ABSTRACT
It is self-evident that once the traditions of Israel and the early church were written down and canonized—that is, determined to be scripture—they entered into the realm of literature. The distinction between literature and history may not be an either or matter in the context of interpretation. Conceptually to think about the literary world within a biblical text is quite distinct from thinking about the historical world outside of the biblical text. Historical approaches to the biblical texts are extra-referential; in the main, they are concerned with the world behind or beyond the text. Literary approaches to biblical texts, on the other hand, are internally referential. In both historical and literary approaches to biblical texts, the act of reading is of crucial importance. For the historian, the act of reading is an act of discovering and assessing the veracity of historical information. Modern historiography is in large measure a matter of analyzing texts in this way.
