Literary Units, the Berean Boundaries

I remember how Dr. Kuist at Princeton Seminary in 1946 emphasized the need to work with literary units in biblical exposition. What is so important about these units is that each constitutes the beginning and end of a writer's train of thought. Such units are different from the Bible's chapters and verses, which are only "units of reference."

Dr. Kuist stressed that the only purpose for units of reference is to provide locators for Bible passages. But they provide no help at all in construing their meanings and in fact often hinder interpretation. An example is the "therefore" statement with which 1 Cor. 11:1 begins. The "therefore" indicates that this statement is based on the argument at the end of chapter 10, verse 33. But this fact is obscured by the person who divided the text as it now stands in our Bibles.

So A. T. Robertson, a New Testament scholar of the early 20th century, declared that "the first step in interpretation is to ignore the [relatively] modern chapters and verses." An Introduction to the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1925), 101.

The first literary unit to be interpreted in Biblical Expositions is Romans 1:13--8:39. We begin with Rom. 1:13, because as the section on Paul's opening remarks will show, this is where the train of thought commences that Paul reels out all the way to 8:39.

The literary unit of Rom. 9:1--15:13 will be presented at a later time. But we linger with it for a moment to call attention to the "therefore" introducing Rom. 12:1. Bible teachers often see this "therefore" as rising from the first eight chapters since, they say, 9:1--11:36 is a "parenthesis" in Paul's thinking. But Bereans will argue that the original readers of this epistle, hearing it read in a small room of a house church in Rome, could not have made such a sophisticated connection. They will urge that the original readers were far more apt to connect the "therefore" of 12:1, based "on the pities of God," back to the recent reference in 11:32's statement about God's "mercy," a close synonym for the "pities of God" found in 12:1.

That is why Romans 9:1--15:13 will be handled as a single literary unit. For a similar reason the miscellaneous literary units in Phil. 3 - 4 are handled later on in Biblical Expositions, after Phil. 1:3--2;30, which is a self-contained literary unit, and whose train of thought is not continued in 3:1 and following. It is hoped that these examples of literary units in Romans and Philippians give some indication of why a Berean wants to expend effort only on the complete train of thought represented by a literary unit.

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