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Is Richard Moulton’s literary analysis of the Bible still useful today?

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.”

Where is the search feature on your blog?

Q. Where is the search feature on your blog?

There is a search box in the right sidebar, just above my picture. There is another search box a little farther down the right sidebar, just above “Most Viewed Posts.”

To use either box, type some key words into the box and then click on the Magnifying Glass icon. You will get a list of posts by title, with the most relevant results first.

I would encourage anyone who wants to ask a question first to use the search feature to see whether someone else has already asked the same question or a similar one and I have answered it. People often submit questions that have already been answered, and in those cases I do not write a further reply, even to point the questioner to a post that would answer their question. (I need to devote my time to responding to new questions!)

So please look around before asking a question, and if you do ask a question and don’t get a reply within a few weeks, please look around again. As of this writing, I am still catching up with questions (including this one) that were asked during the time when I was not able to answer them, but I hope to catch up soon and to have a turnaround time once again of no more than a few weeks for most questions. Thanks.

How did the shepherds know where to find baby Jesus?

Q. A few years ago I browsed the internet with many questions surrounding the biblical accounts of the nativity. One question I had was “How did the shepherds know where to go to find the newborn Jesus?” It was then I came across the proposition that he was born at Migdal Eder, also called “The Tower of the Flock” in Micah 4:8. I found the concept compelling due to the history of special type of shepherding that took place in Bethlehem at the time of Jesus birth. What are your thoughts about the possibility of this being where Jesus was born?

You are referring to an interpretation that a commentator named Alfred Edersheim offered of Micah 4:8, “And you, O tower of the flock, hill of the daughter of Zion, to you shall it come, the former dominion shall come, kingship for the daughter of Jerusalem.” There is a “tower of the flock” mentioned in Genesis 35:21, and Edersheim assumed that it still existed in the time of Jesus. He inferred from a reference in the Mishnah that sheep destined for temple sacrifices were raised and tended there, and so he saw symbolic significance in the location and suggested that Jesus had been born there.

However, this interpretation is not accepted by most biblical scholars. It is unknown whether the tower mentioned in Genesis still existed in Jesus’ day. In any event, the Mishnah reference simply specifies the radius around Jerusalem within which found sheep were to be considered temple sacrifices, using Migdal Eder (the location, not necessarily a tower by that name) to specify the distance. We do not need to infer from this that this was a place where temple sheep were raised and kept.

For his part, Micah seems only to be describing Jerusalem figuratively as the “tower of the flock,” that is, the city that watches over the people of Israel as God’s flock. Micah is promising that the kingship will return to Jerusalem. Christians believe that this promise was fulfilled with the coming of Jesus. But we do not need to conclude from the prophecy that Jesus was born at or near a tower by that name that still existed in his day.

So how did the shepherds find the baby Jesus? The angel who appeared to them told them how. He said, “This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” The shepherds would have known where the various animal feeding locations were in Bethlehem, and they just had to go from one to another until they found a baby, wrapped up as a newborn, in one of the mangers.

Answering questions again

Many thanks again to the readers who encouraged me and prayed for me during the time when health issues kept me from answering questions on this blog. I am very grateful that God has now restored sufficient health and strength for me to start answering questions again. I will begin with the backlog of nearly 70 questions that came in during the year and a half when I was unable to respond to them. This will take some time, and I may have to work slowly at first. But I am very hopeful that eventually I will get back to the place where I am answering questions as they come in. Thanks again very much for your support and patience, and thanks be to God!

I am very grateful for the words of encouragement and support I have received since publishing this post. Many thanks again to everyone who was praying for me!

Thank you for your concern, and please pray for me

– Not a question about the Bible, I’m just concerned about your well being, although I’ve never met you, I’ve always thanked God for you and you’ve been what I call a great role model of how to keep in step with Christ in my trust God daily walk. I hope that you’re well.

– I am grateful for the many blessings of your posts and your blogs. I hope you return again soon but it is all up to His plan. … Still missing your blog and still praying for you.

Thank you both for your kind words and for your concern for me. I am doing all right. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to share the full story at some point, but let me say for now that I am recovering from severe exhaustion. I am making slow but steady progress, thank God, but I am still looking at a long recovery. However, I am now at least able to moderate and reply to comments, and I do plan to resume writing posts to answer readers’ questions at some point. In the meantime, I would ask you to pray for me, that as I am careful to rest and recover, God would restore my strength, health, and energy. Please also pray that in this quieter season of life, I would meet God in new and deeper ways. Thank you so much.

Why did Jesus choose only men as his twelve apostles?

Q. Why did Jesus choose only men as his twelve apostles?

I think that the number twelve is the key to the answer. I believe that Jesus named twelve apostles to be the leaders of the movement of his followers because he wanted to show symbolically that this movement would constitute a new community of God’s people. And so just as there were twelve tribal patriarchs for ancient Israel, the new community would have twelve “patriarchs” of its own.

The Bible gives us several indications of this continuity between the tribal patriarchs and the apostles. Jesus told the apostles at the Last Supper that they would “eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” As John describes his vision of the new Jerusalem in the book of Revelation, he says, “On the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel,” and then he adds, “The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.” And also in the book of Revelation, when John lists the tribes, as I argue in this post, “The names are presented in such a way as to show that the community of Jesus’ followers is the continuation of the people of God flowing out of the community of ancient Israel.”

So the selection of twelve men is, simply stated, symbolic. One implication of this is that I do not believe that the selection of only men as apostles means that women cannot have leadership roles in the community of Jesus’ followers. For my thoughts about that in greater detail, see the series of posts that begins here: Does the Bible say that women can’t teach or have authority over men? (Part 1). Indeed, Jesus chose not just twelve men, but specifically twelve Jewish men. But we do not conclude from that that non-Jewish people cannot have leadership roles in the community of his followers.