You Should Read (and Analyze) the Bible Like a Story (Because It is One) | A Christian Witch's Biggest Tip on Reading the Bible

Forget Sunday School; y'all gotta stop skipping English class.

Now, let me tell you something: if I had a nickel for every time someone made a claim on what the Bible "said" or was "clear" about, only to go look with my own two eyeballs and wonder how in God's green earth they came to that conclusion, I might have enough money to log off this God forsaken internet and disappear into the woods to live the rest of my life as a hermit proper. However, I do not have a nickel for each time this has happened. I only have this blog, where I can crow to my heart's content about the fact that people seriously need to start looking at the Bible for what it is: a story. Rather, a collection of stories.

"But it's the Word of God—!"

And it's given to us in the form of stories. Whether or not you believe in Biblical inerrancy (I sure don't), what matters is that there is an obvious narrative component to at least 60% of the Bible across the Old and New Testament. We follow people who experience moments of conflict, chaos, and the growth that comes with resolving it all (or, in some cases, the desolation of failing to overcome it), and we have no choice but to rely on the Bible as our narrator and trust its version of events if we have no outside sources or counter-stories that run against its narrative. Given how back then, warring countries and tribes liked to just destroy everything from the other side, it's the unfortunate reality that we might not always have a counter-story to the ones in the Bible about certain battles, people, or gods.

What this means is that we only have what's in front of us to understand what's going on, as well as what we can uncover about the time it was written in. And in the spirit of literary analysis, we can come up with whatever conclusions we like about the Bible—so long as it's supported by the text. Yet all too often, I'll get people making claims about what the Bible said that completely ignore other sections of it (often ignoring the next lines of the section they're referring to), and ones that make a lot of assumptions and inferrals that, based on what we know of the text and its background, we have absolutely no reason to make. A good example is the story of the Apostles asking God to choose a replacement for Judas with lots (cleromancy): this happens in Acts 1, and right in the start of Acts 2, we have the Apostles receiving the Holy Spirit on Pentecost.

Many say that because the Apostles received the Holy Spirit (or, in another argument often lumped together with this one, that Jesus died for our sins), they don't need lots anymore, and that's what we can take away from Acts. But if you read the text, it's pretty easy to determine that not only does Acts 2's opening dilemma have absolutely no bearing on the separate incident of Acts 1 with those lots, but also that Peter himself starts talking about the results of the end of days, in which prophetic powers will come to... basically everyone (Acts 2:17-18):

“‘In the last days, God says,

I will pour out my Spirit on all people.

Your sons and daughters will prophesy,

your young men will see visions,

your old men will dream dreams.

Even on my servants, both men and women,

I will pour out my Spirit in those days,

and they will prophesy.

It's quite important to note that dream/vision interpretation and prophesy are also considered types of divination. Combine that with times God Himself actually did such dream interpretation with people, to the point of actual future telling (think of Joseph and the Pharaoh in Genesis), as well as the fact that God Himself commanded the use of the Urim and Thummim when elders couldn't agree on a reading of the Law, and it seems God does see some functional use in using tools or psychic techniques to get a message across. As such, the idea that "the Holy Spirit came and so we don't need to do divination anymore" is... nonsensical. Nonsensical, and not at all supported by the text. For all we know, just like we never saw the Apostles do this cleromancy thing before, and it was never remarked on as something negative to stop doing (as has been done in other areas of Acts, like with the Jewish exorcists and their magical books), there is no reason to assume that they stopped doing it because they had the Holy Spirit.

Instead, based on the text itself, one can only assume it just... wasn't important enough to bring up ever again. I mean, the Apostles are also never once mentioned to shit or piss in this book. Does that mean they never did? They never mention catching fish again after Jesus appears post-crucifixion to them one more time. Is fish no longer something they eat after that? These would be ridiculous claims to make, naturally, and that's why it's important to understand how to do a bit of literary analysis when extracting the full meaning and depth of a text out.

But How Does One Do Literary Analysis?

This is the million dollar question now, I know. Let me tell you, as someone with a BA in creative writing and an MFA in popular fiction and publishing: you're not going to learn everything about it or master it in this one single blog post. However, while I won't bore you to tears with literary theory and start throwing around words like post-modernist or death of the author or tell you to consider maybe a Marxist or Feminist lens with which to analyze the Bible (though if you want to, absolutely be my guest), I will say this: good literary analysis starts and ends with the text. Of course it includes other things along the way, as no text was or will be written in a vacuum and therefore must be informed or influenced by something, but all the context in the world will not make manifest what is simply not included in the text.

Let's use F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as an example of what I'm talking about. In order to understand this story, we need to understand three things:

1. The sociopolitical and economic background of the story's setting (~1920s-30s America, specifically the Jazz Age in Long Island, New York)

2. The story described by Nick, Daisy's cousin and our narrator observing the situation.

3. The fact that Nick's perspective is the only one we get directly (as in, there's never a point of view shift where the story is being told from someone else's lens; it's all filtered through Nick and Nick alone).

One of these things requires us to know something about the book outside what the book tells us. One of these things requires us to deal with the story at face value, just directly from what we can get from the words on the page. One of these things requires us to acknowledge that the words on these pages may hold some bias at worst, or at very best, simply not have an omniscient understanding of the situation that could warp the way the story comes out and the way we're able to access/understand it.

Of course, you can read The Great Gatsby without researching the Jazz Age or knowing a single thing about American history. It's a relatively normal sized novel written in English; anyone with some free time on their hands who also speaks English can go pick it up and have fun with it. However, there are certain things the story won't go deep into detail to explain, because the setting matches the time period it was written in (1925). Anyone who would read this book in the time period it was written in, and who was familiar with Long Island or jazz or American culture in any way, wouldn't need to do a lot of leg work to understand the nuances of the story (old money vs. new money, World War 1's scars on young American men, Prohibition and bootlegged alcohol, American misogyny in specifically the 20s/30s, etc.). Unlike a fantasy or science fiction book that often is set in their own world and therefore requires some explanation to the readers at some point, you just won't find that here in a book intended to be readily understood by its immediate readership.

Moreover, let's look at point three: the narrator. While Nick never gives us a reason to believe he's an unreliable narrator, the fact is that he's also not God or any figure that can know everything, and know it neutrally. He's a person like the rest of us, and he has his investment in figures like Daisy, his family, and Gatsby, an interesting person that he wants to befriend and know more about. While the marital struggles between Daisy and Tom aren't really his problem or his business, there's no way he can just be a blank, emotionless, passive observer in all this, given the absolute insanity that goes down by the end of the book (and the fact that his cousin is open enough with him to say things that she would never say with anyone else, like how she feels bad for her daughter knowing the kind of world she's going to grow up in and how it treats women); Fitzgerald makes him as neutral as possible, but no man can ever really be neutral. As such, it leaves us to wonder how this story would be told from literally anyone else's viewpoint.

That second point, though, is really the biggest thing we have to worry about: the actual story as it's written. That's all we have, and therefore, that's all we have to go off of. We can't look at the story and try and insert things that Nick never said or Nick never witnessed. We also can't say, "well, Nick is biased, so this entire story painting Tom in a bad light is probably a wash." If we're to make any conclusions about this story, like the idea that wealth isn't the only thing a woman cares about and isn't enough to make a woman uproot her whole life (which we can argue by pointing out the way that Daisy never leaves Tom for Gatsby, even if she's tempted to several times and certainly has plenty enough reason to leave him for his own infidelity), the fact is that once we stop talking about whatever information Nick actually gives us to start thinking of our own ideas and theories, we begin speculating, not actually analyzing the text.

Let me say it crystal clear for you: when it comes to textual analysis, you must work with the text before you, and only outside information insofar as it actually helps contextualize the text.

If we think about the Bible in these same terms, now, we might understand why I'm talking about all of this. Many of the books of the Bible, especially the books of the prophets, are stories. They're either written by the prophets themselves (allegedly) or written by others who have passed down and recorded the stories (1 and 2 Chronicles comes to mind, as well as the four Gospels, all written by different people who heard the same story with minor differences or who were potentially there themselves, writing from memory years later, maybe). These books aren't written literally by God Himself, as the tablets with the Ten Commandments were in the story of Exodus; they are stories written down by people, and as we know, people can do their best to be neutral, but they inherently filter a story through their own mental lens.

And worse, just like Fitzgerald felt no need to explain the setting of Gatsby to the readers who already live in that world, the writers of the Bible and its many stories certainly as hell didn't think to explain the cultural norms and customs that they took for granted as their everyday life; they didn't ever imagine someone would read their words on a device like a phone halfway across the world. That means there's a lot of sociopolitical, cultural, linguistic, and economic context left out that we need to actively search for if we want to make sense of what's going on and understand it fully, just like we need to research Gatsby's period of American history to make full sense of the intricacies within it. Us being able to read a translation of a translation thousands of years after the originals were written is not enough to wring the full heft and meaning out of the text of the Bible.

Moreover, and perhaps most importantly, while plenty stories in the Bible do have explicit commands laid out, like God's commands in Exodus or Deuteronomy, along with God's commands to His people in specific times over the course of the entire Bible, the fact is this: much of the narrative is told by stories of battles, the rise and fall of kings and their lives, the travels of the figures in the Bible, etc. By watching these figures in the Bible and assessing how they are either rewarded or punished for their actions, we are often left to infer something about God and about His wishes. If people go attack a city before getting divine approval to do so and the attack ends in disaster, we can draw a conclusion that running hastily into battle is a bad idea. If people put on sack cloth and repent, and a calamity God promised to bring down on people instead skips over them entirely, we might assume repentance is enough to stay the hand of an angry God. And really, truth is, the fun part of literary analysis is that we can draw any conclusion we want from a story—so long as we can prove it in the text.

This is precisely why there are so many radically different interpretations of the same Bible.

So when I see people making claims that are not only stated nowhere in Biblical text, but also outright refuted within that same text a mere few lines later, when I see people insert their own modern cultural understanding into a text not written by or for modern audiences, when I see them cross contaminate the actual Bible with other ideas from things they don't realize are Biblical fanfiction (like the idea that Satan or Lucifer or whoever rebelled against God and fell from heaven in John Milton's Paradise Lost), it just tells me people do not know how to actually work with a text. They don't know how to break it down, or how to cite from a text to prove their point, or how to infer or boil down the text to its logical conclusions. (Especially that last part. Some people will assume because something wasn't directly and exactly stated in the Bible, that a conclusion people can draw from it isn't Biblical. "Where in the Bible does it say I need to give my money to people?!?" they say, entirely ignoring the words of St. John the Baptist, y'know?)

But worst of all, they prove that they don't really understand how logic works to begni with, or that they've ever heard the phrase, "you're putting the cart before the horse," which we see when Christians start arguing that abortion is a sin because it's murder and "thou shalt not kill" is a commandment, for example. What you really need to do here is

1. Find where in the Bible any talk of termination of an unborn fetus or whatever (not a child already born, but an unborn one) is happening

2. Determine whether God views that as a sin or not

3. Determine what kind of sin God views that as, if He does see it as such

And I'll tell you what: while I have yet to see any moment where abortions are even being performed in the Bible, be it medicinally or surgically (obviously), I do see points where God makes it pretty clear that He doesn't view a fetus as a person and that His law prioritizes people already born over the unborn, given that the penalty for causing a woman to miscarry is paying a fine, while the penalty for killing a pregnant woman is death (Exodus 21:22-25). As this is based on the concept of an eye for an eye, as it states directly there in that last verse, then if that fetus were really considered a person, there would be a trade of a life for a life, not a life for financial compensation of the father's choosing.

Isn't literary analysis magical?

But I know some people will still bristle at this. "The Bible isn't some story!" they'll continue to say, as if we haven't already addressed this to some extent. "You can't treat the word of God this way! It's disrespectful!"

Ah, but is it, really?

No, It's Not Disrespectful to Read the Bible This Way; It's Necessary

Wanna know something funny? This entire time, I've been telling you that you should be doing some good old fashioned English-class-style analysis of the Bible, but the reality is that there already is a neat and tidy word for this exact discipline: hermeneutics. Hermeneutics as a discipline includes practices such as exegesis (the full examination of a text in its proper linguistic, historical, etc. context), though more often than not, we might find people engaging with the Bible instead through eisegesis (the practice of looking at a passage just as it is, typically through the lens of one's own biases and agenda with no regard for the original intent of the authors or its context). When people tell you that the Bible "clearly condemns homosexuality" based on the lackluster and rather unimpressive recitation of maybe three verses (in English!) in the entire Bible—completely ignoring literally everything else about the text and its background and sociopolitical context—that's eisegesis, baby.

Homosexuality (as we understand it in modern era) is forbidden? Eisegesis.

Abortion is murder? Eisegesis.

Women can't be prophets, teachers, or preachers? Well, not only is that eisegesis, but that just straight up ignores entire swaths of the Bible, like the book of Judges or the fact that multiple women in the New Testament are mentioned to be prophetesses, deacons, Apostles, etc., so.

Fact is that the Bible is many things, and it is also not many things: it is not univocal, it is not written in a vacuum, it is not without its implicit and unstated context and bias per the humans that wrote it down in the first place. As such, we have to treat the Bible like a story, because that's what it is. In fact, it's a compilation of stories, all of which tell one overarching narrative of people's interactions and experiences with God and vice versa. We cannot simply plop our biases into the text or invent silly non sequiturs to try and prove our point, especially not if the text not only doesn't support our reading, but actively denies it within its own words. We have to have the textual criticism skills, the media literacy skills, to be able to draw out meaningful and accurate takeaways and morals from the text, too; we have to be able to read between the lines and see that even if something as simple as "don't hit your wife" never gets explicitly stated in the text, that there are plenty of lines in the Bible, and plenty of stories in the Bible, that suggest that mistreating anyone, never mind your wife, is wrong.

It's also a lot of common sense, y'know? But it really is true: common sense just ain't so common anymore. And actual skills like textual analysis/criticism and media literacy definitely aren't common anymore—not with how much of a mess our education system is these days. Still, these are things that can be learned, and they can only help us appreciate the Bible that much more when we read it this way, not hurt. So crack that Bible open to your favorite story and read it like you would read The Great Gatsby. It'll most certainly give you quite a bit more food for thought than you'd expect.

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Sara Raztresen is a Slovene-American writer, screenwriter, and Christian witch. Her fantasy works draw heavily on the wisdom she gathers from her own personal and spiritual experience, and her spiritual practice borrows much of the whimsy and wonder that modern society has relegated to fairy-and-folktale. Her goal is to help people regain their spiritual footing and discover God through a new (yet old) lens of mysticism.

Follow Sara on Tiktok, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube, and explore her fiction writing here.