The Daily Herald reports the following:
The Grapes of Wrath offered his first clue.A second came with another John Steinbeck classic, East of Eden. By the time Alex Cyhaniuk got around to reading Fahrenheit 451, the South Elgin High School sophomore knew to scout for references to the ancient text that permeates many of its pages--the Bible. For him, it was not a quest for religion but for literary meaning.
Teaching the literary references found in literature that have biblical foundation is not the same thing as teaching The Bible! It is quite true that one must have a passing knowledge of biblical references in order to fully understand what novelists and poets allude to in their text but teaching those textual references is done in the context of the text being read and not by teaching The Bible as a work of literature.
Teaching The Bible as literature as a ploy for teaching The Bible is fraught with far too much baggage to be of much value to be of much value to anyone save the fundamentalist wearing blinders. For example:
- Which translation would one use? It does make a difference. In Genesis, for example, yom echad, is often translated as the first day when a far better translation would be one day without reference to temporal time.
- Whose version of the text would be used? Would one insist on a Christian version and, if so, would it be a Catholic or Protestant version? Or should the Old Testament be read as a Jewish text using a Jewish translation in order to capture the references in their original form?
- Are Bible stories taught in isolation setting a foundation for literary references?
These are important questions that are generally not part of the public discourse regarding the fundamentalist desire to teach The Bible in the public schools. Perhaps they should be!
Zoundry
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