I knew for a long time that the Bible came from another world. I knew it was ancient and that the people behind it lived thousands of years ago, spoke languages I don’t, and saw the world very differently than I do. None of that was a secret. It’s just that most of it tended to disappear whenever I actually sat down to read it. I’d been taught to come to Scripture expecting God to speak, so naturally I was listening for what God wanted to say to me. What was the lesson? The command? The promise I could claim or principle I could apply? There was something deeply sincere in that. I wanted to hear from God. But it also meant I could move pretty quickly from “Paul wrote this to a church in first-century Thessalonica” to “here’s what God is telling me in my living room on a random Tuesday morning,” with a few thousand years silently disappearing somewhere between observation and application (SOAP method anyone?).¹⛰ Side Trail: The SOAP method (Scripture, Observation, Application, Prayer) can be a helpful devotional practice, but its structure can encourage readers to move quickly toward personal application. Historically oriented interpretation slows that movement down. A text such as Jeremiah 29:11, for example, was addressed to Judean exiles in Babylon (Jer. 29:1–14), not originally as an individualized promise about each reader’s future. Likewise, Philippians 4:13 belongs to Paul’s discussion of learning contentment in scarcity and abundance (Phil. 4:10–13). The point is not that such texts cannot speak beyond their first audiences, but that responsible application begins by asking what they were saying there first. As I mentioned last time, eventually it dawned on me that this book wasn’t actually written to me, even if I believed it could still speak to me. And if inspiration was less about God breathing out words that were distinctly divine and more about God breathing through words that were deeply human, then maybe it mattered who those humans were, and what shaped how they thought, spoke, and wrote. Maybe “context is king” included not just the words around a text, but the history behind it too. In short, maybe reading the Bible faithfully also meant learning to read it historically.

And that meant asking questions I’d often skipped before: Who wrote this? When? To whom? What was happening around them? What assumptions did they share with their world? What kind of writing am I even reading? And what question was this text actually trying to answer? Any decent Bible study taught me to look at context. But that usually meant looking more closely at the text itself: underlining verses, chasing cross-references, looking up Greek words, etc. Reading historically meant widening the lens and trying to enter their world before bringing the text into mine. And once I did, familiar concepts started sounding remarkably different: the “Kingdom of God” began sounding less like a distant spiritual realm and more like God’s rule arriving in a world already ruled by Caesar;²⛰ Side Trail: Jesus’ proclamation of the “kingdom of God” belonged to a world saturated with political rule and Jewish hopes for God’s reign. Mark summarizes Jesus’ message as, “The kingdom of God has come near” (Mark 1:14–15), while the Lord’s Prayer links God’s kingdom with God’s will being done “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). Against the backdrop of Daniel 2 and 7, where God’s kingdom confronts beastly empires, many scholars understand Jesus’ kingdom language as announcing God’s sovereign rule breaking into the present world. It certainly had spiritual dimensions, but it was much richer than simply another name for “heaven after death.” the “gospel” less like a plan for getting saved and more like the announcement that Jesus was Lord;³⛰ Side Trail: The Greek word *euangelion*, translated “gospel,” means “good news” or “good announcement,” and in the ancient world could be used for public proclamations of victory or imperial events. The New Testament gives the word a distinctly Jesus-centered meaning. Mark opens with “the gospel of Jesus Christ” (Mark 1:1); Paul summarizes his gospel by announcing Jesus as the risen descendant of David and “Lord” (Rom. 1:1–4); and Acts repeatedly describes the message as “good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 8:12). The gospel therefore includes salvation, but its basic shape is an announcement about what God has done through Jesus. “salvation” less like escaping this world for heaven and more like God’s work of rescue, restoration, and new creation,⁴⛰ Side Trail: Biblical “salvation” language is broader than the question of where an individual goes after death. In the Old Testament, God “saves” Israel from slavery and enemies (Exod. 14:13–14; Ps. 106:8–10). The prophets envision salvation as restoration, justice, healing, and creation renewed (Isa. 35:1–10; 52:7–10). The New Testament continues that expansive pattern: Jesus announces good news to the poor and freedom for the oppressed (Luke 4:18–21), Paul describes creation itself awaiting liberation (Rom. 8:18–25), and Revelation ends not with humanity abandoning earth but with heaven descending and God making “all things new” (Rev. 21:1–5). Salvation can therefore describe God’s comprehensive work of rescue and restoration. etc. Sometimes, the greatest distance between me and the text wasn’t an unfamiliar word or idea. It was a familiar one that belonged to an unfamiliar world. But seeing the words in their own world raised yet another question: how had those words themselves come to be?

That was the next surprise. The text didn’t just have a historical context, it had a history of its own too. Growing up, I’d often pictured a rather simple process: something happened, somebody wrote it down, and eventually those were gathered into the Bible on my nightstand. Moses wrote down the law, David composed the Psalms, Matthew dutifully took notes, Paul mailed a few letters, and somebody eventually added the maps in the back (preferably in full color). But the actual story turned out to be considerably messier than that, and more interesting too. Many biblical texts took shape over time.⁵⛰ Side Trail: Modern biblical scholarship generally treats many biblical books as products of extended processes rather than single moments of composition. Jeremiah explicitly describes an earlier scroll being dictated, destroyed, rewritten, and expanded with “many similar words” (Jer. 36:1–4, 27–32). Proverbs identifies one collection as sayings of Solomon that “the men of King Hezekiah of Judah copied” (Prov. 25:1). Psalms contains multiple collections and editorial seams, while books such as Isaiah display material associated with different historical settings. Scholars debate the details and dates, but the broader point is well established: preservation, supplementation, collection, and editing were ordinary parts of how ancient texts could reach their final forms. Stories circulated before they were written.⁶⛰ Side Trail: Oral transmission was normal in cultures where literacy and manuscripts were far less widespread than they are today. The Bible itself sometimes preserves traces of this process. Deuteronomy repeatedly commands Israel to teach its traditions orally to later generations (Deut. 6:6–9; 11:18–21). Psalm 78 describes telling “the coming generation” stories inherited from ancestors (Ps. 78:1–7). Paul likewise says he “received” and “handed on” traditions about Jesus’ death and resurrection (1 Cor. 15:3–7), using language associated with transmission. Scholars therefore commonly allow for periods in which memories, stories, sayings, songs, and traditions circulated orally before or alongside their appearance in written texts. Traditions were preserved, collected, combined, edited, and reshaped as new generations inherited them.⁷⛰ Side Trail: The Bible occasionally lets us watch inherited traditions being reused and reshaped. Chronicles retells much of Samuel and Kings while altering emphases for a later community; compare, for example, the accounts of David’s census in 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21. Deuteronomy revisits laws also found in Exodus while adapting their wording and rationale; compare the Sabbath commands in Exodus 20:8–11 and Deuteronomy 5:12–15. Proverbs 25:1 even identifies material copied by Hezekiah’s scribes. These examples do not tell us every stage behind every biblical book, but they make the larger scholarly picture unsurprising: Israel’s traditions were actively preserved, arranged, interpreted, and reapplied as communities carried them forward. As a result, the world in which a story was set wasn’t necessarily the same world in which that story was written. Sometimes centuries could stand between the two.⁸⛰ Side Trail: A story’s narrative setting and the period in which its written form developed are different historical questions. Genesis, for example, places Abraham in a remote ancestral past, while many scholars argue that significant portions of the Pentateuch reached their present literary form centuries later, with exilic or postexilic settings playing an important role in its composition and editing. Deuteronomy narrates Moses speaking before Israel enters Canaan, yet 2 Kings 22–23 describes a “book of the law” becoming central during Josiah’s seventh-century BCE reforms, a connection scholars have long explored. The exact compositional histories remain debated, but historical criticism distinguishes the time being narrated from the time narrators and editors were shaping the narrative. And that opened yet another set of questions. When did this text take shape? What traditions lie behind it? What had happened in the meantime? And, perhaps most importantly, why might this story have been told this way at this point in history?⁹⛰ Side Trail: That last question may be the most revealing. Stories about the past are often told because they speak to something happening in the present. Deuteronomy repeatedly warns that Israel’s unfaithfulness could lead to exile, but also imagines restoration afterward (Deut. 28:36–37; 30:1–5). Isaiah 40–55 speaks words of comfort and promised return to a people experiencing Babylonian exile (Isa. 40:1–2; 43:14–21). Knowing the historical circumstances behind a text can therefore illuminate why certain memories, themes, or questions became especially important. The question isn’t merely “Why preserve this story?” but “Why might a community have needed to hear this story, told this way, right then?” History wasn’t simply set dressing or scenery. It was woven into the process by which the Bible itself came to be. Entire books I thought I already knew began taking on a whole new shape once I could see the histories behind them.

Genesis was one of the first. And if you grew up in the kinds of churches I did, you probably know the questions: Were the six days literal?¹⁰⛰ Side Trail: Genesis 1 itself does not pause to answer the modern scientific question of whether its “days” correspond to twenty-four-hour periods. The Hebrew *yom* can mean an ordinary day, but interpretation also depends on literary structure and ancient context. Genesis 1 organizes creation into a highly patterned sequence: realms are formed in days 1–3 and populated in days 4–6, followed by divine rest on day 7. Exodus 20:11 later uses this pattern to ground Israel’s Sabbath. Readers disagree about whether the days should also be taken chronologically, but historical interpretation first asks what this seven-day architecture communicated within Israel’s ancient theological world. How old was the earth?¹¹⛰ Side Trail: Genesis never assigns an age to the earth. Young-earth chronologies are constructed by combining biblical genealogies and chronological notices, famously producing calculations such as Archbishop James Ussher’s seventeenth-century date of 4004 BCE. But biblical genealogies can serve literary and theological purposes as well as chronological ones: Matthew 1:1–17, for example, deliberately arranges Jesus’ genealogy into three groups of fourteen and omits generations known from the Old Testament. Genesis 5 and 11 certainly contain ages, but whether their intended function is to provide a complete scientific chronology is an interpretive question. Modern geology and cosmology ask questions the ancient authors themselves were not explicitly addressing. What about evolution?¹²⛰ Side Trail: Genesis does not discuss biological evolution, a scientific theory developed millennia after the text was written. Its creation narratives instead make theological claims about God, creation, humanity, vocation, order, and relationship. Genesis 1 portrays humans collectively as God’s image-bearers (Gen. 1:26–28), while Genesis 2 depicts the human formed from the ground and animated by divine breath (Gen. 2:7). Christians therefore disagree over how these texts relate to evolutionary science: some reject evolution, some harmonize particular details, and others see the accounts as addressing different kinds of questions altogether. Historical reading begins by resisting the assumption that Genesis was written to adjudicate a modern scientific debate. Was there a worldwide flood?¹³⛰ Side Trail: Genesis 6–9 repeatedly uses sweeping language for the flood: “all the high mountains under the whole heaven” are covered and “all flesh” outside the ark dies (Gen. 7:19–23). That has understandably supported a global reading. Yet interpreters debate how ancient universal language functions and whether the narrative describes the event from the perspective of the known world. Ancient Near Eastern flood traditions, including *Atrahasis* and the *Epic of Gilgamesh*, also provide important comparative context. Archaeology has not established a recent worldwide flood covering every continent. Historical study therefore asks both what sort of event may lie behind the story and what theological work Genesis is doing with inherited flood imagery. And what exactly are we supposed to do with the dinosaurs?¹⁴⛰ Side Trail: Dinosaurs are never mentioned explicitly in the Bible, which is hardly surprising: the scientific category *Dinosauria* was coined only in 1842. Attempts to identify Job’s Behemoth (Job 40:15–24) or Leviathan (Job 41) as dinosaurs go well beyond what the texts establish. Behemoth is described using imagery associated with a formidable land creature, while Leviathan draws on both animal imagery and the ancient Near Eastern symbol of the chaos monster; compare Psalm 74:13–14 and Isaiah 27:1. Fossils show non-avian dinosaurs disappeared roughly 66 million years before humans appeared. Genesis’ ancient authors simply were not attempting to provide a catalog of prehistoric life. Yet reading historically placed Genesis back in its ancient world, where stories of creation, floods, gods, and kings were already part of the cultural landscape,¹⁵⛰ Side Trail: Genesis participates in a much wider ancient Near Eastern conversation about origins. The Babylonian *Enuma Elish* describes creation amid conflict among gods; *Atrahasis* connects human creation with divine labor and later tells of a catastrophic flood; the *Epic of Gilgamesh* preserves another flood account with striking parallels to Genesis 6–9. Similarities include a divinely announced flood, a large vessel, preservation of life, birds sent out, and sacrifice afterward. Yet the differences matter just as much. Genesis radically simplifies the divine cast, presents one sovereign Creator, and gives humanity a distinctive dignity as God’s image (Gen. 1:26–27). Comparison helps locate Genesis within its ancient intellectual world without reducing it to mere copying. and where the text itself seemed to bear the marks of traditions shaped over generations rather than a book downloaded by Moses straight from On High.¹⁶⛰ Side Trail: Traditionally, Jews and Christians associated the Torah with Moses, and the Pentateuch itself repeatedly portrays Moses writing particular material (Exod. 24:4; Num. 33:2; Deut. 31:9). Yet it never straightforwardly says Moses personally wrote every sentence of Genesis through Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy narrates Moses’ death and burial (Deut. 34:5–12), and Genesis contains notices that appear to look back from later periods (for example, Gen. 12:6). Modern Pentateuchal scholarship proposes various combinations of older traditions, written sources, and later editorial activity. The classic Documentary Hypothesis has itself been heavily revised and debated, but few critical scholars treat the Pentateuch as a single, untouched Mosaic composition. Seen from there, Genesis began looking less like an answer key to modern questions and more like ancient Israel making sense of God, creation, and what it meant to be human.¹⁷⛰ Side Trail: Read in its ancient setting, Genesis is preoccupied with theological and human questions: Who is God? What kind of world is this? What are humans for? Why are violence, alienation, and death so pervasive? Genesis 1 portrays creation as ordered and good and humanity as bearing God’s image (Gen. 1:26–31). Genesis 2–3 explores vocation, relationship, moral boundaries, shame, and mortality. Genesis 4–11 traces violence and disorder while repeatedly preserving divine concern and possibility. The ancestral narratives then ask how God’s purposes might move through one family toward blessing “all the families of the earth” (Gen. 12:1–3). These concerns fit the conceptual world of ancient Israel far better than modern scientific categories. And once I saw what history could do to Genesis, I started seeing the same thing everywhere else too: laws I’d treated like divine legislation began looking like ancient laws addressing an ancient society;¹⁸⛰ Side Trail: Biblical law resembles other ancient Near Eastern legal collections in both form and subject matter. Compare Exodus 21:28–32, concerning an ox that gores someone, with similar cases in the Code of Hammurabi. Israel’s laws regulate slavery (Exod. 21:2–11), property, agriculture, debt, warfare, ritual purity, marriage, and social hierarchy within a world very different from a modern liberal democracy. At the same time, they often give these practices distinct theological framing, repeatedly grounding concern for vulnerable people in Israel’s own memory of slavery (Exod. 22:21; Deut. 24:17–22). Historical reading therefore asks how these laws functioned within ancient Israel before deciding how, or whether, they should function today. prophets I’d read as predictors of Jesus began looking more like voices addressing invasion, injustice, and exile;¹⁹⛰ Side Trail: Biblical prophets certainly speak about the future, but their primary vocation was not supplying coded predictions centuries in advance. They addressed concrete crises in Israel and Judah. Amos condemns economic exploitation and corrupt worship (Amos 2:6–8; 5:21–24). Isaiah confronts Judah amid Assyrian expansion (Isa. 7:1–17; 36–37). Jeremiah warns Jerusalem as Babylon threatens destruction (Jer. 7; 25), and Ezekiel speaks from exile after catastrophe (Ezek. 1:1–3). The New Testament later rereads prophetic texts christologically. Matthew 2:15, for instance, applies Hosea 11:1 to Jesus even though Hosea originally refers retrospectively to Israel’s Exodus. Historical reading allows both settings to be seen rather than collapsing the first into the second. Paul’s letters began looking less like timeless theological essays and more like letters to particular communities wrestling with particular issues;²⁰⛰ Side Trail: Paul’s letters name their audiences because they arose from actual relationships and disputes: “to the church of God that is in Corinth” (1 Cor. 1:2), “to the churches of Galatia” (Gal. 1:2), and so forth. They answer questions (1 Cor. 7:1), respond to reports (1 Cor. 1:11), settle conflicts, address ethical problems, defend Paul’s ministry, and coordinate practical matters. We are often hearing only one side of the conversation, which is why reconstructing the situation matters. Even Romans, Paul’s most sustained theological letter, addresses tensions involving Jews and non-Jews (Rom. 9–11; 14–15). Treating every sentence as a free-standing doctrinal proposition can obscure the pastoral argument the sentence originally served. and Revelation began looking less like a roadmap of future events and more like resistance literature for Christians living under imperial Rome,²¹⛰ Side Trail: Revelation identifies itself as both “prophecy” and a letter addressed to seven churches in Asia Minor (Rev. 1:3–4, 11). Its imagery draws heavily on Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah, Exodus, and other Jewish apocalyptic traditions. Rome is never simply named, but “Babylon” is portrayed as a wealthy, violent imperial city ruling over kings and merchants (Rev. 17–18), and the beast evokes earlier oppressive empires from Daniel 7. Scholars commonly read the book as unveiling the spiritual character of imperial power and calling Christians to faithful resistance. It does contain future hope, especially resurrection and new creation (Rev. 20–22), but that hope originally addressed real first-century communities facing pressures of empire. etc. In short, history wasn’t merely adding background, it was changing what I thought I was reading. And taking it seriously meant being willing to let that happen, even when it complicated the theology I’d brought with me. Yet the deeper I went, the more I realized that the history of a text didn’t end when it was written. If anything, that was only the beginning.

Because once these texts were written, people did what they’ve been doing ever since: they interpreted them. And, ironically, the Bible itself turned out to be one of the first places I noticed it: Israel’s past retold for new generations,²²⛰ Side Trail: You can see this happening within the Bible itself. Psalm 78 retells Israel’s history from the Exodus through David specifically so that a new generation would “set their hope in God” and not repeat their ancestors’ failures (Ps. 78:1–8, 52–72). Psalm 105 tells much of that same history with a different emphasis, highlighting God’s faithfulness to the covenant (Ps. 105:7–45), while Psalm 106 emphasizes Israel’s repeated rebellion and God’s continuing mercy (Ps. 106:6–48). These aren’t simply chronicles preserving what happened. Israel’s past is being selected, arranged, and retold so that later communities can understand their own faithfulness, failures, and relationship with God through the stories they inherited. old laws reapplied to new circumstances,²³⛰ Side Trail: You can see this within the law itself. Exodus instructs Hebrew slaves to be released after six years of service (Exod. 21:2–6). Deuteronomy preserves that law but expands it: the freed person must not be sent away empty-handed but generously supplied from the household’s livestock and produce (Deut. 15:12–18). It also grounds the command in Israel’s memory of having been slaves in Egypt. The basic law remains recognizable, but it has been reapplied and given fresh rationale for a new setting. Even within Scripture, then, inherited commands could be interpreted, developed, and adapted as later communities asked what faithfulness required in their own circumstances. earlier passages reread through the life of Jesus,²⁴⛰ Side Trail: The Gospel writers frequently read Israel’s Scriptures through what they believed God had done in Jesus. Hosea 11:1 originally looks backward to the Exodus: “Out of Egypt I called my son,” referring explicitly to Israel. Matthew later applies those same words to Jesus returning from Egypt (Matt. 2:15). Similarly, Isaiah 40:3 originally announces a way through the wilderness as Israel anticipates return from exile, while Mark uses it to introduce John the Baptist preparing the way for Jesus (Mark 1:2–3). The earlier meanings haven’t disappeared. Instead, the Gospel writers reread Israel’s stories and hopes around Jesus, discovering fresh significance in texts inherited from generations before them. etc. Interpretation, it seemed, had been part of the story all along. And of course, the last page hardly brought that to an end. Those same words kept traveling, first through the early church, then to medieval times (minus the dinner and tournament, sadly), later to the Reformation and Enlightenment, and ultimately to today, encountering new worlds and questions all along the way. And that helped me see how interpretations I’d assumed came straight from the Bible actually had a history of their own. Paul’s talk about “faith and works” was perhaps one of the most striking examples. Like many, I’d inherited a deeply Protestant reading: “works” were the good deeds and religious effort by which we might try (and inevitably fail) to earn salvation, while “faith” meant trusting in what Jesus had done for us instead.²⁵⛰ Side Trail: The classic Protestant contrast between “faith” and “works” was powerfully shaped by the Reformation, especially debates over justification and Catholic penitential practice. Luther read Paul’s insistence that a person is justified by faith “apart from works of the law” (Rom. 3:28) as a decisive rejection of human efforts to establish righteousness before God. That reading captured genuine elements of Paul and became central to Protestant theology. More recent scholarship, however, has asked whether Reformation controversies sometimes supplied Paul with questions framed more by sixteenth-century Europe than first-century Judaism. The issue is not that Luther simply “got Paul wrong,” but that every interpretation, including enormously influential ones, arises within a historical setting. But reading Paul historically meant hearing him in his world first, where Jews saw themselves as a people God had already saved (the Exodus was their defining story of rescue) and where following the law was seen as a response to that salvation, not a way of earning it.²⁶⛰ Side Trail: A major shift in Pauline scholarship came through what became known as the “New Perspective on Paul,” associated especially with E. P. Sanders, James D. G. Dunn, and N. T. Wright. Sanders argued that Second Temple Judaism was not generally a religion of earning salvation through moral achievement: Jews understood themselves as belonging to God’s covenant by grace and obeyed Torah within that covenant. The Exodus pattern itself supports the basic sequence: God rescues Israel first (Exod. 20:2), then gives commandments (20:3–17). This does not mean every Jewish source said exactly the same thing, but it challenged older Christian caricatures of Judaism as straightforward legalistic works-righteousness. In that light, Paul seemed less concerned with how guilty individuals could be “saved” and more with how Jews and non-Jews could belong together as one community of God’s people.²⁷⛰ Side Trail: In Galatians and Romans, “works of the law” appears amid disputes over Jewish and non-Jewish membership in God’s people. Galatians 2 moves directly from Peter withdrawing from table fellowship with Gentiles to Paul’s argument about justification (Gal. 2:11–16). Circumcision becomes a central flashpoint in Galatians 5–6, while Romans asks whether God is “the God of Jews only” and answers, “of Gentiles also” (Rom. 3:29–30). Scholars disagree over how completely this corporate dimension explains Paul’s doctrine of justification, but few deny that Jew-Gentile relations are central to the letters. Paul’s theology addresses personal reconciliation with God within a larger argument about the creation of one multiethnic family. Suddenly “faith and works” sounded less like a debate about morality or merit and more about identity and inclusion. Reading historically, I was discovering, meant learning not only where a passage came from, but where its interpretations came from too.

Yet, somewhere along the way, I realized that history didn’t just belong to other people in other times and places. I’d spent plenty of time learning to locate ancient Israelites, apostles, church fathers, Reformers, and everyone else in their particular worlds. What took longer was realizing that I needed a little pin on the historical map too. After all, I’m not simply reading “what the Bible says.” I’m reading as a twenty-first-century American Christian shaped by modern science and individualism, democratic ideals about equality and human rights, changing conversations about gender and sexuality, and a distinctly post-evangelical way of thinking about faith.²⁸⛰ Side Trail: No reader approaches a text from nowhere. Philosophical hermeneutics has emphasized what Hans-Georg Gadamer called our historically conditioned “horizon”: the assumptions and questions we inherit before interpretation even begins. Biblical scholarship makes the same point more concretely. Modern Western readers often instinctively foreground individual choice, while biblical texts frequently think corporately in terms of households, peoples, covenants, and communities. Contemporary commitments to democracy, universal human rights, scientific explanation, and gender equality likewise affect what modern readers notice and question. Acknowledging this does not mean interpretation is merely subjective. It means historical self-awareness becomes one tool for distinguishing what the text brings to us from what we bring to the text. All of that inevitably shapes what stands out to me, what troubles me, what I find compelling, and even the questions I think are worth asking. Reading historically doesn’t mean leaving all of that behind or trying to become like every biblical writer and interpreter who came before me. I can’t escape my place in history any more than they could escape theirs. But it does mean I can at least become more aware of where I stand, and better recognize what belongs to my world and what belonged to theirs.

Recognizing my own place in that history has also changed what I think reading historically is ultimately for. Because it’s not about digging down to find the earliest layer and simply declaring it the winner. It’s more about learning to see all of the layers, yet without collapsing them into one another. Israel could remember its liberation from Egypt, and prophets centuries later could draw on that same story to imagine a new deliverance from exile.²⁹⛰ Side Trail: The Exodus became one of Israel’s great templates for imagining what God’s rescue looked like. Centuries later, when Judah found itself exiled in Babylon, Isaiah drew directly on that imagery to describe a new deliverance. Just as God once made “a way in the sea” (Isa. 43:16), the prophet now announced, “I am doing a new thing” and making “a way in the wilderness” (Isa. 43:18–19). Elsewhere, the coming return from Babylon is described in language deliberately echoing the Exodus (Isa. 48:20–21; 51:9–11). An old story of liberation had become the language through which a later generation could imagine God rescuing them again. The Song of Songs could begin as ancient love poetry, and centuries later various interpreters could hear in its lovers a picture of the relationship between God and Israel or Christ and the church.³⁰⛰ Side Trail: Song of Songs never explicitly identifies its lovers with God and Israel or Christ and the church. On its surface, it celebrates human desire and romantic love (Song 1:2–4; 2:10–13; 7:6–13). Yet later Jewish interpreters often read the lovers allegorically as God and Israel, drawing connections with biblical portrayals of Israel as God’s bride (Hos. 2:16–20; Isa. 62:4–5). Christian interpreters extended that tradition, hearing the Song as depicting Christ’s love for the church, itself described as Christ’s bride (Eph. 5:25–32; Rev. 19:7–8). A collection of ancient love poetry thus accumulated new theological meanings as it traveled through different communities. Those interpretations could then reach me through sermons, Bible studies, devotionals, etc. Each generation adding another layer, shaped by its own world and the questions being asked there. Reading historically doesn’t mean peeling those later layers away until only the earliest remains. It means learning to distinguish what a text meant in its world from what later readers have heard in theirs, without assuming one must silence the other. It lets ancient voices be ancient, later voices be later, and my voice be mine. Only then can I begin asking how they might speak to one another, and how they might still speak to me today.

So when I open the Bible now, I try to keep all of those layers in view.³¹⛰ Side Trail: For a great resource that helps facilitate this kind of layered reading, I highly recommend The Fortress Commentary on the Bible. It is organized around three lenses: “The Text in Its Ancient Context,” “The Text in the Interpretive Tradition,” and “The Text in Contemporary Discussion.” In other words, it asks what a passage likely meant in its original historical and cultural world, how generations of readers have interpreted it since, and what questions it raises for readers today. It’s probably the single best resource I’ve found for learning to see these layers together. I start with the world around the text: who wrote it, for whom, and what was happening there. I pay attention to the history of the text itself and how it took shape over time. Then I follow the text forward through history, noticing how biblical writers heard earlier texts in new ways, how generations interpreted them after that, and how those interpretations eventually reached me. I also try to remember that I’m standing in history too, bringing my own questions, assumptions, and inherited theology to the page. Sometimes all those layers open up a passage I thought I knew.³²⛰ Side Trail: One example is Psalm 22. Read within the Psalter, it begins as the desperate prayer of a suffering person “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and moves toward trust and praise (Ps. 22:1–31). The Gospel writers later use its language to narrate Jesus’ crucifixion: Jesus voices its opening line (Mark 15:34), while the soldiers divide his clothing in language echoing Psalm 22:18 (Mark 15:24). Seeing both historical layers can make the passage richer rather than thinner. The psalm need not have been a straightforward prediction of Roman crucifixion for early Christians to hear Jesus’ suffering through its vocabulary and discover new resonance in an older prayer. Other times they leave it stranger and less settled than before.³³⛰ Side Trail: Historical reading can also make familiar passages harder. The household codes tell wives to submit to husbands and slaves to obey masters (Eph. 5:22–6:9; Col. 3:18–4:1), reflecting social structures of the Greco-Roman household that modern readers rightly find troubling. Biblical laws regulate slavery rather than simply abolishing it (Exod. 21; Lev. 25:44–46), and some conquest narratives portray devastating violence as divinely commanded (Deut. 20:16–18; Josh. 6). Historical context can explain how such texts participated in ancient worlds and sometimes constrained practices within them, but explanation does not automatically resolve every moral problem. Sometimes understanding a passage more accurately leaves us with more difficult theological questions, not fewer. Either way, taking history seriously hasn’t pushed the Bible farther away. If anything, it’s helped me hear voices I was too quick to make sound like my own. Yet it also raises another question too: once I’ve heard a text in its world, what does it mean to hear it in mine? After all, the Bible itself suggests that these worlds don’t have to remain sealed off from one another. Its writers returned to older stories again and again, finding fresh meaning in them for new places and new times. That possibility, that an ancient story can belong fully to its world and still speak beyond it, is what first drew me toward another way of reading the Bible. Not one that replaces reading it historically, but one that builds on it by asking what these ancient stories might still have to say beyond the worlds that produced them. That’s what eventually led me to reading the Bible metaphorically. And that’s where I want to turn next time.

Until then, thanks again for reading and – as always – stay curious, seek truth, and love well.