We have all done “The Stare”. That agonizing stare you do at the words in front of you. The minutes you spend staring at a passage of scripture, wanting it to say something to you, wishing you understood what the author was saying.
Sometimes you can feel like the writing is schizophrenic and all over the place. Sometimes you read a passage and wonder “why is God so angry and hateful? This isn’t the God that I know.” Honestly, sometimes you can just feel dumb while trying to study the bible.
One tool that I employ on a daily basis is genre identification. Every passage in the Bible falls within a genre. Genre is the literary category in which a piece of writing falls. And each category has a reason for being written and a style all it’s own. The way you would read a letter is very different from how you would read a novel, which is still different from the way that you would read poetry.
The bible is almost like a bookstore. As you embark into each of the different books of the bible, understanding the genre of a passage assists you to read / comprehend? the passage better.
This infographic can assist you in identifying the genre that you are studying. It is one step you can take to doing a /deeper study.
With the understanding of Genre, you can have a richer experience studying scripture. When you understand why something is being written, you further understand the message it is communicating.
Use this infographic today! Choose a passage of scripture to study, and using the checklist, see if you can identify the genre of the passage you are studying,
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