2.6:chosen passage: Hosea 11:1-11 – “When Israel was a child . . .”
One of the most important tasks in analyzing the literary world of your selected passage is to identify how it functions as a part of a larger whole. The books of the Bible were originally written on scrolls of papyrus and often consisted of block letters smushed together with little or no punctuation to tell you which letters went with which word and where the paragraph breaks would indicate a shift in thought. There simply were no paragraph breaks! Part of this was making good use of all of the space you had to write with! So, readers of these texts would have to read and discern where words and paragraph breaks would be: Does this section of writing better go with what comes before or what comes after?
So the first thing we want you to do is determine what makes your selected Bible passage a ‘literary unit’.
- What is it that makes you particular passage a ‘unit’ which fits together?
- Are there ‘beginning markers’? that is, words or phrases which seem to indicate the beginning of a new section of writing?
- Beginning markers might include a title or a shift in time, place, people, theme, style.
- Are there ‘ending markers’? that is, words or phrases which seem to indicate a conclusion or a summary statement.
- When you look at the verses which come before or after your particular passage, why were those verses left out from the passage designated for you to study?
- What are the literary clues which make the case that the verses selected for your passage function as a unit which is set apart from the rest of the chapter or the book of the Bible it is in?
