The first time I heard the term “literary genre” was in a high school English class. I didn’t really like English lit, mostly for shallow reasons. It was too modern. I had a one-track mind for antiquity. If it wasn’t written “BC,” I really didn’t care. I also thought it sounded too artsy and highbrowed. I was under the misguided notion that all I needed to do to understand the Bible was to be able to read. Genre seemed to be nothing more than a fancy term to confuse the simple act of reading.
What a dim bulb I was.
Fortunately, I had some good professors in seminary and graduate school that helped me get a firm grasp of the obvious. They taught me that it was absurd to talk about interpreting the Bible in context and throw genre to the wind. Genre is context (at least one of them).
To speak of literary genre is to speak of how any given piece of writing should be characterized in everyday life. Genre is how we describe a type of written document. In modern terms, all the following are examples of genres: email, blog posts, letters, receipts, contracts, poems, certificates, tax forms, wills, fiction, and nonfiction. Many of these can be categorized even more precisely. For example, fiction might include horror, sci-fi, comedy, history, suspense, mystery, and so on.
Genre is crucial for context because the same word occurring across different types of literature or documents will be understood quite differently. Why? Because genre dictates the perspective for interpretation.
You and I understand the noun “rock” differently if it appears in the sport’s section of a newspaper, a music magazine, a geology textbook, and classic film noir crime drama about a jewelry heist. In order, the word would refer to a basketball or football, a type of music, a piece or mass of stone, and a gemstone. The word doesn’t change, but its meaning varies dramatically. The meaning of a word is driven by context, and genre is context.
The serious Bible student must be aware of the importance of genre. Academic commentaries that engage the text as literature (as opposed to a devotional or homiletical approach) will pay close attention to genre. Make sure you have tools that alert you to genre in your Bible study arsenal.