Grievance is the gateway to death but gratitude is the pathway to life. I wouldn’t have had that joy or arrived at that bottom line had I not first learned to take scripture on its own terms. I would have wasted thirty minutes speculating on the origin of Cain’s wife or the demography of Cain’s city—subjects that do not interest Genesis’s author in the least. How biblical books say what they are saying contributes mightily to what they are saying. Form shapes content. Robert Traina’s