Charles Halton has a nice little post up about Mappae Mundi and biblical genres. I’ve been doing a little bit of thinking about genre recently, and Charles’ post really resonated with some of my own thoughts. Somewhat ironically, when I looked at his first map image my initial thought was, “Well, that’s not very accurate.” This caused me to reflect a bit on what I see as one of the major problems when it comes to genre and the Bible; namely that readers of the Bible–especially conservative evangelicals with whom I have the most experience–are taught to expect certain things from the Bible.

Let me give an example. A conservative evangelical Christian might read any number of prophecies in the Hebrew Bible and automatically apply that prophecy to Jesus Christ, because she has been predisposed to do so. Whether formally or not, she has been taught to read biblical prophecy in a certain way. Similar things take place when a reader fails to understand when metaphor is being used and when it is not. Conservative evangelicals are regularly taught that the Bible is a history book. As a result, they expect it to conform to the norms of modern history books–much like I automatically expected Charles’ map image to conform to my modern idea of what a map is for.

One could look at this from another direction. I have often heard pastors declare that the Bible is God’s love letter to each individual in a congregation. Pastors often mean well when they say this, but I think that it again leads to a misunderstanding of exactly what the Bible is. This in turn leads to a misreading of the text because the reader expects one thing but encounters something that is, in actuality, something quite different. This is, of course, at the heart of the evangelical debates about inerrancy, creationism, etc. Charles points out that looking at cognate texts can help us understand the Bible. He’s absolutely right. Looking at other ancient near eastern texts helps the modern reader to approach the Bible in the proper light so that when it does not conform to a modern ideal of a love letter, or history book, or whatever else, we are able to understand why and interpret it properly.

As it turns out, the map that Charles displayed wasn’t inaccurate at all. My expectations of it were what was inaccurate.