cultivate. Others are necessitated by Scripture’s cultural distance. We might call all of these “guidelines for reading at a distance,” and they include attention to genre, literary context, and social setting.10 The genre of a biblical text or book refers to its classification as a specific kind of literature. There are many types of literature in the Bible, including, but not limited to, narrative, poetry, epistle, legal texts, and apocalyptic literature. Each of these genres can, in turn,