The Bible is its own best interpreter. This claim often meets with an initial skepticism, which stems most often from a lack of understanding of the way that communication actually operates. Each speaker or writer proves his own best interpreter in the nature of the case. If I were to make any particular claim not well understood by an audience, I would quite naturally be the one to ask to clarify the intended meaning of the claim in question. When we do not understand, we instinctively ask the original source (whenever possible and convenient) for an expansion on the sense of whatever expression might puzzle us. The Bible is no different in this regard. Any text not well understood at one point can receive illumination by appeal to some other passage in the Bible, if the immediate context of that passage does not drive the point home adequately. Sometimes another author quotes the passage, showing there what we missed at the first. Or some other text may render its main ideas clearer in other ways, perhaps by surrounding it with other terms already familiar to us.
The Bible is so constructed that the earlier parts anticipate the later ones, and the later ones reflect back on the earlier parts. This means that each of the parts has a kind of "prefab" logical relationship to the other parts -- like a blueprint does. The authors of each part deliberately show you how to handle much of its own teachings. This is extremely helpful once you learn how to read the road signs. If you cannot these, what they say -- emblazoned in glorious yellow backgrounds with black pictures -- perhaps "Deer crossing," won't help you much.
So just as you read a syllabus at the outset of a class to grasp its overall structure, so the Bible provides us with "Genesis." The Psalms, Proverbs and other books reflect back upon Genesis much, telling us in summary form what we were supposed to noticed in the first place, but didn't. We are a slow bunch, and an excellent teacher anticipates the errors of his students and provides corrections in the class lessons. So the Bible tells us what it is going to tell us, then it tells us, and and then tell us what it told us. This also follows the pattern of good rhetoric.
In each case, the author of an individual book has specific themes which he announces, pursues and then concludes, showing us at the end, the point he had in mind all along. This means that, given the author's intent and the structure of the books, the first few rules of literary-structural analysis for biblical investigation implies the following approach:
A. Before you start, pray to God for wisdom and understanding. He is the primary Author, and has promised to help his people understand what He has given them. You have to want wisdom to get wisdom. Your dinner will not cook itself for you either. You must make a sincere effort. And that begins with prayer.
1. Read the last few chapters first. This will tell you where the author intends to go -- his literary goal.
2. Then read the first few chapters. Then pick out two middle chapters and read those. This provides an overview "snapshot" of the books themes quickly. You may need to re-read each part three or four times. Go for it. That is how you study.
3. Compare the sections, noting commmon words, and especially common concepts said in different words. These will turn out to be the threads or themes that run throughout the book. These carry what we call "the main points" the author intends to convey. Always ask yourself, "where have I seen this idea or word before?" And what did it mean THERE?
4. Since, like all other speakers and literature, the Bible is its own best interpreter, look for specific reflections in later texts upon earlier ones. From these you get the "lens" by which to view the earlier.
5. Since the primary Author of the Bible remains perfectly wise and orderly, we must study the Bible SYSTEMATICALLY in every case, to determine the sense of any one passage, subsection, section, book, division, testament, or the whole canon.
6. This means that algorithmic tools - tools or people which measure the instances,contexts, and number of occurences of this or that word (or concept) in any-sized literary unit (great or small) - provide the most effective way to study the Bible. This makes the biblcal approach necessarily canonical, a "whole-Bible" approach to studying any one of its parts. You do not understand the "biblical" idea of X, until you know all relevant and representative instances of X in the Bible, and what they have in common.
7. Once you have the whole-Bible overview of an idea or word you wish to study, you can then return to the passage in question, and plug in the larger understanding of the sense obtained from the canon at this or that point. This will illumine the surrounding details, for which you will use the same approach (again) in each case. And from this repeated method the book's themes quickly emerge as more obvious by far than at first blush.
8. Print out a book of the Bible, and leave wide margins for note-taking. Remove the verse markers (But leave the chapters. They don't interfere much, and still give you a good idea of where you are in the book's narrative. Brain-crash the text on paper, filling in all the canonically-informed parts you have studied.
9. Try to determine the social setting of what it is you are studying, from the surrounding text. How did it function and what was the point of it then? (for instance -- start basic -- ask "why did they have priests at all? What was the point?). Some of the most basic questions will yield the most profound answers. But you have to ask them in your head and write them down, even if the answer is not immediately available. Fill them in as you go. This is how one part of the Bible will help you interpret the others.
10. When you find a major theme, write it down, and divide it into its smaller parts; then make its parts the focus of your next analysis. Take them one at a time, asking "How do these parts fit together?" The answers will come quickly if you follow through on the "canonical overview" process described above. I also call this "canonical enlargement." Get the big picture first, for each part, after isolating them one by one; then glue the canonically enlarged pieces back together. Chances are good, you will not be able to write fast enough the insights you obtain.
11. Finally, consult a variety of reference works to help you fill in little blanks, like idioms often used, places and their importance, and the like. When you have a little free time, read up on Bible backgrounds to help you understand the setting of your passage. Then go back to your notes and keep going. The larger picture will fill itself in with your systematic help.
Searchable Bibles online make this work much easier and faster; and so does some software. This obtains for you an immediate "overview" of the concept, word or phrase under scrutiny. http://www.biblegateway.com has such a searchable Bible collection, as do many other places on the internet.
For an example of how the later parts of the Bible illumine the earlier parts, we can note that the wisdom literature reflects on the earliest chapters of Genesis, and uses highly technical "Temple language" to describe chapter 1 in particular. This means that the later author knows that the earlier author wanted us to understand what God was doing in Genesis 1 as building a very large temple called the "cosmos." This is the biblical way of viewing Genesis. For "By wisdom the Lord laid the foundations of the earth." Now how does the earth have foundations? It has foundations because it is a metaphorical temple. And temples have foundations.
The Bible also (I will sum up here without a long presentation of evidence for it) teaches us that the Ark of Noah, the Tabernacle and Temple were constructed as a "mini-cosmos," a miniature representational picture of the whole creation. I learned this in seminary, but remained fairly skeptical until I hunted down the details for myself. My OT biblical theology professor -- Bruce Waltke -- was pretty sharp.
The frameworks the Bible itself imposes upon this or that part, we are to take as "normative" (THE right way to interpret a text) since the primary author, God Himself, conveys all the parts in a rigorously orderly and unfathomably consistent manner. It's authorship is what makes it holy, infallible, universally binding, and the final standard in all matters upon which it pronouces judgments -- explicitly or implicitly.
But an attitude of submission and humility is required to read it properly. Since the Bible teaches its OWN hermenteutical lenses (i.e. the temple framework-picture for understanding Genesis 1), a failure to do this renders one incapable of understanding it properly. This means that only by obeying it in all places, will one learn to grasp the whole of it and the proper relations of its parts.
It's literary facts are "grouped" together in bundles. And then these bundles are themselves bundled as discreet units to form the whole book; and then the books bundle to form the canon as a whole. Each larger bundle, and then "sub-bundle" God has matched together in a very specific fashion.
The larger bundles are obvious. We have the first testament (often called the "Old Testament") and the second ("New") Testament. The First consists of the "Law, Psalms, and Prophets," and the Second, of the Gospels -- and of the journey of their message from Jerusalem to Rome (called the "book of Acts"), together with the ecclesiastical and domestic epistles, and the apocalyptic-prophetic literature of Revelation.
Essentially, the task of the interpreter of the Bible consists in comparing (and contrasting) bundles and sub-bundles to find the major and minor themes, of the chapter, book, division and testament, to see how these are woven together into the larger, seamless fabric and picture of the whole canon.
Usually, the term "exegesis" refers to the more technical side of managing the detais of a smaller subsection of some book, and "hermeneutics" to the handling of relationships of the larger literary units. But the two concepts necessarily overlap. I here maintain that -- though more technical tools may certainly help in many cases, they are not necessary to the understanding of the Bible. The Bible is both necessary and sufficient to enlighten the ordinary believer as to its intended meanings in all places.
The method outlined above may seem a bit simple. It has very little about it that is terribly technical or complex. I derived these principles from the Bible itself, in thinking on its literary structure -- how it looks and they way its parts are shaped. Some of this stuff, I learned in grad school doing history at Cal State Hayward, and then tried out on the Bible, adjusting it to suit the demands of Scripture.
The two important features of it are very direct: these principles are biblical; these principles work to yield the kind of results you want from studying your Bible. Throughout, each step assumes that the Bible is sufficient, and that other tools are not necessary, but they can speed things up or help in other ways; and so we ought to use the ones consistent with the Word.
Remember, you might learn X from the newspaper or historical literature. In fact, I have written biblically-oriented letters-to-the editor before. If you go to your Bible with information from extra-biblical sources, only to find it was there all along (and you did not have eyes to see it until now), this does not make your method of learning improper, so long as you JUSTIFY your claims in terms of the Bible. HOW you learn something is not the same as HOW YOU JUSTIFY what you have learned. They both have to do with knowing. But learning and justifying comprise different kinds of actions. When you learn X, this assumes you did not know X before you performed the action (of learning). When you justify X, this assumes you already know X is true before the action of justifying it.
Extra-biblical tools and ideas then often provide a new way of looking at some text that enables you to see what was there before, and hidden from you in plain sight. This is essentially the biblical view of the Bible. It's meanings at any point, God has put in full view of all - and yet they remain hidden from those who have not eyes to see or ears to hear it.
So, by way of summation, listen prayerfully, listen cautiously (re-read a dozen times if you must), listen intra-librally and thematically - use the book's end to understand the beginning and vice versa, with a middle link (chosen a bit arbitrarily) to nab a thematic "snapshot" of a book. Listen comparatively - compare one book's themes with another's -- to find still larger threads. Listen canonically (fit tiny units and themes together into progressively larger ones), listen systematically (compare textual ideas and words to each other to find their common threads), listen reflectively and retroactively (employ a later author's commanded "lenses" to retrofit his own biblical "grid of understanding" -- to grasp properly an earlier text upon which he comments). Listen personally - take notes and keep a log of insights (with verseless printouts and big margins. Scribble on, Highlight, and underline everything - brain crash it. Listen discreetly - think in terms of literary units with defined "bookends" - parallel passages than open and close discreet and limited sections in a book. Listen analytically -- when you find a theme, chop it up, inform each part with the whole canon, and glue them back together. Listen socially -- find out what this thing did and why people cared originally. Listen "totally" and interrogatively -- when you learn a new idea, look at it from every perspective you can think of - economics, science, politics, etc. Use whatever unique perspective you have. If you are a lawyer, ask how this might function in a court if applied to that context. If you are a dad, ask what does this mean for child-rearing? Brain crash it.
Wisdom demands a systematic approach to studying the Bible that is uniquely fashioned upon the special features of the Bible -- as in the way the secondary author thinks when writing, and how we can reconstruct his outline. We want his notes. And by following this brief guide, you can get them, and apply them to other parts of the Bible for greater insight. Study well.
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