In the first part of this short series I only got as far as comparing the composition of the Bible with its two Testaments to the existence of a modern city into an older and newer part of town. But this analogy can certainly be extended further.
Genres
The next smaller unit we run across in the Bible is found as one groups together the individual books into similar types. Thus, we have the following general divisions by genre: historical books (Genesis-Nehemiah and The Gospels and Acts), Prophecy and Apocalyptic Literature (Isaiah-Malachi and Revelation), and the Letters (Romans-Jude). Of course, these are only broad generalities since one will, for example, certainly run into prophetic material in both the historical books and the epistles.
Or one could divide all the books of the Bible into those written in prose and those which are better classified as poetry. But the problem with that mode of genre differentiation is that almost all the books are a mixture of the two to some extent or another, and scholars on occasion disagree even on individual verses as to whether they could best be called prose, poetry, or “elevated prose.”
The same sort of a mixture of types is found as one examines the individual smaller neighborhoods found within both the older or newer parts of town. There may be, as in my present town, golf course and retirement communities which have their own restrictive rules regarding the acceptable outer appearance of the individual houses (up to and including the maximum height of the grass in one's lawn, whether or not you are able to park your car on the street, and how long children are allowed to stay in your house) and may require maintenance fees to support the upkeep of the common areas. And in the historic areas of town, there are a number of laws limiting the amount of house modernization one can do.
Applying this analogy to the individual genres in the Bible we see that there are rules of proper interpretation regarding each type of literature. (The classic book How to Read the Bible For All Its Worth is a very valuable resource in this regard.) This consideration runs counter to both the more liberal believer and the fundamentalists. Thus, one will find most liberals who deny that events such as Christ's multiplication of the loaves and fishes or the resurrection of Jesus were ever meant to be taken literally since the authors were only talking symbolically. But at the other extreme, I have personally talked to those who feel that if you don't take every single statement in the Bible as a literal, propositional truth (including the parables), you have no right calling yourself a Christian.
Individual Books
Finally we work our way down to the level of a single book of the Bible, each of which has its own individual character. Fortunately, I now live in a community where practically anything goes in terms of the outward appearance of our properties. So although I may not personally agree with the colors the neighbors in my community chose to paint their houses or be slightly annoyed when someone leaves their unwanted furniture out near the road for anyone who chooses to pick it up. But on the other hand, no one in by neighborhood has ever criticized me for the way I often let my grass get little higher than I should. And of course what I do to my house's interior is strictly up to me.
In the same manner, in interpreting the books of the Bible, one must take each one individually on its own merits, including the particular theological slant of the author, the style he chooses to employ, and the sometimes unique way he has of using his favorite vocabulary to express his ideas. And also you need to always keep in mind the particular historical background against which each author is writing and who his intended audience is.
Chapters
Now that we have limited our analogy down to the confines of a single house, the next logical divisions are found in the rooms within that house. Within a house, one may have individual rooms which are quite serviceable in themselves but do not at all work in their present location. For example, there are some house plans I have seen in which anyone in the guest bedroom has to walk through the master bedroom to get to the bathroom. Then there was another house we looked at before moving to our present location. It had obviously been expanded with time to the point where one needed to transverse two series of stairs and walk through a huge game trophy room in order to get from one end of the house to the other.
So we had to be careful to make sure that the room divisions made sense before we actually bought a house, and that the natural flow from one part of the house to the next was one with which we could live.
Similarly, when one burrows down to the next smaller convenient unit in the Bible into which the books are divided, we come to the chapters. These are certainly chunks of material that generally lend themselves well to serving as the subjects for individual sermons or Sunday school lessons. But some people go even further and take these divisions as sacrosanct, feeling that they must be considered part of the original text. The fact is that the first attempt to divide up the biblical text into chapters did not actually happen until 1227 AD when Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton came up with our present chapter divisions. Although the Archbishop did an admirable job, to call these divisions inspired is a drastic overstatement. As a matter of actual fact, our present divisions are sometimes quite misleading, including both those occasions when a given chapter should more properly have been a little shorter and those in which they should have been extended to include more verses.
Getting back to our house analogy, when we brought our present house we felt quite free to both shorten some wall openings between rooms to create a more open access between them and to create a brand new room by subdividing one room which was too large for our needs. In the same manner, one should take the present chapter divisions as only rough guidelines as to where the author wished to begin a new thought or present a different event.
Verses
The same situation which applies to the chapters in the Bible also must be taken into account in regard to our present verse divisions, which were by no means found in any of the early manuscripts of the Bible. In fact, the Old Testament was divided into verses for the first time by a Jewish rabbi by the name of Nathan in A.D. 1448. And Robert Estienne, also known as Stephanus, was the first to divide the New Testament into standard numbered verses, in 1555. Stephanus essentially used Nathan’s verse divisions for the Old Testament. Since that time, beginning with the Geneva Bible, the verse divisions employed by Stephanus have been accepted into nearly all the Bible versions.
The problem comes in when we try to elevate those individual verse designations as the only sure guide to what the authors intended in the first place. As an example I have shared before, I visited a Sunday school class once where the teacher would absolutely not allow anyone to refer to a previous or subsequent verse for clarification when discussing an individual verse. By “atomizing” the text in that manner, it was treated as a series of unrelated verses which had to each stand on their own. This is an especially ridiculous way in which to approach the Bible since, for example, some of Paul's individual introductory sentences in Greek encompass ten or more verses in our English versions.
Again, even at this smallest level, there is applicability to the spatial analogy I have been developing. To explain, the verses in a chapter can be considered as the furniture and decorations within each individual room. And just as one wouldn't bunch all the furniture in one corner, leaving the rest of the room bare, so there should be both an aesthetically pleasing and practical arrangement of furnishings in a room.
Applying that principle to the verses in the Bible, we now come to the subject that is near and dear to my heart, the literary symmetry found within every level of the Bible. Since it has been the subject of many of my past posts, I will not belabor the issue except to point out that same sort of recurring pattern appears when the walls of a room are decorated by matching elements. For example, pairs of sconces or pictures which are of similar subjects, size, style, and/or color are quite often hung on the wall on either side of a central feature such as a fireplace or TV. This is closely analogous to the chiastic arrangement of words, events, or paragraphs within a biblical chapter and taking the form ABA', in which A and A' match in vocabulary or theme and B is the center point of emphasis.
Of course, there are other equally aesthetically pleasing ways both to decorate a room and to construct an orderly chapter-size segment of Scripture, but I think you will get the general idea from the example above.
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