b'Let me give you an obvious example. In Psalm 23, we read: The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. Well, that cant be literally true. First, God is not a physical shepherd; that statement is a metaphor (God is like a shepherd). And, I dont know about you, but Ive never been made to lie down in green pastures, although I do believe God leads and protects me. This is a silly example, because this is obviously a poem, full of metaphors and images, meant to be read poetically. The truth of Psalm 23 is not in its literal meaning, but in the truth of those metaphors. Therefore, the Catholic Church and many Protestant denominations first object to a literalist interpretation because it does not recognize all BUT JEWS ANDthe different kinds of texts the Bible may contain.One of the arguments that divide Christian CHRISTIANSdenominations is the way that they answer WOULD SAYthe question, who wrote the Bible? While most Christians would say that texts in the Bible THAT GOD IS ANwere written by both a human and a divine AUTHOR OFauthor, the model for how this interaction played out can differ significantly. Some THE BIBLE. HOWChristians hold to a model of divine dictation: CAN THIS BE? God told the human author what to write. Others think of Gods role more as an object for reflection than as an active agent in writing. Each religious tradition deserves careful study to understand how its view of human-divine authorship, or inspiration, fits in with its views on creation, natural reason, and so on. Obviously, there is neither time nor space to do that here. What I can provide, however, is the model that informs my reading as a Catholic biblical scholar. In many ways, it will be compatible with many Protestant and Jewish understandings of inspiration.The question of how to read the Bible stems in part from the question of the authorship of the Bible. When we use the word author today, we usually mean the person who actually took up pen and paper (or computer and printer) and physically, purposefully, wrote the words we read. If we restrict the word author in this way, then God did not write the Bible, because 8 AspireVolume 1//Fall 2019 Subscribe today! smp.org/aspire'