A recovery of what we have lost
The fundamental units of the Bible are its books
DESIGNING BOOKS NOT TO BE USED, BUT RECEIVED
C. S. Lewis once said that our fundamental obligation to a piece of literature—any literature—is to receive it on its own terms, not merely use it on ours. It is a constant temptation to begin our interaction with a text by imposing our own agenda on it. We are who we are and we know what we want, and so we tend to use texts for our own predetermined purposes. Foremost in our minds is that we are working on our project, or we are looking for something to help us in some specific way. In short, we tend to start from a standpoint of utilitarianism. So we come to the text with our expectations already firmly in place. And, most emphatically, they are ours.
This is a very different thing, says Lewis, from simply receiving the text the way the author wrote it. Authors make choices in their writing. They have content. They want to say something, to welcome others into their circle of meaning. They want to say things in particular ways, so they choose genres as good tools to aid their cause. Different literary genres fit different kinds of content in different ways. Authors begin with goals of their own—to teach, inspire, scold, comfort, encourage, reveal, or even to issue an invitation. Depending on what they are trying to do, authors will choose a form of writing that follows certain conventions to effectively reach their goal. Some forms of literature deliver particular kinds of content better than others. Straightforward prose can instruct and inform. But poetic imagery can move us emotionally. Fitting the choice of a literary genre to one’s communicative goal is a key part of good writing.
“Modern Bibles are built to be efficient conveyors of information, two hardworking columns on every page churning out little bits of sacred truth like some assembly line in the divine economy of spiritual packaging.”
Correspondingly, it is the job of a virtuous reader to begin by discerning an author’s goals as much as possible. The first step on this journey is to recognize the kind of writing a piece of literature is and then to follow the conventions that go with that genre. It does no good to read poetry as a dictionary, or a story as a how-to manual. And it’s probably worth mentioning that humility is the virtue that especially applies here. If I aspire to be a good reader the first thing I must do is quell the urge to jump in by using the literature in front of me for my own ends. I must stifle my prior agenda as much as possible. I must strive to read openly and sympathetically, ready to hear what some other has to say. (It is clear, I hope, that this is the best place to start reading. It does not mean that once I have appropriately taken in an author’s meaning I can’t respond in turn.)
DESIGNERS, BRIDGE BUILDERS, AND TEXT SCULPTORS
It is right here that we must discuss the crucial importance of text design. The form and presentation of the words can either aid or hinder the communicative goals of both authors and readers. The designer is the bridge builder, the one who can bring producers and receivers of content together, provided the designer embraces their own form of humility. Designers exist to serve the text by honoring the choices made by authors and accurately representing them to readers.
Think again about those different literary genres. One of the first clues readers will receive to help them correctly identify authors’ choices will be the visual form of these texts. What signals does a certain form send to the reader’s brain about what they are encountering? Does the book look like the kind of literature it is? Can the poem, the reference work, or the story be easily seen for what it really is?
Designers of texts must see themselves as shape shifters with a purpose, sculptors who bend the words and carve the page until the right form emerges. All the usual suspects contributing to pleasing readability are of course part of the program. But I am focusing here on something else. Text crafters must be familiar enough with the literary content of what they are working with to unveil the meaning with skill and intentionality. Performing this vocation well means taking genre seriously, but also learning the finer parts of texts—the stanzas, oracles, proverbs, and natural divisions of a narrative. Attention to both form and detail will issue a clear and strong invitation for readers to enter into the world of meaning in the words.
Words are speech acts; they do things in the world. Well-designed words are more powerful speech acts. The sculpting of text matters.
THIS PECULIAR COLLECTION OF SACRED WORDS
This concept of using versus receiving is a general idea, and it applies to all kinds of literature. But it is especially relevant in the case of the Bible. The Bible is a collection of very different kinds of writing, so it does the Bible a special disservice to flatten it out and present all of it in the same monotonous visual format. Doing so prevents the reader from seeing the different kinds of writing and taking the first steps toward receiving the Bible on its own terms. The Bible is a challenging book on many levels, and would-be readers need all the help they can get.
Unfortunately, good design help is exactly what modern Bible readers have rarely been given. For it was in the modern period that designers transformed the visual presentation of the Bible, essentially turning the entire collection into a large and complex reference book. The very first chapter-and-verse Bibles appeared during this time, quickly followed by more and more explanatory aid—footnotes, cross-references, section headings, and callouts. So the attempted help for readers was essentially to keep adding more commentary. But what was increasingly covered over was the simple and elegant natural form of the Bible text itself.
Modernity’s Bible imposed a bland sameness over all of the words, making it impossible to see songs and proverbs, or stories and letters. It was all just words, words surrounded by numbers and then isolated and dissected for individual meaning. In such an environment it is a nearly unattainable goal to simply receive the text. Modern Bibles are built for using, period. Modern Bibles are built to be efficient conveyors of information, two hardworking columns on every page churning out little bits of sacred truth like some assembly line in the divine economy of spiritual packaging.
Looking things up is what modern Bibles encourage, not reading for depth and understanding. Our opportunity today is to re-think what’s been done to the modern Bible and to embrace fresh design principles that serve the literary content of Bibles better.
What would it look like if we were to design Bibles to be received, not merely used? What if Bible designers themselves accepted that the Bible is a library, not a single book, and that each entry must be understood and then presented with skill and artistry so readers are introduced to them as they really are?
We tend to start from a standpoint of utilitarianism
What would it look like if we were to design Bibles to be received not merely used?
DESIGNING THE BIBLE THAT’S REALLY THERE
Granted, it’s really the translator’s job to enter into the ancient world of the text and come back to our world with some kind of explanation. It’s the Bible historians and literary scholars who should be regularly educating us on what ancient genres are and how they worked in their own setting.
But make no mistake, that is precisely the world that we should all be striving to enter, because it’s there that the meaning lies. The fundamental intentional units of the Bible are its books, not chapters and verses. These larger literary creations represent distinct genres that the translated words and the published form of the Bible can either obscure or reveal. Modern language users have the best chance of receiving the Scriptures on their own terms, and entering the ancient world of the text with understanding, when translators think in terms of whole books and literary form.
Assuming for the moment that this good work has been done, and is accessible to the Bible designer, then the next step is to craft those texts in ways that open the literature to readers today. Attention to such things as the parallel lines of Hebrew poetry, the three standard parts of ancient letters, the appearance of recurring phrases to mark natural literary seams, and the metastructures of biblical books (to name just a few), brings individual words together into larger contexts of meaning. Combining such attention with intentionality in shaping and formatting translations to reflect these forms provides invaluable aid to comprehension. Readers will thus have a greater opportunity to encounter the intentional literary units of the Bible, engaging with the truth of the Scriptures precisely through the means chosen by inspired authors and tradents.
Perhaps at this point it would be helpful to explore a couple of actual examples from the biblical text to illustrate the point.
HEBREW POETRY
Ancient Hebrew poetry is fundamentally built by combining parallel lines of meaning, usually two, but sometimes three. Familiar elements of verse like rhyming and assonance, while not completely absent, are not the key here. The way to enter into most of the Bible’s poetry is to read the lines as having equal strength and as having a conversation with each other. Once the first line makes its point, watch for how the second line responds: does it repeat and strengthen the first line? Extend it in a new direction? Or maybe talk back to it?
If this is how readers can engage Hebrew poetry, how should designers present the text to best enable this deeper kind of engagement? First, consider the typical two-column modern reference Bible, which has adopted the form of an outline for presenting poetry. This means that the parallel phrases are presented with various levels of indentation, incorrectly implying that those with more indentation are secondary or even tertiary. This is misleading since each phrase is supposed to have equal strength. Then the picture gets even more complicated since the space in a standard column is not wide enough to fit in an entire phrase of the original poetry. The remainder must then be moved down to the next line and indented, but indented at a different level than the next parallel phrase. The end result is simply confusion, with lines and indents and phrases all over the place. The simplicity and power of the original is not well served in this arrangement.
The alternative is to allow the poetry to breathe freely rather than being crowded into a narrow space. A single-column setting allows each full parallel phrase to fit in a single line, with the second phrase flush left and aligned with the first, giving each the equal strength it deserves. Each couplet can then be distinguished from others in the poem or stanza by simple half-line spaces. Full line spaces are reserved for separating stanzas within the poem. Here the reader quickly and intuitively sees the natural parallelism and interprets accordingly. Simple. Clean. Easy to understand.
The Family Bible with self-interpreting and explanatory notes, and marginal references of the late Rev. John Brown. Published by Thomas Nelson in 1842.
Immerse Bible, published in 2017 by Tyndale House Publishing in collaboration with Institute for Bible Reading.
THE INTERNAL STRUCTURES OF BIBLICAL BOOKS
A second major opportunity today is to rediscover the natural literary sections within the books of the Bible. The chapter-and-verse structure has blinded us to the intentional units of the Bible’s authors. We’re so used to seeing this foreign exoskeleton overtop our Bibles, that it has not occurred to us that there might be other, older ways to structure its various texts.
But once we are open to seeing the Bible differently—open to looking past the numbers—the inherent forms quickly emerge. Matthew’s Gospel reveals its provocative New Torah, organizing the teachings of Jesus into five “books” marked off by the phrase “When Jesus had finished saying these things . . .” His point is that this is where Israel’s ancient story had been heading all along. When Luke and Acts are properly reunited as Luke’s two-volume history of the early Christian movement, we notice that each volume is built on journey narratives. In Luke, Jesus travels to Israel’s capital, Jerusalem. In Acts the gospel travels to the empire’s capital, Rome. Letters in the ancient world typically had three standard parts—an opening which identifies the writer and recipients and includes words of blessing and thanksgiving, followed by the main body of the letter, and then closing with more good wishes and extended greetings to other friends. And so forth. We could continue on in this fashion with all the books and literary forms found within the Bible.
Once again, Bible designers have the option of doing something other than continuing in the modernist tradition of ignoring these natural literary structures. They can find creative and pleasing ways to mark these inherent seams in the Bible’s literature by using elegantly simple design, maybe minimalist filigrees or even just varying amounts of white space between sections. The goal is to allow readers to immediately see what’s going on with each particular book. Matthew’s five books should stand out. Luke’s journeys should be marked. The tripartite letter form quickly discerned. There are literary realities throughout the Bible—oracles and collections of oracles, embedded forms like short letters included in narratives or previously existing songs incorporated into Pauline letters—and all of this should be recognized and duly acknowledged in the formatting of the sacred texts.
This kind of Bible is virtually unknown in the world today. But the history of the Bible is a history of change, journeying from oral tradition to scroll, then from ancient codex to modern printing, and on to the still-embryonic digital formats. It’s time for the next change, this one a recovery of the Bible we’ve lost. It’s time we moved beyond using our Bible, back to receiving it on its own original and literary terms.
BACK TO A LITERARY BIBLE
To design a book is to design the reading, and therefore also to design the understanding of that book. Modern Bibles have been misrepresenting the kind of book the Bible is, visually arguing that it is a reference book for snatching small, isolated pieces of information.
Bible designers can overturn this centuries-long distortion and reintroduce us to all the Bible’s sad or joyous songs, pithy proverbs, impassioned apostolic letters of correction and care, prophetic oracles of judgment then hope, and narratives that capture our attention and invite us in to experience them for ourselves. Designers can do all this by showing us a new Bible—the Bible after modernity—which is at the same time a very old Bible that unveils the artful words by arranging them just so. We will then see the beauty and the literature that the Scriptures are, and we will read, and we will understand.
If we can find sculptors of texts once again, then once again we can fully receive the Bible we’ve been given.
Glenn R. Paauw
Senior Director, Content, for the Institute for Bible Reading
The focus of Glenn’s 30 years in Bible ministry has been publishing, researching, speaking, and writing on the topic of reading and living the Bible well. His groundbreaking book Saving the Bible from Ourselves was published by InterVarsity Press in 2016. He is a leader in the development of Reader’s Bibles, and is currently working on Immerse: The Reading Bible for Tyndale House. Previously, Glenn was Bible Publisher and VP, Global Bible Engagement at Biblica. He is also a former staff member of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and a high school Bible teacher.
Glenn’s education was in philosophy and theology at Calvin College and Seminary. He lives in Colorado Springs with his wife, Jain, and has two adult sons.
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Pioneering a Bible Reading Movement through research, education, and new resources that reshape the way people read so they can become immersed in the Bible’s story.
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