Taking the Bible's Own Context Seriously
Most Christians think Bible reading is Bible study. It is not. And what most people do beyond Bible reading is not going to penetrate the text either — because it amounts to reading about the Bible rather than reading the Bible itself. Commentary that never reaches the original languages, word studies that are nothing more than grocery lists of English alternatives, and theological traditions imposed on the text from outside its own world are all forms of secondhand engagement. The goal of this resource is to move past that.
Close knowledge of the text and serious engagement with what it actually says are not in competition with a living faith. The deeper into the text you go, the better the result.
I. Ten Principles for Biblical Study
How can you hold to a biblical theology without being able to root what you believe in the text? Many believers operate on creedal theology, inherited theology, or the theology of whatever book was in the Christian bookstore. These may not be deeply flawed, but they are secondhand — someone else's paraphrase of an English Bible. They are adequate for basic orientation, but they fall well short of a biblical theology derived from the text itself.
Use several translations and learn the skills for understanding why they disagree. Those skills include learning grammatical terms so you can follow a serious commentary, understanding translation philosophy (every English Bible of recent origin has a preface where the translation committee explains their approach), and learning to recognize thinking fallacies that trap interpreters, including scholars. Clear thinking means knowing what can and cannot be said about a given word or passage.
Word studies are a starting point, not an endpoint. Resources like concordances and basic dictionaries offer little more than grocery lists of English alternatives for your translation — and grocery lists lend themselves to a smorgasbord approach to interpretation, selecting the meaning that agrees with what you already believe. There is more to word studies than choosing from a list, and word studies themselves are subordinate to patterns: how terms recur, what they appear alongside, in what order, and in what juxtapositions. No word study tool will get you to that level of observation, or even suggest it.
One inspired text ought to be our guide in reading another. New Testament writers do not always quote the Old Testament as it appears in your English Bible. They do not strike simple one-to-one equivalences between Old Testament passages and their New Testament applications. They use interpretive methods that were mainstream in their own cultural context — methods that would have been immediately recognized by their readers. Understanding what they are doing requires knowing how people interpreted Scripture in the Second Temple period. If you claim an Old Testament passage means something specific, or points to a specific event, and a New Testament writer never applied it that way, the claim is not a biblical theology — it is an assertion.
The context that produced the Bible is the ancient Near East and the ancient Mediterranean world. That is the context to take seriously. The Bible was not written during the period of Augustine, or Aquinas, or the Reformation, or modern evangelicalism. All of those contexts are foreign to the biblical context. A theology filtered through any of them may be consistent with biblical theology at points, but it cannot be called a biblical theology, because it is being interpreted through a worldview the biblical writers never shared and would not have recognized.
God chose people to write the biblical text. People write using grammar and styles understood by their peers, with deliberate intent. The Bible did not drop from heaven as a series of paranormal events. God chose specific persons at specific times in specific cultures with specific worldviews, and through a lifetime of providential preparation prompted them to write. He used them as people, not as instruments of automatic writing. What those writers produced carries a context — and that context is the biblical context, because what they wrote is the biblical material.
What appears in the text is there for a reason. Oddness is not randomness. A passage must be treated in its immediate context, in the context of the book, and in the context of the biblical worldview as a whole — a worldview that is not yours, and was not any worldview produced after the first century AD. Just because a modern reader finds a passage odd, offensive, or bizarre does not mean it was inserted to fill space. It has a role in biblical theology. Start with the strangeness, not in spite of it.
Putting Bible verses into categories of meaning is what systematic theology does. That process is not inherently wrong, but it is misleading if what you think those verses mean does not derive from exegesis of the original text. Biblical theology must begin with careful analysis of the text — the grunt work of exegesis and original language study — and then organize the results. Starting with English translations and building categories from there is proof-texting. It is top-down rather than bottom-up, and it produces theology organized around a tradition rather than around the text.
If you are not bothered by the Bible, you cannot be reading it closely. If your reading does not produce questions about how what you just found in one passage needs to be balanced against another passage, you have not studied it — you have read it to get a spiritual impression, not to think the thoughts of the text. The discomfort is the signal that contact has been made.
The connections within the text are the result of a supernatural mind guiding human writers. The only way to think God's thoughts from the text is to follow the threads where they lead, one at a time. Read the Bible the way you read a serious novel: with the awareness that the writer is doing something deliberate, drawing your attention toward certain things and away from others, setting up recurrences, planting vocabulary that will surface again later. The words look different when you are in that mode. Train yourself to be in that mode every time you open the text.
II. The Meta-Context: What "Context" Actually Means
The advice to "interpret the Bible in context" is common enough to have become meaningless. The problem is not that it is wrong — it is that nobody has thought carefully about which context is meant. There are many different contexts:
There is immediate context — the surrounding verses and paragraphs. There is book context — the whole book in which a passage appears. There is the context of the author's other writings, where those can be determined. There is the context of the literary section a passage belongs to: wisdom literature, prophetic literature, apocalyptic. On the word level, there is semantic context — how a word is used in that book, by that author. And there is grammatical context — how words relate to each other in the original language. All of these are real, and all are different.
But what this resource is primarily concerned with is the meta-context: the much larger frame. To properly understand the Bible requires keeping three things in mind.
First: Biblical writers were people, living in a specific time and culture.
Understanding that the biblical writers were fully human directs our thinking about inspiration and about the product of inspiration — the Bible itself. The tendency is to view inspiration as a series of paranormal events: a prophet going into a trance, an arm moving automatically across parchment. That is not how inspiration works, and it is easy to demonstrate that from a close look at the text itself. There is evidence of editing. The Synoptic Gospels carry parallel dialogue that differs in detail — in real time, only one thing was said, and it was said once. Biblical writers were people used by God, chosen for who they were and where they were, writing out of the worldview formed by their culture and their moment in history.
Second: The context that matters is not yours.
The biblical context is not your context, and it is not the context of any great thinker in the intervening centuries. The contexts of the Apostolic Fathers, the medieval theologians, the Reformers, and modern evangelicalism are all foreign to the Bible. They are alien contexts when it comes to the real context of the biblical writers. Filtering the Bible through any of those frameworks produces theology — but not necessarily biblical theology.
Third: The biblical context is not the context of any post-apostolic tradition.
The biblical context is the world between the second millennium BC and the first century AD. That is where the biblical writers lived, thought, and wrote. To take the Bible seriously in its own context means mentally entering that world — thinking the thoughts of a pre-modern person living in those centuries. That is a difficult task, but it is not impossible. And there is a direct method for doing it.
III. The Method: Comparative Studies and Ancient Literature
The way to enter the biblical worldview is to saturate yourself in the literature, religion, and intellectual output of the ancient Near Eastern and ancient Mediterranean civilizations that were contemporaneous with the biblical writers. This is what scholars call comparative studies.
The biblical writers were not divorced from their culture. They shared vocabulary, symbolic forms, and categories of thought with their neighbors — because they had to communicate with those neighbors, and communication requires a shared framework. What distinguishes the biblical material is not that it emerged from a cultural vacuum, but that within the shared cultural grammar, the theological content is different. The biblical writers used the available language and imagery to make statements about Yahweh that were distinct from and often in deliberate contrast with the claims made for the gods of surrounding cultures.
You can only perceive those distinctions if you know what the surrounding claims were. Knowing the ancient Near Eastern material does two things:
It makes strange passages decipherable. The overlap between biblical and ancient Near Eastern material helps clarify what the biblical writer is saying — because you can compare it to something in the wider cultural world the writer and readers shared.
It makes divergent material visible. When you know how an ancient person thought and what a standard ancient Near Eastern claim looked like, the places where the biblical text breaks from that pattern stand out clearly. Those breaks are almost always theological statements — the biblical writer using familiar imagery to make a claim that is emphatically not what the surrounding cultures believed.
The great theologians of the past — Augustine, Calvin, Luther — simply did not have access to this material. This is not a question of modern scholars being smarter. It is a question of what is now available. We are in a position to add nuance and clarity to biblical interpretation that was not available to those thinkers, and we are obligated to use it.
IV. Resources: Ancient Near Eastern Literature (Old Testament Context)
What follows is a curated guide to the most reliable print resources for accessing the ancient Near Eastern literary and intellectual world that forms the context of the Old Testament.
General Collections (All Civilizations)
Currently the most up-to-date academic English anthology for ancient Near Eastern texts. Covers all the major civilizations. The standard reference for the field.
The former industry standard before COS, now available in an affordable two-volume paperback edition. Fewer texts than COS but still valuable, especially for material not reprinted elsewhere.
Individual volumes available in hard copy covering letters from ancient Egypt, Hittite myths, Mesopotamian chronicles, Ugaritic narrative poetry, Hittite prayers, and more. Buy individual volumes as needed.
Egypt
Available in paperback and digital form. Covers Old and Middle Kingdom (vol. 1), New Kingdom (vol. 2), and Late Period (vol. 3).
Broad anthology including stories, wisdom literature, monumental inscriptions, autobiographies, and poetry. Get the third edition.
Mesopotamia
The most exhaustive collection of Akkadian literature in English. A one-volume distillation, From Distant Days, is also available from the same author.
Covers the major creation epics, flood epics, and the Gilgamesh cycle. Affordable paperback, widely used.
Poetic epic myths from Sumerian literature. Jacobsen was a leading figure in Sumerian studies.
Ugarit (Canaan)
Includes Ugaritic epic material and a number of the Rephaim texts.
Get the second edition.
V. Resources: Reference Works and Scholarly Guides (Old Testament)
Essential Reference Sets
Covers virtually all areas of religion, culture, history, science, and everyday life in the ancient Near East. Unsurpassed as a comprehensive reference.
Covers the Pentateuch, Historical Books, Wisdom/Poetry/Writings, and Prophets. Articles are deeply attentive to the ancient Near Eastern worldview. Excellent starting point for any specific subject.
Specifically focused on divine beings, gods, angels, and anything related to the spiritual realm in both testaments. Every entry is written with attention to ancient Near Eastern context. One of the most useful single reference works available for serious biblical study.
History and Culture
Each chapter covers a different ancient civilization — Egyptians, Babylonians, Moabites, Ammonites, and more — with a complete cultural overview.
Written for the non-specialist but with solid academic content.
Ancient Near Eastern and Israelite Religion
The most comprehensive treatment of ancient Egyptian religion currently available.
If you acquire only one volume from this entire list, acquire this one. Covers prophecy, cosmology, law, ritual, and the afterlife — showing at every point how the ancient Near Eastern world informs reading of the Hebrew Bible.
One-volume introduction to the names for God in the Old Testament and their significance in context.
If you acquire one book on everyday life in ancient Israel — religious and non-religious, all social strata — this is it. Unsurpassed.
VI. Resources: Second Temple Period Literature (New Testament Context)
The Second Temple period runs from 516 BC (completion of the Second Temple) to 70 AD (its destruction by Titus). When scholars speak of Second Temple Jewish literature, they mean the non-biblical Jewish religious texts of this period: the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the writings of Josephus and Philo of Alexandria.
The Apocrypha
The Apocrypha includes books such as 1 and 2 Maccabees, Tobit, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Wisdom of Sirach. Protestant tradition does not consider these books canonical; the Roman Catholic Church considers some of them deuterocanonical. Regardless of canonical status, they are indispensable for understanding the intellectual world of Second Temple Judaism — the world in which the New Testament was written.
Vol. 1: Apocrypha. Vol. 2: Pseudepigrapha. Available separately.
The Pseudepigrapha
The Pseudepigrapha is a scholarly collection of non-canonical, non-apocryphal books written during the Second Temple period — the most familiar of which is 1 Enoch. The term does not mean "false writings"; it refers to the fact that many of these books bear the names of ancient figures (Enoch, Jubilees) without those figures having actually written them.
The major academic resource for the Pseudepigrapha in English translation. Includes detailed introductions and textual histories for each book.
The Dead Sea Scrolls
There are two categories of Dead Sea Scrolls: biblical scrolls (different textual traditions of the Hebrew Bible found at Qumran) and non-biblical scrolls (documents the Qumran community itself wrote, and other books — including fragments of 1 Enoch — that had circulation in Second Temple Judaism). The latter category is what most scholars have in mind when they speak of "the Dead Sea Scrolls."
Get the most recent edition.
Widely used standard translation.
English translation of all the biblical scrolls — the oldest known Old Testament text in English. The visual layout shows which portions of the Hebrew Bible were present in the Qumran manuscripts and which were not.
Josephus
Flavius Josephus produced four major works: The Jewish War (account of the Jewish-Roman conflict), Jewish Antiquities (a 20-volume history of the Jewish people from Adam to the war with Rome), The Life (autobiography), and Against Apion (refutation of anti-Semitic writings).
Full English translation of all four works.
Philo of Alexandria
Philo was a first-century Jewish theological, religious, and philosophical writer whose primary interest was the allegorical interpretation of Scripture. Central to his teaching is a doctrine of the Logos — an intermediary being — which makes his work directly relevant to New Testament study, particularly the prologue to the Gospel of John.
VII. Resources: Reference Works and Monographs (New Testament Context)
Essential Reference Sets
Four volumes: Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (ed. Green), Dictionary of Paul and His Letters (ed. Hawthorne), Dictionary of the Later New Testament and Its Developments (ed. Longenecker), and Dictionary of New Testament Background (ed. Evans). Excellent discussions with thorough bibliography, attentive to Second Temple Jewish context throughout.
Covers both testaments. Includes specific entries on New Testament terminology for divine beings — including Paul's vocabulary for the powers and principalities.
A New Testament study Bible with notes written by Jewish scholars. Provides a Jewish reading of the New Testament that illuminates its context.
General Second Temple Context
Broad, detailed coverage of Second Temple period literature, ritual, and culture as it bears on the genesis and early life of the church.
Vol. 1: Qumran and Apocalypticism. Vol. 2: Sages and Literature. Dense, academic, better used as a reference than read straight through.
History of the Second Temple Period
Interpretation of Scripture in New Testament Times
The New Testament writers had methods of interpreting the Old Testament that were fully mainstream within Second Temple Judaism. Those methods were not foreign to their readers; they were recognizable and accepted interpretive strategies. Understanding what those methods are — and how they differ from modern assumptions about literal one-to-one textual correspondence — is essential for any serious New Testament study.
If you choose one book from this section, start here. An introduction to how the New Testament uses the Old Testament and why it matters for interpretation.
Covers the New Testament use of the Old Testament across the Gospels, Paul, and the remaining epistles and Revelation. Academic and comprehensive; read after Beale.
Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian Origins
Greco-Roman and Hellenistic Context
Long-standing standard reference for Greco-Roman background to the New Testament.
Covers New Testament social culture — honor, shame, patronage, purity — with attention to both Jewish and Greco-Roman context.
Contextualized New Testament Theology
Dense with Second Temple contextual knowledge and sensitive to Old Testament continuity throughout. Wright's New Perspective on Paul is contested; his engagement with the Second Temple world is not. These volumes are worth reading with discernment.
VIII. Online Resources
Online resources are generally older, in public domain, and do not incorporate recent scholarship. Their translations are from early in the twentieth century or earlier. But there is a great deal available for free, and for orientation and basic access they are useful.
ETANA (Electronic Tools and Ancient Near Eastern Archives) — Searchable collection of ancient Near Eastern core texts in English translation. Also contains ABZU (thousands of free academic books on the ancient Near East) and eTACT (Akkadian materials specifically).
The Internet Sacred Texts Archive — A curated collection of English translations of ancient texts with coherent topical organization. Not limited to the ancient Near East. One of the best free starting points for accessing primary sources.
The Internet Archive — Public domain and freely available books on virtually any subject, including many older but important works on the ancient world. Search by keyword or author.
Early Jewish Writings — The most complete online collection of Jewish documents from antiquity, with translations, introductions, and links. Covers Josephus, Philo, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, and more.
pseudepigrapha.com — Links to apocryphal and pseudepigraphical books in English translation.