LXXXIII. THE TRANSLATION OF ELIJAH. LXXXV. ELISHA AND THE SHUNAM MITE WOMAN. LXXXVI. THE HEALING OF NAAMAN THE SYRIAN. .... INTRODUCTION THE LITERARY STUDY OF THE BIBLE Scholars and writers have, from the earliest times, studied the Bible, yet very few of them have studied it as literature. The reasons for the lack of appreciation of the Bible as literature are easy to find. Not only did its religious character tend to blind men to its qualities as writing, but until comparatively recent times the form given to it in all the tongues into which it was translated was wholly unliterary. The Semitic original shows specimens of prose, poetry, drama, and essay; yet even in the authorized version all are alike printed in prose. Besides, all was unnaturally broken up into what we have become accustomed to call " verses," in which no attention is given to paragraphing and which at times do not even consist of complete sentences. Professor Moulton, who has done more than any other one man to promote the literary study of the Bible, speaks with such authority on this point that we quote him at length: A man who should peruse a drama under the impression that he was reading an essay would go widely astray as to the significance of what he was reading; this would be an obvious truth were it not. that such a thing seems inconceivable. But this is precisely the kind of thing which happens in connection with the Bible. The Hebrew Scriptures go back to an antiquity in which the art of manuscript writing was in an embryonic condition; when manu scripts scarcely divided words and sentences, much less indicated distinctions between prose and verse, between one meter and another, between speeches in dialogue and even the simplest divisions in simple prose. The delicate varieties of biblical literature, however clear they might have been to the ages that first received them, must, for their preservation, be committed to manuscripts of this kind, manuscripts in which all literary forms looked alike. It appears, then, that the form of our modern Bibles has been given to them, not by the sacred writers themselves, but by others who, centuries later, had charge of the scriptures at the time when manuscripts began to indicate differences in form. Now these were rabbinical and medieval commentators: men to whom literary form meant nothing, but who regarded the Bible as material for commentary, each short clause being worthy of a lengthened disquisition. The form such commentators would give to their scriptures would naturally be that of texts for comment. In this form of numbered texts, or verses, it came down to our translators; the most elementary distinction of form, that between prose and verse, was not discovered in relation to the Hebrew Scriptures until more than a century after King James' Version had been completed. The Bibles most commonly circulated among us are these Bibles in medieval form; however correct the translation, they remain a double misrepresentation of the sacred original, as ignoring on the one hand the literary varieties of form, and on the other hand presenting, in their chapters and verses, a structure which is alien to the Bible itself, and is the creation of medieval commentators. Two things are necessary to the realization of the Bible as literature in the truest sense. We must in the first place do for it what is as a matter of course done for all other literature, ancient or modern, we must print it in its complete literary structure, a structure discovered by internal evidence and literary analysis. Dialogue must appear as dialogue, with distinction of speeches and names of speakers; verse must appear with the proper variations of meter; epic must be distinguished from history, essay from song: such structural presentation goes far toward making commentary superfluous. |