Reading the Bible with Older Eyes: Two Books That Help Make Sense of Scripture

Someone once observed that you can read the Bible profitably without knowing anything about ancient Near Eastern culture the same way you can also travel to a new place and take pleasure in what you can see from a tour bus.

It’s true. You can profit from Scripture using whatever tools lie at hand: studying, reading, or listening to the Bible on a regular basis is a vital spiritual discipline.

But there are layers of depth and meaning waiting to be discovered when we understand more about the culture of the writer and the audience.  And if we ignore that cultural context altogether, we can misunderstand what the Bible is actually saying.

I have recently read two books that seek to help us engage the cultural context of the Scripture: Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes by E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O’Brien (2012) and Misreading Scripture with Individualistic Eyes by E. Randolph Richards and Richard James (2020).

Yes, you read that right. Richards has co-written two very similar books. Both of them, especially the former, have helped me read the Bible with a clearer understanding not only of what Scripture is saying but – more importantly – what unconscious assumptions I bring to my reading of the sacred text.

We are influenced by our unconscious assumptions.

Once, when he was on a missions trip, our missions director, Phil Black, was asked by an African Christian if we dance in our worship services. When Phil said that, no, dancing was not part of the way we worship, the African brother was puzzled. “Then how can you worship God?”

Because of our own cultural assumptions, we at PPC tend to see dancing in church as a distraction, but that African brother could scarcely conceive of genuine worship of God that doesn’t involve dancing.

So yes, it’s true that we bring unspoken, unconscious cultural assumptions to everything we do, including how we worship God.

Another example: we would greatly benefit if our English Bibles would use “y’all.” In English “you” serves as both the second person singular and second person plural pronoun. There are many places in our Bibles, especially in the epistles, where we see “you” but it means “y’all.”

When we read a plural “you” as a singular pronoun, we miss the corporate aspect that both the writer and the readers would have understood. And armed with our individualistic sensibilities, we think the text is speaking of individual believers (me), not the body as a whole (us).

In Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, Richards and O’Brien drive home the importance of how cultural assumptions play a role in how we read Scripture:

The most powerful cultural values are those that go without being said. It is very hard to know what goes without being said in another culture. But often we are not even aware of what goes without being said in our own culture. This is why misunderstanding and misinterpretation happen.

When a passage of Scripture appears to leave out a piece of the puzzle because something went without being said, we instinctively fill in the gap with a piece from our own culture—usually a piece that goes without being said. When we miss what went without being said for them and substitute what goes without being said for us, we are at risk of misreading Scripture.

One example of this danger of misreading Scripture is in what the Bible says about wealth.

Richards and O’Brien explain how our baked-in assumptions about money can skew our understanding of the Bible: Outside the West, wealth is often viewed as a limited resource. There is only so much money to be had, so if one person has a lot of it, then everyone else has less to divide among themselves. If you make your slice of pie larger, then my slice is now smaller. In those cultures, folks are more likely to consider the accumulation of wealth to be immoral, since you can only become wealthy if other people become poor.

This, of course, offends our own capitalist sensibilities. But it does explain some of the language the Bible uses in its warnings against the dangers of wealth. In a culture where “who wants to be a millionaire?” is a rhetorical question, we have a hard time taking seriously the Bible’s warnings about money.

If you’re going to read these books – and I do recommend both of them – read Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes first. It was written first, and it provides the broad framework that underlies what he has to say in the second book, Misreading Scripture with Individualistic Eyes, which explores the implications of how an honor-shame culture shapes the stories and covenants we see in Scripture.

Both books have helped me read the Bible not with new eyes but with “older” eyes; they’ve helped me see more clearly what the ancient writers and hearers would have understood.

Persevere, Paul Pyle Discipleship Pastor