Form Criticism is genre identification at an advanced level. Its goals are to recognise patterns of literary form, classify them, and try to identify how these forms were used in their faith community. This method has produced great results with the Psalms in particular.
Identification of literary form is achieved by noticing what each section of the text does. Does it address people or God? Is is praise, complaint or request? Are there typical word-groups or structure patterns that re-occur? This type of analysis can be done using a chart with the text in one column and the student’s notes in another. Comparing Biblical texts with contempory non-biblical ones can also be of interest. Once this has been done with several passages they can be compared and classified.
The Form Critic will now try to make an educated guess as to how these texts were used in the life of Ancient Israel or the early Church. Connecting the literary form with sociological reality, each passage, they presume, was generated to meet a need in the faith-life of the community. This is the life situation that the text was created in. The technical term for life situation is ‘sitz im leben’. In a similar way to me changing these notes from personal scribbles to an article format, the Bible’s stories, songs and prophesies (and all the other genres) were recorded according to convention and according to the needs of the communities that were using them.
When form is comparable, we can assume a sociological connection with the materials’ use, even if content is noticeable different.
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