Ask whether the Bible should be taken literally, and the question already assumes the Bible is one kind of writing. It is many kinds. Kristie Anyabwile, a writer who trains Bible teachers at her church in Southeast Washington, DC, reverses the order: “every book of the Bible can be studied and should be studied literarily according to its literary genre.” Identify the kind of writing first. That tells you when a passage is meant to be read literally, and when it tells the truth some other way.
That order matters most for the passages that cause the most unease. Did creation take six ordinary days? Did a man really survive inside a fish? Is Revelation a coded schedule of next year’s headlines? When someone presses you on these, it can feel like you have two options: defend every word as flat reportage, or admit the whole thing is myth. Reading for genre removes that false choice. It does not settle every hard question, and it is worth being honest about where it stops.
What are people really asking when they say “literally”?
The word carries two meanings at once. Sometimes “literal” means this really happened. Sometimes it means these words contain no figures of speech. People slide between the two without noticing. A skeptic who says Christians take the Bible literally usually means you believe things that cannot be true. A worried believer who asks whether they have to usually means something else: if I read any of it as figurative, have I stopped believing it?
A simple test helps. Psalm 91:4 says of God, “He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust.” No reader concludes that God has feathers, and no reader concludes the psalm is therefore false. The verse makes a true claim about God’s protection through an image, which is how poetry works. Reading it as poetry is simply reading it correctly. The real question becomes what a particular passage is doing and how it tells the truth.
What does it mean to read the Bible literarily?
Anyabwile describes a genre as a category, a way of grouping writings that work alike. She admits she grew up without thinking about genre at all and only later learned to ask plain questions of a passage: “Is it a story, should it be read as historical fact? Is it a parable?” Is it poetry? Is it full of images? Is it emotional speech?
Her answer to the literal question follows from those questions. Genre, she says, “will impact whether or not we read that passage, literally.” Historical narrative is meant to be read literally. Poetry and wisdom writing are different, because “you can’t really read that literally because it’s not meant for that.” Then comes the line that holds the idea together: “you can’t read it literally, but you can read it literarily.”
Lisa Fields recalled a saying in the same spirit when she introduced the conversation: Christians do not so much take the Bible literally as take it literarily. The saying moves the reader’s job. Before deciding how much of the Bible you can believe, you have to recognize what kind of book you are holding.
Anyabwile sketches the main kinds as parts of one movement. The Torah, which she explains means instruction, is God teaching his people how to live. The narrative books show how they responded, mostly by rebelling. The poetic books voice their hearts before God. The prophets bring “warnings, but also glimmers of hope.” The Gospels show God’s instruction embodied in Jesus, the letters instruct the church, and apocalyptic writing in Daniel and Revelation shows the end, which she describes as “not even the end, but kind of a new beginning.”
Why does genre matter outside a classroom?
The clearest example of a misread genre is Proverbs. Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Lisa Fields notes that parents who did exactly that, and then watched a child walk away from faith, often answer with some version of “the Bible says.” She describes Proverbs as “principles, not promises,” and warns that “people will throw the Bible away because they don’t understand literary context.”
Anyabwile traces where that misreading leads. A parent starts asking what is wrong with their faith, what is wrong with their child, or what is wrong with God. Her answer is to name the genre: “that’s not a promise, that’s not a command, it’s proverbial wisdom.” And more plainly: “It’s generally true, but it’s not a guarantee.”
The parent who reads Proverbs 22:6 as an ironclad contract is not reading the verse more faithfully than the parent who reads it as wisdom. They are reading it as the wrong kind of writing, and the mistake costs them something real. A literal reading of the wrong genre does not protect faith. Sometimes it breaks it. The same skill applies to Genesis, Jonah and Revelation.
So what about Jonah?
Jonah has the features Anyabwile teaches readers to look for in narrative: a setting, rising action, a climax and a turn at the end. By her rule, historical narrative is read literally. Most Christians have read Jonah that way, and Jesus speaks of it as an event when pointing to his own death and resurrection: “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40). Some interpreters read Jonah as a teaching story closer to a parable and argue that Jesus can cite a familiar account without settling that question.
Anyabwile also notes that “there are elements of narrative in other books too,” and the reverse holds in Jonah, a story placed among the prophets with a poem inside it. Jonah 2 is a prayer written as poetry, set in the narrative as Jonah praying from the fish’s belly (Jonah 2:1). Noticing the shift is part of reading the book well.
Many people want Jonah to be figurative mainly because surviving inside a fish seems impossible. That is an assumption about whether miracles happen, and it is a separate argument from genre. For someone who believes Jesus rose bodily from the dead, a miracle in a story is not, by itself, evidence that the story is fiction. The honest question about Jonah is the literary one: what kind of account did its author write?
Does Genesis 1 require six twenty-four-hour days?
Here genre reading does not hand you a single answer, and pretending it does would be dishonest. Anyabwile places Genesis within the Torah, the books of instruction, while observing, “There’s a lot of narrative in Genesis.” A book can tell a story and also serve to teach, and Genesis 1 shows both. It moves like a narrative, yet it is carefully patterned, each day closing with a refrain that begins, “And the evening and the morning were the first day” (Genesis 1:5).
Christians who love Scripture read that pattern in different ways. Some take the days as ordinary days. Others read them as long ages. Others see a deliberate literary arrangement that teaches who made the world and why, without describing the mechanics or the timeline. What every one of these readings shares is the claim the chapter opens with: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
Genre reading still changes the debate by moving it to where it belongs. Two Christians arguing over Genesis 1 are arguing about what kind of writing the chapter is and how it makes its claims. They can do that with an open Bible, without treating each other as compromisers. And if a skeptic insists that your faith hangs on one reading of the days, you can answer calmly that it hangs on the Creator the chapter names.
Is Revelation a literal timeline?
Revelation announces its own genre in its first verse. It is a revelation God gave, and “he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John” (Revelation 1:1). To signify is to show by signs, and the book explains some of its own. After John sees seven golden candlesticks, he is told, “the seven candlesticks which thou sawest are the seven churches” (Revelation 1:20). The image refers to something real, though not to actual lamps.
Apocalyptic beasts, numbers and cosmic upheavals work the same way: pictures pointing to real churches, real powers and a real return of Christ. Christians hold different views on how and when the visions unfold. None of those views requires reading the book like a newspaper. Anyabwile’s account of what the genre is for gives the point that every reading shares: God’s instruction carried through to the end and into eternity, where his people “get to enjoy relationship with him forever.”
Isn’t genre just an escape hatch?
This is the strongest objection. If any hard passage can be called poetry or symbol, can’t a reader dodge whatever they dislike?
They could try, but the method works against them. Genre is signaled by the text: refrains, parallel lines, stated visions, plot and setting, a book that calls itself a revelation. The rule that lets you read Psalm 91 as poetry obliges you to read narrative as narrative, and Anyabwile says outright that historical narrative is read literally. Genre removes the freedom to make everything figurative as firmly as it removes the demand to make everything literal.
Genre also limits what you may take from a passage. Readers of David and Goliath want to be David, slaying the giants in their lives. Anyabwile turns that around: “We’re not David. We would be the ordinary Israelite.” In the story, “in David, we see not a pattern for us, but we see a glimpse of a king” who points ahead to the greater King, Jesus Christ. A narrative describes what happened; it does not automatically command you to repeat it. That keeps readers from treating every story as a script, and from treating David’s sins as permission.
The limit is real, though. Genre narrows the options without ending every argument, and Genesis 1 shows careful readers studying the same signals and reaching different conclusions. What the method secures is that the disagreement stays answerable to the text.
Where does this leave the reader?
Anyabwile insists that “this isn’t an academic exercise.” The tools of genre are not an end in themselves: “they’re meant to free us so that we can read the Bible well and really enter into communion and fellowship with the Lord.”
Her deepest claim is the one that makes the hard cases less isolated. After walking through the genres, she concludes that “from beginning to end the Bible is one story about one person. And the genres serve to help us to see where we are in that story.” Jonah’s fish, the days of Genesis and the beasts of Revelation are not separate positions to be defended one verse at a time. Each belongs somewhere in an account that runs from creation to new creation and centers on Christ, and the first question to ask of any of them is where in that story it stands.