ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the project of studying the Bible as literature since the end of the nineteenth century, and why, on the whole, theologians avoided it in their conferences. It focuses on Ulrich Simon and Mieke Bal as they, in their very different ways, unpick the literary readings of the Bible and their theological fallacies and dangerous coherences. Although the phrase 'the Bible as Literature' first appeared in Matthew Arnolds Isaiah of Jerusalem, twentieth-century study of the Bible as literature truly begins with the work of Richard Green Moulton, Professor of Literary Theory and Interpretation at the University of Chicago. The capacity for literary readings of the Bible to 'open' the text to reveal what is hidden and therefore too often forgotten below its surface can, for some people, be an emancipatory experience that may be either liberating or threatening. The Bible, as a text of Western imperial authority becomes, in the novel, a place of 'hermeneutical contestation'.
