It’s an on-going joke that the Colorado
outdoor activity is wasted on me. I do not want to hike, kayak, hunt, fish or camp
in the mountains. Nor do I want to sit on a sandy beach with my toes in the
surf for days on end. My idea of a dream vacation is a tour of the Presidential
Libraries. I love Philadelphia, Washington DC, and Boston. Doreen Rappaport,
Beth Anderson, Marissa Moss, and Barb
Rosenstock write the BEST kids history. Thank you, Jill Eileen Smith, and Fiona
Davis, for cannot-put-down historical fiction. Yep, I’m a history nerd.
Despite that, I stumbled
through Old Testament books 6-17 yawning. Mostly lost in the wilderness with
the children of Israel. Yet another driving reason to look for a better way to read
the Bible.
I knew those books
as the history of God’s people, but they seemed so repetitive and boring. Until
I started reading them as stories, not
statistical historical accounts. Ignoring the chapter and verse breaks and the
subtitles in my translation.
In narratives, we read about specific characters and see
them as real people with real problems. Villains become more villainous; heroes have flaws also. We see thought
processes for problem solving and we feel their emotions. As with any
narrative, these stories give us deeper understanding of our God and His plans
for the world He created.
Writers are
constantly admonished to “show, not tell”
in their stories. The writers of these Old Testament narratives were experts
in this literary technique. For example:
I Kings 10:1-5. What if the author had written “The Queen of Sheba came
to visit and to test Solomon with questions?
She was shocked at the wealth of Solomon.” Read what it really says and see the
difference!
A good narrative will
put the reader in the setting, the
characters will feel like friends or foes. An ‘inciting incidence’ such as seven
hundred wives and 300 concubines turning a king’s heart from the Lord will
cause our blood pressure to rise as we anxiously anticipate the outcome of this
action. The action follows an “arc” as
the action rises, and situations become more dire until they fall into
resolution. The Biblical narratives are a roller coaster of good and bad even
among our heroes.
Old, familiar
stories become exciting when read as a narrative. Choose a story from 1 Kings
and . . .
DIVE
DEEP
·
Identify
the main characters and the setting of this story.
·
What
has happened that led up to this story?
·
Identify
the ‘inciting incident.’ What happened
after this that led to the resolution?
·
What
is God trying to teach us through this story?
I can’t wait to read the rest of I Kings this
week. How about you?
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