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1 Studying the Bible in Its Ancient Context(s)

       Chapter Outline

       Chapter Overview

       Why History Is Important in Studying the Bible

       The Geography and Major Characters of the Biblical Drama

       Major Periods in the Biblical Drama

       Multiple Contexts, Multiple Methods

       Looking Forward to the Big Picture

       Chapter One Review

       Resources for Further Study

       Appendix: Israel’s History and Empires

      Chapter Overview

This chapter introduces the basic orientation of the textbook and sets the stage for what follows with three overviews: geographical, historical, and methodological. The beginning of the chapter answers the questions “What makes academic study of the Bible different from typical ‘bible study’?” and “Why is such academic study important?” We will briefly compare the general outline of the biblical story with the history of Israel that will structure this textbook. Next you gain a bird’s-eye view of the major regions of the land of Israel, the periods of Israel’s history, and methods used by scholars to analyze the Bible. Your future study will be helped in particular by learning the location of the two major regions of ancient Israel – the heartland of tribal Israel to the north and the area of David’s clan, Judah, to the south (with the famous city of Jerusalem between these two areas) – and by memorizing the dates of the major periods in the history of Israel and beginnings of Judaism and Christianity (see also the appendix to this chapter).

       EXERCISE

      Write a half-page to one-page statement or mini-autobiography of your past encounters with the Bible. Which parts of it have been most central in such encounters? Have you studied the Bible in an academic context before? Have you had unusually positive or negative experiences with the Bible or people citing it?

      Why History Is Important in Studying the Bible

      At first glance, the Bible is one of the most familiar of books. Many families own a copy. Every weekend, Jews and Christians read from it at worship. There are echoes of the Bible in all kinds of music, from Handel’s Messiah to reggae and hip hop. Popular expressions, such as “Thou shalt not” or “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” come from the Bible. Movies are often filled with biblical allusions. And you can still find a copy of the Bible, or at least the New Testament and Psalms, in many hotels.

      AD, BC, BCE, AND CE

      The older expressions for dates, BC and AD, are explicitly Christian in orientation. BC comes from “Before Christ,” and AD comes from the Latin anno Domini, which means “in the year of the Lord.”

      Over the past decades scholarly works have tended to use the more neutral terms BCE and CE, which refer to “Before the Common Era” and “Common Era,” respectively. The year references are the same, but the labels are not specifically Christian.

      This Introduction uses the standard scholarly BCE and CE abbreviations.

At second glance, the Bible is one of the most foreign of books. Its language, even in English translation, is often difficult to understand, especially if you are reading the King James Translation (1611), with its beautiful, but often obscure, seventeenth-century cadences and words. The biblical texts that are translated in the King James and other versions are still older. The New Testament was written in Greek, and its texts date from about two thousand years ago (50–200 CE). The Hebrew Bible/Old Testament was mostly written in Hebrew (a handful of chapters are in a related language, Aramaic), and some of its parts date as far back as three thousand years (1000–164 BCE). Both testaments reflect their ancient origins in many ways. They use ancient literary forms and images that are not common now. They come out of religious contexts much different from contemporary Judaism or Christianity. And they are addressed to historical struggles and circumstances that most readers of the Bible do not know.

      The ancient aspects of the Bible are part of what give it its holy aura, but they also make biblical texts difficult to understand. If someone sees a reference to “Cyrus” in Isa 44:28 and 45:1, that person will likely have few associations with who “Cyrus” was and what he meant to the writer of this text. Most readers have even fewer associations with places and empires mentioned in the Bible, such as “Ephraim” or “Assyria.” Usually, their only acquaintance with “Egypt” or “Babylonia” is a brief discussion in a world history class. Furthermore, certain types of writing mean little or nothing to contemporary readers, for example, the long genealogies of Genesis or the detailed instructions for sacrificing animals in Leviticus. As a result of all this unfamiliarity, few people who try to read the Bible from beginning to end actually get very far, and those who do often fail to make much sense out of what they have read.

      The goal of this book is to give you keys to understand the Bible, including its more obscure parts. Names (e.g. Cyrus), events (e.g. the liberation from Babylonian captivity), and general perspectives in the Bible that previously you might have skipped past or not noticed should come into focus and make sense. For many, the experience of reading the Bible in historical context is much like finally getting to see a movie in color that beforehand had only been available in black and white. It is not at all that the meaning of the Bible can or should be limited to the settings in which it was originally composed. On the contrary: along the way we will see how the Bible is an important document now, thanks to the fact that it has been radically reinterpreted over centuries, first by successive communities of ancient Israelites and later by Jewish and Christian communities who cherished the Bible. Still, learning to see scriptures in relation to ancient history and culture can make previously bland or puzzling biblical texts come alive.

      To pursue this historical approach, we will not read the Bible from beginning to end. Instead, we will look at biblical texts in relationship to when they were written. This means that, rather than starting with the creation stories of Genesis 1–3, this book starts with remnants of Israel’s earliest oral traditions. These are songs and sagas from the time when Israel had no cities and was still a purely tribal people. Our next stop will be texts from the rise of Israel’s first monarchies, particularly certain “royal” psalms that celebrate God’s choice of Jerusalem and anointing of kings there. When we move to the New Testament, it will mean beginning with Paul’s letters, all of which were written before the gospels. Overall, as we move through Israelite and early Christian history, we will see how biblical texts reflect the very different influences of successive world empires: the Mesopotamian empires of Assyria and Babylonia, and then the Persian, Hellenistic (Greek), and Roman empires. The common thread will be historical, and this will mean starting most chapters with some discussion of the historical and cultural context of the biblical texts to be discussed there.

Overview: Order of Main Discussions of Biblical Books