I have several friends who write professionally. Some write resumes for people. Others write fiction or for newspapers. Several are bloggers or freelancers. Any writing trade requires a certain skill set—and that means more than having a firm grasp of grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
There are several overlooked aspects of writing as a trade. For example, knowing your audience and their expectations is crucial. Audiences naturally expect clarity and readable prose. But there’s a part of audience expectation that is less familiar. The competence of a writer is also judged by whether a writer produces content in the expected form. Those expectations arise from the type of document in view—its genre.
All of us take the form of a document for granted. We don’t even think about it unless we encounter a flawed example. If you were in court, for example, and your lawyer handed a judge a document only to have the judge growl out loud that the document wasn’t prepared according to required specifications, you’d wonder if your lawyer knew what he or she was doing. If you picked up a book that had the table of contents in the back, you’d think immediately that the publisher or the writer was incompetent. If you were reading the first chapter of a novel that told you how the story was going to end, you’d wonder if the author had any sense of plot. Every genre includes expectations about the right way to write.
When writers violate this sense of convention, most readers would think that the writer is an inexperienced amateur—a hack, in literary terms. The biblical writers were not hacks.
The Bible is filled with all types of literature: laws, legal cases, treaties, poetry, historical narrative, apocalyptic visions, letters, annals, parables, and speeches are examples. Each one came with expectations of how that particular type of literature “ought” to be written and structured. The fact that biblical material has a high degree of conformity to ancient examples of all these literary genres shows us that the people who wrote Scripture knew what they were doing. They were competent writers. The Bible wasn’t the result of amateur hour.
This has two implications for us as Bible students. First, we’re obligated to discover what the biblical writers were doing. We need to learn something about the literary genres of the Bible and how biblical writers wrote according to such forms. Second, we need to let our knowledge of what the biblical writers were doing dictate our reading. Simplistic readings of the Bible that are inattentive to what the biblical writers were doing—and why—will not produce an accurate interpretation. Part of understanding the Bible is understanding each writer’s craft.