HGP-06 Literary Analysis of the Prophets

How can identifying the different kinds of literature that appear in the prophetic books help us interpret them more responsibly?

When we interpret the Old Testament, we have to look at the genre of the material that we’re reading. In terms of today, we don’t read a novel the same way we read a contract. We don’t view a documentary concerning a battle in World War II in the same way that we would look at a movie on the same subject. There are certain rules of interpretation that come with different types of literature. For example, there’s a difference between poetry and prose. A great deal of the Old Testament is written in poetic form, and it is characterized by a terseness; there is an absence of words that they would gap or leave out. And there’s also an extended use of figures of speech. So, we have to come to the material sensitive to this, or we will misread it because, perhaps, we’re not understanding a figure, or we’re not understanding that sometimes words are left out, and it can be important by that omission as well.

Another example would be with regard to prophecy. There are several factors we need to keep in mind with regard to prophecy. For example, some prophecies, not all, have an element of contingency baked into them. And so, for example, in Jeremiah 18 and in Ezekiel 18, God will say, “If I say I’m going to punish someone because of their sins, and then they repent, well, I won’t do it. I’ll set that aside. Or if I say I’m going to bless them, and then they start sinning, then I’m not going to bless them.” There’s a contingency based upon the reaction of the people that received the word of God. An example of this would be in the book of Jonah. Some people would look at the book of Jonah and say, a prophet is supposed to be right all of the time. Jonah went into Nineveh and said, “Forty days and you’re toast. You’re going to be destroyed.” Forty days later they weren’t destroyed, so Jonah got it wrong. Well, no, Jonah is a prophet, and in that prophecy there is the notion that if they repent God isn’t going to destroy them. And, in fact, we know that that’s the case. They repented, and God didn’t destroy them. But Jonah also gives us the idea that he understands that that’s true because he says, as he’s sulking to the east of the city, he’s saying, “I just knew. Didn’t I say, when I was back in my home country, didn’t I just say that you’re the type of God that forgives? Didn’t I call this in advance?” And so, there’s baked into even the message of Jonah this idea of contingency. So when we come to the Old Testament, we have to be sensitive to the type of literature, particularly as we deal with poetry and with respect to prophecy.