The Bible Read Aloud

In the previous  post I commented that the story of Elijah on Mount Carmel (I Kings 18:20-40) needs to be read aloud. I say this because the defeat of the prophets of Baal is high drama, and dramatic literature  must come to the hearer out loud, not just in an isolated meditative and silent reading.  And if the drama is also the inspired word of God, the oral presentation becomes compelling, if presented with rhetorical skill.

The  texts were written in and for oral cultures.  The texts were read in the public assembly. The Bible itself describes scripture read aloud for the benefit of of the gathered listeners.  See Exodus 24:7; Deuteronomy 31:9-13; Joshua 8:34-35; Nehemiah 8:1-3, 8, 18; Luke 4:16-21; Acts 15:21; Colossians 4:16 cited in this article by Jason Jackson.

The late Donald Juel argued that the oral/aural power of the Bible has been  neglected within the worship life of the church as well as in biblical scholarship.  To recover the Bible's power to capture the the imagination of readers and interpreters, we must once again attend to the public reading, or performance, of the Bible. Donald Juel, "The Strange Silence of the Bible," in  Shaping the Scriptural Imagination: Truth, Meaning, and the Theological Interpretation of the Bible, edited by Shane Berg and Matthew L. Skinner (Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press, 2011 at 33-48) (essay originally published in Interpretation 51:1 (1997)). In this essay Juel describes his experience of seeing and hearing the Gospel of Mark "performed" in public. Juel at page 37-38.   Juel concludes that biblical interpretation is "deficient" without the experience of reading and hearing: "Being present for a performance of Mark's Gospel and dealing with the reactions of the audience have convinced me that without the actual experience of reading and hearing, biblical interpretation is deficient.  An interpretation that fails to take into account what happens when written words are spoken seems adequate neither to the original setting in which they were spoken  nor to the contemporary settings in which they continue to function."  Juel at 38.

A related point which Juel makes is that if the texts call for  oral proclamation, that gives the reader "considerable power" and that is risky:  "The reader has considerable power, including, as it turns out, the power to make the Bible so uninteresting that people do not bother to read it."   Juel at 37.    But this need for the reader  to make the oral proclamation skillfully will have to be the subject of another post.