How to Read the Bible

How to Read The Bible?

I’m assuming that if you’re reading this blog page, you’ve already read the page about “What is the Bible?”. That blog page is background to this one. This one is about how to read it once you know what it is.

The best way to know what the Bible says is to get a group of people interested in the Bible and seat them in a circle of chairs with a Bible in the middle of the circle. And then wait for the Bible to speak. After 5 minutes, or 5 hours, or 5 days, it will be apparent that the Bible doesn’t say anything. This may sound a bit smart-alecky, but it actually points to a very important point. It is only when you read the Bible, that you can hear it and only when you interpret it, that you can understand it.

Everyone can agree that that it is important to read the Bible to see what it says, not what you want it to say. Some claim you can read the Bible without interpretation, that you can just read what the Bible says and not put anything more into it. But this is just an illusion. The best one can hope to do is understand the cultural context of the writing, understand ones own biases, and then see how the reading of the Bible impacts your understanding of your life and your relationship to the Spiritual Source of your life.

But if one hasn’t studied the history and the culture of biblical times, then one is left to interpret things based on the culture in which one has been raised. This in turn results in making assumptions without realizing what those assumptions are because they are taken for granted. Another form of this type of cultural bias is when one just accepts the interpretations of a revered leader of their community without trying to understand what assumptions the leader has made and how those assumptions relate to a cultural historical understanding of the text.

The approaches to reading the Bible that make the most sense to me are:
1. The historical-metaphorical approach
2. The “Aramaic Jesus” approach

The first one offers a specific way into a relationship with the Bible and the second one offers a specific way into a relationship with Jesus.

(In another blog, I’ll explore the fundamentalist approach to the Bible.)

The “Historical-Metaphorical” Approach

This nine syllable title is just a fancy way of saying:
“Pay attention to the history and the culture of the people who wrote and the people listening to those books.”
And
“Realize that if someone writes, ‘ah, you are beautiful; your eyes are doves”, this doesn’t mean that he things his beloved has birds in her eyes. It’s a metaphor – a figure of speech – a poetical way of expressing ideas and relationships.

When we begin to the understand the history and cultural background of the biblical narratives, then words that we have interpreted in the context of today’s culture to mean one thing often, in the context of the ancient culture, begin to mean a different thing altogether. And when we see the variety of ways in which ancient writers expressed themselves metaphorically, then we see that a narrow literal reading sometimes misses the point the author was trying to make.

The historical part of this approach asks the question: “What DID this text mean in the ancient historical setting in which it was written?”. Part of this is understanding the social structure, the family structure, the values, the beliefs, the sexuality, the power relationships, the fears, and the hopes of the cultures in the Middle East and the Mediterranean ancient world. Part is understanding the text itself – what are the various possible translations of key words and how does one understand the differences between the various Greek versions of the New Testament.

This may seem like quite a daunting task. How on earth is someone who works for a living and hasn’t spent a lifetime reading books about the Bible and biblical times supposed to do all this! Well, luckily, there are a lot of scholars who have woken up to the fact that instead of writing for each other, they need to write for a more general audience. They need to drop the overly technical language and complicated discussions and present their insights in a clear way to non-scholars. We are all so fortunate to live in these times when the fruits of scholarly research are being available to you and me.

As Marcus Borg, who has spent the past 40+ years studying the bible, has said: “The historical study of the Bible is one of the glories of modern scholarship. It has been immensely illuminating. Without it, much of the Bible would remain simply opaque. Setting biblical passages in their ancient context makes them come alive. It enables us to see meanings in these ancient texts that would otherwise would remain buried the past. Moreover, it allows us to hear the strangeness of these texts the come to us from worlds strange to us. This it helps us to avoid reading the Bible simply with our current agendas in mind and frees the Bible to speak with its own voices. ”

Here are some examples of how the historical approach changes interpretation:

The historical approach helps us understand the history of the rise of kingship in Israel and the parallels with the rise of political and economic concentration of power in our own times. Understanding the social divisions within the society reveals the very different viewpoints being expressed in the Bible. We get to hear these voices as differing voices and different groups within the society, rather than one homogonous point of view. When we see how some of the same contradictions exist in today’s society, we get to see more clearly the choices that need to be made in living a Christian life.

For example, “the book of First Samuel contains two very different traditions about the emergence of kingship – one that was strongly anti-monarchical, the other pro-monarchical. According to the anti-monarchical tradition, the people ask Samuel to appoint a king over them. Their request displeases both Samuel and God. Their desire for a king is said to be a rejection of God’s kingship. Nevertheless, God grants their request, but with a stern and remarkably precise warning about what a king will do to them: he will take their sons as warriors, conscript them into labor battalions to work his fields and produce weapons; make their daughters to be perfumers, cooks and bakers; take the best of their fields and vineyards and orchards and give them to his friends; take one-tenth of their grain and their flocks; take their male and female slaves and the best of their animals and put them to his work; and God says to them, “You shall be his slaves.”

According to the second and pro-monarchical tradition God’s intervention established the monarchy with Saul as its first king..God discloses to Samuel that a certain man (Saul) will come to him whom God has chosen to be king and that Samuel is to anoint him as such.

So the two views represent (1) the view of the people who suffer under monarchical systems of oppression and (2) the view of the people who benefit from the oppressing.
Reading the Bible with this historical and socio-economic understanding helps us see the self-serving nature of those who praise the kingship.

Or take the tradition about the wisdom of Solomon. We are given to believe that Solomon was a wise and beloved ruler. Yet when he died, a revolt that split the kingdom in two broke out to overthrow the heavy taxation that burdened both the people and the elites in the other parts of the kingdom. The wisdom view comes from the royal court. The occurrence of the rebellion reflects the oppressiveness of the system. We begin to see that one needs to be careful to not totally buy into the beneficence of those expousing the domination system.

By the time of Solomon, all the major features of the ancient domination system were in place: a politics of oppression centered in monarchical authority; an economics of taxation and exploitation centered in the monarchy and the aristocracy; and a religion of legitimation centered in the temple built by Solomon in Jerusalem.

Thus by the time the classical prophets began to speak in the eighth century, Israel and Judah were miniature versions of the ancient domination system that had enslaved their ancestors in Egypt. The victims (the majority of the population) were Israelites, but the now the elites at the top were also.

The prophetic indictments of Israel have traditionally been seen as if the people as a whole were being indicted for injustice. But seeing the social structure clarifies that it was the elites who were responsible for creating and maintaining structures of domination and exploitation. The prophets indict the elites; they do not blame the victims and hold them responsible for the injustice of their society.

The elites are addressed not only because they had the power to change things, but because it is they who were primarily responsible for Israel’s becoming a radically unjust domination system. They had deformed Israel, changing her for the exodus vision of an alternative community living under the lordship of God to just another kingdom living under the lordship of a native “pharaoh”.

The prophets were absolutely convinced that what they were witnessing could not be the will of the God who had liberated Israel from bondage in Egypt. This theme of God being on the side of liberation and against the oppressiveness of the domination system runs through the entire Bible.

Metaphorical Approach

But even when we understand the historical context, there are still some thorny issues. One example is the creation stories of Genesis.

The historical approach can shed some light on the form of these wonderful stories. The six day creation story was written around 500s BC/BCE, during or after the 50 year period when the leadership of the Jewish people was in exile in Babylon. They had a need to maintain their cultural identity in exile and to rebuild and strengthen their national identity after exile. The six day creation story helped support the religious observation of the Sabbath since even God celebrated the Sabbath. Similarly, the defeat of their God by the God of the Babylonians implied by the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian captivity required them to assert some specialness to their God. This need was met by asserting that their God was the creator of the entire world. Further, the repetitions of the creation story (“And God saw that it was good.“ “There was a morning and there was an evening”) made it suitable for singing, chanting, call-and-response or other similar liturgical use in religious ceremony. All these things served to strengthen the identity of the new Jewish community.

But we are still left with the question of what is true about this story. This is where the metaphorical reading of the bible helps us understand the author’s intent and helps us to read it in a way that the truth of those stories inspires us.

The metaphorical approach sees the author as poetically describing the way that creation happened in stages over time and how each stage was blessed and seen as good, and how it culminated in the creation of humanity, and then a sacred day – a sacred day of rest. It also points to the way in which the beingness of humanity has its origin in the divine. God becomes not only the creator but the sustainer as well.

In a metaphorical approach, you don’t really care whether the story is factually historically or literally true. The absence of that kind of truth does not make it false. You see the author as writing poetically; you’re interested in what the symbolic truth is. You’re interested in what the story tells you about how to live in relationship to this divine source and in relationship to the goodness of creation. You assume that the author didn’t think that the events of creation happened literally as described, but that they happened that way in a symbolic sense and that is what the author inherited from the oral culture and that he was seeking to capture in his writing.

Just ponder these ideas while we move on to describe another approach.

The “Aramaic Jesus” Approach

This approach is based on the historical fact that anything Jesus said, he said in Aramaic, the language spoken throughout the Middle East 2000 years ago. The Peshitta, the Aramaic Bible passed down through the centuries in the Church of the East in Aramaic speaking communities, is therefore seen as an important source for understanding Jesus and his teaching. This language, like other Semitic languages such as Hebrew and Arabic, was originally written with only consonants, the vowels being understood, and with every set of consonants having several sets of vowels that could be used to complete each word. This of course leaves the reading of each word open to several different translations, depending of which set of vowels are taken to complete the word.

Though translators of the Bible into English usually expend their effort trying to find the “right” word that translates the Aramaic, Greek or Hebrew word of the biblical text, an Aramaic Jesus approach to the bible is not so concerned about the “right” word. The goal is to find the most accurate set of words. In other words, multiple meanings and multiple translations are seen not as confusing the situation, but as illuminating the depth of the message in the biblical text.

Rabbis in the second century used a similar approach and called it Midrash – seeing the various words associated with a specific set of consonants as all pointing to different levels of meaning and associations in different passages in the Bible using the same word root.

Another aspect of the “Aramaic Jesus” approach is using the primitive meanings of the consonants to illuminate the words.

For example, in Matthew 18:20, the King James Version translates:

“For where two or three are gathered together in my name; there am I in the midst of them.”

As Neil Douglas-Klotz writes in “The Hidden Gospel” :

“The word for name in Aramaic is “shem”, but the root of this word (SHM) gives rise to various meanings: light, word, sound, reputation, name, and atmosphere. The roots themselves indicate the space or movement extending from a point (Sh) that defines some specific form of existence (M). What unifies these meanings is the idea of vibration: everything that vibrates its way into existence as a seemingly separate being carries its own unique “shem”. All individual name-light-vibrations return in various ways to the one sacred “shem” of the divine which is beyond human words or names. All vibration is part of the whole vibration of the universe.”
..
“Keeping in mind that the preposition “in” (b in Aramaic) can also mean “within”, “along with”, “among”, or “from within”, then “in my name” can also mean:

With my atmosphere.

From within my experience,

In rhythm with my sound,

With my sense of illumination,

With the light of my essence,

From within my name,”

This is obviously a very different approach from the historical metaphorical approach described above. However, both of these approaches converge on an understanding of Jesus as a Middle Eastern mystic, who brought a message of how one could live a life with the spiritual essence of God as one’s center and as one’s Lord.

With these two approaches to reading the bible in the back of our mind, let us return to the basic question of what is the Bible.