The old joke goes that a new course was being offered in a university religion department: “The Bible of Religious Document”. A “new” course because of the more typical “Bible as literature” classes. James Wood thinks biblical characters lack inner lives. Tod Linafelt thinks otherwise in this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

It is hard to deny that in many respects the Bible is the most unliterary work of literature that we have. Saint Augustine, already in the late fourth century AD, confessed that biblical style exhibits “the lowest of language” and had seemed to him, before his conversion, “unworthy of comparison with the dignity of Cicero.” It is easy to see what he means. Biblical narrative especially (things are different with biblical poetry) tends to work with a very limited vocabulary and consistently avoids metaphors and other sorts of figurative language, evincing a drastically stripped-down manner of storytelling that can seem the very antithesis of style.

Then, readers have not traditionally gone to the Bible in search of literary artfulness but rather for its religious value — that is, as a source of theology (What can we learn about God?) or of ethics (What can we learn about morality?). For Augustine, as for so many religious readers after him, the Bible’s theological truths and ethical teachings won out over its literary art or lack thereof.

Linafelt goes on to state that:

What makes Wood’s mischaracterization of biblical narrative so disappointing is the opportunity that is lost, the opportunity to have one of our best and most subtle analysts of fictional narrative go to work on our most ancient example of fictional narrative. For whatever else the Bible is or contains — scripture, ethics, history, lyric poetry — it also represents a genuine precursor to the modern novel.

Jane Smiley, in her book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (Knopf, 2005), gives this basic definition: “A novel is a (1) lengthy, (2) written, (3) prose, (4) narrative with a (5) protagonist.” One may nuance the definition, but that is a pretty common one. And classical biblical narrative brings together all those elements, probably for the first time in literary history. Indeed, the Bible contains, in the books of Genesis and Samuel, what is very likely the earliest ever extended prose narratives, presenting protagonists who develop and change over the course of a lifetime and who, contra Wood, demonstrate a genuine sense of a past that impinges on their present.