FIRST PAGES

Back when I was teaching high school English, I came across a book that I enjoyed using with my more advanced students. The title is How to Read Novels Like a Professor. 

I leaned most heavily on author Thomas Foster's first chapter: "Pickup Lines and Open(ing) Seductions, or Why Novels Have First Pages". 

Foster maintained that in the opening paragraphs of a book, a great deal of information is revealed or at least hinted at. Stuff that shapes how one reads the rest of the book.

I would challenge my students to look at the first few paragraphs of Lord of the Flies through Foster's lens - and by golly, what he said was true!

I was reminded of How to Read Novels Like a Professor when I started diving into Genesis as the birth place of every important theme to span the Bible. 

Below are some quotes from Foster which pertain in his mind to the opening pages of a novel. I think they also fit the book of Genesis by and large:

"The beginning of a novel is, variously, a social contract negotiation, an invitation to a dance, a list of rules of the game, and a fairly complex seduction." (21)

 "It wants to tell us what it thinks is important, so much so that it can't wait to get started. Perhaps more importantly, it wants us to get involved." (21-22)

"The opening of a novel is an invitation to come inside and play." (22) 

"The opening is the first lesson in how to read the novel ... narrative style, method of character presentation, revelation of consciousness, dialogue, plot." (23)

We rarely give much thought to the process of READING the Bible in the more academic sense of that word - paying attention to word choice, genre, motifs, themes and such. But we should give it some thought.

I suppose this is yet another frontier where the modern church doesn't go out of its way to truly educate the laity.