Understanding the Bible isn’t for the few, the gifted, the scholarly. The Bible is accessible. It’s meant to be read and comprehended by everyone from armchair readers to seminary students. A few essential insights into the Bible can clear up a lot of misconceptions and help you grasp the meaning of Scripture and its application to your 21st-century life.
More than half a million people have turned to How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth to inform their reading of the Bible. This third edition features substantial revisions that keep pace with current scholarship, resources, and culture.
Changes include: •Updated language •A new authors’ preface •Several chapters rewritten for better readability •Updated list of recommended commentaries and resources Covering everything from translational concerns to different genres of biblical writing, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth is used all around the world. In clear, simple language, it helps you accurately understand the different parts of the Bible—their meaning for ancient audiences and their implications for you today—so you can uncover the inexhaustible worth that is in God’s Word.
EXCERPT
Most of us assume as we read that we also understand what we read. We also tend to think that our understanding is the same thing as the Holy Spirit’s or human author’s intent. However, we invariably bring to the text all that we are, with all of our experiences, culture, and prior understandings of words and ideas.
Sometimes what we bring to the text, unintentionally to be sure, leads us astray, or else causes us to read all kinds of foreign ideas into the text. Thus, when a person in our culture hears the word “cross,” centuries of Christian art and symbolism cause most people most English-speaking cultures are apt to think that “flesh” means the “body” and therefore that Paul is speaking of “bodily appetites.” But the word “flesh,” as Paul uses it, seldom refers to the body—and in this text it almost certainly did not—but to a spiritual malady, a sickness of spiritual existence sometimes called “the sinful nature.”
Therefore, without intending to do so, the reader is interpreting as he or she reads, and unfortunately too select texts from the Bible itself. Every imaginable heresy or practice, from the Arianism (denying Christ’s deity) of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and The Way, to baptizing for the dead among Mormons, to snake handling among Appalachian sects, claims to be “supported” by a text. Even among more theologically orthodox people, however, many strange ideas manage to gain acceptance in various quarters…”
There are, for example, Christians who, on the basis of Deuteronomy 22:5 (“A woman must not wear men’s clothing,” NIV), argue literally that a woman should not wear slacks or shorts. But the same people seldom take literally the other imperatives in that list, which include building a parapet around the roof of one’s house (v. 8), not planting two kinds of seeds in a vineyard, etc.
The First Task: Exegesis
The first task of the interpreter is called exegesis. Exegesis is the careful, systematic study of the Scripture to discover the original, intended meaning. This is basically a historical task. It is the attempt to hear the Word as the original recipients were to have heard it, to find out what was the original intent of the words of the Bible.
This is the task that often calls for the help of the “expert,” that person whose training has helped him or her to know well the language and circumstances of the texts in their original setting. But one does not have to be an expert to do good exegesis. In fact, everyone is an exegete of sorts. The only real question is whether you will be a good one. How many times, for example, have you heard or said, “What Jesus meant by that was . . .” or “Back in those days, they used to . . .”? Those are exegetical expressions. Most often they are employed to explain the differences between “them” and “us."
Exegesis requires knowledge of many things we do not necessarily expect the readers of this book to know: the biblical languages; the Jewish, Semitic, and Hellenistic backgrounds; how to determine the original text when the manuscripts have variant readings; the use of all kinds of primary sources and tools. But you can learn to do good exegesis even if you do not have access to all of these skills and tools. To do so, however, you must learn first what you can do with your own skills, and second you must learn to use the work of others. The key to good exegesis, and therefore to a more intelligent reading of the Bible, is to learn to read the text carefully and to ask the right questions of the text.
... To read or study the Bible intelligently demands careful reading, and that includes learning to ask the right questions of the text...
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