The Old Testament as Literature: Foundations for Christian Interpretation

by Tremper III Longman

Tremper Longman has studied and taught the Old Testament and its interpretation for four decades. Now, in a planned three-book project, he presents his mature thoughts on the essentials of Old Testament interpretation.

This first volume explores the importance of reading the Old Testament as literature. We need to recognize that each culture tells its stories and writes its poems in different ways. To read and understand the Old Testament texts the way the ancient authors intended, we need to be aware of the conventions of Hebrew storytelling and poetry. In part one, dealing with literary theory, Longman investigates how texts create meaning, the history of the study of the Old Testament as literature, and how genre dictates reading strategy. He explores the Hebrew conventions of both narrative and poetry in conversation with contemporary literary analysis. Part two delves into practice, using the tools gained in part one to look at and interpret a variety of Old Testament narratives and poetry.

Longman's accessible writing and balanced judgments make this book suitable for the classroom and the church.

Genres: Old Testament

304 pages, Hardcover

Published June 25, 2024

Reviews

[Zack · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I think that Longman’s earlier work “Literary Approaches to Biblical Interpretation” is more helpful (in large part because it’s more succinct), this expansion on the same theme (and beginning of a new trilogy) has some important updates and points of maturation in the author’s thought over the decades. I found certain readings he offered to be unconvincing imbalanced, but the overall thrust is good. I appreciated how he handled Intertextuality within biblical studies, though I was looking for more (in light of the recent explosion of scholarly literature on the OT use of the OT, for example). He is transparent about his commitments to determining authorial intention through close (writerly) readings of the text. Thus, he prefers diachronic author-centered approaches to intertextuality. But his commitment to divine inspiration allows much room for synchronic readings.

[Kristjan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ultimately the Old Testament is a collection of written works designed to communicate some idea or concept to a particular audience. The tools used by the various authors and redactors are not new; they relied upon the same forms and techniques used in contemporary literature that were already well known to their audience … sending signals to their readers to enable them to correctly interpret the intending meaning of the text. While much of the text has developed over time, and many scholars seem to be focused on extracting the original text and meaning, the author here recommends that we focus on the final version and how it has been traditionally interpreted through the ages since as a starting point.

Part One covers the current state of scholarship for studying the Old Testament as Literature, including some background on how we got here and what literary devices and concepts are used in understanding the authors’ intent as well as how parts of the text or “books” work with other text or “books” of the Old Testament. And while this is an extremely academic undertaking, it remain accessible to the causal reader (although repetition and independent study would also be very helpful). What makes this work exception is Parts two and three where everything that was covered in Part one is illustrated with analysis of specific parts of prose and poetic text … although this also tends to be very technical and, at times, difficult to follow for me (which is why this is something to periodically come back to). Over all, this book can only help any student of scripture that is interested in biblical exegesis.

The chapters and sections in this work are …

Introduction: Scope and Procedure

Part One: Literary Theory and the Conventions of Biblical Narrative and Poetry
1. The Location of Meaning
2. History of the Study of the Old Testament as Literature
3. Genre Triggers Reading Strategy
4. Narrative Prose as Genre
5. Poetry
6. Intertextuality

Part Two: The Analysis of Illustrative Prose0 Narrative Texts
7. Literary Readings of Prose Narratives from the Torah
8. Literary Readings of Prose Narratives from the Historical Books

Part Three: The Analysis of Illustrative Poetic Texts
9. Literary Readings of Poetic Texts from the Psalms
10. Literary Readings of Poetic Texts from the Wisdom Literature
11. Literary Readings of Poetic Texts from the Prophets and Epic Poetry

Postlude

Some of the other points that really got my attention (regardless of whether or not I agreed with them) are:

My most important conclusion is that authors send genre signals to their readers to convey how to take their words and thus trigger a reading strategy.

Readers should primarily be interested in the final, canonical form of the biblical book. Even if a passage such as Elihu’s speech was added later, we must ask how it functions within the book as it is now.

John the Baptist is thrown in jail, where he hears reports about Jesus’s ministry. Yet what he hears disturbs him because Jesus doesn’t seem to be executing the judgment John predicted. Jesus is healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, raising the dead, and preaching the good news. When John hears this, he thinks “I may have baptized the wrong person!” This is why he sends two of his disciples to Jesus to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” (Matt. 11:3).

Besides writing in an ancient language, the biblical authors used genres, literary conventions, and figurative language that were immediately familiar to their original audience but are likely unfamiliar to modern readers. Likewise, these authors refer to ancient institutions and customs that may be unknown to a modern audience or misunderstood by those who are outside the original historical context.

It can be unsettling to consider that our reading of the biblical text is constrained by our status, previous experience, and level of education. But the obvious solution to this problem is to recognize that interpreters need to read in community. We understand the biblical text better when we listen to diverse voices.

What went by the name “literary criticism” was not an analysis of the text in its present final form but rather a type of textual archaeology, an attempt to look behind the text to find its putative sources, often with the idea that these earlier sources were somehow more authentic or important than the final form.

With its goal of recovering the original meaning of a text, historical-critical scholarship tends to downplay or ignore how the text has been interpreted through the ages.

According to Gottwald, Israel originated in a revolt of the underclasses of Canaanite feudal society. Evidence for this revolt and the emergence of Israel is seen archaeologically in the dissolution of Canaanite coastal cities in the thirteenth to the eleventh centuries BC and the appearance of small towns in the highlands to the east.

“Every culture, even every era in a particular culture, develops distinctive and sometimes intricate codes for telling its stories, involving everything from narrative point of view, procedures of description and characterization, the management of dialogue, to the ordering of time and the organization of plot.”

Phelan and Rabinowitz tell us that the best reading takes place when actual readers do their best to acquire the competencies of the implied reader: “Readers typically join (or try to join) the authorial audience, the hypothetical group for whom the author writes—the group that shares the knowledge, values, prejudices, fears and experiences that the author expected in his or her readers and that ground his or her rhetorical choices.”

The Hebrew narrator is often reticent to provide a moral evaluation of a character’s actions in the story. Rarely do narrators give explicit pronouncements that a character is doing the right thing or the wrong thing. This does not mean that the narrator does not subtly lead readers toward such moral evaluations, but readers must look hard for the clues.

In contrast to life—where we are invariably confronted by an endless stream of incidents occurring haphazardly and disparately—the plot of a narrative is constructed as a meaningful chain of interconnected events. This is achieved by careful selection, entailing the omission of any incident which does not fit in logically with the planned development of the plot.”

The Hebrew word for this area is midbar (cf. 1 Sam. 25:1–2, 4, 14, 21), which most translations render “wilderness” (NLT, ESV) or “desert” (NCV, NIV). The term “desert,” however, can be misleading and may evoke the idea of a barren, sandy expanse, whereas Nabal is able to raise sheep in this area.

I was given this free advance reader copy (ARC) ebook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

#TheOldTestamentasLiterature #NetGalley.

[Matthew Bruemmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall, this book is a great summary of a lot of different approaches to viewing the Old Testament as literature. The author is clearly knowledgeable about scripture, the overarching theme of the story of the Bible, and how to clearly communicate points of view on a wide variety of topics. Each section is well organized to a certain theme, but I did find at times I got lost in the hypothesis and overall point he was trying to make which may have been that I am a layperson vs a educated theologian. The language and vocabulary is a high entry bar which does benefit the book but can slow down a layperson like me in grasping the points of each explanation on a wide variety of topics. I do think this book leans into a more summary of theories rather than a new approach on certain topics but I do believe that is the intention. I would recommend this book as a layperson interested in how to read the Old Testament better knowing that grasping the entire book will take time and likely reading sections at a time during bible study as a reference.

[Jeannine · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Old Testament as Literature: Foundations for Christian Interpretation
By, Tremper Longman III

This is volume 1 in a planned three-book project on the Old Testament. Tremper Longman III is a wonderfully accessible and readable scholar. In this volume Longman is providing an overall summary of a variety of literary approaches to the Old Testament text. This is a great volume to savor over time to draw out the riches present in the Old Testament. I can see this a volume uses in College and Seminary classes.

A helpful overview of the text topics…
Part One: Literary Theory and the Conventions of Biblical Narrative and Poetry
• The Location of Meaning
• History of the Study of the Old Testament as Literature
• Genre Triggers Reading Strategy
• Narrative Prose as Genre
• Poetry
• Intertextuality
Part Two: The Analysis of Illustrative Prose-Narrative Texts
• Literary Readings of Prose Narratives from the Torah
• Literary Readings of Prose Narratives from the Historical Books
• Part Three: The Analysis of Illustrative Poetic Texts
• Literary Readings of Poetic Texts from Wisdom Literature
• Literary Readings of Poetic Texts from the Prophets and Epic Poetry

#TheOldTestamentasLiterature #NetGalley