How to Read the Bible

3. The Art of Reading the Bible

3 The Art of Reading the Bible Reading is a complicated, multifaceted process.1 I am not referring to the technical aspect of sounding out words, what is called “decoding”—this is relatively simple, especially in Hebrew. Nor am I referring to resolving the types of ambiguities that exist in any dead, or literary, language. These ambiguities can be quite significant in translating the Bible. For example, should the first sentence of the Bible be rendered “In the beginning God created heaven and earth” or “In the beginning of God’s creation of heaven and earth”? Should the root q-n-’ (anq) when describing God be translated “jealous” or “zealous”? Lack of punctuation in the earliest biblical texts raises additional reading problems: should I read Isaiah 40:3 as “A voice rings out: ‘Make clear in the desert a road for the LORD!’” or as “A voice rings out in the desert ‘Clear a road for the LORD!’”? As theologically significant as these issues may be for reading or translating the Hebrew Bible, they pale in comparison to the reading challenges caused by the fact that the Bible was written in an ancient society that had fundamentally different literary conventions from ours. Especially if we know only one language, and live mostly in one society or social group, we may not be aware of the extent to which convention guides so much of what we do and how we behave. Conventions, however, by definition have particular meanings in particular groups. Anyone hitchhiking in Israel using the American hitchhiking sign, which is considered an obscene gesture there, will quickly appreciate the importance of convention. Conventions combine with the meaning of words to determine how a text should be understood. Words alone do not determine meaning; we interpret them based on the context that they are in, namely their genre. The same words will be interpreted differently if they are found in a different genre or context. For example, the words “slow children” will be understood one way if they are found as part of a report dealing with special education in a school district, and another if they are found on a yellow, triangular street sign. The words are the same; their context, which determines their genre (school report vs. street sign), 13 will ascertain whether they are descriptive of children with below-average IQs, or are prescriptive, telling the driver to slow down because a large number of children live in a neighborhood. The proper interpretation of the same two words differs based on their genre. Reading and the Biblical Text There are many ways of reading the Bible. My interest, however, is in reading the Bible like an ancient Israelite,2 what is often called reading the Bible from a historical -critical perspective. As noted in chapter 1, “historical-critical” is an unfortunate term; much more than history is involved in this type of reading, and the term “critical” incorrectly suggests that the “critic” is interested in somehow dismantling the Bible or any faith-based commitment with the Bible at its core. This is not what I am attempting here. Instead, I am assuming that the Bible, like any ancient text, has been read differently in different periods, because readers read the Bible using their own conventions or rules. James Kugel, for example, has shown how readers in the early postbiblical period understood the Bible; their readings are often very strange from our perspective, because these interpreters lived two thousand years ago and worked within a religious and cultural system that is so different than ours.3 Whether a particular biblical interpretation is right or wrong in an absolute sense is usually impossible to say, because the validity of any reading depends on its time period and the conventions of that period. Everything depends on what rules the reader uses when reading the biblical text. The Rules of the Game Those who play the board game Monopoly® might know the official rules (printed on the box), but they might also be familiar with alternative sets of rules. Nowhere do the official rules suggest that $500 must be added to Free Parking after anyone lands on that space and collects the money, nor do the rules deal with the special cases of the player who rolls double ones or double sixes. Yet almost all Monopoly players have conventions that determine how these situations should be handed. What is crucial is that before the game starts, all participants agree on the...