ABSTRACT
In China, many people begin to know Hebrew Literature from the Bible. In
the view of Chinese people, the Bible is not only a religious work, but also
of great literary value. An important source of Western civilization, the
Bible has left us a series of ‘‘puzzles’’ to reckon with. Therefore, from the end
of the 1970s, the Bible became a part of the course of Oriental Literary
History taught at universities in China. Generally, the Bible as literature taught in China can be classified into
two main groups. One group changes the map of Bible according to literary
genres, accordingly, the Bible was divided into tales and legends, e.g. the
creation by God, the flood story; historical stories, e.g. the story of Joshua,
the story of Samson; novels, e.g. Ruth; play, e.g. Job; and poems, e.g.
Psalms, Songs of Songs, Lamentations, and so forth. The methodology they
applied is similar to that of the new interpretations of Western literary and
Biblical scholars since the 1970s, although at the very beginning ‘‘terms as literature was still relatively new,’’ to some extent ‘‘as a voice crying in the
wilderness.’’1 The other group discusses the Bible as literature according to
the traditional designation by Jews as Torah (Five Books of Moshe), Nevim
(Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings). Meanwhile, there are also some scho-
lars who engage or try to engage in the programs of comparative culture,
comparative philosophy, and comparative literature between these two
ancient civilizations. However, it must be noted that the versions of the
Bible on which they are mainly based were not translated from Hebrew, but from English, Greek, or Latin.
