One common challenge in Bible study is figuring out how much text to study. Whether it’s for personal study, small group discussion, or a sermon selection, students of the Bible have a number of things working against them in making this choice.
First, ancient literature didn’t have typesetting, headings, or subheadings in the same way modern literature does. If you pick up the latest bestselling fiction, chapters are clearly marked. If you prefer non-fiction, you have not only chapters, but clear section headings to break up units of thought. Having no such conventions, ancient literature had to embed its literary markers within the text itself.
Second, modern presentation of Bibles is not always all that helpful. For about 8 centuries, we’ve been stuck with a system of chapter and verse numbers that were designed primarily to help us find things and not to mark off literary units. But most people reading a Bible will presume the chapter and verse divisions should be treated like modern chapters and subheadings, when they ought to function more like line numbers in a Shakespeare play.
Add to that the common publishing practice of adding headings over segments of text, which may or may not be sensitive to the innate literary markers, and readers have a lot to sort through (and learn not to rely on) before they can begin observing.
So I regularly hear folks asking how to figure out how much text to study at once. Ryan wrote a great piece on this question, which you can find here, where he argues we ought to study complete units of thought. That then begs the question of how to identify complete units of thought. Ryan’s piece offers much help to that end.
And a reader of the blog, Barbara Johnson, recently put me on to another wonderful piece by Jason DeRouchie that goes into greater depth on this crucial topic of identifying units of thought. Perhaps you’ve read some of my interpretive book overviews, and you wonder what I mean by “literary markers” and why I begin each piece with them. I am simply trying to show the literary conventions, found within the text itself, that mark off the author’s units of thought.
DeRouchie can help:
The limits of the passage could be a quotation, a paragraph, a story, a song, or even an entire book. The process of establishing literary units is not random, for the biblical authors wrote with purpose, logic, and order, creating groupings and hierarchies of thought to guide understanding. As a biblical interpreter, consider whether there is a clear beginning and end to your passage. Are there clues in the content and/or the grammar that clarify a passage’s boundaries? … Determining the boundaries of a passage can help you lead a Bible study, plan a series of Bible studies, or plan a preaching series. Before you can do any of these things, you have to know where to start and where to end. This blog post offers some basic guidelines for establishing the boundaries of literary units.
He then gives 5 primary steps to help you establish these boundaries, with much insight into each step:
- Don’t automatically trust English translations’ verse and chapter divisions.
- Remember that some multi-volume works in our English Bibles were single books in Jesus’ Bible.
- Look for recognizable beginning and ending markers.
- Treat literary units as wholes.
- Check your decision against modern translations and, if possible, the standard Hebrew text.
This is very helpful material, which will help you to grow into a more literary student of the Scriptures, acquiring an appropriate sensitivity to the shape of the text before you. I highly commend DeRouchie’s article.
