ABSTRACT
The canonical approach to reading the Bible, especially the Old Testament, is a new feature of biblical scholarship in the last twenty-five years or so. The fact that the canonical approach is a novelty within modern biblical scholarship must not disguise its historic importance for most Bible-readers. The canonical approach makes the Bible profitable for the Christian reader, or better, it endorses the questions Christian readers tend to put to the Bible. The canonical approach treats the Bible as unlike any other book, as a text to be read with quite different questions from those we put to other ancient texts. Rather than simply rejecting the constructive agenda of the Biblical Theologians who had wanted above all to make the Bible fruitful for the work of theologians and ordinary believers Childs proposed a new way of approaching the matter.
