines of our "A-to-Z" formula), as well as a sense of orderliness that results when the letters of the alphabet appear in consecutive order. The scheme may also have served a mnemonic ("remembering") function in an oral culture.

ADVENTURE STORY

A story that specializes in the extraordinary — something beyond the routine. The wordadventure is synonymous with excitement. To attain this excitement, adventure stories are built out of stock ingredients, such as the following: variety of action; remoteness of settings; marvelous or supernatural events, settings, and characters; danger and suspense; heightened conflict; and spectacular feats. This set of ingredients, in turn, often depends on such plot staples as storms, disguises, shipwrecks, battles, journeys through dangerous landscapes, chases, hiding, arrests, and escapes (including narrow escapes).

We ordinarily encounter adventure stories in works of fiction. The result is that our immediate tendency is to assume that the genre of adventure story is irrelevant to the Bible, which records events that really happened. But this response is unwarranted. Because of the heavy incidence of the marvelous and supernatural in the Bible, the biblical stories continuously fall into the genre of the adventure story. The adventure stories of the Bible differ from fictional adventure stories by virtue of having actually happened. The world of the Bible is one in which streams stop flowing, the earth opens up to swallow evil people, food miraculously appears, and a boy with a slingshot kills a giant in armor. Settings that were familiar to the original audience are remote in time and place for modern readers, making the events seem adventurous. Most stories in the Bible have some affinity with the genre of the adventure story. Their factual nature should not be allowed to obscure that they are made up of the familiar ingredients of adventure stories.

A FORTIORI

A rhetorical device and form of logical argument based on a comparison of two things. The name comes from a Latin phrase that literally means "from the stronger" and can more loosely be understood as meaning "how much more so." The logical relationship between the two items under comparison is that if the first is true, then the second is "all the more" true. What is true of the first item is true of the second for a similar but even stronger reason. The a fortiori formula appears in the discourses of Jesus and in the Epistles: "If God so clothes the grass, ... how much more will he clothe you" (Luke 12:28); "not one [sparrow] is forgotten before God; ... you are of more value than many sparrows" (Luke 12:6–7); "if the blood of goats and bulls ... sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ ..." (Heb. 9:13–14).

ALLEGORY

A work of literature, usually a story, in which many of the details have a corresponding "other" level of meaning. This technique is akin to symbolism in the sense that a detail in the text stands for something else. A symbol, however, is a freestanding, individual unit, whereas allegory implies a continuous and coherent string of second meanings. Jesus's parables are allegories in which numerous (and sometimes most) details in the stories stand for other things. Jesus himself interpreted every detail in the parable of the sower (Matt. 13:1–9) as having an allegorical "other" meaning (vv. 18–23), except for the sower. An allegorical story requires a reader to figure out the symbolic or "other" level of meaning.

The nature of allegory has been rendered complex because of an abuse called allegorizing a text. This should not be confused with interpreting an allegorical text. To interpret an allegorical text is to attach secondary meanings to a text that the author designed to be an allegory. To allegorize a text implies foisting a second level of meaning on details that the author did not intend to be allegorical. Virtually any text can be allegorized, but that does not make the process legitimate.

There are not many allegorical texts in the Bible. Parables are the chief repository. Jesus's discourse about the Good Shepherd (John 10:1–18) is an autobiographical allegory in which Jesus told the story of his atoning life and death by means of a story of a shepherd and his sheep. Many of the visions in the Prophetic Books have the quality of allegory. For example, the account in Zechariah 5 of a flying scroll that destroys houses and of a woman sitting inside a measure container that two women remove to a distant land is an allegorical passage about God's judgment against evil and his removal of evil from his people. The vision of a dragon (Satan) who attempts to destroy the son (Christ) of a woman (Israel) but who is prevented from doing so (Revelation 12) is an allegorical story of Satan's inability to destroy Christ's redemptive mission during his earthly life.

The interpretive principle to keep in mind is that an allegorical story has inherent properties (an inner logic) that requires us to view it as an allegory. Chief among these is that the story does not make complete sense at a literal level, thereby prompting us to look for an allegorical level of meaning. In the absence of such an inner logic, we need to resist all attempts to impose a second level of meaning on a text — allegorizing the text, in other words.

ALLUSION

A reference to literature or history. With an allusion, an author consciously refers to a written text from the past or to a historical event. This means that we should not use the terms allusion or alludes to so loosely as to cover all instances when an author refers to something. Sometimes an author actually quotes from an earlier text, but usually the link is obvious without quoting. When in Psalm 114 the poet speaks of how "Israel went out from Egypt" and the "sea looked and fled" (vv. 1, 3), he alludes to the exodus and to the passage through the Red Sea on dry land.

ANAPHORA

A category from classical rhetoric that denotes repetition of a word or group of words at the beginning of successive clauses, sentences, or poetic lines. For example, the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:3–12) all begin with the formula "Blessed are ..." Verses 3–5 of Psalm 103 contain a sequence of five successive lines beginning with the pronoun who ("who forgives all your iniquity, / who heals all your diseases," etc.). Anaphora is common in formalized or "high-style" prose passages (such as the Beatitudes in Jesus's Sermon on the Mount or the encomium on love in 1 Corinthians 13) and in poetry. To speak of anaphora as "parallel clauses" is equally accurate.

ANNUNCIATION STORY

A story in which an angel or human agent announces to a barren woman that she will become pregnant and bear a child. A set of ingredients converges in an annunciation story in a way that fits the category "type scene": a barren woman is visited by an angel or receives an oracle via a human agent (such as Eli to Hannah in 1 Sam. 1:17); during this encounter, an announcement is delivered to the woman that she will conceive a child; the woman responds with faith and rejoicing; she conceives and gives birth to a baby; and the child of promise (a son) is extraordinary, set apart for unusual service to God and others. Examples of annunciation stories in the Bible are those of Sarah and her son Isaac; Manoah's wife and her son Samson; Hannah and her son Samuel; Elizabeth (via her husband Zechariah) and her son John; and Mary and her son Jesus (the climax toward which the predecessors point). Annunciation stories in the Bible feature an element of supernatural or miraculous intervention by God into human history and testify to his power and providential control of people's lives.

ANTAGONIST

A character or force in a story that stands opposed to the protagonist. The protagonist is the "first struggler" in a story — the person whom we as readers accompany as the story unfolds. The antagonist is in conflict with the protagonist. In most cases, we sympathize with the protagonist(s) and dislike the antagonist(s), but this is not a fixed rule. For example, Jonah is the ignominious protagonist of the book that bears his name, and his antagonist is God. Most antagonists are characters external to the protagonist, but a tendency within the protagonist can serve as an antagonist. In the story of Cain, for example, Cain is in conflict with his own evil impulses (Gen. 4:5–16), which God pictures as a personified evil when he confronts Cain before the murder of Abel (v. 7).

ANTHROPOMORPHISM

A portrayal of deity in human form. References to God's hand or foot, or to his changing his mind, are examples of anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is a figure of speech and must be understood as nonliteral. In primitive religions, anthropomorphism often signals a belief about what the gods are literally like, but the writers of the Bible make it clear that they know that God is a supernatural and spiritual being. They are not primitives but poets with metaphoric imaginations.

ANTIHERO

A literary protagonist who lacks the conventional qualities of a hero. Because an antihero fills the role of protagonist within a story but does not live up to the expectations of a hero, we immediately feel a dissonance. The term antihero comes from modern literature; in that context, the antihero embodies the nihilism and negations of the modern age. We need to dissociate the biblical antihero from all such connotations. In place of them, the biblical antihero embodies important spiritual principles.

The starting point for seeing this is Paul's statement that God did not choose many who "were wise according to worldly standards, not many ... powerful, not many ... of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world" (1 Cor. 1:26–27). The biblical narratives give us many examples. Gideon is the most fully drawn antihero of the Bible — a reluctant hero who tried to disqualify himself when God called him to lead his nation (Judges 6). When offered the conventional reward for military success, kingship, Gideon declined on the ground that God is the true deliverer (Judg. 8:23). Similarly, in Paul's autobiographical vignettes in the Epistles, he portrayed himself as weak and unimpressive (e.g., 2 Cor. 10:10; 12:7–10). In the songs of Hannah (1 Sam. 2:1–10) and Mary (Luke 1:46–55), God is pictured as "deheroizing" the exalted figures in society and elevating those without heroic claims. The apotheosis of the antihero comes in Isaiah 53, where the suffering servant is praised for acts and qualities that consistently run counter to those that characterize the heroes of the world (including those portrayed in most literature). Biblical antiheroes show the degree to which the values of the Bible stand opposed to the success ethic that has captured the allegiance of the human race through the ages.

ANTITHETIC PARALLELISM

Two lines of poetry in which the second line states the truth of the first line in a contrasting way. For example, "The LORD knows the way of the righteous, / but the way of the wicked will perish" (Ps. 1:6). When the coordinating conjunction but is absent, the contrast is more subtle; we might need to ponder the text before we see the contrast between the two lines: "Faithful are the wounds of a friend; / profuse are the kisses of an enemy" (Prov. 27:6). Multiple contrasts are expressed in those two lines — wounds vs. kisses (representing criticism vs. flattery), friend vs. enemy, and (implied) the constructive intention ("faithful") of the friend's criticism vs. the deceptive flattery represented by the "profuse" gestures of good will from an enemy.

APHORISM (adjective form: aphoristic)

A concise, memorable statement. Aphorism is synonymous with such terms as saying, proverb, and epigram. The Bible is continuously aphoristic, though this quality is lost in colloquial translations that do not retain the succinctness of the original authors. The most conclusive proofs of the aphoristic quality of the Bible are (1) the ease with which we remember its terse sayings and (2) the fact that the Bible always gets the most space in collections of famous sayings in the English language (as in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations).

APOCALYPSE/APOCALYPTIC WRITING

A genre that is difficult to define, partly because it merges with the overlapping genres of visionary writing, prophecy, and eschatological visions of the future.

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Excerpted from "A Complete Handbook of Literary Forms in the Bible"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Leland Ryken.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
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