Narratives are spiritual historical stories about the promises and calling of God to his people the Israelites. Forty percent of the Old Testament is considered narratives. They are stories to retell the historical events of the past for the people of God of the present. All narratives have three parts: characters, a plot and the plot resolution. Most narratives have a situation that needs to be resolved. The characters in traditional narratives are that are called protagonists the primary character, the antagonist the person who brings the conflict and sometime agonist other major characters in the story. The story that is being told has three levels. The top level is called the story of redemption. The second level is the story of God redeeming his people with the old and new covenant. Chapter five, deals with Abraham’s lineage, God’s people from the call of Abraham to the restoration of his people after the exile. The first and final which includes compound narratives for example Genesis speaks of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob or Joseph as a whole.
These are the common mistakes most Christians make as we read biblical narrative as Fee and Stuart states (p.103 – 105):
Allegorizing. “Instead of concentrating on the clear meaning of the narrative, people relegate the text to merely reflecting another meaning beyond the text.”
Decontextualizing. “Ignoring the full historical and literary contexts, and often the individual narrative, people concentrate on small units only and thus miss interpretational clues.”
Moralizing. “This is the assumption that principles for living can be derived from all passages.”
Personalizing. “Also known as individualizing, this refers to reading Scripture in the way suggested above, supposing that any or all parts apply to you or your group in a way that they do not apply to everyone else.”
Misappropriation. “It is to