Traditional approaches to the Bible lean heavily toward the conceptual and the doctrinal. We have erroneously operated on the premise that a person's world view consists solely of abstract ideas--but it also includes stories and images. . . . The Bible is more than a book into which we reach for proof texts. What would happen if, instead of tracing ideas through the Bible, we traced a single image, such as light or food or garment or rock? We would have covered an amazing range of biblical doctrine, in a manner completely in keeping with the kind of book the Bible is.

Leland Ryken, How to Read the Bible as Literature, p. 22