THE OLD TESTAMENT NARRATIVES: THEIR PROPER USE

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WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW:

  • The single most common type of biblical literature is narrative, which are purposeful stories retelling the historical events of the past that are intended to give meaning and direction for a given people in the present.
  • Instead of concentrating on the clear meaning of the narrative, some relegate the text to merely reflecting another meaning beyond the text. This is know as allegorizing.
  • Ignoring the full historical and literary contexts, and often the individual narrative, some people concentrate on small units only and thus miss interpretational clues, called decontextuallizing.
  • Basic narrative parts: characters, plot, plot resolution.
  • Metanarrative: the whole universal plan of God worked out through his creation and focusing primarily on God's chosen people.
  • Distinctive features of Hebrew narratives: narrator, scenes, characters, dialogue, plot, and structure.
  • Implicit teaching: narrative teaching that is clearly present in the story but not stated in so many words.
  • Moralizing: in asking "what is the moral of this story?, this approach involves the assumption that principals for living can be derived from all passages.
  • Misappropriation: closely related to personalizing, it is to appropriate a narrative for purposes that are quite foreign to it's reason for being there.

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ACTS: THE QUESTION OF HISTORICAL PRECEDENT

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THE EPISTLES: THE HERMENEUTICAL QUESTION