This is John at the Bible Project.

Today on the podcast we continue our series on how to read the Bible.

We're doing the series because it's important to appreciate that reading the Bible is different than reading modern literature.

The Bible is an ancient book, it's from a different time period, a different culture,

and the way the Bible tells stories is similar to the way we tell stories today with plot-setting characters,

but it also has key differences from what we would expect as modern readers.

And sometimes for us, that's difficult.

So are they true? Am I asking, do they communicate something that's true to the human experience?

Is it true in the sense of historical reference?

So yeah, it depends. We shouldn't just import our modern expectations of what a history book ought to look like on these texts.

So today we discuss the craft of storytelling in the Bible, and we start off with a very basic feature of storytelling, the plot.

What is a plot? How is it used in storytelling and how do the biblical authors use it?

That's what we'll talk about on today's episode. Here we go.

Cool, so we've been going through a series on how to read the Bible.

Yes. And up to this point, we haven't actually done any conversations about how to read the Bible.

That's true. It's been about where did the Bible come from, what's the main storyline that the Bible's all about?

Right.

Different types of literature in the Bible, now we're getting to it.

Now we're jumping in. How do you actually read these types of literature?

And so the last video went through the three big buckets of literature, narrative, poetry, and prose discourse.

And so what we're going to do is drill down first to the narrative, stories, biblical narrative.

For obvious reasons, it makes up nearly half of the entire Bible is in narrative form.

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