Romanticising the Bible

I've noticed that when we read, we often distance ourselves from the emotions of the characters. We read that the writer has said that a character feels happy, or that they feel sad, but we don't feel those emotions ourselves. We treat them as distant, almost non-human entities.

Obviously fictional characters in novels are not really feeling these emotions, but we seem to distance ourselves from the emotions of the people involved when we read the Bible. In particular, we read passages like the Psalms, which are full of emotion, but we don't connect with the emotion that was needed to write them. The difference between the Psalms and a poem written by a fictional character is that the emotion behind the Psalms are real, but we don't connect with them.

After all, the Bible is a history book. It tells the story of the history of God's people, which is, in essence, our history as Christians. We cannot distance ourselves from the people in the Bible, or their emotions, because unlike fictional characters they were real. So we can put ourselves in their shoes, and remember how they really felt, instead of romanticising their situations.