Reading the Historical Books of the Bible

 

      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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