The Importance of God's Comprehensive Story as a Framework for Interpreting the Narrative and Non-historical Parts of the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

The article explores the need to read the Bible as one comprehensive story despite the fact that it contains different literary genres, plots and subplots, characters, etc. Also, it is pointed out that even the non-historical parts of the Bible contain a story and/or are part of some larger story that we must have in mind when we read and/or interpret these parts. For this purpose, the first part of the article describes and defines the concept of God's comprehensive story, and the second part shows, using selected examples (the Law, genealogy, Psalm 1), what the interpretation looks like when God’s comprehensive story is taken into account or neglected. The article concludes that the rediscovery of God's comprehensive story as it is written in the Bible is crucial because otherwise, Christianity not only harms Judaism, but also deprives itself of knowing the fullness of God's word if it reads the Bible only in accordance with theological systems that have developed during the history of the Church.

Keywords

• narrative
• story
• inclusion
• genesis 3:15
• law
• genealogies
• psalm 1