When we approach the Bible in terms of its genres, it will quickly become evident how much of the Bible is literary (though not fictional) in nature. It is filled with stories, poems, visions, proverbs, letters, and other literary forms. That is why (to quote Lewis again) there is a “sense in which the Bible, since it is after all literature, cannot properly be read except as literature; and the different parts of it as the different sorts of literature they are.”12 The antidote