The Poetics of Biblical Narrative - Part 4
Meir Sternberg’s poetics shows why cataloguing literary devices is pointless unless we explain how each small textual choice serves the biblical author’s communicative purpose.
The World is Designed in Layers, Just Like Stories
Reality and great literature are both organized into distinct tiers of meaning, where each level possesses its own structure and deepens the whole.
The world is designed in layers, and stories are designed in the exact same way.
Have you ever stopped to consider how strange it is that the physical world is not constructed out of just one uniform substance? If I were to cut off my thumb and place it under a microscope, you would not see smaller thumbs all the way down. You would see distinct tissues, complex chemicals, molecules, atoms, and electrons. Physical reality is created in layers.
The Levels of Reality
Imagine you go to a university because you want to study the physical world. You walk into the registrar’s office and say, “I would like to take a course on the world.” The registrar will not simply hand you an enrollment form for “World 101.” Instead, they are going to force you to choose a specific layer or level of reality to investigate. They will ask what scale of the world you are interested in exploring.
If you say you want to study the smallest foundational layer, they will tell you to take physics. In physics, you study subatomic particles, forces, and their fundamental relations. If you want to move one level up, you take chemistry, studying molecules and the rich interactions that happen at that scale. If you step up another level, you enter biology, exploring everything from a single living cell to a human being or a dinosaur.
If you want to understand the workings of the mind, you move up to psychology. If you want to see how human beings behave together in communities and groups, you study sociology. Notice that you have all of these distinct tiers. To understand the world as an entire work of art, you cannot settle for examining only one level. You have to keep ascending through the layers, because there is genuine meaning at every single stage. You cannot adequately grasp the layer of chemistry merely by studying physics; each stratum possesses its own distinct reality.
The Architecture of Narrative
Stories work in precisely the same way. Consider the tiers of literary composition. A story begins with raw sounds. Those sounds combine into syllables, syllables build phrases, phrases form sentences, sentences become paragraphs, and paragraphs build scenes and acts, all the way up to the overarching work: the book itself. Just as with the natural world, you have to appreciate what is happening on every individual layer, because there is a whole world contained within each one.
Take Dante’s Divine Comedy as an example. The Comedy is structured into three distinct books: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Dante journeys through these three realms, and you can read the poem in a straightforward, linear fashion, following his progress as he learns about vice, virtue, and character.
Yet if you want to ascend to a higher level of appreciation, you can begin to analyze how Dante organized the work across its broader architecture. He organized it both horizontally and vertically. Following an initial introductory canto, each of the three canticas contains exactly thirty-three cantos—thirty-three in the Inferno, thirty-three in Purgatorio, and thirty-three in Paradiso.
More than that, Dante intentionally aligned the numbering of those cantos across the three realms. Inferno 1, Purgatorio 1, and Paradiso 1 correspond directly with one another. In each of the opening cantos, Dante sets out on a journey along a specific path, encounters an obstacle that thwarts his trajectory, and receives assistance from a classical pagan figure from antiquity. Those vertical correspondences are intentional.
To reach the heart of Dante’s design, you have to ask what he is communicating through this architecture. On the horizontal plane, Dante descends into the depths of hell and gradually climbs toward paradise. But because of these vertical correspondences running throughout the structure, Dante is demonstrating that the entire moral universe is integrated. At every step, the reader is learning about the character and tendencies of virtues and vices, growing in moral intelligence.
The architecture of the Bible is constructed with that very same structural depth. Once you understand the text at the level of a single sentence, you can step up to the level of the episode and ask higher-order questions: Why did the author place these three particular scenes together? You can inspect the individual words—asking why an author chose one specific image over another—and then step back to view the grand literary organization, the overarching design of the biblical architecture. When you examine that structural artistry, you begin to see why the Bible is art.