| Q. I notice that in your book The Beauty Behind the Mask you reference The Modern Reader’s Bible, edited by Richard Moulton, and you offer some criticism of his choice of book order and book titles. I own a copy of that book, as well as Moulton’s book The Literary Study of the Bible, both of which I purchased years ago at a used book store. He has other books about the Bible and literature that can now be found online. Moulton aimed to lay out the text of the Bible according to the literary structure—perhaps a forerunner of The Books of the Bible edition. Although I do not regularly read from The Modern Reader’s Bible, I do refer to it to notice how it lays out the poetic structure, and I notice that Moulton in his notes has an overarching system of the literary forms of the Bible, from simple to complex. My question is how valid and useful are his views, his literary theory of the Bible, and his Bible edition, all more than 100 years old, considered today? Did he have insight that is still valuable and been forgotten, or has modern scholarship rendered it obsolete? The short answer to your question is that Moulton’s analysis, in my opinion, is still very valuable. While, as you noted, I differ with him about some details, overall he is asking the same questions and pursuing the same goals as we did in producing The Books of the Bible. Now here is the long answer to your question. God gave us his word in the Bible by using not only existing human languages—Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek—but also by using existing human literary forms: psalms (songs), epistles (letters), parables, proverbs, stories, visions (dreams), and so forth. If we really want to understand what God is saying to us through the Bible, we need to appreciate the Bible for what it is: a collection of literary compositions. That is what the Bible is made of. Unfortunately, most people who engage the Bible treat it as if it were made of something else. One common way to engage the Bible is as if it were made up of “verses.” These are taken to be short doctrinal propositions or “precious promises” or “thoughts to live by.” Since Bible verses each seem to have their own indexing (e.g. John 3:16), and since published versions of the Bible number them right in the text (some editions even print each verse as a separate paragraph), they seem to be intentional divisions of the text—the basic building blocks of the Bible. But as I point out in The Beauty Behind the Mask, chapters were only added to the Bible around the year 1200 and verses were only added around 1550. They are late, artificial divisions introduced for convenience of reference, most often for the sake of reference in the course of discussions and debates. It is not a coincidence that verses were added to the Bible around the time of the many theological debates of the Reformation. A friend of mine calls the chapter-and-verse Bible a “debater’s Bible.” But that visual presentation suggests that the Bible is something that it is not. Suppose that all you had of Shakespeare was a collection of “famous quotations.” For example: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” Hamlet, Act 2, scene 2. “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, scene 2. “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them,” Twelfth Night, Act 2, scene 5. These are certainly interesting and valuable thoughts to consider and apply to life. But what Shakespeare wrote was drama for the theater. If you haven’t seen his plays acted on stage, you haven’t engaged his writings for what they are. Similarly, if you only reference “Bible verses,” you haven’t engaged the biblical writings for what they are. Another way people engage the Bible is as if it consisted of short articles on various topics, like an encyclopedia. Printed editions of the Bible foster this understanding by separating the text into sections that each have their own headings. People tend to read section by section, and preachers often preach on one section at a time, so this is another answer people have implicitly in their heads to the question of what the Bible is made of. Just by looking at most Bibles published today, they can only conclude that it is made of “sections.” But these sections do not do justice to the literary character of the compositions in the Bible. Translation committees and publishers create and label them not with a view toward literary structure but simply with a view towards subject matter or topic. These titled sections encourage “dipping in” rather than experiencing the biblical compositions as a whole. They also suggest an objective, distanced approach to the topics that are apparently taken up, as in an encyclopedia, rather than that the writers are immersed in the situations they are writing about, sometimes literally in a life-and-death struggle. So engaging the Bible through “sections” is also not engaging its writings for what they are. Yet another way that people engage the Bible is as the subject of an academic discipline. This is what you were asking about specifically in terms of an assessment of Moulton’s analysis. It’s important to realize that when we engage the Bible, there is a “world behind the text,” a “world of the text,” and a “world in front of the text.” The world behind the text is the historical and cultural context in which the Bible was written. Much of academic study of the Bible deals with that. The world in front of the text is the reactions and responses to the text by all the people who are receiving it in various ways. In academic circles, this would be all of the scholars in the field of biblical studies and their various publications. Much of the remaining part of academic study of the Bible has to do with addressing what various other scholars have said about the Bible. Engaging the biblical works as literary compositions is often regarded as outside the scope of biblical studies, as something that falls within the realm of literary studies instead. (And indeed, courses on the Bible are a required part of many college literature majors, since the Bible is such a foundational influence on the literature of many languages and cultures.) The structures of biblical books sometimes are discussed within the field of biblical studies, but my personal feeling is that this is not done in a progressive or cumulative way. In other words, I do not feel that we have come to understand these structures better and better as biblical studies has progressed over the years, so that anything Moulton might have written over a century ago must of course be obsolete by now. Rather—and again, this is a personal feeling—as biblical studies takes up various suggestions about structure in the course of its own conversation, different views come in and out of vogue as the conversation progresses. So for myself, to assess Moulton’s contributions, I would instead ask how the people who, over time, have engaged the biblical books as literary compositions have seen them to be put together on their own terms. This question of literary structure is one (along with the questions of circumstances of composition, literary genre, and thematic development) that Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren encourage readers to address in their classic work How to Read a Book. It is also a question that various approaches to inductive Bible study encourage readers to pursue first, in light of an overall reading of a book: what are its major and minor divisions? Those are to be determined independently of chapters and verses and of any divisions that publishers have introduced. When we approach the Bible this way, we find, as I show in The Beauty Behind the Mask, pp. 139–143, that the various people who, down through the years, have sought to offer literary-structural presentations of the biblical books have ended up identifying essentially the same outlines, even though these may differ in some smaller details. Richard Moulton is one of these people, and I would say that his overall approach is still one that we can learn much from today. We certainly saw him as someone who helped blaze the trail for The Books of the Bible. Indeed, we knew we were standing on his shoulders as we did our work, and we were and are grateful for his contributions. Let me conclude, therefore, by quoting from his preface to The Modern Reader’s Bible: “The revelation which is the basis of our modern religion has been made in the form of literature: grasp of its literary structure is the true starting-point for spiritual interpretation.” |
Good Question 
Thank you for the reply. I use my books by Moulton as a reference for the sake of comparison, especially for his poetic layout, and consult more recent Bible versions. He does insert many headings, something that I notice that the Books of the Bible does not choose to do. I was reading this morning his book on The Modern Study of Literature, and he mentions the Bible often, and he makes the same points that raised in your reply – even regarding the Shakespeare quotations. He has a chapter on Literary Form the Key to Literary Interpretation.
I have not read Moulton’s book on The Modern Study of Literature, but it’s interesting to know that he uses the same example of Shakespeare. Thank you.
I did a Google search, and Moulton uses the phrase “the fallacy of quotations”, and the phrase occurs in several of his books. So on page 350 of the The Modern Study of Literature, in the section on Plot the Key to Story Philosophy, he writes: “Among the fallacies arising out of the neglect of this fundamental principle the most common is the fallacy of quotations : the attempt to construct a philosophy of Shakespeare or Euripides by copious quotations from the plays .” He uses the Book of Job, and Proverbs as examples.
And in his Literary Study of the Bible, starting on page 83, he discusses for several pages the layout of the Bible in verses, and that reading the Bible in verses tends to obscure the Higher Unity. And he writes:
“In dealing with any other the literature the student would naturally, and as a matter of course, look for the higher unity in what he reads. He would not study Virgil merely to get quotable hexameters, nor Shakespeare to find pithy sentences: he would wish to comprehend the drift of a scene, or the plot of a whole play; he would read a whole eclogue at once, or even sustain his attention through the twelve books of the Aeneid. But the vast majority of those who read the Bible have never shaken off the mediaeval tendency to look upon it as a collection of isolated sentences, isolated texts, isolated verses.”
I am finding that listening to an audio Bible in a version such as NLT, or NIrV, to be helpful to me in absorbing larger portions of Scripture.