Here’s a truism. Open a book about biblical hermeneutics, and you’ll find a warning about genre. You can’t read Song of Solomon the way you read II Chronicles. They’re not the same genre. Don’t read Genesis the way you read The Psalms. Again, not the same genre. The Gospel According to John is different than the three epistles of John. Same name, different genre.
The books of the Bible are not all the same type of book, and that matters to interpretation. David Chilton argues in his commentary on Revelation that part of the problem with many interpretations of the book is precisely one of genre.
The Book of Revelation is often treated as an example of the “apocalyptic” genre of writings which flourished among the Jews between 200 B.C. and A.D. 100. There is no basis for this opinion whatsoever, and it is unfortunate that the word apocalyptic is used at all to describe this literature. (The writers of “apocalyptic” themselves never used the term in this sense; rather, scholars have stolen the term from St. John, who called his book “The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ.”) There are, in fact, many major differences between the “apocalyptic” writings and the Book of Revelation.
David Chilton, Days of Vengeance
Chilton’s analysis gets at a problem. Critics have a tendency of judging biblical books by non-biblical genres. The Bible contains literary genres that should be definitive.
My hypothesis is that we can read biblical books as redemptive versions of the literary genres they belong to.
Now what this means for a form like the novel, I’m not really sure.
As I put together a handbook of literature, I will need to dig a little deeper here.
Experiments in Criticism 