God gave us his word in a book that is made up of multiple books. Whereas biblical theology (step 10) looks more at Scripture as a whole, literary context focuses on the individual parts as they come to us within their overall canonical context. It’s the difference...

Step 8 of the interpretive process moves us from “Observation” to “Context” as we consider, “Where does the passage fit?” This post considers the historical context, and the next will consider the literary context. Starting to Assess Historical Context By considering...

In God’s wisdom, he chose to give us his Word in a book shaped by words. Words often carry a range of meanings, dependent on the context. If I say “trunk,” many different images may come to mind: (1) the main woody stem of a tree, (2) the torso of a person or animal’s...

When interpreting Scripture, we observe carefully by considering how a passage is communicated. We have already established the literary units and text hierarchy (step 2) and assessed clause and text grammar (step 5). So, we are ready to finish tracing the literary...

With step 5 of the interpretive process we move from “Text” to “Observation,” and we consider a series of issues related to how a passage is communicated. Our initial goal is to assess the makeup and relationship of words, phrases, clauses, and larger text units. In...

According to the Wycliffe Global Alliance, only 2,932 of the approximately 7,000 languages have at least some of the bible; this leaves 3,955 languages without access to Scripture. Because “faith comes from hearing, and hearing from the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17),...

For all their care and attention to detail, the scribes who copied and recopied the Hebrew Bible were not perfect. Errors in copying did occur. Poor memory, impaired judgment, mishearing, and errors of sight or misunderstanding caused the best-intentioned scribes to...