Surveying Biblical Texts

Yesterday I sketched the outline of a chapter on following the train of thought of a passage. Since I went over this today with a class, I thought I'd sketch out:

Chapter 5
Surveying Biblical Texts

1. The Big Picture
In the last chapter, we mentioned that you should know a little something about what a text has said in the lead up to the passage you are most interested in interpreting. This is literary context. How do you get the big picture of a whole biblical book or a section of biblical text like the Sermon on the Mount? For that matter, how do you get a sense of the flow of a chapter?

We are good memory verse people. We're good at individual trees. We don't tend to be as good at the forest.

2. Content and Arrangement
The book of Proverbs is somewhat unusual in the Bible. It has some chapters here and there that go together but, in general, it does not really have an overall flow. It's not like a story that unfolds. It's not like an argument that moves from point to point. It is a collection of wise sayings that no doubt span a large period of time.

But most "discourses" have a structure. They are not just a collection of miscellaneous content. Rather, the content is arranged in a certain way intentionally so as to convey meaning. Books as a whole have a train of thought, not just individual passages. For example, most discourses have a beginning, a middle, and an end. So a great number of books of the Bible have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

For example, ancient letters tended to have a standard format that we see underlying the structure of most of the letters in the NT. There is an opening greeting, perhaps a thanksgiving to God, the body of a letter, perhaps closing greetings and a farewell.

The goal of surveying a biblical text is to get an overall sense of the basic content, as well as the overall way that content is arranged. So to survey a text we will:

• Give titles to the chapters (or paragraphs if we are surveying a smaller bit of text).
• Outline the book or section we are surveying.
• Get a sense of the way each part of the book/section connects to the one(s) that follows.
• Look for themes that run throughout the book or section.
• Ask questions that will help us dig into the specifics later.

3. Getting a Sense of the Content
Obviously to get a sense of the content of a book or section, you need to read it, probably several times. If a formal equivalence translation is best for following a train of thought in detail, a more dynamic translation is better for getting the big picture of a larger amount of text. The chapters and verses were added over a 1000 years after each book, but a good way to get into the content of a book or section of the Bible is to title each chapter...

4. Outlining a Text
A far more challenging task is to outline the way content is arranged in a text. Often there will be a beginning, a middle, and and end. Sometimes there are aspects of the type of text (genre) that suggest strong possibilities (see the genre chapters on letters and narratives in particular for more on outlining specific types of biblical literature).

The key is looking for major shifts in the train of thought. Some interpreters approach this more as an intuitive art. Others approach it like a science (e.g., discourse analysis). No doubt in both cases there is evidence:

• shift in topic - this is the biggie. The text was talking about one thing, then it started talking about another.
• major conjunctions - Connecting words can join words, phrases, clauses, paragraphs. But they can also transition from one section to another.
• introductory formulae (the word of the LORD came to...)
• shifts in tenses, shifts in point of view or speaker, shift in sub-genre (e.g., from exposition to exhortation)
• There are some literary devices that occasionally are used to arrange text (inclusion, interchange, intercalation, chiasm, acrostic).

Narratives often have turning points and climaxes, as well as background at the beginning. This helps a person ascertain the structure of the narrative. A special consideration is whether there might be composite texts in the Bible, texts where more than one source has been combined or a previous source has been edited. In such instances, there may be "fissures" left where the joining took place.

5. Looking for Patterns
a. relationships between units
As we saw in the previous chapter, there are a limited number of ways in which one piece of text can relate or connect to the next (repetition, comparison, contrast, movement from general to particular or vice versa, movement from cause to effect or explanation of effect from cause, etc.)  Understanding the overall flow of a text means having a sense of how each unit of a text flows into the next.

b. threads of thought that run throughout
These are recurring themes or recurring patterns. So you can have a recurrent theme of reconciliation, and you can also have a recurring contrast or a recurring sense of cause and effect.

6. Asking Questions to Follow-up
The Traina/Bauer method of inductive Bible study, from which this surveying method originates, suggests that there are certain key kinds of questions to ask about basic patterns you find in a text. This allows you to know the best way to continue your study deeper into a biblical text. These questions include questions of definition, why questions, how questions, and questions of implication for the original meaning.

7. Give examples

The Literary Structure of the Sermon on the Mount

I'll be writing a devotional book on the Sermon on the Mount in the next couple months.  Although the structure of Matthew 5-6 gelled with me a long time ago (rightly or wrongly), it's only been in the last week that Matthew 6-7 have.  Although I use the Sermon on the Mount as an example of how to survey a text, I've always been a little less confident about the second half than the first.

Here's just a thumbnail of how I see the structure:

Matthew 5:3-16 Beatitudes
Kingdom Introduction--presents the values of the kingdom.  It involves some contrasts that will play out throughout the sermon--between now and not yet, between the visible and the heart, between true blessedness and superficial blessedness.

Matthew 5:17-20 Key Verses
These verses are ground zero in the sermon.  They are a general statement that plays itself out in the rest of it in two ways: 1) Jesus, as the new Moses, gives the fulfilled, the complete, perfected, and authoritative interpretation of the Law and the Prophets and 2) that fulfilled interpretation is true righteousness, a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees.  These verses also form an inclusio with 7:12, which returns to the theme of summing up the Law and the Prophets with the Golden Rule or what we know from Matthew 22 as the love commandment.

Matthew 5:21-48 The Fulfilled Law
In this series of contrasts, Jesus plays out what he means by fulfilling the Law.  It's not merely the superficial, external rule but the playing out of the love principle in the heart in each area.  In some cases, this shakes up and shuffles an OT law (e.g., eye for eye). The chapter climaxes with the general principle in 5:43-48.  The fulfilled law not only loves ones friends but one's enemies as well.  This is what it means to be complete or "perfect" as our heavenly Father is complete (5:48).

Matthew 6:1-7:12 True Righteousness
This section plays out 5:20 and what exceeding righteousness is in contrast to the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees.  First, their righteousness is only acting (6:1-18).  It is external rather than a righteousness of the heart.  It is a righteousness for now rather than for the kingdom.  It is a righteousness for the world rather than for God and the kingdom.

They lay up treasures on earth (6:19-24).  They judge others when in fact their heart is guilty of the same things (7:1-6). If they focus too much on receiving honor in the here and now, the visible (remember the topsy turvy values of the Beatitudes), one can also focus too much on the troubles of the visible and the moment.  The worrier is also wrongly focused on the current mourning (cf. 5:4), on the current crisis before the kingdom comes (6:25-34).

So the person in current need, before the kingdom comes, should ask and seek from God, who is a loving Father (7:7-12; cf. 5:43-48).  And we are to be complete as he is complete and do to others what we would wish them do to us (7:12).

Matthew 7:13-27 Be Wise!
The sermon now concludes with several warnings.  The most central one is to be a wise builder.  Someone might hear this sermon and do nothing with it.  That's like a foolish builder.  That person's house will fall.  The wise builder hears the "rock" of the sermon and applies it.

Relatively few will do that.  The gate to life is narrow.  Even some of those who pretend to hear are only faking.  There will be false prophets who, like the scribes and Pharisees, pretend to go along with the kingdom but whose heart isn't really with it. By the time Matthew was writing, this was probably a comment on people in his context.

Finally, like the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25, not everyone who claims Jesus as Lord on the Day of Judgment will make it. Those who are only playing at it will be cast out into outer darkness, even though they may have done spectacular external things.