much of what a Yale style Bible study entails is keeping in mind the distance between us as readers in the present and the biblical text which is the product of the distant past whether it is divinely inspired or not the Bible is old if we were to attribute the Psalms to David as traditionally those would be from the 10th Century BC Ezekiel is from the 6th Century BC the book of Kings also from the sixth Century Ezra is from the fifth century it's old but we need to remember that the Bible is not the oldest
book in the world and when we get to what's in the Bible when we open it up it and when we look at what's in all these other texts it turns out the Bible's not all that unique either we have creation stories like Genesis 1 and laws like those of Exodus and Deuteronomy from third millennium Mesopotamia third millennium BC be very strange from the third millennium ad I suppose we have wisdom literature from Egypt I mean literally it texts chunks of Proverbs that are almost word for word from Egyptian texts from a thousand years earlier
we have poetry and ritual laws like we have in Leviticus from the Canaanite city of ugarit on the coast of Syria we have laws from Turkey we have historiography from Greece the Bible which has all of these things didn't make any of it up out of thin air the biblical authors were writing in line with the literary conventions of their time and this is crucial to remember the biblical authors didn't know that we were coming along the Bible was written in a different time and for a different audience with different knowledge and ideas right and
there are some obvious examples like um one we'll get to in a few weeks where does the rainbow come from right uh the biblical answer right obviously has to do with you know God putting the rainbow in the in the sky at the time of the flood we don't think any less of the biblical authors for not knowing sort of the science behind how rainbows work similarly I hope you don't think any less of me for not really understanding the science behind how rainbows work but that's you know this is just a simple obvious gap
between us and them there are some less obvious ones that go the other way uh when Jacob buys the birthright from Esau what's the implication of that in order to understand that story we sort of have to understand customs of inheritance in the ancient near East and this is the central task of historical criticism to understand the Bible in the temporal and geographical and cultural context in which it was written this means knowing like a huge amount of stuff it means understanding language right some meanings of biblical words we only know from Context in Genesis
two in the creation story there right the Earth is dry and like a a Mist uh sort of Wells up and to water the the land that word for mist uh we don't know what that word means context is pretty good a spring a Mist a something wet but we have no idea what that word means some words we know only sort of by guessing educated guesses so when we get to the Joseph story uh what is it that Jacob gives Joseph as a gift in Hebrew it's a konet pasim in English it's now a
Technicolor Dream Coat evidently uh but obviously it didn't mean that and we don't really know what it means actually some sort of special article of clothing there are some words that we know their meanings not from anything in the Bible but only from cognate languages um uh in The Book of Leviticus uh it your Bibles will all say something like um it is it is an offering by fire but that word that is translated as fire turns out probably means gift and we didn't know that until uh you know earlier in the early in the
20th century with the discovery of the language of ugaritic so language is something that we need to know if we're going to really understand what's going on in the Bible but even broader than language is sort of literary genres right we need to be culturally competent readers uh of the the text what does that mean well it means we need to learn how to read uh in in the genres that they were writing because they assumed that we would that their Their audience not we Their audience would understand them so the example I use all
the time is if you gave somebody a newspaper who'd never seen one before they wouldn't naturally know that what you find on the front page news is distinguishable from what you find on the back page opinion and I don't know if that's a disting that exists in the world anymore anyway but for our sake when it comes to the Bible when you pick up Genesis within the first few chapters you're flooded with genealogies we kind of skip them because we don't know how to read them we don't know what they meant I mean we should
but most of us don't when we get to Leviticus everybody skips that thing because we're not sort of competent readers of ancient ritual texts okay so language and genre you need to know some history to read the Bible because so much the Bible is actually about historical events not so much Genesis but when you read the Samson story and Samson's fighting Philistines who are the Philistines and where did they come from when sarib invades in the book of Second Kings that's a like real historical event that we have multiple sources for from the ancient world
it helps to know what's actually happening there geography when Abraham is said to come from or of the calans where is or of the calans when Jacob goes to his uh relatives in Aram where is Aram when Moses goes to Midian where's Midian most of our Bibles have helpful maps for this but the fact that your Bible has a map and it tells you something about how much you need to know in order to understand the text and then there's cultural stuff how did people in the ancient world understand sacrifice to work was it a
gift was it food you know there's all sorts of possibilities it's not obvious on the face of it when it when it says that God smelled the pleasing odors what are we to make of that really when the Bible talks about animals being pure and impure when it talks about people uh Contracting impurity what is impurity when the Bible talks about the responsib responsibility of children to care for their parents what did that mean in that time and place and of course we can't get anywhere without archaeology right which can often be the most difficult
for folks because it kind of is like the hardest and fastest evidence that we have sometimes it's great right so sometimes we dig up something like the salom tunnel in Jerusalem and go my goodness like the Bible talks about King Hezekiah digging the this tunnel and we found it and in it we found a datable sort of inscription saying we built this tunnel that's fantastic sometimes it's neither good nor terrible we don't really have archaeological evidence for the Exodus so we'll call that one a wash and sometimes it's really bad like the Bible tells us
that Jericho was you know fell uh under Joshua and archaeology tells us that's not possible so these are all things that we have to sort of keep in mind and hold in our heads as we're asking questions about the biblical text if we're not reading and asking these questions we're not really reading the old text we're just reading something uh something that might as well have been written recently but it wasn't a big part of the reason it's worth asking uh these kinds of historical questions is to understand not just the world of the past
but understand how and why we read the Bible today the way that we do we don't just read the Bible after all we read it through the lens of centuries of accumulated interpretation we read it in the light of church fathers and rabbis and Luther and Calvin we read it overwhelmingly in light of the translators of the King James version without asking the historical questions we're not really reading just the Bible we're reading the Bible as understood by others which is of course fine in traditional church and synagogue settings where that's exactly what's expected but
as I said this is Bible study Yale style so we want to know what's going on in the text and also why we read it the way that we do
