The Bible reports what people did without approving it, and how to tell narration from endorsement
Reading a Story
Abraham lies about his wife. Jacob cheats his brother and is cheated in turn. David takes a man’s wife and has the man killed. The Bible tells every one of these stories without a sentence of comment, and readers have drawn the wrong conclusion from that silence for as long as there have been readers.
Lesson 4 of 12 · Reading a story
Almost half the Bible is story, and the stories report what people did, usually without saying what to make of it. Narration is not endorsement. The judgment is there, but it is kept in the shape of the story, in what happens next, in what is repeated and in who is silent, and not in a moral tacked on at the end. A reader who takes a character’s act for a command has read a story as if it were a law, and a reader who waits for the narrator to disapprove will wait a long time.
The narrator does not comment
Genesis tells you that Sarai, childless, gave her servant to her husband so that a child might be born through her, and that Abram agreed.
Sarai said to Abram, “See now, Yahweh has restrained me from bearing. Please go in to my servant. It may be that I will obtain children by her.” Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. — Genesis 16:2 · WEB
Read the comment on Hagar, and the God who sees
Not a word of judgment. No sentence says this was wrong, and none says it was right. The narrator reports and moves on, and the reader who wants to know what to think has to read on, to a household torn in two and a boy sent into the desert. That is the ordinary manner of Bible narrative, and it is so consistent that the exceptions stand out like a raised voice. After the whole affair of Bathsheba and Uriah, the narrator finally speaks.
When the mourning was past, David sent and took her home to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son. But the thing that David had done displeased Yahweh. — 2 Samuel 11:27 · WEB
Read the comment on The Letter Uriah Carried
But the thing displeased the Lord. One sentence, after a chapter of silence, and it lands like a hammer precisely because the narrator so rarely says anything of the kind. Where such a sentence is absent, and it is absent almost everywhere, the absence is not approval. It is the method.
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Where the judgment is kept
If the narrator will not say, the story will show. Its commonest way is what happens next. Jacob deceives his blind father by dressing as his brother; the next thing that happens to him is that his uncle deceives him in the dark with the wrong daughter, and Jacob asks the question the reader has been waiting for someone to ask.
In the morning, behold, it was Leah! He said to Laban, “What is this you have done to me? Didn’t I serve with you for Rachel? Why then have you deceived me?” — Genesis 29:25 · WEB
Read the comment on Seven years, and in the morning it was Leah
Why have you deceived me? The story has not said that Jacob’s trick was wrong. It has arranged for him to be tricked in exactly the same way and to feel exactly what his father felt. That is the verdict, and it is more searching than a comment would have been.
The other way is repetition. Watch what the patriarchs do with their wives.
“Please say that you are my sister, that it may be well with me for your sake, and that my soul may live because of you.”” Genesis 12:13 · WEB
Abram, in Egypt, asks Sarai to say she is his sister.
“Abraham said about Sarah his wife, “She is my sister.” Abimelech king of Gerar sent, and took Sarah.” Genesis 20:2 · WEB
Abraham does it again, in Gerar, twenty-five years later.
“The men of the place asked him about his wife. He said, “She is my sister,” for he was afraid to say, “My wife”, lest, he thought, “the men of the place might kill me for Rebekah, because she is beautiful to look at.”” Genesis 26:7 · WEB
Isaac, his son, does exactly the same thing in the same town.
Three times, without comment, and the third time is the comment. A fault told once is an event; told three times across two generations it is a family, and the story is asking you to notice.
תּוֹלְדָה tôwlᵉdâh H8435
or תֹּלְדָה; from יָלַד; (plural only) descent, i.e. family; (figuratively) history; birth, generations.
The word Genesis uses to organize itself. Eleven times the book says these are the generations of someone, and each time a new story begins, from the heavens and the earth to Jacob. The word means what came of someone, what they brought forth, and it is the book’s own way of saying that a story is judged by what comes of it. Read a story to the end of its generations and you will know what the narrator thought.
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Heroes are not examples
The Bible’s stories have heroes, and it is a mistake to read them as examples. Gideon is called by God, wins his battle with three hundred men, and then makes a golden object that his whole town worships.
Gideon made an ephod out of it, and put it in Ophrah, his city. Then all Israel played the prostitute with it there; and it became a snare to Gideon and to his house. — Judges 8:27 · WEB
Read the comment on The Ephod That Became a Snare
It became a snare. The story that made him a hero is the same story that records his ruin, and it records both in the same tone. Samson is worse, David is worse still, and the book of Judges ends with the people of God doing things that cannot be printed in a children’s Bible. None of it is told for imitation. It is told because it happened, and because what God did with such people is the point.
Here a real disagreement should be marked. The letter to the Hebrews lists Gideon, Samson, Jephthah and David among the examples of faith, and it does so knowing their stories. Readers divide over how far that makes the patriarchs and judges models: some hold that scripture presents them as such, faults and all, others that Hebrews praises one thing in each and passes over the rest. What both agree on is that the stories themselves do not tell you to copy their people. Hebrews is a letter doing something with a story. The story is doing something else.
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How to read a story
Read it to the end, which is often further than the chapter division. Ask what changed between the beginning and the end, because that is where the story has put its meaning. Ask what is repeated, since repetition is the narrator’s way of underlining. Ask who is silent, and notice that the women and servants in these stories often are. And ask what God did, because in a Bible story God is a character, usually the least visible one and always the one the story is finally about.
Take a Bible story you know well and read it to the end of its generations, past where you usually stop. What happened next to the person at its center, and does that change what you thought the story was saying?
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