typical of the renewed literary interest in the Bible (which can otherwise be marked by considerable diversity). Literary critics tend to look at the text as it stands, rather than through the text to the history that lies behind it. While some focus on relatively small textual units, the literary critic Northrop Frye looks at the entire Bible as a literary whole. What impresses him is the continuity to be found in the Bible which he characterizes as a sequence or dialectical progression consisting