We read the Bible in two directions, horizontally and vertically. Or, because I really like the word, we read the Bible orthogonally.
I’m using some of the language here of Michael Niebauer, who argues for these two angles of reading, horizontal and vertical. I depart from him in the below to some extent, but I’m using his terms.
Horizontal Reading
To read horizontally is to read the story of the Scriptures. As we read the Bible, we set each part of the whole into its place in the grand narrative of redemption. We pay careful attention to its own internal story too, reading its literary features and assuming that the writer knew what they were doing when they constructed their story as they did.
This means that we know the Bible is a unified story that not only points to Jesus but where he is the crescendo to whatever tune that particular book plays.
It also means that we notice when the story isn’t as straightforward as it seems and we don’t rush past that to Jesus, we pay deep attention to the story itself. We notice that Numbers seems to be written in a circle, for example, but we also don’t brush past the difficulties raised by the death of Canaanites or the sexual violence of Esther in our rush to the cross.
We attempt to judge the stories with their own criteria, reading along the text rather than starting by imposing a different structure or set of values from outside of the text. We assume everything has a story, even the texts that don’t immediately seem to like poetic, wisdom, or apocalyptic sections of the Old Testament. Proverbs has a story, so does Psalms, so do all the books of the Bible. We find the story and read along it.
Vertical Reading
To read vertically is to read the symbols of the Scriptures. As we read the Bible, we discover that it is constantly referencing itself and that a number of key images are layered references to the rest of the Bible.
This sort of reading is the kind that sees a tree and ponders in what way the two trees of Eden, or the cross, or the tree of the New Jerusalem, is in view in this particular text. How is this similar and different, how does reading it alongside these other texts change this particular passage?
It’s not just that the text is referenced vertically like a set of hyperlinks, but also that each symbol has its own symbolic domain. Much like the semantic domain of a word—a set of meanings that the word can mean though it doesn’t always mean all of them at once—key Biblical symbols have symbolic domains that they carry with them. They do not necessarily mean all of them in each instance and careful reading the texts should attune us to where that might be the case.
Symbolic domains emerge across the whole canon of Scripture. To read like this requires a knowledge of the Bible that is constantly being refined that we bring to all of the Bible. It takes careful work to start to see—as Mark Scarlata argues—that ‘wine’ carries three particular meanings with it across the canon, the first two opposed and operating in different places (blessing & cursing) and the final one emerging from that interplay (wisdom). All key Biblical symbols work in a similar way, in that they take their meanings with them, and those that are commonly employed have more complex symbolic domains where not every possible meaning is present in each use of the symbol.
Reading like this means we spot a tree, or a table, or the sea, or bread or wine or water or oil, or mountains, or garments, or fire, or light, or a number of other key symbols and think ‘I wonder if this connects to those others?’
Orthogonal Reading
Reading either vertically or horizontally on its own gives us challenges.
We can flatten texts into just a story where their own form is much richer than that; this is the opposite tendency to the one that ignores story entirely. We can fall so in love with the redemptive narrative of the Bible that the texts where the story is harder to perceive can be ignored entirely, especially wisdom and prophetic books.
We can also flatten texts to a pancake of symbols, where all we read are the symbols and we eliminate all the detail of how that symbol is employed here specifically and the wider richness of the text. Texts have symbols, texts have stories, they aren’t just reducible to one, or even both, of those.
The Bible doesn’t just progress through the story, it is a hyperlinked narrative, a layered narrative, that moves along and constantly back and forth. All of the Bible is always in view. We need both a microscope and a wide-angle lens. We need knowledge of the whole having heard it many times and to listen carefully to the specific phrases in front of us.
We need to read the Bible attentive to symbol and to story.
Photo by Declan Sun on Unsplash
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