a book devoted to that aspect of it? They are, for the following seven reasons. 1) In any piece of writing, there is no content without the form in which it is expressed. Without the story or poem, for example, there is no message. The content of the Bible does not exist in disembodied form; it is all embodied in a myriad of literary forms. 2) There is an important way in which an analysis of literary forms needs to come first when we interact with a biblical text. This is not a precedence of value