Abstract
Toward the end of the twentieth century a genuine, sustained appreciation of the Bible’s literary art—regardless of its historical veracity or of its religious value—arose. The Introduction explains that focus of this VSI is on the two traditional literary genres found in the Bible, namely narrative and poetry. It asks what it means to read the Bible “as literature” and concludes that it is to pay attention to precisely those qualities that do more than communicate information, those qualities of linguistic imagining that may startle and provoke, or soothe and comfort, or perhaps just ask us to enjoy the play of language itself, because we can.
