第31章

The simplicity of the Bible is largely because there is so little abstract reasoning in it.Having few or no abstract ideas, it does not need abstract words.Rather, it groups its whole movement around characters.Three eminent literary men were once asked to select the best reviews of a novel which had just appeared.One of the three statements which they rated highest said of the book that it "achieves the true purpose of a novel, which is to make comprehensible the philosophy of life of a whole community or race of men by showing us how that philosophy accords with the impulses and yearnings of typical individuals." Few phrases could be more foreign to Bible phrases than those.But there is valuable suggestion in it for more than the literature of the novel.That is exactly what the Scripture does.Its reasoning is kept concrete by the fact that it is dealing with characters more than movements, and so it can speak in concrete words.That always makes for simplicity.

There are two elements common to the history of literature about which a special word is deserved.I mean the dramatic and the oratorical elements.The difference between the dramatic and the oratorical is chiefly that in dramatic writing there is a scene in which many take part, and in the oratorical writing one man presents the whole scene, however dramatic the surroundings.There is not a great deal of either in the Scripture.There is no formal drama, nothing that could be acted as it stands.It is true, to be sure, that Job can be cast into dramatic form by a sufficient manipulation,but it is quite unlikely, in spite of some scholars, that it was ever meant to be a formal drama for action.It does move in cycles in the appearance of its characters, and it does close in a way to take one back to the beginning.It has many marks of the drama, and yet it seems very unlikely that it was ever prepared with that definitely in mind.On the other hand, a most likely explanation of the Song of Solomon is that it is a short drama which appears in our Bible without any character names, as though you should take "Hamlet" and print it continuously, indicating in no way the change of speakers nor any movement.The effort has been measurably successful to discover and insert the names of the probable speakers.That seems to be the one exception to the general statement that there is no formal drama in the Scripture.But there are some very striking dramatic episodes, and they are made dramatic for us very largely by the way they are told.One of the earlier is in I Kings xviii:21-39.It is almost impossible to read it aloud without dramatic expression: