"Please don't mistake your Google search for my PhD"

The science of Interpreting the Bible

I first discovered this jaded little jingle when I saw it on a colleague’s coffee mug. There it was, happily tucked away among his lexicons and commentaries, five different languages demanding his attention from the myriad of photocopied journal articles scattered across the desk. A quiet little coffee mug shouting at humanity to step back and allow the scholar to do what a scholar does … biblical interpretation. And although I laughed out loud when I saw it, and commended my faculty colleague for actually putting into words what so many of us in the field think on an hourly basis (but are too socially conditioned to actually say out loud), truth be told, I have never actually said it to anyone. And I likely never will—even I am not that brash. So instead this little Substack post, distilled from a new sidebar in The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament, 2nd edition, is likely as close as I’m ever going to get. So here goes.

What is it that makes everyone and their brother feel they have the expertise to leverage the Bible’s ancient authority to support whatever their social-media-fueled cause might be this week? Whether it’s politicians or health fanatics, social activists or scientists, I find biblical quotations in the oddest places. Typically stripped of their original contexts and deployed to support causes and campaigns that would’ve made the biblical authors’ jaws drop. Do people do this with chemistry? Constitutional law? Do we really assume that a Google search and one GE course in college makes us ready to perform surgery or resolve the immigration crisis? I don’t think so. But for some odd reason, everyone wants to claim their expertise in Bible. And as someone who has spent nearly four and a half decades of my life formally studying this text (yes, I am that old), it honestly makes me a little nuts. So will you indulge me while I spend 700 words talking about the concept of hermeneutics, the science of interpreting Scripture?

I think that one reason folks play “fast and free” in their interpretation of the Bible (sometimes over personalizing it; sometimes trying to leverage its authority for a personal agenda; sometimes forcing it to answer questions the authors never intended to answer) is because the Bible is so familiar to Western Civilization. And because it has so much cultural influence. So if someone can corral the Bible’s authority for their cause, well, that could prove to be a very strategic victory. The unintended consequence of all this grappling for influence, however, is that honest folk are left with a hodgepodge of readings that leave them saying, “there are so many interpretations of that passage, does it really mean anything at all?” And instead of questioning the interpreters, they question the Book.

But here’s the news flash, there are actual rules for engaging any text, especially one as ancient as the Bible. First can we recognize that contrary to what some might claim, the Old Testament is not a hodgepodge of unrelated materials thrown together by some late, uninformed redactor. Nor is the Bible the result of an empty-headed secretary copying down some mysterious message verbatim. No, the biblical writers were historians and theologians, scribes and poets, and, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have written a carefully formatted piece of literature designed to reveal to us the character of God and the great story of his people. So our goal as interpreters is not to force these words to say what we want them to say, but to discover what it was they want to say.

Hence our first guideline, we need to recognize that the Bible is an intentional act of communication, and to understand any book or passage within it we need to be willing to engage an ancient author, who has purposefully engaged a particular audience, by means of a recorded text. And because this is the Bible, a modern interpreter has to engage two authors—the human author who first put pen to parchment (or stylus to clay) and the divine Author whose ambition was to reveal himself to a present and future people.

We also must engage (at least) two audiences—the original and immediate audience and the intended future audience (our biblical authors were well aware that their act of communication was going to be preserved for future incarnations of the people of God). And as any act of successful communication requires that an author and his audience tap into a shared notion of the world, it is essential that the modern interpreter also tap into that shared notion, doing her best to understand what the shared world of her ancient author and audience looked like. And just like us, these writers communicated via their own language/vocabulary/idioms and their experienced social settings. So if we are going to understand them, we need to allow their words and cultural references to mean to us what the meant to them.

A fun little example (and I hope I don’t lose you). How do you feel about puppies? Here in sunny Santa Barbara dogs have acquired nearly human status—they are fed Blenders down on State Street, clothed in designer outfits, and transported in baby carriages and bike seats. People speak of their four-footed-friends as “fur babies” and my neighborhood website refers to pet owners as “parents.” As a result, no one is surprised to find a dog in a library, restaurant, post office, grocery store, classroom, or (my) office building, and everyone in my town is fiercely protective of the dogs who share our world. That is our cultural reference for the creature we know as a dog. In ancient Israel, however, most dogs ranked somewhere around sewer rats. Dirty. Vermin. Dangerous. To kill a dog was to do your community a favor. This is why Goliath shouts at David, “What am I a dog, that you come at me with sticks?!” and David defends himself to Saul saying that his status is no more than a “dead dog” (1 Sam 24:14; e.g. 2 Sam 9:8; 16:9). That is their cultural reference.

Next rule? We must deal with the text itself. What sort of literature is this? Is this poetry or prose? Am I reading an international treaty, a letter, an archived royal inscription, the prayer of a desperate and bereaved mother, a law code, parable or proverb? If you don’t know what you’re reading, you have little chance of figuring out what it meant to say. Genre, vocabulary, and literary context must all be accounted for—just as any other intentional act of communication. And each of these genres have vocabulary and literary conventions that are specific to that genre. The word “love” in Deuteronomy (political document) does not mean the same thing as “love” in the Song of Songs (an erotic poem). Thus, to understand these texts, we need to know something about genre and the vocabulary of the original languages. Too often, in the words of Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

So how are we going to accomplish this? Well, we have some hard work to do. First, we need to get past the great barrier that divides us from them— the chasm resulting from millennia of linguistic, cultural and historical changes. Then we have to put the great Story in order so that we modern interpreters can get a handle on our Old and New Testaments as one unified story. We need to know what we are reading and attend to particular vocabulary—context, context, context. All this so that we can begin to see the people of the Bible as real people, who lived in real places and struggled with real faith … just like we do. That’s why I wrote The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament in the first place, and it is my prayer that the second edition will do it only better.

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Good places to start in reading about hermeneutics: Richard N. Longenecker, “Major Tasks of an Evangelical Hermeneutic: Some Observations on Commonalities, Interrelations, and Differences” BBR 14.1 (2004): 45-58, 45, and Jeannine Brown, Scripture as Communication: Introducing Biblical Hermeneutics, 2nd ed. (Baker Academic 2021).