01.07 - 10-Context of Genre

Chapters 7 - 10 Context of Genre

Although we have surveyed and illustrated many of the most important general rules for interpretation, we must now note that some interpretation skills depend on the kinds of writing in the Bible one is studying. For example, Revelation is prophetic (and probably apocalyptic) literature, which is full of symbols; if interpreters today debate how literal some of Revelation’s images are, no one doubts that much of Revelation (for instance, the prostitute and the bride) are each symbols representing something other than what they would mean literally (Babylon and New Jerusalem versus two literal women). The Psalms are poetry, and also often employ graphic images. Poetry involved poetic license; when Job claims that his steps were "bathed in butter" (Job 29:6), he means that he was prosperous, not that his hallways were packed with butter up to his ankles. One could provide hundreds of examples; those who deny the use of symbolism in some parts of the Bible (especially poetic portions) have simply not read the Bible very thoroughly.

On the other hand, narratives are not full of symbols. One should not read the story of David and Goliath and think, "What does Goliath stand for? What do the smooth stones stand for?" These accounts are intended as literal historical stories, and we seek to learn morals from these accounts the same way we would seek to learn them from our experiences or accounts of others’ experiences today. (The difference between biblical experiences and modern experiences is that the biblical ones more often come with clues to the proper interpretation from God’s perfect perspective.) We may apply what we learn from Goliath to other challenges that we face, but Goliath does not "symbolize" those challenges; he is simply one example of a challenge. Even our most important rule, context, functions differently for different kinds of writings. Most proverbs, for instance, are not recorded in any noteworthy sequence providing a flow of thought; they are isolated, general sayings, and were simply collected (Proverbs 25:1). This is not to suppose, however, that we lack a larger context in which to read specific proverbs. By reading these proverbs in light of the entire collection of proverbs, and especially in light of other proverbs addressing the same topic, we have a general context available for most individual proverbs. Scholars use the term "genre" for kinds of writings. Poetry, prophecy, history and wisdom saying are some of the genres represented in the Bible; examples of different kinds of genres exist today, for example fiction (most parables are something like fiction), bomb threats, or newspaper reports. Let us survey some of the most common "genres" in the Bible, and some important interpretation principles for each.

1. Narrative

Narrative is the most common genre in the Bible. Narrative simply means a "story," whether a true story like history or biography (most of the Bible’s narratives) or a story meant to communicate truth by fictional analogy, like a parable. A basic rule of interpretation for a story is that we should ask, "What is the moral of this story?" Or to put it differently, "What lessons can we learn from this story?"

Avoid Allegory

Some principles help us draw lessons from stories accurately. The first principle is a warning, especially for historical narratives in the Bible: Do not allegorize the story. That is, do not turn it into a series of symbols as if it did not happen. If we turn a narrative into symbols, anyone can interpret the narrative to say whatever they want; people can read the same narrative and come up with opposite religions! When we read into a text in this way, we read into it what we already think--which means that we act like we do not need the text to teach us anything new!

For example, when David prepares to fight Goliath, he gathers five smooth stones. One allegorist might claim that David’s five stones represent love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, and goodness. Another might claim that he picked five stones to represent five particular spiritual gifts; or perhaps five pieces of spiritual armor listed by Paul in the New Testament. But such interpretations are utterly unhelpful. First, they are unhelpful because anyone can come up with any interpretation, and there is no objective way for everyone to find the same point in the text. Second, they are unhelpful because it is really the allegorist and his views, rather than the text itself, which supplies its meaning and teaches something. Third, it is unhelpful because it obscures the real point of the text. Why did David pick smooth stones? They were easier to aim. Why did David pick five of them instead of one? Presumably in case he missed the first time; the lesson we learn from this example is that faith is not presumption: David knew God would use him to kill Goliath, but he did not know if he would kill him with the first stone. Where did allegory come from? Some Greek philosophers grew embarrassed about the myths of their gods committing adultery, robbery, and murder, so they turned the myths into a series of symbols rather than taking them as true teachings about their gods. Some Jewish philosophers, trying to defend the Bible against accusations by Greeks, explained away uncomfortable portions of the Bible by taking them as mere symbols. Thus instead of allowing that biblical heroes like Noah had weaknesses, a Jewish philosopher might claim that he did not actually get drunk with wine, but rather was spiritually drunk on the wonderful knowledge of God. Christian scholars from Alexandria, whose schools were controlled by Greek philosophical thought, often practiced allegory, though some other church leaders (like John Chrysostom) preferred the literal meaning. Gnostics like Valentinus, condemned by the orthodox Christians, mixed some Christian ideas with pagan philosophy. They often used the allegorical method to justify blurring distinction between Christianity and other thought systems. Many later Christian thinkers borrowed the allegorical method, which became quite common especially in Europe in the Middle Ages. ¹ Many people practice allegory because they want to discover some hidden meaning in every word or phrase of Scripture, The problem with this approach is that it defies the way Scripture was actually given to us, hence disrespects rather than respects Scripture. The level of meaning is often the story as a whole, and individual words and phrases normally simply contribute to that larger contextual meaning. To read into the story meaning that is not there is in essence to attempt to add inspiration to Scripture, as if it were inadequate by itself. (Allegorical attempts to find a deeper meaning behind the actual words of Scripture takes on many forms. In recent years some have looked for numerical patterns in the words of Scripture, but these ignore the hundreds of "textual variants," mostly spelling differences, among different ancient copies of the Bible. Most scholars agree that the supposed number patterns some computer technicians have found in Scripture are random; one can come up with equally convincing results for other kinds of patterns.) ______________________________

¹On Gnostic use of allegory, see e.g., Stephen M. Miller, “Malcontents fro Christ,” Christian History 51 (1996): 32-34, p. 32; Carl A. Volz, “The Genius of Chrysostom’s Preaching,” Christian History 44 (1994): 24-26, p. 24. For the Alexandrian school (perhaps a little too favorably), see Robert M. Grant with David Tracy, A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 52-62; on the Antiochenes like Chrysostom, see ibid., pp. 63-72.

Read the Story as a Whole

Sometimes we cannot draw a correct moral from a story because we have picked too narrow a text. Earlier in this book I mentioned my friend who doubted the usefulness of the passage where Abishag lies in bed with David to keep him warm. What moral would we draw from such a story? We would be wrong if we supposed that the moral was that young people should lie with older people to keep them warm. True as it might be that we should look out for the health of our kings or other leaders, that is also not the moral. Nor is the moral that live humans work better than blankets? Some might wish to draw from it a lesson that contradicts other moral teachings in the Bible. But all these interpretations miss the point, because the writer did not intend us to read one paragraph of the story and then stop. We should read the entire story, and in the flow of the entire story, this paragraph identifies that David is dying and prepares us for why Solomon must later execute his treacherous brother Adonijah. It helps us understand the rest of the story, and the point comes from the larger story, not always all of its individual parts.

How much do we need to read to get the whole picture? As a general rule, the more context you read, the better. We need not spend much time here, because this is the principle of whole book context we illustrated at length above. We should pause merely to point out that the literary unit is sometimes longer than what appears as a book in our Bibles. Because it was difficult to get a very long document on a single scroll, longer works were often divided into smaller "books." Thus 1 Samuel through 2 Kings represents one continuous story (with smaller parts); 1 and 2 Chronicles represents another story; Luke and Acts together comprise a single, united work (although our Bibles place John between them; read Acts 1:1 with Luke 1:3). There is also a sense in which larger stories may contain smaller ones. For example, many of the stories in Mark can be read on their own as self-contained units with their own morals; some scholars have argued that the early church used those stories as units for preaching the way they used many Old Testament readings. But while this observation is true, modern scholars recognize that we should also recognize these smaller stories in their larger context to get the most out of them; one can follow the development of and suspense in Mark’s "plot" and trace the themes of the Gospel from start to finish. This prevents us from drawing the wrong applications. For instance, one might read Mark 1:45 and assume that if one is sent from God and fulfills God’s mission like Jesus does, one will be popular with the masses. But if one reads the whole Gospel, one recognizes that the crowds later clamor for Jesus’ execution (Mark 15:11-15). The moral is not that obedience to God always leads to popularity; the moral is that we cannot trust popularity to last, for the crowds are often easily swayed. Jesus thus focused on making disciples more than on drawing crowds (Mark 4:9-20).

Identify the Lessons in the Story

Reading a biblical story as a true account and then learning principles by analogy (the way we would learn lessons from hearing, say, our parents’ stories of lessons they learned in life) is not allegorizing; it is reading these stories the way they were meant to be read. As best as possible, we should put ourselves in the place of the original audience of the story, read it in the context of the whole book it which it appears, and try to learn from it what the first audience would have. Only then are we ready to think how to reapply the story to our situations and needs today. At the same time, if we stop we the ancient meaning, we will miss the story’s original impact. Once we understood what it meant in its first setting, we must think how to apply the passage with a comparable impact for our settings today.

Most narratives involve characters. One can try to determine whether the examples of the characters were good or bad ones in any given case by several methods: (1) When the writer and readers shared the same culture and it assumed an act was bad or good, the writer could assume that the readers knew which was which, unless he disagreed with the views of the culture. (2) If you read through the entire book, you may notice patterns of behavior; an evaluation of the behavior in one case would apply to similar cases of the behavior in that book. (3) By deliberately highlighting the differences among characters, one could usually see which were good and which were bad examples. Sometimes we learn from a story by looking at positive and negative characters in the story and contrasting them. We can do this frequently in 1 Samuel; in chapters 1 and 2, we learn that humble Hannah, who was looked down on by many of the few people who knew her, was godly, whereas Eli the high priest had compromised his calling. Hannah offered to give up her son for God; Eli, refusing to give up his sons for God, ultimately lost them and everything else as well. After this the story compares the boy Samuel, who hears God and delivers his message, with Eli’s ungodly sons, who abuse their ministry to make themselves rich and have sexual relations with many women. God ultimately exalts Samuel but kills the hypocritical ministers. Later 1 Samuel contrasts David and Saul; by examining the differences between them, we can learn principles for fulfilling God’s call and also dangers to avoid. Such contrasts also appear in the New Testament, for instance in Luke chapter 1. Zechariah was a respected, aged priest serving in the Jerusalem temple, but when Gabriel came to him Zechariah disbelieved and was struck mute for a few months. By contrast, the angel Gabriel next comes to Mary with an even more dramatic message, but she believes. On account of her gender, her age, her social status, and being in Nazareth rather than the temple, most people would think less highly of Mary than of Zechariah. But the narrative shows us that Mary responded with greater faith and consequently received greater blessing than Zechariah. Similarly, we noted above a contrast between the Magi who seek Jesus and Herod who seeks to kill him. Of course, distinguishing positive from negative examples is not always simple, and most characters in the Bible, just like most characters in Greek histories and biography, included a mixture of positive and negative traits. The Bible tells us about real people, and we learn from that pattern as well not to idolize as perfect or demonize as wholly evil people today. John the Baptist was the greatest prophet before Jesus (Matthew 11:11-14), but he was unsure whether Jesus was fulfilling his prophecy (Matthew 11:2-3) because Jesus was healing sick people but not pouring out fiery judgment (Matthew 3:11-12). John was a man of God, but he did not know that the kingdom would come in two stages because its king would come twice. Distinguishing positive from negative examples takes much work, but is rewarding. It requires us to immerse ourselves in the entire story over and over until we can see the patterns in the story which give us the inspired author’s perspectives. But how better to learn God’s heart than to bathe ourselves in his word? We can often make lists of positive attributes we can learn from characters in the Bible, especially if the text specifically calls them righteous. One example of learning lessons from a character’s behavior is Joseph in Matthew 1:18-25. The text specifically says that Joseph was a "righteous" person (Matthew 1:19). Before listing lessons, we need to provide some background. Given the average ages of marriage among first-century Jews, Joseph was probably less than twenty and Mary was probably younger, perhaps in her mid-teens. Joseph probably did not know Mary well; sources suggest that parents did not allow Galilean couples to spend much time together before their wedding night. Also, Jewish "betrothal" was as binding legally as a marriage, hence could be ended only by divorce or the death of one partner. If the woman were charged with unfaithfulness in a court, her father would have to return to the groom the brideprice he had paid; also the groom would keep any dowry the bride had brought or was bringing into the marriage. By divorcing her privately the groom would probably forfeit such financial remuneration. The narrative implies first of all something about commitment: Joseph was righteous even though he planned to divorce Mary, because he thought she had been unfaithful, and unfaithfulness is a very serious offense. The text also teaches us about compassion: even though Joseph believed (wrongly) that Mary had been unfaithful to him, he planned to divorce her privately to minimize her shame, thereby forgoing any monetary repayment for her misdeed and any revenge. Here Joseph’s "righteousness" (Matthew 1:19) includes compassion on others. The passage further emphasizes consecration: Joseph was willing to bear shame to obey God. Mary’s pregnancy would bring her shame, perhaps for the rest of her life. If Joseph married her, people would assume either that he got her pregnant or, less likely, that he was a moral weakling who refused to punish her properly; in either case, Joseph was embracing Mary’s long-term shame in obedience to God’s will. Finally, we learn about control. In their culture, everyone assumed that a man and woman alone together could not control themselves sexually. But in their obedience to God, Joseph and Mary remained celibate even once they were married until Jesus was born, to fulfill the Scripture which promised not only a virgin conception but a virgin birth (Matthew 1:23; Matthew 1:25). There are other morals in this paragraph, too (for instance, about the importance of Scripture in Matthew 1:22-23), but these are the clearest from Joseph’s own life. Now is a good opportunity to practice on one’s own. One could take a passage like Mark 2:1-12 and list the sorts of morals one might draw from it. For example, one critical lesson is that the four men who brought their friend recognized that Jesus was the only answer to their need and refused to let anything deter them from getting to Jesus (Mark 2:4). Mark calls this determination on their part "faith" (Mark 2:5). Sometimes faith is refusing to let anything or anyone keep us from seeking Jesus for ourselves or (as in this case) for the need of a friend. Another important lesson is that Jesus responds to their faith first of all by forgiveness (Mark 2:5), because that is Christ’s first priority. We may also note in passing that Jesus’ true teaching generates opposition from religious professionals (Mark 2:6-7). Not everyone in religious leadership is always open to God! But while forgiveness is Christ’s priority, he also is ready to grant the miracle these men sought and to demonstrate his power with signs (Mark 2:8-12). He was not a western rationalist who doubted the reality of supernatural phenomena! One could subdivide some of these lessons and perhaps find other lessons. But one should always be careful, as noted above, to draw the right lessons in light of the larger context. As noted before, Jesus’ popularity in the text (Mark 2:1-2) does not imply that such ministry always produces popularity, for many people ultimately asked for Jesus to be crucified (Mark 15:11-14). Nor should we read into the text something that is not clear in it; for example, we should not read into Jesus’ response to "their faith" in Mark 2:5 that the Lord will forgive others’ sins because of our faith; the text nowhere indicates clearly that the man lacked faith himself. (One supposes that if he had no faith, he would have been protesting against his friends letting him down through the roof!) Some passages do not yield as many specific applications as this passage. The story of the lepers’ discovery of the abandoned Aramean tents (2 Kings 7:3-10) functions as part of larger story about God’s provision for Israel, judgment on those who doubted his prophet, and how God could replace his judgment on the nation with extraordinary mercy according to his prophetic message. At the same time, this smaller unit probably does provide some insights that also fit into the larger pattern of Scripture as a whole. God chooses not the mighty (cf. 2 Kings 7:2) but lepers excluded from the city (2 Kings 7:3) to make the discovery--desperate people who had nothing more to lose (2 Kings 7:4). The Bible indicates that these are often the kind of people God chooses. Sometimes when I lead Bible studies I take a passage like Mark 2:1-12 a few verses at a time and ask people to think about the lessons in the text; this way they begin thinking how to study the Bible on their own. If their answers are too far a field, I call them back to the text; we grow more accurate as we get more practice, but we should be patient in teaching students how to read the Bible for themselves. When I taught a Sunday School class for boys ages 10-13, I would simply have them read passages of Scripture, then I would give background and we would discuss the Scripture, allowing them to discover lessons in the text. Because they knew the issues they were facing in their lives, they also could think of ways to apply those lessons to their lives far more relevant than I could have come up with on my own! After a few weeks, I told a 13-year-old that he would lead our Bible study the next week (I would simply supply cultural background). He led the discussion just as well as I would have! So did a ten-year old the next week. My point is that once we teach people how to study the Bible this way, as long as we are there to help them while they are learning, they can in turn be equipped to help others. God forbid that we should keep our learning to ourselves! Can We Learn "Teaching" from Narratives?

Some modern theologians have been skeptical about learning "doctrine," or (literally) "teaching," from narratives. 2 Timothy 3:16 explicitly declares that all Scripture is profitable for teaching, so to rule out a teaching function for narratives altogether these theologians would have to deny that narratives are part of Scripture! But narrative makes up more of the Bible than any other genre does, and Jesus and Paul both teach from Old Testament narratives (e.g., Mark 2:25-26; Mark 10:6-9; 1 Corinthians 10:1-11).²

If narratives did not teach, there would be no reason for different Gospels. Because Jesus did and taught so much, no one Gospel writer could have told us everything that he said or did (as John 21:25 explicitly points out). Rather, each Gospel writer emphasized certain points about Jesus, the way we do when we read or preach from a text in the Bible. This means that when we read Bible stories, we not only learn the historical facts about what happened, but listen to the inspired writer’s perspective on what happened, i.e., the lessons to be drawn from the story. When the writer "preaches" to us from the stories he tells us, he often gives us clues for recognizing the lessons; for example, he often selects stories with a basic theme or themes that repeatedly emphasize particular lessons. Yet despite considerable historical precedent for using biblical historical precedent, many theologians suggest that one should feel free to find in narrative only what is plainly taught in “clearer,” “didactic” portions of Scripture. Although some of these scholars are among the ablest exegetes of other portions of Scripture, I must protest that their approach to Bible stories violates the most basic rules for biblical interpretation and in practice jeopardizes the doctrine of biblical inspiration. Did not Paul say that all Scripture was inspired and therefore useful for “doctrine,” or teaching (2 Timothy 3:16)? I freely admit that I do not understand some portions of Scripture myself (what is the eternal function of the genealogies in Chronicles?); but other obscure parts came to make sense to me after I understood the cultural context they addressed (for instance, the design of the Tabernacle in Exodus). Some given texts are more useful for addressing common situations today than others, but all biblical texts have a useful function for some circumstances. One of the most basic principles of Bible interpretation is that we should ask what the writer wanted to convey to his contemporary audience. This principle applies to narratives like the Gospels as much as to epistles like Romans. If one could simply write a “neutral” Gospel that addressed all situations universally, the Bible would undoubtedly have included it. Instead, the Bible offers us four Gospels, each selecting some different elements of Jesus’ life and teachings to preach Jesus to the needs of their readers in relevant ways (which also provides us with a model for how to preach Jesus in relevant ways to our hearers). The way God chose to give us the Bible is more important than the way we wish He would have given it to us. More importantly, we must be able to read each book first of all as a self-contained unit, because that was how God originally inspired these books. God inspired books of the Bible like Mark or Ephesians one at a time, inspiring the authors to address specific situations. The first readers of Mark could not cross-reference to Ephesians or John to figure out an obscure point in Mark; they would have to read and reread Mark as a whole until they grasped the meaning of any given passage in Mark. When we read a passage in such books of the Bible, we need to read the passage in light of the total message and argument of the book as well as reading the book in light of the passages that make it up. This is not to say that we cannot compare the results from our study of Ephesians with the results from our study of Mark. It is to say that we discount the complete character of Mark when we resort to Ephesians before we have finished our examination of Mark. For instance, the opposition Jesus faces for healing a paralytic does provide a lesson for the hostility we can expect from the world for doing God’s will. The opposition to Jesus which builds in early chapters of Mark and climaxes in the cross parallels the suffering believers themselves are called to expect (Mark 8:31-38; Mark 10:33-45; Mark 13:9-13; Mark 14:21-51). Mark summons Christians to endure; that Mark provides negative examples of this principle (e.g., Mark 14:31-51) reinforces his point (even if it also shows the inadequacy of Christians to fulfill this call in our own strength). Most cultures in the world teach lessons through stories. Most theologians who question the use of narrative, by contrast, are westerners or those trained by them, children of Enlightenment thought. In fact, not even all westerners find Bible stories inaccessible. Even in the United States, Black churches have for generations specialized in narrative preaching. In most churches children grow up loving Bible stories until they become adults and we teach them that they must now think abstractly rather than learning from concrete illustrations. Just because our traditional method of extracting doctrine from Scripture does not work well on narrative does not mean that Bible stories do not send some clear messages of their own. Instead it suggests the inadequacy of our traditional method of interpretation the way we apply it, because we are ignoring too much of God’s Word. When Jesus’ followers were writing the New Testament, everyone in their culture already understood that narrative conveyed moral principles; biographers and historians expected readers to draw lessons from their examples, whether these lessons were positive or negative. Students recited such stories in regular elementary school exercises, and in more advanced levels of education learned how to apply these examples to drive home moral points. Demanding the use of non-narrative portions of the Bible to interpret narrative is not only disrespectful to the narrative portions; it implies a thoroughly misguided way of reading non-narrative portions of Scripture as well. Everyone acknowledges, for instance, that Paul’s letters are “occasional” documents--that is, that they address specific occasions or situations. Thus, had the Lord’s Supper not been a matter of controversy in Corinth, we would know quite little about it except from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. If we then interpreted the narrative portions of Scripture only by other portions, we would assume that we do not need to observe the Lord’s Supper today. Of course, Jesus provides his disciples teaching about the Lord’s Supper within the narrative; but since the teaching is within the narrative, we can always protest that he addressed this teaching only to a select group of disciples. A few hundred years ago many Protestants explained away the Great Commission in just such a manner; today many similarly explain away the teachings of the Gospels and Acts about signs often confirming and aiding evangelism. Not only is the traditional “doctrinal” approach inadequate for interpreting the Gospels; it is inappropriate for interpreting the epistles as well. The “narrative” way of interpreting Bible stories in fact shows us how to read the epistles properly. Paul wrote to address specific needs of churches (rarely just to send greetings); while the principles Paul employs are eternal and apply to a variety of situations, Paul expresses those principles concretely to grapple with specific situations. Before we can catch his principles, we often must recognize the situations with which he grapples; Paul’s concrete words to real situations constitute case studies that show us how to address analogous situations we should address today. Paul’s letters presuppose a sort of background story--he is responding to events and situations among his audience. In other words, we must read even Paul’s letters as examples. This is how Paul read the Old Testament--drawing theology (especially moral teaching) from its examples (1 Corinthians 10:11). I suspect that many scholars--including myself in earlier years--have felt so uncomfortable with finding theology in narrative largely because of our western academic training. In the world of the theological academy, one can feel satisfied addressing important issues like Christology while ignoring other necessary issues like domestic abuse and how to witness on a secular job. But pastors, people who do much personal witnessing and other ministers cannot ignore issues that exceed the bounds of traditional doctrinal categories. (We should not forget that those general doctrinal categories were established by Medieval theologians who often could afford to withdraw from the daily issues with which most of their contemporaries struggled. The issues they addressed were important, but they were hardly exhaustive!) I believe that the more we are forced to grapple with the same kinds of situations with which the writers of Scripture grappled, the more sensitively we will interpret the texts they wrote. When that happens, we will need to reappropriate all of Scripture for the life and faith of the Church. One warning we need to keep in mind is that not all human actions recorded in Scripture are intended as positive examples, even when performed by generally positive characters. Scripture is realistic about human nature and openly reveals our frailties so that we can be realistic about our weaknesses and our need to depend always on God. Abraham and Sarah each laughed when they heard God’s promise (Genesis 17:17; Genesis 18:12-15); David almost snapped under the pressure of Saul’s pursuit and Samuel’s death, and thus would have slaughtered Nabal and his workers had Abigail not stopped him (1 Samuel 25:32-34); despairing that anything would prove sufficient to shake Jezebel’s evil control over Israel, Elijah asked to die (1 Kings 19:4); discouraged that no one was listening to his message, Jeremiah cursed the day of his birth (Jeremiah 20:14-18); John the Baptist doubted Jesus’ identity shortly before John’s execution (Luke 7:19; Luke 7:23); Peter denied Jesus three times (Mark 14:72). As Paul said, we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so people may recognize that the power comes from God (2 Corinthians 4:7). Jesus alone exhibits no moral weaknesses, and even he identified with our being tempted (Mark 1:12-13; Mark 14:34-42). Scripture shows the weaknesses of men and women of God so we will recognize that there are no spiritual superhumans among us--just, at best, men and women who depend on the power of God’s perfect Spirit to give us victory.

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²Some of what follows below is borrowed from the appendix of my book, 3 Crucial Questions about the Holy Spirit (Grand Rapids, MI, USA: Baker Book House, 1996).

Parables

Parables are a specific kind of narrative that differs somewhat from other kinds of narrative. Ancient Israelite sages in the Old Testament and in the time of Jesus used various graphic teaching forms to communicate their wisdom, forms that usually made their hearers think carefully about what they were saying. One such kind of teaching was the proverb (which we will address below). A larger category of teaching (covered by the Hebrew word mashal) includes proverbs, short comparisons, and sometimes more extended comparisons, including some actually intended to be allegorized (unlike most kinds of narrative in the Bible)!

By Jesus’ day, Jewish teachers often communicated by telling stories in which one or two or sometimes more characters might stand for something in the real world. Often they told stories about a king who loved his son, in which the king was an analogy for God and the son for Israel. When Jesus told parables, therefore, his hearers would already be familiar with them and know how to take them. But even though Jesus’ parables sometimes were extended analogies with truths in the real world (for instance, the four different kinds of soil in the parable of the sower, Mark 4:3-20), they often included some details simply necessary for the story to make good sense, or to make it a well-told story. (This is also the case with other Jewish parables from this period.) For instance, when the Pharisee and the tax-gatherer pray in the temple (Luke 18:10), the temple does not "represent" something; that was simply the favorite place for Jerusalemites to pray. When the owner of the vineyard built a wall around his vineyard (Mark 12:1), we should not struggle to determine what the wall represents; it was simply a standard feature of vineyards, and forces the attentive reader to recognize that Jesus is alluding to the Old Testament parable in Isaiah 5:5 so the readers will know that the vineyard represents Israel. When we told the parable of the prodigal son earlier, the father represented God, the younger brother was an analogy for sinners and the older one for scribes and Pharisees. But the pigs do not "represent" something in particular; they merely illustrate the severity of the prodigal son’s suffering and uncleanness. The prostitutes (Luke 15:30) do not represent false teaching or idolatry or anything else as if they are a standard symbol; they simply illustrate how immorally the son squandered his father’s earnings. Let us look at the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:30-35. In this parable, a man goes "down" from Jerusalem toward Jericho, when he is overtaken by robbers who beat him and leave him nearly dead. A priest and Levite pass by him, but finally a Samaritan rescues him and takes him to an inn. Augustine, a profound thinker and church father from the coast of North Africa, decided that this was the gospel story: Adam went "down" because he fell into sin, was abused by the devil, was not helped by the law but was finally saved by Christ as a good Samaritan. One could preach this interpretation and actually expect conversions, because one would be preaching the gospel. But one could preach the gospel without attaching it to this particular parable, and in fact this is not what the parable means in its context in Luke. In Luke 10:29, a lawyer asks Jesus who is his "neighbor" that the Bible commands him to love (cf. Luke 10:25-28). Jesus responds that his neighbor might even turn out to be a Samaritan--that real love must cross racial, tribal, even religious lines. This was probably not the answer the lawyer wanted to hear; the answer remains offensive enough even to many people today to suggest why many people would not want the parable to mean this! But why would the man go "down" from Jerusalem to Jericho? Simply because Jericho is lower in elevation than Jerusalem! Further, the road to Jericho (like many roads) hosted many robbers; a man who traveled alone would make an easy target, especially at night. The priest and Levite who passed by on the other side of the road (Luke 10:31-32) probably did so to avoid contracting ritual impurity; many Jewish teachers felt that one would become unclean for a week if even one’s shadow touched a corpse, and one could not tell, unless one got close, if someone "half-dead" (Luke 10:30) were really dead or alive. The point of the story is that some very religious people did not act very neighborly, but that a person from whom one would not expect it did so. Perhaps if we told the story today we would talk about a Sunday School teacher or minister who passed by on the other side, but a Muslim or someone from a hostile tribe rescued the person. Our hearers might react with hostility to such a comparison--but that is exactly the way Jesus’ hearers would have reacted to his. The lawyer’s "neighbor" might be a Samaritan. Ours might be someone we are tempted to dislike no less intensely, but Jesus commands us to love everyone.

Narratives and History

Following the influence of the Western Enlightenment, many western scholars grew skeptical of miracles hence skeptical of biblical accounts as history. Discovery after discovery from the ancient world has challenged this skepticism, new trends have begun to challenge old Enlightenment views, and today most scholars, whether Christian or not, focus more on the meaning of the text than its relation to history.

But the early church did expect Christian leaders to be able to respond to objections raised against the faith (2 Timothy 2:25-26; Titus 1:9), so we will briefly introduce some of these issues here. Because some of my scholarly work published so far is in Gospels, I can best illustrate the methods with respect to the Gospels (whose historical reliability I affirm). If an honest skeptic had no evidence for or against the reliability of the Gospels, should that skeptic accept or doubt the Gospels? A growing consensus of scholars is arguing that the Gospels are ancient biographies, which means that at the very least they are substantially historically reliable. They fit all the characteristics of ancient biographies and not the characteristics of other genres; thus even a skeptic should regard them as at least generally reliable. Some nineteenth-century scholars asking historical questions noted that some parts of the Bible overlapped, such as Kings and Chronicles or Mark and Matthew. Thus they developed a method called "source history," trying to reconstruct what sources biblical writers of history used. Clearly, if they depended on earlier sources, they did not simply make things up from their imaginations. Many passages in the Bible mention their sources (Numbers 21:14; Joshua 10:13; 2 Samuel 1:18; 1 Kings 14:19; 1 Chronicles 29:29; 2 Chronicles 27:7); 1 and 2 Chronicles cite a "Book of Kings" ten times (nine of them from 2 Chr 16 on). Although the Gospel writers write closer to the time of the events they describe, when many sources probably reported similar events, hence they do not need to name their sources, they do make it clear that many were available (Luke 1:1). Although there remains some debate, the majority scholarly view is that Matthew and Luke both used Mark and some other material they shared in common. Beyond such a basic consensus, however, source history provided few widely accepted views. Early twentieth-century "scissors-and-paste" approaches (where skeptics chopped up Scripture to their liking) are now almost universally rejected, weakening the value of those commentaries that followed it. We also know that ancient Mediterranean storytellers drew on a wide variety of sources, including oral traditions, so we cannot always identify which report derives from which source. Some other scholars advanced a method called "form history"; Jesus’ teaching and works were reported in several different literary forms. Some of these distinct forms (such as parables) are clear, but traditional form-historians speculated too much about which forms were used by the church in particular ways, and most of their early speculations have been refuted by later scholars. Scholars then moved to redaction-history, or editorial history. If Matthew used Mark as a source, why does Matthew edit or adapt Mark the ways that he does? Ancient biographers had complete freedom to rearrange sources and put them in their own words; a simple comparison of Matthew, Mark and Luke will indicate that they do not always follow the same sequence or use the same wording to describe the same event, and such differences are to be expected. When we find consistent patterns in Matthew’s editing, we may learn about Matthew’s emphases and hence what he wanted to communicate to his first audience. Some early redaction historians, however, were too confident of their abilities to reconstruct why some changes were made; later scholars have recognized that some changes were purely stylistic or for space constraints! While there is some value in each of the above approaches, modern scholars have turned especially in two directions. The first is various forms of literary criticism, a basic component of which is usually reading each book as a whole unit to understand its meaning. The second is the social history approach, which focuses on what we have called "background." Nearly all biblical scholars today, across the entire range from "conservative" to "liberal," accept the validity of both these approaches.

2. Laws in the Bible

Biblical laws have much to teach us about justice, even if we need to take into account the culture and era of history they addressed. Thus God informs Israel that no other nation has such righteous laws as they do (Deuteronomy 4:8) and the psalmist celebrates and meditates continually on God’s law (Psalms 119:97).

Some laws, like the ten commandments, are stated largely as transcultural principles; it is also difficult to find genuine parallels to them in other ancient Near Eastern legal collections. Most laws, however, addressed ancient Israel as civil laws for how Israel’s society should work; these were addressed specifically to an ancient Near Eastern framework, and we need to think carefully when we look for appropriate analogies in how to apply them today. Ancient Near Eastern law set the tone for which issues had to be addressed; Israel’s laws addressed many of the same issues as Mesopotamian law. The Code of Hammurabi and other legal collections addressed ear-boring (Exodus 21:6); debt-slavery (Exodus 21:7); the treatment of enslaved captives (Exodus 21:9); causing a miscarriage (Exodus 21:22); eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth (Exodus 21:23-25); negligence regarding an ox (Exodus 21:28-36); brideprice (Exodus 22:16-17); local responsibility for bloodguilt there (Deuteronomy 21:9-10); and so forth. At the same time, significant differences modified ancient Near Eastern legal tradition. In other societies, one received a harsher penalty if one belonged to a lower social class; Israel’s law distinctively eliminates that injustice. Whereas in Babylonian law a man who caused the death of another’s daughter would have his own daughter executed, in Israelite law the man who did the killing would die. We do not know of other societies that protected ancestral lands the way Israel’s laws did (Leviticus 25:24); this law would prevent a monopolistic accumulation of capital that would make some people wealthy at others’ expense. Some offenses have more lenient penalties in Israelite law (thieves who break in during the day are executed under Babylonian law) and some have harsher penalties (Israelite law was harsher toward disobedient children). Babylonian law mandated the death penalty for those who harbored escaped slaves; God’s law commanded Israel to harbor escaped slaves (Deuteronomy 23:15). But the laws in the Old Testament, while improving the standards of their culture, do not always provide us with God’s perfect ideal of justice. In any culture, civil laws provide a minimum standard to enable people to work together efficiently, but do not address all moral issues; for instance, a law may say, "Do not kill"; but only God can enforce the fullest implications of that law for moral standards, i.e., "You shall not want to kill" (Matthew 5:21-26). We may take for example the law concerning a slave who is beaten and dies in Exodus 21:20-21, where the slaveholder is not executed if the slave survives a day or two. To some extent, this follows the law for anyone who does not die immediately from injuries (Exodus 21:18-19), but in this case the law specifically states that this is because the slave is the slaveholder’s "property." Given what we read about slavery in Philemon and Ephesians (treated above), slavery hardly seems God’s ideal purpose! Likewise, although the law condemns the sexual use of another’s slave, it is condemned less harshly than adultery because she is a slave (Leviticus 19:20; cf. Deuteronomy 22:23). Two centuries ago some people tried to argue from such texts that God supports slavery, but no text specifically endorses slavery. Rather, the texts address a system that already practiced slavery and made it more humane. Fellow-Israelites could not be enslaved permanently; they would serve for a time, then be set free and given capital by which they could provide for themselves (Deuteronomy 15:12-15). (Israel usually did not even meet this divine standard; cf. Jeremiah 34:11-22.) Christians who opposed slavery cited broader biblical principles (such as loving one’s neighbor as oneself, Leviticus 19:18; or all people being the same before God, Acts 10:28). It is this latter group of interpreters who correctly articulated the ideal of Scripture. How do we know? When some scholars cited Deuteronomy 24 as permission for a man to divorce his wife, Jesus said that law was a "concession" to human sinfulness (Mark 10:5): that is, God did not raise the standard to its ultimate ideal because he was working within their culture. To provide workable laws in a sinful society, God limited sin rather than prohibiting it altogether. But the morality God really demands from the human heart goes beyond such concessions. God never approved of a man divorcing his wife, except for very limited reasons (Mark 10:9; Matthew 19:9). Other concessions in the Old Testament may include polygamy, indentured servanthood, and perhaps holy war; God worked through or in spite of these practices, but his ideal in the New Testament is better. Ritual and civil laws may contain some moral absolutes, but they also contain concessions to the time and culture they addressed, just as Jesus recognized. At the same time, some offenses always carried the death penalty in the Old Testament, suggesting that God took these quite seriously for all cultures: murder, sorcery, idolatry, adultery, premarital sex, homosexual intercourse, extreme rebellion against parents, and some other offenses. This does not mean that we should enforce the death penalty against all these sins today, but we should take all these offenses seriously. In interpreting Old Testament laws, we must take into account the difference in era as well as the difference in culture. Just as people in Moses’ day could not ignore God’s revelation to Moses by citing the earlier revelation to Abraham, so today some things are different because of the coming of Jesus. Human nature is largely the same; God’s ways of working have much in common with his ways of working in the Old Testament, but now he sometimes works in very different ways. In Moses’ day, God drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea; in Jesus’ day, God unleashed a spiritual revolution that within three centuries converted much of the Roman and Axumite (East African) empires. The old covenant was good but worked by death; the new covenant works by life (2 Corinthians 3:6). The law remains good and useful for ethical teaching, provided we use it properly (Romans 3:27-31; Romans 7:12; 1 Timothy 1:8-11). But mere obedience to the law without faith has never brought salvation; God always saved people by grace through faith (Romans 4:3-12), and since the coming of Jesus he has saved people through faith in Jesus Christ. When we consider how to apply particular details of the law today, we should also take into account other factors. Some biblical patterns, like God’s command to us to rest, were given prior to the law (Genesis 2:2-3; Exodus 20:11), and God also gives us commands in the New Testament (John 13:34; Acts 2:38; 1 John 2:7-11). Also, the Spirit was quite active in the Old Testament era (1 Samuel 19:20-24; 1 Chronicles 25:1-2), but has become active in a new way in Christ (John 7:39; Acts 1:7-8; Acts 2:17-18).

3. Biblical Prayers and Songs, especially Psalms In some cases we have the historical context for psalms (e.g., 2 Samuel 22:1 for Ps 18; 2 Samuel 23:1-7), but in more cases we do not. One can gather that some psalms reflect mourning after the exile (e.g., Psalm 89, especially 89:38-51), but the context of some other psalms, say Psalm 150, is obscure--and ultimately not as necessary as with some other parts of the Bible. God inspired the psalms not only for the immediate circumstances that generated them, but for use in liturgical worship in later times (2 Chronicles 29:30); most resonate with many kinds of circumstances. Worship was a primary activity in the biblical temple (1 Chronicles 6:31-32; 1 Chronicles 15:16; 1 Chronicles 15:28-29; 1 Chronicles 16:4-6; 1 Chronicles 16:41-42; 2 Chronicles 8:14; Psalms 5:7; Psalms 18:6; Psalms 27:4; Psalms 28:2; Psalms 48:9; Psalms 63:2; Psalms 65:4; Psalms 68:24; Psalms 68:35; Psalms 73:17; Psalms 84:2; Psalms 84:10; Psalms 92:13; Psalms 96:6-8; Psalms 100:4; Psalms 115:19; Psalms 134:1-2; Psalms 135:2; Psalms 138:2; Psalms 150:1), and especially restored in periods of revival (2 Chronicles 20:20-24; 2 Chronicles 29:25-27; 2 Chronicles 31:2; 2 Chronicles 35:2; Ezra 3:10-11; Nehemiah 12:24-47). The Levites praised God especially at the morning and evening sacrifices (1 Chronicles 23:27; 1 Chronicles 23:30), perhaps as part of the offering (Psalms 141:2; Psalms 5:3; Psalms 88:13). Such worship was usually not calm, but joyful, celebrating God’s mighty works (e.g., Nehemiah 12:27; Nehemiah 12:36; Nehemiah 12:43-46; perhaps one hundred references in the Psalms).

Israel had always used songs in worship (Exodus 15:20-21), and these could be used for inspired or Spirit-directed worship (1 Samuel 10:5; 2 Kings 3:15; Habakkuk 3:19; 1 Corinthians 14:15); God could also use prophecy to direct the nature of worship (2 Chronicles 29:25). In the Spirit, a worshiper could move back and forth between speaking to God and hearing from God (2 Samuel 23:1-2; Psalms 46:1; Psalms 46:10; Psalms 91:2; Psalms 91:14). Most significantly, God appointed an orderly but Spirit-led worship in the temple (1 Chronicles 25:1-7); the New Testament develops further the importance of depending on God’s Spirit to empower us for worship worthy of the Lord (John 4:23-24; Php 3:3). Psalms on the whole may be meant less to be interpreted than to be prayed and sung. Once a person is full of the psalms, they also provide models for our own spontaneous worship to God. (Because the musical and poetic culture of the ancient Near East did affect the way the Psalms were presented, we might write our psalms somewhat differently today; cf. 1 Corinthians 14:26; Ephesians 5:19. The Puritans used only the biblical psalms as their hymnbook, but we seek God to provide us contemporary songs in the music of our own cultures as well.) Thus it is helpful for us to summarize some different kinds of psalms and their uses. Douglas Stuart, co-author with Gordon Fee of How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth (Zondervan, 1993), 194-97, lists several types of psalms. We have followed and adapted much of his listing here, though they overlap and one could divide many of these categories differently. Over sixty of the psalms give individuals or groups examples how to express our discouragement, suffering or sorrow in prayer to God; these are often called "laments." Some Christians today think that we should never admit that we are discouraged; biblically, however, we should openly express our hurts to God. These psalms often follow a consistent structure; most include a statement of suffering, an expression of trust in God, a cry for deliverance, the assurance that God will deliver, and finally praise for God’s faithfulness. Prayers like this help us deal with our suffering rather than allowing it to crush our spirit. Thanksgiving psalms are appropriate for celebrating God’s kindness to us, and are thus in some sense for different situations than laments (James 5:13); ancient temple worshipers may have sometimes used these during thank offerings (Leviticus 7:7-11). Stuart lists sixteen thanksgiving psalms, some for individuals and some for God’s people as a whole (Psa 18, Psa 30, Psa 32, Psa 34, Psa 40, Psa 65, Psa66, Psa 67, Psa 75, Psa 92, Psa 107, Psa 116, Psa 118, Psa 124, Psa 136, Psa 138); these normally include an introductory summary, a note of one’s distress, an appeal that the psalmist made to God, a description of God’s deliverance and praise for God’s deliverance. In addition to these are many psalms Stuart calls "hymns of praise," which worship God without such focus on particular matters for thanksgiving (Psa 8, Psa 19, Psa 33, Psa 66, Psa 100, Psa 103, Psa 104, Psa 111, Psa 113, Psa 114, Psa 117, Psa 145, Psa 146, Psa 147, Psa 148, Psa 149, Psa 50). Others emphasize trust in the Lord (Psa 11, Psa 16, Psa 23, Psa 27, Psa 62, Psa 63, Psa 91, Psa 121, Psa 125, Psa 131). Many psalms involve celebration and affirmation of God’s works on behalf of one’s people. Some psalms emphasize God’s enthronement (Psa 24, Psa 29, Psa 47, Psa 93, Psa 95, Psa 96, Psa 97, Psa 98, Psa 99); we can use these to praise God’s might and reign. Psalms that celebrate the rule of Israel’s king (Psa 2, Psa 18, Psa 20, Psa 21, Psa 45, Psa 72, Psa 89, Psa 101, Psa 110, Psa 132, Psa 144) are useful for our celebration of our Lord and king, Jesus the Messiah; in non-royal cultures, we need to be reminded of what it means to celebrate our Lord’s rule over us. Some emphasize the holy city (Psa 46, Psa 48, Psa 76, Psa 84, Psa 87, Psa 122), we can use these to celebrate the promised New Jerusalem and the grace God has shown us in both our future and our heritage in the holy city. The work of the biblical historians, prophets, and sages is compatible with psalms as well. Some psalms celebrate God’s work in our heritage in Israel’s history (Psa 78, Psa 105, Psa 106, Psa 135, Psa 136); some sound like the messages of the prophets, including a covenant lawsuit summoning God’s people to obedience (Psa 50); some are wisdom psalms, sounding like the teaching of the sages (Psa 1, Psa 36, Psa 37, Psa 49, Psa 73, Psa 112, Psa 119, Psa 127, Psa 128, Psa 133). We can teach and learn through our worship (Colossians 3:16). Psalms can also express our passionate devotion to God, a devotion that we confess based not always on feeling but which we reaffirm in the very act of confessing it. When we sing to God that he matters to us more than anything else, we reaffirm our devotion to him (e.g., Psa 42, Psa 63). The psalms provide ways for us to express anguish, sorrow, hope, despair, and joy in prayer to God. Some psalms are for mild distress; others, that end on a note of despair (Psalms 89:49-51) are encouraging only to the person who is in great despair and needs to express his or her pain fully to God. Even though we know that God ultimately will deliver us--in life or in death--we need to express our feelings before him. Imprecatory psalms, such as Psa 137 (announcing blessing for one who kills the babies of Babylon as Babylon has done with Israel’s babies), fall into this category (see also Psa 12, Psa 35, Psa 58, Psa 59, Psa 69, Psa 70, Psa 83, Psa 109, Psa 140). Instead of pressing the literal meaning as far as possible, we should consider the rhetorical function of these psalms: they are prayers for swift vindication of the oppressed, for God to act with justice quickly. The oppressed does not take vengeance for himself or herself, but cries out for vindication the way Abel’s blood did (Genesis 4:10; Matthew 23:35; Luke 11:51; Hebrews 11:4; Hebrews 12:24). This practice also appears in the New Testament (Revelation 6:10; cf. 2 Timothy 4:14), though Jesus wants us ultimately to forgive and love so fully that we pray good for our enemies (Matthew 5:44; Luke 6:28). This approach to the psalms is not a way to get around texts uncomfortable for those of us conditioned differently by Jesus’ teaching. We are trying to read the psalms according to their intention, thus according to their rhetorical function. Thus some psalms sound as if God always grants blessing to the righteous, whereas others note the frequent distresses of the righteous. Yet both psalms are in the same psalter, because those who first wrote and sang the psalms saw no contradiction; they used the psalms to express their hearts before God, and God inspired their worship and was pleased with it. Psalms thus can include summons to worship, building to a crescendo of emotion. ("Hallelujah,” meaning “Praise the Lord!” literally is a command to praise the Lord rather than a word of praise itself; Levite musicians prophesied to the people as they led them in worship-- 1 Chronicles 25:1-2.) Other psalms can be inspired laments, providing acceptable models for us expressing our grief. Others are prayers for vindication. Although we are to pray kind things for our enemies (Luke 6:28), prayers for vindication continue in the New Testament era (Revelation 6:10; cf. 2 Timothy 4:14), as we have noted. Psalms are mainly meant to be prayed, but we can also preach and teach from them provided we recognize that we are teaching models for various kinds of prayer. For instance, Psalm 150 tells us where to praise God--both in his sanctuary and in heaven, i.e., everywhere (Psalms 150:1; Hebrew often summarized the whole by contrasting opposite parts); why we should praise God--both for what he has done and for who he is (Psalms 150:2); how we should praise God--with dancing and all available instruments (Psalms 150:3-5); and finally, who should praise God--anyone with breath (Psalms 150:6). The Psalms also can provide other encouragement. For example, Psalm 2 predicts the victory of Israel’s king over the nations who mock him. This reminds us that ultimately it is not people in our society or other societies that wield power over us; God is in control, and he will reveal that; no human empire that rebels against him has ever endured and none ever will.

4. Proverbs

Wisdom teachers, or sages, often taught in easily memorizable sayings called proverbs. Most cultures have some familiarity with this genre; Americans have sayings like, "Haste makes waste," and traditional African societies have made much more abundant use of proverbs.

Proverbs are short, succinct statements of general principle. As such, they are summaries of what is normal, not unconditional promises for all circumstances. Some general principles may actually conflict with one another in practice in specific situations. Thus in Proverbs 26:4-5 one should both answer a fool according to his folly, and not answer a fool according to his folly. For his sake you should correct him; for your sake you should be careful not to become like him. Both are true principles, and recognizing both requires us to keep attentive to the breadth of Scripture, rather than taking one text and reading it into all others without first considering the meaning of each text. One who preaches from Proverbs may wish to gather different proverbs on the same topic and preach them together. This is important because most of the Book of Proverbs consists of sayings in random order, so normal rules of context do not apply. But the broader context of genre does apply, and pulling together other wisdom-sayings on the same topic can be very helpful. By ignoring the genre of Proverbs, some have used isolated proverbs as unconditional promises which they may then "claim" with certainty. (Some, like Job’s friends, therefore use Proverbs’ general principles about success for the righteous to condemn as lacking in faith those who do not experience such success. This approach completely misunderstands the nature of proverbs.) Some have also come up with strange doctrines by taking individual proverbs out of the context of the larger collection of sayings on the same subject. For example, some say that we can speak things into existence based on some proverbs (as well as some other texts out of context). They note that the tongue can bring death or life, hurt or healing (Proverbs 18:21; Proverbs 12:18). But when one compares other proverbs about the tongue bringing healing or life, their meaning becomes clear: you can edify or hurt others by your speech, and you can get yourself into trouble or help yourself by how you speak to others (Proverbs 12:14; Proverbs 13:2-3; Proverbs 18:20; Proverbs 21:23). Other statements in Proverbs about healing include the well-being of those who choose trustworthy messengers (Proverbs 13:17), have tranquil or joyful hearts (Proverbs 14:30; Proverbs 17:22), receive good news (Proverbs 25:25) or hear encouraging words (Proverbs 16:24). Many texts emphasize the therapeutic value of the tongue, especially in relationships (Proverbs 12:25; Proverbs 15:1; Proverbs 15:4; Proverbs 15:23; Proverbs 25:11-12; Proverbs 25:25). Egyptians and Mesopotamians also had proverbs about the tongue and about words bringing healing or death, not in the sense of speaking things into existence but in the sense of getting one in trouble or out of it (see, e.g., the "Words of Ahiqar"). We should also note the "rhetorical function" of proverbs. Ancient sages offered proverbs in short, succinct statements as general principles. Proverbs were poetry (often with the second line contrasting with the first line), and they were short summaries that would not list all possible exceptions to the principles they articulated. They might use humor, hyperbole (rhetorical overstatement), irony, and other means to communicate graphically; proverbs were intended to be memorable and practical, not detailed statements of philosophy and certainly not legal guarantees. We must read them according to the character in which they were written. We briefly mention some other kinds of wisdom literature. Job and Ecclesiastes both challenge the kind of conventional wisdom in Proverbs: What happens when the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper? That the Bible includes these books reminds us that the general principles in Proverbs are principles only, not ironclad guarantees that we can "claim" as if God is obligated to answer them. (He does, however, often answer our prayers of faith, including faith strengthened by such principles. But that is a different matter.) That the Bible also includes such a wide range of perspectives (although not contradictions) also may warn us to keep our own boundaries wide: God may send many Christians to us with different kinds of wisdom, and we should have the wisdom to embrace all kinds of wisdom. We may meet those who tend to be cautious and skeptical (like the cynicism of Ecclesiastes), those who have learned through the sufferings of Job, and those who have seen general principles of God’s faithfulness to the righteous; we should welcome them all, and help them to work together in Christ’s one body, just as different books of the Bible work together in one canon.

5. Romance Literature

Although some psalms may have been used at royal weddings (Psa 45), the largest continuous piece of romance literature in the Bible is the Song of Solomon. Through history many interpreters were annoyed that sacred Scripture would devote such attention to so "secular" a topic as marital romance, and so interpreted the song allegorically concerning the relationship between God and Israel or Christ and the church. But the song makes better sense in its literal meaning (Christ’s marriage to the church has some parallels to human romance, but the probable allusions to intercourse, a marital disagreement, and jealousy do not fit that interpretation!)

God gave us this song in our Bible because he values marital romance highly and wants husbands and wives to enjoy their love for each other. Some of the romance language that is unfamiliar to us was standard romance language in its day (for instance, Egyptian love songs also celebrate as a romantic setting the coming of spring and the voice of animals emerging at that time--cf. Song of Solomon 2:12). The Song deals with many practical aspects of marital romance (through the specific example of the king and his bride): for example, he affirms her beauty (Song of Solomon 1:9-10; Song of Solomon 1:15; Song of Solomon 2:2; Song of Solomon 4:1-15); she affirms his attractiveness (Song of Solomon 1:16; Song of Solomon 2:3; Song of Solomon 5:10-16); they participate in the wedding banquet (Song of Solomon 2:4); they experience a misunderstanding and are reconciled (Song of Solomon 5:2-8); one should beware of provoking jealousy (Song of Solomon 8:6). This book is useful for marriage counseling and for preaching about marriage. Only after we have internalized its lessons for our own marriages can we find some marriage principles in the song that also apply to our relationship with our Lord.

6. Jesus’ Teachings

Jesus’ teachings are not a broad genre like poetry or narrative; in fact, they mix together elements of different kinds of genres. Jesus was, among other things, a Jewish sage, so he often uses the teaching style used by Jewish teachers in his day: for example, rhetorical overstatements, wisdom proverbs (see above), and parables. At the same time, Jesus was a prophet, and sometimes gave oracles like prophets did (“Woe to you, Capernaum...!”) Of course, as the Messiah, Jesus was more than a prophet or a sage, and he often spoke with greater authority than either prophets or sages did. But he also used many teaching techniques that were familiar to his people in his day.

For our example, we will take Jesus’ teaching on divorce. Many people assume that what Jesus said on a particular occasion covers every situation, but while that is often the case, sometimes Jesus himself provided different perspectives for different kinds of situations. Thus we recognize that while Jesus wants us to love him more than our parents, we “hate” them only by comparison with our love for him (Luke 14:26); elsewhere he instructs us to provide for them in their old age (Mark 7:10-13). Some people quote only Jesus’ saying that remarriage is adultery (Mark 10:11-12; Luke 16:18), but what kind of saying is this? When Jesus says that one who lusts should pluck out his eye to avoid hell (Matthew 5:28-30), should we take more literally his saying about remarriage that occurs immediately afterward (Matthew 5:31-32)? The only way to test this is to examine it in the context of all of Jesus’ teachings on the subject. First we should examine the “why” of Jesus’ teaching, as best as possible. In Jesus’ day the Pharisees debated among themselves as to the grounds for a husband to divorce his wife; the stricter school said a man could divorce his wife if she were unfaithful to him, but the more lenient school said he could divorce his wife if she burned his bread. In Jewish Palestine (as opposed to Roman laws), husbands could divorce their wives for almost any reason; wives could not divorce their husbands or prevent themselves from being divorced. Jesus was at least in part defending an innocent party from being wronged: the husband who divorces his wife and remarries commits adultery “against her”--against his wife (Mark 10:11). This was a sin not only against God, but also against another person innocent of the divorce (cf. also Malachi 2:14). Second we should examine what this saying literally claims. “Adultery” in the literal sense is being unfaithful to one’s marriage partner; for remarriage to be adultery against a former spouse means that, in God’s sight, one is still married to one’s former spouse. If we take this literally, this means that marriage cannot be dissolved, and that Christians should break up all second and third marriages. (Interestingly, despite the scandal this would have caused in ancient society, we have no record of anyone breaking up later marriages in the New Testament.) But is this a literal statement, or one of Jesus’ deliberate overstatements meant to grab people’s attention--like plucking out the eye, a camel passing through a needle’s eye, or a mustard seed of faith? We can easily answer this question by examining Jesus’ other sayings on the same subject. In the same context as Mark 10:11, Jesus also says, “What God joined together, let no one separate” (Mark 10:9). In Mark 10:11, marriage cannot be broken; in Mark 10:9, it should not be and must not be, but it is breakable. The difference in meaning here is this: one says that one is always married to one’s first spouse; the other says that one should remain married to one’s first spouse. The one is a statement; the other is a demand. Yet marriage cannot be both unbreakable and breakable; so it is possible that Mark 10:11 is a deliberate overstatement (hyperbole) whereas Mark 10:9 communicates its real intention: to keep us from divorcing, not to break up new marriages. Other sayings of Jesus help us further. For instance, Jesus himself did not take Mark 10:11 literally: he regarded the Samaritan woman as married five times, not as married once and committing only adultery thereafter (John 4:18). Further, Jesus himself allows an exception in two of the four passages where he addresses divorce. A follower of Christ must not break up their marriage, but if their spouse breaks it up by sexual unfaithfulness, Jesus does not punish the innocent person (Matthew 5:32; Matthew 19:9). In that case, the marriage may be broken, but only one person is guilty of breaking it. (Because both Jewish and Roman law required divorce for adultery, Mark and Luke could assume this exception without having to state it explicitly.) When Paul quotes Jesus’ prohibition of divorce, he tells Christians not to divorce their spouses, whether or not the spouses are Christian (1 Corinthians 7:10-14). But if the spouse leaves, the Christian is not held responsible for the spouse’s behavior (1 Corinthians 7:15). His wording, “not under bondage,” “not bound” (1 Corinthians 7:15), is the very language used in ancient Jewish divorce contracts for freedom to remarry. Paul therefore applies Jesus’ teaching as a demand for faithfulness to marriage, not a statement about breaking up marriages: Christians must never break up their own marriages, but if the marriage is broken against their will, we must not punish them, either. Jesus spoke to defend an innocent spouse, not to make their condition more difficult! But even though Jesus is not really calling Christians to break up remarriages, this does not mean we should not take seriously what he is saying. The point of a deliberate overstatement is not to let us say, “Oh, that is just overstatement; we may ignore it.” The point of overstatement is to grab our attention, to force us to consider how serious is his demand. Genuine repentance (expressed in restitution) cancels past sins, but one cannot premeditate sin and expect one’s repentance to be genuine. Christians are not held responsible for marriages broken against their wills, but they are responsible before God to do everything genuinely in their power to make their marriages work. In this example, we have tried to show how we need to listen carefully to why Jesus speaks certain ways, and to examine all of his teachings to discern when he speaks literally and when he overstates his point parabolically. But overstatements are not meant to be ignored; they are meant to grip our attention all the more! We should also add two words of caution: Jesus himself uses principles like “compassion rather than sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13; Matthew 12:7) and looking for the heart of the message (Matthew 5:21-22; Matthew 23:23-24). But also we should be honest in grappling with what he says: proper fear of God will give us integrity in searching for truth rather than trying to justify how we want to live (cf. Proverbs 1:7).

7. Gospels The Gospels are a specific kind of narrative, but rather than treating them only as narrative we make some special points here. The Gospels fit the format of ancient biographies. (Some early twentieth century scholars disputed this premise, but more recent scholarship has increasingly returned to the historic view that the Gospels are ancient biographies.)

Ancient biographers followed some fairly standard conventions in their writing, but some of these differed from the ways we write biographies today. For example, ancient biographies sometimes started with their subject’s adulthood (as in Mark or John) and sometimes arranged their story in topical more than chronological order (so, for example, Matthew’s reports of Jesus’ teaching; that is why events are not always in the same order from one Gospel to another). Nevertheless, biographers were not free to make up new stories about their heroes; they could choose which stories to report and put them in their own words, but other writers criticized those who made stories up. Further, one need not quote people verbatim, though one did have to get correct the sense of what they meant. Knowing such details about various kinds of ancient narratives helps us be even more precise when we learn principles for interpreting narratives. (We can also identify other kinds of narratives in the Bible more specifically than we have; for example, the Book of Acts is a special kind of history book that was common in the first century.) Here we offer just a few comments on the historical trustworthiness of the Gospels as ancient biographies, using Luke 1:1-4 as a simple outline. We know from Luke 1:1 that by the time that Luke wrote, many written sources (other Gospels) were already in circulation. (Most of those Gospels no longer exist. Apart from the Gospels in the New Testament, all first-century Gospels have been lost. The so-called “Lost Gospels” some people speak about are forgeries, novels, or sayings-collections from later eras.) Luke himself writes in the lifetime of some of the apostles, and already many others have written before him! People were writing Gospels when others still remembered Jesus’ teachings very accurately. Further, there were many oral stories about Jesus being passed on that went back to the eyewitnesses (Luke 1:2). Many African societies have members of the tribe (in some places called a griot) who can recall centuries of information that matches well with written records of European travelers. Ancient Mediterranean people were excellent with memory. Schoolchildren learned by rote memorization, focusing on sayings of famous teachers. Orators regularly memorized speeches that were hours in length. Teachers expected their students, their disciples, to memorize and propagate their teachings--that was the main duty of disciples. Students regularly took notes, and often ancient teachers attest that students reported their teachings exactly as the teachers gave them (for documentation, see the introduction in Craig Keener, Matthew [InterVarsity, 1996], or the more detailed volume I wrote for Eerdmans). It is actually historically naive to doubt that Jesus’ disciples accurately passed on his teachings; that was precisely what ancient disciples were for! Further, we can trust the testimony of these eyewitnesses. The apostles remained in positions of leadership in the early church; both Acts and Paul mention Jesus’ brother and the leading apostles in Jerusalem. (No one had any reason to invent such people, and the spread of Christianity started somewhere; further, diverse sources attest them. So virtually no one today denies their existence.) Because of their leadership, no one could make up stories about Jesus that contradicted their true reports about Jesus. Further, no one can accuse them of lying about Jesus. They were so convinced that they spoke truth about him that they were prepared to die for their claims. Moreover, they were not simply dying for what they believed; they were dying for what they saw and heard when they were with him. Third, Luke had the opportunity to investigate their claims (Luke 1:3, according to the Greek and most translations). Back when it was still possible to do so, Luke verified his sources by interviewing witnesses, wherever possible. Some sections of Acts say “we” because Luke was traveling with Paul at those points, and those sections include their journey to Jerusalem and Palestine, where they remained two years (Acts 21:15-17; Acts 24:27; Acts 27:1). That gave him the opportunity to interview Jesus’ younger brother James, among others (Acts 21:18). Finally, Luke himself would not be able to make these stories up. He is confirming accounts for Theophilus, not introducing new ones (Luke 1:4). That is, while some eyewitnesses are still alive, the stories Luke records were already known by Theophilus. This further confirms to us that, even on purely historical grounds, the Gospels are trustworthy. (In the same way, Paul can remind his readers of miracles they themselves have witnessed, often through his ministry, or mention that other witnesses of the risen Christ are still alive and hence available for interview: 1 Corinthians 15:6; 2 Corinthians 12:12; Galatians 3:5.)

8. Letters As we read letters in the Bible, we must read them first of all as letters addressed to real people in the writer’s own day, for this is what they explicitly claim to be (e.g., Romans 1:7). Only after we have understood the letters in their own historical context can we consider how to rightly apply them to our situations today. In contrast to those who assume that letters require less interpretation than other parts of Scripture, they are actually among the parts of Scripture most closely tied to their historical situation.

For example, how does one apply the teachings of 1 Corinthians in a very different cultural setting? The promise of future resurrection (1 Cor 15) seems easy enough. More controversially in many cultures, in many churches in many parts of the world it is taken for granted that women must wear head coverings (1 Corinthians 11:2-16), even if that is no longer part of the broader culture. But what about food offered to idols (1 Cor 8-10)? In cultures where people no longer sacrifice food to idols, like much of the western world, are we free to simply skip over those chapters? Or are there transcultural principles that Paul uses there which would also be relevant to other cultures? As we noted in more detail above, cultural background in Bible study is not optional; we must take the original situation into account to fully understand the Bible. This is at least as true of letters as it is of every other part of the Bible, and maybe more so, because letters explicitly address specific congregations or people facing specific situations. Some passages are difficult to understand because the original audience already knew what was being addressed, and we are not always able to reconstruct it (2 Thessalonians 2:5); in such cases we must learn humility! After all, if Paul was with the Corinthians for eighteen months (Acts 18:11), one might expect him to allude to some issues with them that we know little about (1 Corinthians 1:16; 1 Corinthians 3:4-6; 1 Corinthians 15:29). But even in such cases we can often catch the general point of the passage as a whole, and that is what we need most. Further research into the background usually reveals more details, but there will always be some things we do not know until Jesus returns (1 Corinthians 13:12). Writers of biblical letters often followed standards of "rhetoric," proper speaking and writing conventions of their day. Knowing some of those customs can help us understand the letters better (for instance, why Paul often opens with "grace and peace be with you, from God and Christ," which links Christ as deity alongside the Father). At the same time, those writers were not simply showing off their writing abilities. They were making points, correcting problems and encouraging Christians in particular situations. Once we understand the situation, we can usually understand how the writer is addressing that situation. These writers applied eternal principles to concrete situations in their own day; to allow for an equivalent impact, we must reapply those principles to the concrete situations of our day, taking into account the differences in culture. When we apply them, we must make sure that we find the appropriate analogies between the situations Paul addresses and our situations today. For example, some interpreters believe that Paul prohibits most women in one congregation from teaching because they were generally uneducated, hence could prove easily misled (1 Timothy 2:11-12). In that culture, his command that they should "learn" (1 Timothy 2:11; "quietly and submissively" was the appropriate way for all novices to learn) actually liberated women, who normally did not receive direct instruction except by sitting in services. It makes a difference whether or not this is the issue: if not, the appropriate analogy today may be that women should never teach the Bible (though this would leave in question what to do with other texts, like Romans 16:1-2; Romans 16:7; Php 4:2-3; Judges 4:4; 1 Corinthians 11:4-5). If so, the analogy today may be that unlearned people, whether male or female, should not teach the Bible. Gordon Fee, in one of his chapters on "Epistles" in his book co-authored with Doug Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth (Zondervan, 1993), suggests two main general principles for interpreting letters. First, "a text cannot mean what it never could have meant to its author or his or her readers" (p. 64). He notes for instance that one cannot argue that the "perfect" in 1 Corinthians 13:10 refers to the completion of the New Testament--since Paul’s readers had no way of knowing that there would be a New Testament. Second, "Whenever we share comparable particulars (i.e., similar specific life situations) with the first-century setting, God’s Word to us is the same as his Word to them" (p. 65). Murmuring, complaining, sexual immorality and greed will always be wrong, no matter how much or little any culture practices them. What do we do with texts that address situations very much unlike our situations today? Jewish and Gentile Christians divided over food laws and holy days, and Paul warned them in Romans 14 not to divide over such secondary matters. If we are in circles where we do not know any Christians who keep Old Testament festivals and who abstain from pork, do we simply skip over this chapter? Yet Paul’s advice in this chapter works from a broader principle in addressing the specific situation. The principle is that we should not divide from one another over secondary issues, issues that are not at the heart of the gospel and Christian morality. Paul wrote to specific, real-life congregations. Because he was not expecting Christians for many centuries later to keep reading his letters in different cultures and situations (cf. Mark 13:32), he did not stop to distinguish for us his transcultural principles on which he based his advice from the concrete advice he gave to these congregations in their situations. Fee lists several principles for distinguishing transcultural principles from the specific examples the Bible gives us, the most important of which we have adapted here. First, we should look for the "core," or the transcultural principle in the text. This is important so we keep the emphasis on Christ’s gospel and do not become legalists on details like some of Jesus’ enemies were. Second, the Bible presents some matters as transcultural moral norms, such as in Paul’s vice lists (Romans 1:28-31; 1 Corinthians 6:9-10). But in different cultures the Bible allowed different customs in terms of women’s work outside the home (Proverbs 31:16; Proverbs 31:24; 1 Timothy 5:14) or various forms of ministry (Judges 4:4; Php 4:3; 1 Timothy 2:12). If different passages allow different practices, we see these practices as providing guidelines in a specific culture, but not a transcultural principle behind them without exceptions. Third, we need to understand the cultural options available to the writer. For example, biblical writers wrote in an era where no one was trying to abolish slavery; that the Bible’s writers do not explicitly address an issue that no one had raised does not suggest that they would have side with slavery’s supporters had the question been raised! On the other hand, Greeks in Paul’s day held various views regarding premarital sex, homosexual intercourse, and so on, but the Bible is unanimous in condemning such practices. Fourth, we need to take into account differences in situation: in the first century, men were far more apt to be educated, including in the Bible, than women; would Paul have written exactly the same applications for today, when women and men are more likely to share equal opportunities for education? Fee’s principles resemble those we articulated above on the use of cultural background. We may provide one stark example of how we need to take Paul’s situation into account. In two texts, Paul requires women to keep “silence” in church (1 Corinthians 14:34-35; 1 Timothy 2:12). If we press this to mean all that it could mean, women should not even sing in church! Few churches today press these verses this far, but are they ignoring the passages’ meaning? Not necessarily. In other texts, Paul commends women for their labors for the kingdom (Php 4:2-3), and in Romans 16 commends more women for their services than men (even though he mentions more men!) Moreover, he at least occasionally uses his most common terms for his male fellow workers to some women: “fellow worker” (Prisca, Romans 16:3); diakonos (“servant,” Phoebe, Romans 16:1); and once even “apostle” (Junia, according to the best translations; Romans 16:7)! Even more importantly, he accepts women praying and prophesying with their heads covered (1 Corinthians 11:4-5). How can they pray and prophesy if later in the same letter he requires them to be completely silent in church (1 Corinthians 14:34-35)? Does the Bible contradict itself here? Did Paul contradict himself in the very same letter? But the two texts about silence probably do not address all kinds of silence, but deal with special kinds of situations. The only kind of speech specifically addressed in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is asking questions (1 Corinthians 14:35). It was common for people to interrupt teachers and lecturers with questions in Jewish and Greek cultures alike; but it was rude for unlearned people to do so, and they might have considered it especially rude for unlearned women. Keep in mind that women were usually much less educated than men; in Jewish culture, in fact, boys were taught to recite God’s law but girls almost never received this education. As to 1 Timothy 2:11-12, scholars still debate how Paul uses the Old Testament background (he applies Old Testament examples different ways in different passages, even the example of Eve: 2 Corinthians 11:3). But one point, at least, is interesting: Paul’s letters to Timothy in Ephesus are the only letters in the entire Bible where we know that false teachers were specifically targeting women with their false teachings (2 Timothy 3:6). In fact, they may have targeted widows (1 Timothy 5:9) who owned homes so they could use their houses for churches--one of the Greek terms in 1 Timothy 5:13 nearly always meant spreading “nonsense” or false ideas. Those who knew less about the Bible were naturally most susceptible to false teachings; those who do not know the Bible should not be allowed to teach it. Whatever other conclusions one may draw from this, it seems unlikely that Paul would have refused to let women sing in church! But Fee also cautions against extending the application too far beyond the point in the text. If the law is summed up in love (Romans 13:8-10), we apply the text rightly to love our neighbor as ourselves, a principle which has a potentially infinite number of applications. But some people have taught as if this principle empties all the moral content of the law, so that adultery or bank robbery are fine as long as one is motivated by love. That such an application twists the meaning of the text is obvious, but we practice other such distortions all the time. For instance, we sometimes quote 1 Corinthians 3:16, "you are a temple of God," and use this against smoking, because smoking is bad for your body. The text in context, however, means that we as a church are God’s temple and dwelling-place (1 Corinthians 3:9-15), and anyone who defiles that temple by causing division incurs God’s judgment (1 Corinthians 3:17). This text applies even to nonsmoking Christians to the extent that we are unloving toward other Christians! A little better would be 1 Corinthians 6:19, "your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit." This verse refers to our individual body, which should be used for the Lord only (1 Corinthians 6:20). Paul’s own primary point, however, is that our bodies should not be joined to prostitutes (1 Corinthians 6:15-17). This is a text to be used against sexual immorality! If we try to apply the principle also to smoking, because that is not glorifying God with our bodies, then we should also apply it to gluttony, lack of exercise, poor nutrition, and other problems damaging to our bodies. Our extension of Paul’s principle in this verse may be legitimate, but it is certainly secondary to Paul’s own focus, and Paul’s own focus should be primary to us: if we are joined to Christ, we must avoid sexual immorality. Different letters were written in different ways, but for the most part we need to read letters carefully in sequence and the entire way through. Romans develops an argument through the entire book (as noted above); 1 Corinthians takes on several related issues, but most of those issues take up many paragraphs through several chapters (1 Cor 1-4, the church divided especially over the most skilled speakers; 1 Cor 5-7, mainly sexual issues; 1 Cor 8-11, mainly food issues; 1 Cor 12-14, spiritual gifts). You might practice discerning that argument by thinking up titles for each paragraph and show how these paragraphs relate to one another, developing a continuous argument. We provide here a summary of our guidelines for understanding and reapplying (contextualizing) the Bible’s letters:

Distinguishing principles from applications; reapplying (recontextualizing).

(1) Read first as letters addressed to real people (2) Learn the situation; how does writer address situation? a. What is the culture and (as best as we can tell) the specific situation he addresses? b. Rhetorical criticism: are there cultural reasons for why he constructs his argument in a particular format? c. Determine how he addresses the situation (agreeing, disagreeing, a mixture of both elements, etc.) (3) Is his application transcultural, or is what is transcultural merely the principle behind this application? a. In different cultures or situations, does the Bible present alternative teachings? b. Does the writer agree or disagree with majority views in his culture? c. If he agrees on some points, he may be embracing morally neutral elements of his culture for the sake of relating to it positively. d. If he disagrees on some points (or if he takes a firm position and his culture holds diverse views), he is likely articulating a transcultural norm.

(4) For equivalent impact, we must apply principle to equivalent situations today. a. What situations today are almost exact analogies to those of the first audience? b. What situations today (in our lives, others’ lives, society, etc.) are similar to the original situation in various respects? c. What other situations might the principle address (provided we have correctly ascertained the principle behind the application)? d. Make sure your application fits the kind the original writer would have given; if he had lived in our day, what would he have said to this situation?

9. Prophecy

Many prophecies appear in the Bible’s historical books, but we also have books that consist primarily of prophecy with merely some historical summaries in them, such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, or Hosea or Nahum. In the historical books, it is usually clear when prophecies address a specific king or period in Israel’s history, in which case we study them the way we study God’s other actions in historical narrative (see discussion above.) But how do we interpret books of prophecies that do not provide the full background concerning the situations they address? Below we provide some principles that should prove helpful.

(1) Find out who and what circumstances the prophecy addresses in context.

    To ascertain the circumstances prophecies addressed, you can usually discover the specific era in which a prophet prophesied by looking at the beginning of the book, which usually (though not always) lists the reigns of the rulers during which the prophet prophesied. Then you can turn to 1-2 Kings and 1-2 Chronicles to learn what was going on in Israel in that period of time.

(2) Use the law and earlier prophets as background.

The prophets saw themselves as calling Israel back to the covenant; many judgments they announce simply fulfill the warnings of curses in Deuteronomy 27-28. Their language regularly echoes and recycles the language of earlier prophets for their own generation. Many of the prophets repeat the same basic message over and over, except in creatively new, poetic ways. Some surrounding cultures claimed prophets, but none of them had a succession of prophets with the same basic message generation after generation. (The city of Mari had prophets whose most "moral" reproof to a king might be that he was in danger of losing a battle because he was not paying enough money to the temple. Egypt had prophetic writers who denounced injustices of past rulers, which is a little closer but still not like the Bible’s prophetic succession.) (3) Before the exile, prophets usually prophesied in poetry in their books.

That prophets often prophesied in poetry invites us to interpret them in a particular manner. First, most ancient poetry was rich in symbolism, worded so as to capture attention. Most people knew that not all the details were literal; rather, one should strive to catch the basic point. Some details were even deliberately obscure until their fulfillment, though clear enough in retrospect that one would recognize both God’s wisdom and humanity’s foolishness in not understanding it. Second, Israelite prophecy involved parallelism, as in the psalms and proverbs. (When the King James was translated, this principle was not recognized, but nearly all newer translations arrange biblical prophecies in lines like other poetry, which makes it easy to recognize the poetic form.) Some modern poetry and songs balance sound, for instance, by rhyme and rhythm; but the Israelites balanced especially ideas. Thus the second line might repeat the thought of the first line (either in the same words or in similar ones that might slightly develop the thought). Or the second line might give the opposite point (e.g., if the first line says, the memory of the righteous will be blessed, the second might note that the name of the wicked will rot). In such cases, we should not read into parallel lines different thoughts. Some preachers have even taken separate points of their sermon from parallel lines, but in the original poetry, these separate lines were not separate ideas; they were simply varied ways of stating the same idea.

(4) Was the prophecy fulfilled already? Does some remain?

Here you should check historical parts of Bible and other historical information to see if a prophecy was fulfilled. Often prophecies are poetic ways to give the general sense, while the particular application remains ambiguous (Isaiah 37:29; Isaiah 37:33-37); God does not give prophecy to satisfy our curiosity, but to tell us just what we need. Thus we should not expect literal fulfillment of every detail as if prophecies were prose rather than poetry (although God sometimes did fulfill details literally). Thus, for example, all scholars agree that Jeremiah prophesied before Jerusalem’s fall, announcing in advance judgment on his own people. (This was unusual in the ancient Near East, where prophets were often expected to be patriotic and encourage their people to victories.) But Jeremiah (and Deuteronomy) prophesied the restoration of Israel to the land. When the Assyrians had carried people into captivity, no one ever returned, and no one expected matters to be different with the Babylonians. But a generation after Jeremiah’s death the Judean exiles returned to their land. This was a remarkable, large-scale fulfillment, not naturally expected and not able to be viewed as coincidence, that validates Jeremiah’s prophecy even if some details were intended poetically. Jeremiah’s very writing style lets us know that many of his details are merely poetic, graphic ways of communicating his broader point (e.g., Jeremiah 4:7-9; Jeremiah 4:20-31). (Parts of Daniel include more details in prose; these occurred exactly as Daniel predicted them.) A few prophecies were never fulfilled and never will be (e.g., Jeremiah 46:13; Ezekiel 29:19; Ezekiel 30:10), because people responded to the threats or took for granted the promises; God gives many prophecies in a conditional manner (Jeremiah 18:7-10). Of prophecies that were fulfilled, part may remain future. This is because there are consistent patterns in God’s dealing with humanity, because both God and human nature have remained the same. Thus, for example, the temple was repeatedly judged in "abominations of desolation," by the Babylonians (587 BC), by Antiochus Epiphanes (second century BC), by Pompey (first century BC), by Titus (first century AD) and by Hadrian (second century AD). (Referring in advance to Titus’ destruction of the temple, Jesus could speak of an abomination of desolation within one generation-- Matthew 23:36-38; Matthew 24:1-3; Matthew 24:15; Matthew 24:34 --which was fulfilled forty years after Jesus predicted it.) Because there are many evil emperors in history, the "mystery of lawlessness is already at work" (2 Thessalonians 2:7); because deceivers remain, there are already many antichrists (1 John 2:18). When a prophecy was not fulfilled but deals with God’s unconditional promises, how much of it remains future? For example, the Israelites’ return from Babylon was a clear miracle, although Cyrus needed less miraculous persuasion to let his captives return home than Pharaoh had needed when the Israelites had been slaves in Egypt. (Indeed, he sent home other captive peoples as well.) But Isaiah’s exalted prophecies of the deserts blossoming with lilies were not fulfilled; Israel remained a very small kingdom. (This disappointment seemed no less severe than the generation that wandered in the wilderness after a miraculous deliverance from slavery in Egypt.) Some aspects of Isaiah’s prophecy were fulfilled in Jesus’ ministry, both physically and spiritually (e.g., Isaiah 35:5-6; Isaiah 61:1-2; Matthew 11:5; Luke 4:18-19). But history also suggests that God is preserving Israel for a purpose. Israel was scattered again a generation after Jesus’ crucifixion, as he warned would happen in judgment (Luke 21:20-24). Yet the Jewish people never disappeared, in contrast to the Hittites, Edomites, Philistines and other nations that were assimilated into other peoples. Jesus’ coming may appear at first sight a less dramatic deliverance than the first exodus or the return from Babylon, but within a few centuries Judea’s oppressors were converted to belief in Israel’s God--something more dramatic than happened with Pharaoh or Cyrus. Today perhaps half the world’s population acknowledges that there is one God; much of this faith may be inadequate in many respects, but from the standpoint of Jeremiah’s or Jesus’ day it would appear an amazing miracle. All this leads us to expect the fulfillment of future promises of restoration, though we cannot get past the prophets’ symbolic language to fathom all the details. Those who have been grafted into the biblical heritage and hope by faith (Romans 2:26-29; Romans 11:17-24) share in those future promises. We must be careful, however, in speaking of "double fulfillments." Many of the "secondary fulfillments" of Scripture we see in the New Testament are actually applications or analogies with the Old Testament, not claims to primary fulfillment. Thus, for example, when Hosea said, "Out of Egypt have I called my son," the context makes clear that he speaks of Israel in the exodus (Hosea 11:1). When Matthew applies this to Jesus, it is because he recognizes an analogy between Israel and Jesus, who repeats Israel’s history but overcomes: for instance, tested forty days in the wilderness (as Israel was for forty years), Jesus passes the very temptations Israel failed (note the context of the verses he quotes from Deuteronomy). The whole Old Testament bears witness to Christ because it reveals God’s character, his way of saving by grace, his ways of using deliverers, his principles for atonement, covenant and promise, his purposes for his people, and so forth. This means that understanding it properly leads us to recognize in Christ the promised deliverer, and God had all this in mind when he inspired the Old Testament Scripture. It does not mean, however, that we are free to come up with new "fulfillments" of Scripture randomly; the writers of the New Testament were guided by special inspiration, but we cannot make the same claim. That is not to deny that we should be led by the Spirit in understanding Scripture. It is rather to claim that if we say, "The Bible says," we dare say only what it specifically says. If we read into the Bible what is not there, we should be honest and say, "This is my view, not the Bible’s," or "I felt as if God were leading me this way." The safest way to read Scripture is to look for its one meaning; with so much of the Bible yet to understand correctly, we have no reason to go looking for "hidden" meanings!

(5) We should beware of "prophecy teachers" who claim that every detail of the biblical text is being fulfilled in our generation. Through most of church history and especially in the past two centuries, many interpreters have reinterpreted biblical prophecies to apply them to their own generation. Every decade or two, as news events change, they have to revise their interpretation of Scripture. In such cases teachers are not reading Scripture on its own authority, but interpreting it in light of current news reports. This is problematic because they do it on two assumptions: first, that all prophecy applies to the final generation (which is not true, biblically); and second, that we must be the final generation. But most generations in history believed they were the final generation! God says that for all we know we might be--or we might not (Mark 13:32); we must always be ready (Mark 13:33-37). In the New Testament, the “last days” included the entire period between the first and second coming, including the first century (Acts 2:17; 1 Timothy 4:1; 2 Timothy 3:1; Hebrews 1:2; James 5:3; 2 Peter 3:3).

    Most interpreters who claim, "All this is being fulfilled now" use biblical texts that are general enough to have been "fulfilled" similarly many other times. A number of books (e.g., Richard Kyle, The Last Days Are Here Again [Baker, 1998]) survey the history of errors that are common to every group that has practiced prophecy interpretation. Most people know that some groups repeatedly predicted the end of the world and were wrong, but we mostly know about those groups that kept insisting they were "somewhat" right. Yet from some early church fathers through some Reformers and many modern prophecy teachers, the same mistake has occurred over and over again. We should learn from history, as well as from Jesus’ warnings (Mark 13:32; Acts 1:7).

10. Revelation

Revelation is a particular kind of prophecy; because of its special importance and the interest it generates, I have devoted an entire section to its discussion. Revelation is a mixture of prophecy and apocalyptic (a special kind of prophecy that appears in Daniel, parts of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Zechariah), delivered in a letter format. On any book like Revelation, there will be serious differences of opinion, and we must be charitable in our disagreements. Nevertheless, it is worth exploring to see what the methods introduced above can teach us, and how they can take us beyond many of the views that have circulated widely. Reading Revelation as a whole (paying attention to whole-book context) and in light of its background (Old Testament and other background) will help us avoid or correct many of the common mistakes we have often inherited from others.

Revelation is not meant to be an obscure book. It may not be meant to satisfy our curiosity regarding all end-time details, but it certainly is a very practical book that presents God’s demands on our lives. Thus it opens by promising a blessing to those who heed and obey its message (Revelation 1:3)-which presumes that we can at least understand enough of it to obey it! An angel told Daniel that the book of Daniel would be sealed up and understood only in the end-time (Daniel 12:9); by contrast, the angel told John not to seal up his book, because the end-time was near (Revelation 22:10). Revelation may be “hidden” to those who think they need a special key in someone’s teaching to unlock it. It is certainly unclear to those who interpret it only in light of current newspaper headlines-which require us to readjust our interpretations every year or two. But it is not as hidden to those of us who read Revelation straight through and understand it in its whole-book context. All Scripture should be profitable for teaching and instruction in righteousness from the time it was written (2 Timothy 3:16-17)-so whatever else it might mean, at least Revelation must mean something relevant for our lives today. A History of Misinterpretations

Too often people in the past two centuries have used “newspaper hermeneutics” to understand Revelation-that is, they have interpreted it in light of newspaper headlines. This is why many prophecy teachers have to change their interpretations of the book so often. That they recognize that Jesus could be coming soon, hence that prophecy is being fulfilled now, is commendable, but assertions that some current event definitely fulfills a biblical passage only leads to disillusionment when today’s headlines end up in tomorrow’s trash bin.

One example of newspaper hermeneutics involves interpretations of the “kings of the east” in Revelation 16:12. In the early twentieth century, many North American interpreters thought of the “kings of the east” as the Ottoman Empire, headquartered in Turkey. Of course, the seven churches of western Asia Minor could never have conceived of kings of the “east” as Turkey, since Asia Minor is modern Turkey! But to western interpreters over a century ago, the Turks seemed the most threatening “eastern” empire on their horizon. After the Ottoman Empire was dismembered at the end of World War I, the new threatening “eastern” empire was imperial Japan (an empire that also threatened Korea, China, the Philippines and the rest of Asia). After imperial Japan was defeated at the end of World War II, western interpreters shifted the title to Communist China. The only common factor in any of these interpretations was that these hostile kings were to the “east” of those interpreting the passage; sometimes the interpretations may also reveal some anti-Asian sentiments, which are unbiblical and ungodly. How would John’s first readers have understood “kings of the east”? To everyone in the Roman Empire, and especially in Asia Minor, the greatest military threat was the Parthian Empire. The Parthian king rode a white horse, and claimed to be “king of kings and lord of lords.” The definitive boundary between the Roman and Parthian empires was the River Euphrates (cf. Revelation 9:14; Revelation 16:12). Although they ruled in the region of Iran and Iraq, the geography is less important than the image: the most feared enemies of the Empire would invade it. In the end, it was northern barbarians rather than an eastern empire that did the Roman Empire in, but Rome did die by invasion. Yet conquest remains a frightening warning of judgment in any generation, and from any location (Revelation 6:1-4).

Other prophetic interpretation errors abound. Jehovah’s Witnesses, a cult, wrongly predicted Christ’s return or other end-time events for 1874, 1878, 1881, 1910, 1914, 1918, 1925, 1975, and 1984 . Even Bible-loving Christians, however, have made mistakes in setting dates, contrary to our Lord’s teaching (Mark 13:32). The church father Hippolytus concluded that the Lord would come by the year 500. Saint Martin of Tours believed that the Antichrist was already alive in his day; Martin died in 397, so if the final Antichrist is still alive, he possesses remarkable longevity!

Others have offered “prophetic” interpretations of the news uncritically. Some prophecy teachers in the 1920s embraced a work called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as confirming their teaching; the work is now known to be a forgery used by the Nazis. Many Christians in the 1970s worried about a computer in Belgium called “the beast”-unaware that the computer existed only in a novel! Around 1980 I heard a prophecy teacher explain that the Soviet Union would, in the next year or two, invade Iran, take control of the world’s oil supply, and precipitate a world war. Needless to say, his prediction is running behind schedule at best.

Various books (including Richard Kyle, The Last Days Are Here Again [Baker, 1998]; Dwight Wilson, Armageddon Now! The Premillenarian Response to Russia and Israel Since 1917 [Grand Rapids: Baker, 1977]) have documented countless claims made by prophecy teachers through history, and especially in the past 150 years, about various contemporary events. These teachers were occasionally right (about as often as astrologers), but were wrong the vast majority of times.

Below is a brief sampling of mistakes in recent history, borrowed from the introduction to my own commentary on Revelation (Revelation, NIV Application Commentary [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000]):

•    Christopher Columbus voyaged to the New World hoping to help precipitate the biblical new heaven and earth

•    During the Reformation, Melchior Hoffman allowed himself to be arrested in Strassburg on the belief that it was about to become the New Jerusalem

•    Also during the Reformation, Thomas Müntzer aided the Peasant’s Revolt of 1524, believing that it would precipitate the final judgment; the peasants lost, and Müntzer was executed. In those days, end-time speculations died hard-sometimes literally!

•    When King James I persecuted early Baptist leaders in England they feared that they were enduring the final tribulation

•    Many Americans believed that King George III (probably one of England’s most pious rulers, as John Wesley recognized) was the final Antichrist

•    Many northern ministers expected the U.S. Civil War to establish God’s kingdom in their favor; some ministers expected God to weigh in on the opposite side

•    William Booth, an apostolic leader in the late nineteenth century whose Salvation Army was doing great works for God, believed that the Salvation Army he had founded “had been chosen by God as the chief agency to finally and fully establish” God’s kingdom

More recently, in Christians in the U.S. bought over 3 million copies of Edgar Whisenant’s 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Could Be in 1988. A friend of mine worked in a Christian bookstore whose owner urged her to sell as many copies of the book by the end of 1988 as possible; the owner warned that no one would buy the book in 1989. Sure enough, Christians failed to buy many copies of his updated version the next year, rescheduling Jesus’ return to 1989. Let it never be said that North American Christians are easily deceived-at least, twice in a row by the same author the following year. The world was watching, however: the campus newspaper at the university where I was doing my Ph.D. mocked the failed predictions. Others predicted the Lord’s return for various dates in the 1990’s or for the year 2000. As one other writer has pointed out, all predictors of times and seasons have had only one thing in common: they have all been wrong.

Often interpreters have proceeded on the basis of two assumptions: first, that we are the last generation; and second, that all prophecies apply to the last generation. The first assumption is always possible, but we cannot ever assert it dogmatically; every generation, looking at potential “signs” around them, has hoped that it might be the last generation. (Biblically, the last generation needs to do more than hope: we need to finish the task of world evangelization, whatever the cost.) The second assumption is simply wrong; many prophecies were already fulfilled within the Bible or await Jesus’ return. Not all pertain specifically to the final generation before his return.

Views about Revelation Traditionally, readers have taken one of the following approaches to interpreting Revelation:

1.    Preterist: those who believe that everything was fulfilled in the first century

2.    Historicist: those who believe that Revelation predicted the details of subsequent history which we can now recognize in history books.

3.Idealist: those who believe that Revelation contains timeless principles 4.Futurist: those who believe that Revelation addresses the future The historicist interpretation has been largely abandoned because history does not fit the outline of Revelation very well. (This is true even for the letters to the seven churches, which some once read as stages of church history; very few scholars accept this today even in the “dispensational” tradition where it was once most common. Dispensationalism has also changed a great deal since it was founded.) Of the other views, there is something legitimate in each, provided that we do not use one of them to exclude the other views. It is true that Revelation, like other books in the Bible, was written first to an ancient audience (the preterist view); the book explicitly addresses the seven churches in Asia Minor just like Paul addresses churches in his letters (Revelation 1:4), and Revelation is written in Greek and uses symbols that first-century readers would understand. This need not mean, however, that it does not speak about the future or (like the rest of the Bible) articulate principles useful for subsequent generations.

Revelation contains timeless principles relevant for the church in every generation. It also speaks about the future, in addition to the present and the past. Readers may disagree on how much of Revelation refers to the future, but almost everyone agrees that Revelation 19-22, at least, is future. Likewise, at least some of it refers directly to the past: the catching up of the child in Revelation 12 (whom most believe to be Jesus) has already happened.

Beyond these points, however, readers have come to startlingly different conclusions about Revelation’s teaching throughout history. We can illustrate this divergence by way of commenting on the “millennium,” the 1000-year period mentioned in Revelation 20. Many readers schooled in a particular tradition may be surprised to learn how many people they respect in church history have held other interpretations. That surprise offers some lessons for us: God does not use his servants solely on the basis of their end-time views, and we should always go back to the Bible to see what it teaches us. Just because everyone we know holds a certain view does not make it right; 150 years ago, most born-again Christians held a different view, and 100 years before that, a still different one.

After the Book of Revelation was finished, the first church fathers (leaders of the early church for the first few centuries) were premillennial; that is, they believed that Jesus would come back before the 1000 years in Revelation. They also were all post-tribulational; that is, they all believed either that they were already in the great tribulation, or that it was future but that Jesus would not return for his church until afterwards. But a few centuries later, by the time of Augustine, most Christians were amillennial. Many believed that when Constantine ended the persecutions against Christians, the 1000 years started, and many were expecting Jesus’ return 1000 years after Constantine. Another amillennial view, more common today and easier to defend from Scripture, is that the millennium is symbolic for the period between the first and second coming, with Christ ruling until his enemies are put under his feet. Not only were most Medieval Christians amillennial, but so were most of the Reformers (including Luther and Calvin). Most denominations founded in times when amillennialism predominated are most amillennial today; the same is true of churches in various parts of the world founded by amillennial missionaries. By contrast, churches founded by premillennial missionaries are usually premillennial! John Wesley believed in two separate millennia in Revelation 20, one in heaven and the other on earth.

Most leaders of the Great Awakenings in the eighteenth- and especially nineteenth-century United States were postmillennial, including Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney. During revivals that brought a large percentage of people in the early nineteenth-century United States to Christ, people exercised faith that “the gospel of the kingdom” would be “preached among all nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew 24:14). Charles Finney, who may have led as many as half a million people to Christ, and helped lead the movement against slavery, was postmillennial. Postmillennialists believed that they would, through God’s Spirit, establish God’s kingdom on earth, and then Jesus would come back to take his throne. Today most Christians view postmillennialism as naïve optimism, but it was the dominant view of Christians in the U.S. in the nineteenth century.

Another view is first attested in the nineteenth and popular in the twentieth century. This view is called dispensational premillennialism. In or around 1830, John Nelson Darby came up with a system of interpretation that divided Scripture between what applied to Israel (the Old Testament, Gospels, Revelation, and much of Acts) and what applied directly to the church (especially the epistles). Through this system he argued that spiritual gifts were not for the church age, and that there would be a separate coming for the church (before the tribulation) and for Israel (afterward). Once introduced, the view was popularized through the Scofield Reference Bible, becoming popular especially in the early twentieth century. The failure of postmillennial optimism in the nineteenth century and the disintegration of the old, evangelical consensus in the U.S. made this view appear appealing. And after all, who would complain about getting raptured before a tribulation rather than afterward?

We cannot afford the space to debate for or against this view here, but merely wish to point out that most people who hold this view are unaware that no one in church history held this view before 1830. Some today believe that this view is clear; but Christians read the Bible for over 1700 years without anyone, so far as we know, noticing it! (And that, even though most Christians through history believed that they were already in the end-times, and many, like many Christians for the past few generations, that they were in the final generation.) Each view cites verses to defend its position, but each of these verses must be examined in context to be sure of its meaning. That includes views that are widely held today, like dispensationalism; and we should remember that such views widely held today were rarer or (in this case) unheard of in earlier history. For whatever it is worth, the majority of scholars committed to Scripture today are either amillennial or non-dispensational (generally post-tribulational) premillennial, though there are good scholars with other views. In my opinion, premillennialists have an easier time explaining Revelation 20 itself, but amillennialists other end-time passages (for many, the debate then becomes whether to interpret the more explicit but single text in light of the many but less explicit ones, or the reverse). Since we will all know which view is correct by the time it happens, I see little point in arguing about it. Certainly it is foolish to break fellowship with other Christians over these matters! Why then do I raise the issue? Only to help us be more charitable to those who hold different interpretations of Revelation than we do. If we fight with our brothers and sisters over every single passage we interpret differently, then we will be out of fellowship with most of Christ’s body. The true church is united on the essential matters necessary for following Jesus, but beyond that it is our unity and love that shows the world God’s character (John 13:34-35; John 17:20-23). The real issues for us here must be the practical ones that our methods above can help us fathom. Some issues are very practical but no real Christian disputes them: for example, we all recognize that we must be ready for our Lord to return. But other issues are practical and often missed by interpreters who lack access to cultural background or whole-book context methods. Of these I offer a sampling below. The Use of Symbolism?

Some people argue that we should take everything in the book of Revelation literally. But Revelation is full of images that we cannot take literally. Was a woman literally clothed with the sun in Revelation 12:1 (with the moon literally under her feet and twelve stars on her head)? Is Babylon literally the genetic mother of every prostitute in the world (Revelation 17:5)? Revelation even tells us what some of its symbols represent, making clear that the book includes many symbols (Revelation 1:20). God could create the sort of monsters described in Revelation 9, but they resemble locusts in Joel’s prophecy, where they are simply a poetic description of either a locust invasion or an invading army (or a combination of both).

Then take as much as possible literally, comes the reply. But why should this be the case? Is it not better to be consistent with how we interpret the rest of Revelation, which clearly has many symbols? The appropriate way to read narratives is normally to read them literally, but as we noted above, that is not the best way to read Hebrew poetry, nor the Old Testament prophecies given in poetic form. Neither is it the way to read New Testament prophecies that use the same mode of symbolic communication as many Old Testament prophecies. Some statements may be literal (we argue that the seven churches are, for example, literal churches), but others (like the woman clothed with the sun) are not, far more often than in narrative. Some scholars, pointing to a Greek word for “signified” or “communicated” in Revelation 1:1, even suggest that one of the very terms used for revealing the message to John suggests that it came in symbols. (A related term for “sign” might bear this sense in Revelation 12:1; Revelation 12:3; Revelation 15:1.)

Jewish writers in John’s day who imitated the writing style of Old Testament prophets (writing a form of literature later called apocalyptic) frequently used symbolism as well (for example, 1 Enoch portrays angels impregnating women as stars impregnating cows). Just as Jewish teachers often used riddles to provoke thought, apocalyptic writings used enigmatic prophecies to challenge the hearers. Even if we had only the Old Testament as background for Revelation, however, we would expect an abundance of prophetic symbolism (for example, see especially Zechariah, Ezekiel, and many prophecies in Daniel and Isaiah).

Whole-Book Context

Revelation offers a running contrast between two cities: Babylon and the New Jerusalem. Babylon is a prostitute (Revelation 17:5); the New Jerusalem a bride (Revelation 21:2). Babylon is decked out with gold and pearls (Revelation 17:4), like a prostitute seeking to allure us with its offer of sinful, temporary gratification. The New Jerusalem is built of gold and its gates are pearls (Revelation 21:18; Revelation 21:21). No one with any sense would prefer Babylon to the New Jerusalem; but only those with faith in God’s promise wait for the city from above and resist present temptation. In the days of Augustine (a North African theologian, AD 354-430), Rome fell to northern barbarian invaders, and Christians were dismayed. Augustine contrasted Rome with the City of God; earthly cities and empires decked with splendor will perish, but God’s city is eternal, and his promise to us will never fail. The world demands that one take the mark of the beast, if one wishes to buy or sell (Revelation 13:17). But for those who refuse to compromise with the world’s kind of food (Revelation 2:14; Revelation 2:20), God offers a promise of eternal food (Revelation 2:7; Revelation 2:17) and manna even when the world persecutes them (Revelation 12:6). Those who think themselves rich may be poor in what matters (Revelation 3:17), just as those who seem to be poor may be rich in what matters (Revelation 2:9). Jesus offers the true gold of the New Jerusalem to those who trust him rather than in their worldly wealth (Revelation 3:18).

What can we learn about the New Jerusalem? Some translations explain that the New Jerusalem is 1500 miles in every direction, including high (Revelation 21:16); this would make it about 1495 miles higher than the world’s tallest mountain, where the air is already thin hence difficult to breathe. Admittedly, God could change the laws of physics if he wanted to, but there is another clue that the specific measure given for the New Jerusalem offers a symbolic point: in a city 1500 miles (about 2400 km.), the wall is only 72 yards (about 80 meters). The answer to the significance of these apparently disproportionate measurements comes when we read the verse in Greek, or in a very literal translation, or in the footnote in most other translations: the New Jerusalem is 12,000 stadia cubed, with a wall of 144 cubits. By the time a reader of the book of Revelation gets to chapter 21, they have seen these numbers before. Revelation 7:4-8 and Revelation 14:1-5 speak of 144,000 chaste male Jews, 12,000 from each tribe. Because “Jerusalem” in the Bible referred to the people (Jerusalemites) as well as the place, the connection here makes sense: here are the New Jerusalemites who stand on Mount Zion (Revelation 14:1), the people who will live in the New Jerusalem! The city belongs to those who endured for it, those who were “chaste” (Revelation 14:4) and did not sleep with the prostitute Babylon. Does this mean that only male Jews will live in the New Jerusalem? (If the numbers are literal, each of them would get over 15 square miles on the city’s ground floor.) Will Gentile Christians have no home there? Quite the contrary! The list of tribes in Revelation 7:4-8 resembles military census lists in the Old Testament, suggesting an end-time army here. Jewish armies were male, and many Jewish people expected an end-time army; some also expected this army to be chaste before the battle. Not surprisingly, Revelation speaks of this group having “overcome” or “triumphed” (Revelation 15:2-4; cf. Revelation 14:3); the beast might overcome God’s servants on a human level (Revelation 11:7; Revelation 13:7), but they overcame by refusing to disobey the Lord who holds the final victory (Revelation 12:11). But does Revelation mean a literal army of 144,000 Jews? One can interpret it this way, and it would make sense; after all, the Bible does speak of Jewish people turning to the Lord in the end-time (Romans 11:26). But in the context of Revelation, I believe that another interpretation fits better.

Revelation elsewhere speaks of those who are spiritually Jewish (Revelation 2:9; Revelation 3:9). Likewise, in the ancient world lampstands (John’s symbol for the churches in Revelation 1:20) are symbolic for Jewish faith. Sometimes a second vision or dream repeated the point of the first one (e.g., Genesis 37:7; Genesis 37:9; Genesis 40:1-7), and the same is probably true here: in the next paragraph, this triumphant army of 144,000 Israelites turns out to be a numberless crowd from all nations (Revelation 7:9-17). The promises given to this crowd in Revelation 7:15-17 are promises God made to Israel in the Old Testament; but by following Israel’s king these Gentiles have been grafted into Israel’s heritage and promises, hence are spiritually Jewish. Whole-book context clarifies the connection between these two paragraphs. Two chapters earlier, John “hears” about the lion from the tribe of Judah, a symbol Judaism used for the warrior Messiah. But when John turns, what he “sees” is a slain lamb-one who conquered by his own death (Revelation 5:5-6). Now John “hears” about 144,000 (Revelation 7:4), but when he turns what he “sees” is a numberless multitude (Revelation 7:9), possibly of martyrs who have shared Christ’s suffering. This fits what the text itself says. The 144,000 are “the servants of God” (Revelation 7:3)-a title which elsewhere in Revelation refers to all believers in Jesus (Revelation 1:1; Revelation 22:3). Are there only 144,000 servants of God? Are all of them ethnically Jewish, and all of them male? Certainly only God’s servants will inhabit the New Jerusalem, but God’s servants include both Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus. The New Jerusalem is for all those who trust in Christ (Revelation 21:7-8; Revelation 21:14; Revelation 21:27), and offers the same promise this passage suggests for the Gentile Christians (Revelation 21:4 and Revelation 7:17). Jehovah’s Witnesses wrongly take the number (144,000) literally but the male Jewish part figuratively; many Christians take both elements literally; in the context of Revelation, however, both elements are probably symbolic, with a deeper message for the church than most Christians recognize.

Whole-book context also offers insight into what Revelation may mean when it mentions the mark of the beast. Should we preach about that by simply warning people to avoid something in the future, or does it have something to teach us in the present? Against what most of us have been taught, a consistent reading with the rest of Revelation suggests that this mark may not be visible to people. Notice the other marks written on people in the book of Revelation. For example, believers will become pillars in God’s future temple, and just as other ancient pillars had names inscribed on them, so we will have God’s name and the name of the New Jerusalem inscribed on us (Revelation 3:12; cf. Revelation 2:17). Forever God’s and the lamb’s name will be written on our foreheads (Revelation 22:4), perhaps like a slave brand or some other kind of brand showing to whom we belong. Jesus comes back with a name written on his thigh (Revelation 19:12-13; Revelation 19:16), perhaps so John could read his title in the vision. Babylon the great has a name written on her forehead (Revelation 17:5), but just as Babylon is not a literal woman, we recognize that the inscription is part of the vision, not literally written on a woman’s head.

Just like God placed a mark on the righteous in Ezekiel 9:4-6, so God seals the 144,000 to protect them during his judgments (Revelation 7:3). As in Ezekiel, this is a mark that only God himself sees. Because there were no chapter breaks in the original Bible, the first readers would have readily noticed the contrast between the 144,000 and the rest of the world (Revelation 13:16-18; Revelation 14:1-5). Those who follow the beast bear his name (Revelation 13:17); those who follow the lamb bear his (Revelation 14:1). The beast, progeny of its master the dragon, has seven heads and ten horns (Revelation 12:3; Revelation 13:1; Revelation 17:3; Revelation 17:7). But a second beast is a deliberate counterfeit of the lamb (compare Revelation 5:6): he has two horns like a lamb, but speaks the dragon’s message (Revelation 13:11). A small army of 144,000 follow the true lamb; the rest of the world (the army of which is at least 200 million, Revelation 9:16) follows the beast. Each follower has an identifying mark showing their loyalty, either to the lamb or to the beast. Whether those in the world need to see a literal mark showing who belongs to them or simply signs of allegiance, the preaching point is clear: we must be loyal to God’s side, not the world’s, no matter what the cost.

Background

John probably wrote this book while in exile (Revelation 1:9) in the time of the Roman emperor Domitian. Domitian demanded that everyone worship his statue as if he were a god, and the early Christians refused to give it. This issue was most pressing in western Asia Minor, where the seven churches were; some of these churches already were facing persecution (Revelation 2:9-10; Revelation 2:13; Revelation 3:9). The first audience of Revelation would have found its warning about worshiping the image of the beast (Revelation 13:15) relevant for their own day! Some of the other churches, however, were compromising with the very world system that was killing their siblings elsewhere (Revelation 2:14; Revelation 2:20; Revelation 3:2; Revelation 3:15-18). The seven churches of Asia Minor (Revelation 1:4) were an audience just as real as any church to which Paul wrote. The churches are in the seven most prominent cities of the Roman province of Asia, and are arranged in precisely the sequence that a messenger traveling from Patmos would deliver the letters. Many issues addressed (such as wealth and distasteful water in Laodicea) address precisely the issues we know were relevant to these particular churches. This is not to say that the message is relevant only for the church addressed; Jesus invites everyone to listen in on his message to each of the churches (Revelation 2:7). But we learn from their example the same way we learned from the churches Paul addressed: we learn the background so we can understand what issues the inspired writer was really addressing.

We spoke above about Babylon. This need no more be a literal name than the false prophets’ parents had literally named them “Balaam” or “Jezebel” in Revelation 2:14; Revelation 2:20. As most Christians through history have recognized, the Babylon of John’s day is Rome. Everyone knew that Rome was a city on seven hills (Revelation 17:9); Rome even had an annual festival called “Seven Mountains,” celebrating its founding. The imports in Revelation 18:12-13 are precisely the imports we know were most prominent in Rome, and in John’s day Rome was the only mercantile empire to rule the kings of the earth by sea (Revelation 17:18; Revelation 18:15-19). Most importantly, Jewish sources (and probably 1 Peter 5:13) already called Rome “Babylon.” This was because Rome, like Babylon, had enslaved God’s people and destroyed the temple. The implications of associating Revelation’s “Babylon” with Rome are dramatic. In Revelation 18:2-3, John hears a funeral dirge over Babylon (just like the dirge over literal Babylon in Isaiah 21:9). Rome, the mightiest empire the world had yet known, seemed ready to crush the tiny church of Jesus Christ. Rome had exiled the aged prophet John to the island of Patmos (Revelation 1:9). Yet John hears a funeral dirge over this mighty empire! What faith it must have taken the early Christians to believe this promise that their oppressor would fall; yet John stood on the shoulders of earlier prophets who had prophesied against Assyria, literal Babylon, and so forth, and their prophecies had come to pass. Assyria, Babylon, Rome, and all the other empires of past history now lie in ashes. But the church of Jesus Christ, whom past empires threatened to stamp out, is more widespread than ever before! In a day when the church was established mainly in a few cities of the Roman Empire, John prophesied a church from every tribe and people and nation (Revelation 5:9; Revelation 7:9)-and so it has come to pass! But while “Babylon” for John’s first readers is Rome, that is simply because Rome filled the role in John’s day. If Rome could be a new Babylon, there could be other new Babylons or new Romes, other evil empires that usurp the rightful role of God’s future kingdom. These need not be geographically in Italy any more than Rome as a new Babylon was geographically in the Middle East. In other words, Babylon is the city of the world, like the city called “Sodom” and “Egypt” in 11:8; the world system, in its rebellion against God, is the alternative to the New Jerusalem. But just as the first Babylon fell, just as Rome fell, so likewise the other Babylon’s and Rome’s of history will fall. The final empires will collapse in the day when the kingdom of this world becomes the kingdom of our God and of his Christ (Revelation 11:15)! The Roman background might be relevant for understanding the evil king in Revelation 13:1-3; Revelation 17:10-11. The first emperor to officially persecute the church was Nero, who burned Christians alive as torches to light his gardens at night. When Nero was killed, however, the belief that he was coming back became so widespread that some impostors rose up claiming to be Nero; a few years before Revelation was written, one false Nero even persuaded the Parthians to follow him across the river Euphrates to invade Asia Minor. Many scholars thus suggest that the head wounded to death and returning to life in Revelation 13:3 is a “new Nero.” This does not mean that he is literal Nero come back (any more than the figures in Revelation 11:3-6 are a literal Moses or literal Elijah come back); it would simply mean that he comes “in the spirit and power” of Nero (cf. Luke 1:17), i.e., he is being compared with Nero, the terrible persecutor. That is, Revelation uses the language of its day to say, “the future dictator will be like Nero Caesar, just as evil and persecuting Christians just as much.” A Parthian invasion from across the Euphrates was a horrifying image in John’s day, and a new Nero warned of future suffering.

Two further factors support this association with Nero. Revelation speaks of a past king not currently reigning, who would return (Revelation 17:10-11); Nero was definitely one of the few kings before the current one when Revelation was written. Further, if his name is spelled in Hebrew letters, it comes out to 666. Many early Christians thought that Nero would return as the final Antichrist. There are, of course, other possible interpretations; “beast” in Hebrew letters also comes out to 666, and this point is no less relevant. Whether Nero or not, the final evil world ruler will be a wicked one! And the character of that evil ruler is already at work in others who do evil (2 Thessalonians 2:7; 1 John 2:18). Let us never underestimate evil-nor forget that in the final analysis, the righteous God is still in control (Revelation 17:17).

Other Reapplications of Old Testament Images

We noted above that the lion turns out to be a lamb. We could also note the reapplication of the plagues of Exodus in Revelation’s judgments (chapters 8, 9, and 16), or the city called “Sodom” and “Egypt.” Revelation is not pretending to “predict” the plagues of Moses’ day, nor is the city of which it speaks the literal Sodom or Egypt of old (as if it could be both!) In Revelation 21:16, the New Jerusalem’s height is equal to its breadth and length-that is, it is shaped like a cube. This probably evokes the holy of holies in the Old Testament, which only the high priest could enter, and only once a year. In the New Jerusalem, however, all of us who believe in Jesus will be in God’s full presence, as in the most holy place, without any barriers (a glory that our current mortal bodies could not withstand, but we will have glorified bodies then!) God’s tabernacle will be among us, and he will dwell with us, and we will be his people (Revelation 21:3).

Ezekiel prophesied a glorious new temple, with a river of water flowing from the temple, and fruitful trees on either side of the river (Ezek 47). Yet Revelation declares that there is no temple in the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21:22). This is not to say that Revelation contradicts Ezekiel; instead, Revelation speaks of a greater reality to which Ezekiel’s symbolism pointed. Ezekiel was showing that the future temple would be more glorious than the old temple. Revelation’s promise is not less than Ezekiel’s, but more: God and the lamb are the temple (Revelation 21:22), and the river flows from their throne (Revelation 22:1). The river is the river of life (Revelation 22:1), and Ezekiel’s trees are the tree of life (Revelation 22:2). These new details point to a greater promise than Ezekiel’s, by alluding back to Genesis. The original Eden had a river and tree of life, but was marred by a curse; the New Jerusalem has a river and tree of life, but no more curse (Revelation 22:3). Paradise will be in God’s presence forever and ever.

God’s presence is not just a promise for the future New Jerusalem, but also for believers in heaven. Examine the furnishings of heaven in Revelation’s scenes of it: for example, the ark (Revelation 11:19); an altar of sacrifice (Revelation 6:9); an altar of incense (Revelation 8:3-5; Revelation 9:13; Revelation 14:18); lamps (Revelation 4:5); a sea (Revelation 15:2); and harps (Revelation 5:8; Revelation 14:2; Revelation 15:2). How is heaven portrayed? It appears like a temple (the Old Testament temple had all of the above-mentioned furnishings). Thus it is not surprising that we find people worshiping in heaven; Revelation portrays it symbolically as a temple to remind us of our main activity there. We are never as close to heaven on this earth as when we worship God, an activity we will continue in a purer and fuller way in his presence forever. In Revelation 6:9-11 we read of souls “under the altar,” martyrs who died to spread the message of Jesus. Why are they “under the altar”? The blood of some sacrifices was poured out at the base of the altar in the Old Testament (Leviticus 4:7). These servants of God, by dying for the gospel, share in Christ’s sufferings. As the lamb in Revelation 5:5-6 was sacrificed, so these servants of Christ have become living sacrifices with him.

Let us take one more example, perhaps the most controversial one possible, namely, the length of Revelation’s tribulation. Are the 1260 days (Revelation 11:2-3; Revelation 12:6; Revelation 12:14; Revelation 13:5) literal or figurative? Whether they are literal or figurative, several factors warn us not to assume, before investigating, that Revelation must mean them literally. Revelation gets this length of time from similar figures in Daniel (e.g., Daniel 7:25; Daniel 12:7; Daniel 12:11); but it may address a different issue than Daniel does. In Daniel, this period involves an abomination of desolation (Daniel 11:31; Daniel 12:11); Jesus shows that at least one of these happened before Revelation was written, within the generation Jesus spoke of it (Matthew 24:15; Matthew 24:34; Mark 13:14; Mark 13:30). (Those who claim that “generation” means “race” there are making up their own meanings for Greek words; the term always means “generation” in the Gospels.)

Daniel’s literal abomination had already been fulfilled before Revelation was written (Revelation was written over two decades after the temple’s destruction!) Further, Daniel’s chronology rests on a symbolic reapplication of Jeremiah’s “70 years” prophecy, after the 70 years were nearly over (Daniel 9:2-3; Daniel 9:24). If Daniel could symbolically reapply a number in Jeremiah, why could not Revelation reapply a number in Daniel? Many of John’s Jewish contemporaries also reapplied Daniel’s period of time symbolically, so everyone would have understood this method if Revelation followed it. This would not mean that Daniel was not literal on this point (as we said, at least one of Daniel’s abominations was fulfilled literally before Revelation was written, according to Jesus); only that Revelation applies the number differently. Because Revelation often uses numbers (like 12,000 and 144) symbolically, it is possible that Revelation borrows Daniel’s number to tell us less about the length of time than the kind of time. But so far we have only argued that it is possible, not that Revelation actually uses the period symbolically. How can we know whether it employs the number symbolically or literally? In Revelation 12:1-6, the dragon (the devil) opposes a woman and the child born from her. When the child is caught up to rule the nations with a rod of iron, the woman fled into the wilderness for 1260 days. Almost everyone agrees that the child refers to Jesus (cf. Revelation 12:17; Revelation 19:15); if so, the 1260 days seem to start when Jesus was exalted to heaven (over 60 years before Revelation was written). It begins with the first coming and ends with the second coming. For Judaism, the final tribulation was the period directly before the end (sometimes three and a half, or seven, or forty, or even 400 years), but we Christians recognize that we are already in the end-time. The coming Messiah has already come once, and we who live between the first and second coming live in the end-time, always awaiting our Lord’s return. Just as the lion is the lamb, Christ’s going and return frame the tribulation; all Jewish expectations take on new meaning in light of Christ’s coming.

It is perfectly likely that there will in fact be further intensification of tribulation just before the end, but Revelation’s point, at least in this passage, has a broader relevance to us than that. Our present time in the world is a time of tribulation, but we can take courage, because Jesus has overcome the world (John 16:33). The woman and her other children were in the wilderness (Revelation 12:6; Revelation 12:17), which tells us about the nature of the in-between time. Israel lived in the wilderness between their redemption from Egypt and their inheritance in the promised land. By Christ’s exaltation we, too, have begun to experience salvation; Satan can no longer accuse us (Revelation 12:10); but we must still endure in this world until Christ’s return (Revelation 12:11-12).

There is not space here to address whether this is the only sense of the tribulation period in Revelation (I address the issue at greater length in relevant passages in my commentary on Revelation). But the present “end-time” does appear to be the point in chapter 12, and the New Testament often does view the present age as the end-time period. Ever since the first apostles, we have been in the “last days” (Acts 2:17; 1 Timothy 4:1; 2 Timothy 3:1; James 5:3; 1 Peter 1:20; 2 Peter 3:3). Jewish people spoke of the end-time as the “birth-pangs of the Messiah,” but Jesus taught that the birth pangs have already started, whereas the end will come only when we have finished our mission of preaching the gospel to all nations (Matthew 24:6-8; Matthew 24:14). Paul declared that even creation is already experiencing birth pangs with us to bring forth the new world (Romans 8:22-23). Knowing that we live in the end-time should affect how we live. Since Pentecost we have lived in the era of the outpouring of the Spirit; we live in an era begun by Jesus and to be finished by him. Therefore we should keep focused on who sent us, what our mission is, and what and whom we are really to be looking for.

Conclusion for Chapters 1-10 A general principle for interpreting any text is to seek to understand it in light of its full context-the whole book in which it occurs (its themes and plot or argument) and its historical background. Another principle is to take into account the kind of writing a work is; thus, for example, we read Mark as an ancient biography, Acts as a work of ancient history, Isaiah as a book of prophecies (mostly poetic in form), and Psalms as a collection of prayer and praise songs. In the same way, we read Revelation as prophecy or apocalypse (which would include many symbols). Each kind of literature has some special characteristics (for instance, we should interpret most narratives literally, but recognize many symbolic figures of speech in poetry and prophecy).

Once one has mastered the skills mentioned above, one needs outside resources only for help with background (like The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament; for many details, the new International Standard Bible Encyclopedia) and with words or phrases in Greek and Hebrew that might clarify the translations. But this course has focused especially on developing the skills the interpreter needs before pressing deeper. They may be summarized as literary context, cultural context, and context of genre (kind of writing).