Hello. What “kind” of book is each book of the Bible? What is prophetic, what is poetry, what is a journalistic account, etc.? I recently watched an eye-opening video by Bishop Barron. When referring to atheists and people who interpret the bible literally, Bishop Barron clarified that each book is a different “kind” of book, but he didn’t share any resource or list where it shares what “kind” of book each book of the Bible is.
Do you know where I can find a list of what “kind” of book each book of the Bible is?
Thank you for your help,
Kyle
I haven’t read all the other posts. I wouldn’t trust any particular single “list” of what type of book each one is. My approach has been to study a lot of Jewish commentaries, which go line by line, to explain what it in the book, like Genesis. I am not aware of a Catholic book that does that.
First of all, they try to get the translation from the Hebrew (or Aramaic) as best as they can, and then they build up from there in a very logical fashion. The best form of Bible study is in the original languages. There’s quite a lot lost in translation from Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek to English.
They delve deeply into the words (but these commentaries are written for general people, not academicians). It’s much harder than it looks by reading the English.
Hebrew had no upper/lower case. Characters stood for letters and numbers, no punctuation and usually no spaces between words, no vowels, no footnotes, no dictionary to look to, and so forth. So, translations really carry a lot of weight. The Jewish Bible (Tanakh) from the Jewish Publication Society has footnotes that show how frequently the words are really not understood – the Hebrew is just too obscure or archaic. I like to look at the Jewish English translation a lot, for comparison.
In a lot of English translations I’ve seen, the poetic parts are NOT set off as lines of poetry (by indentation for example) to clue us in about that, but a significant part of the OT is poetry – I can barely write in prose (if I may be so bold as to say that) much less to express myself in poetry.
You have to study a few commentaries to get the feel for different opinions. There is no ultimate one source for Bible commentary. The Vatican II said to read everything the Church has ever written – (right!).
The first creation account of Genesis, roughly 1:1 to 2:3 is poetic. Even in English there’s a lot of repetition of words, like verses in a song. In Hebrew, the verses are either 7 words or a multiple of 7 words – emphasizing the importance of the Sabbath 7th day of Creation – the LORD’s day.
In the original, Genesis is divided into 12 parts (hint: tribes of Israel), not 50 chapters, which comes about in about the 12th century, give or take a century.
The Jewish commentaries give me so much more insight into the structure of the OT books, because really there is structure there, that is not obvious in English. The book of Psalms is all poetry, I think. Job is prose at the beginning and end, but poetry most of the middle. (I don’t know how they can tell this.)
What’s really wild, there is a whole genre of Jewish writing outside the Bible which is called re-written scripture, which skips over the hard or embarrassing parts and emphasizes various things the author had in mind. Appropriately, the 3-volume work is called “Outside the Bible: Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period.” You’re thinking “oh, this isn’t Catholic” but actually these writings were very popular in the early Church, because the early Church fathers were looking for everything they could find that pointed to Christ and, depending on who you read, the OT was not really settled at the time of Christ.
You have to take the plunge into scripture studies.
