This is one of the main reasons I’ve always been confused by people’s assertions of the Bible’s great literary value. The only permanent character basically doesn’t have to deal with conflict.
God is for most of the Bible in the backdrop. The actual good literature is generally in sections with minimum amounts of divine intervention. Much of Samuel and Kings falls into this category. Some other well done literary sections are the sections where the characters are in conflict with God. See for example the story of Jonah.
Note also that even if this were not the case, there would still be literary value because of the immense influence the Bible has had on Western literature.
This may be a definitional issue then. I’m not sure how to make the notion of literary value at all precise since I only have a vague intuition. I do however see sort of where you are coming from. In your view, to have literary value, the literature itself needs to be somehow worth reading independently of whether other later actually good texts were influenced by it. Is that the relevant distinction?
This is one of the main reasons I’ve always been confused by people’s assertions of the Bible’s great literary value. The only permanent character basically doesn’t have to deal with conflict.
God is for most of the Bible in the backdrop. The actual good literature is generally in sections with minimum amounts of divine intervention. Much of Samuel and Kings falls into this category. Some other well done literary sections are the sections where the characters are in conflict with God. See for example the story of Jonah.
Note also that even if this were not the case, there would still be literary value because of the immense influence the Bible has had on Western literature.
I don’t think that having an immense cultural influence is a sufficient condition to constitute literary value.
This may be a definitional issue then. I’m not sure how to make the notion of literary value at all precise since I only have a vague intuition. I do however see sort of where you are coming from. In your view, to have literary value, the literature itself needs to be somehow worth reading independently of whether other later actually good texts were influenced by it. Is that the relevant distinction?
Yes.