Watching a Biblical Narrative

Drawing upon the work of literary critics and linguists on point of view in secular literature, this work develops a methodology for analyzing point of view in biblical narratives. The literary concept of point of view addresses the issue of the angle from which a reader is led to experience any given moment of a story. Think of how a movie director chooses between several different camera angles to create just the right image for the audience to view on the screen. The narrator of a written story also chooses between various camera angles to create images to be viewed in the reader's "mind's eye," using various linguistic devices to produce these different angles. The present work isolates all the linguistic devices used to any substantial degree in the manipulation of point of view in biblical narratives, describing how each affects the angle from which the reader experiences the story.