This blog is an attempt to formulate for myself a hermeneutic in which I apply literary techniques to the Bible. The entries will be fragmentary as they might in a notebook that one writes down casual thoughts, preserving them in order to shape them into a more coherent form or a later date. I would appreciate any comments, both positive and negative that will lead me to express ideas more clearly and more accurately. I would appreciate being referred to books and articles in which the writers take a similar or dissimilar view. I have very little ego. If I respond to a correction with that argument is basically to test the soundness of my idea for the challenging idea, or to clarify the new idea. I will readily change my mind and hopefully adopt the idea which is the best.
Some of the ideas that follow are intended to define what I am trying to do with what I call a literary hermeneutic.
I would like to deal with the words as they are written in the Bible. I am trying to strip away many of the ideas about the Bible passage or story that I have accumulated over the years from folks, Sunday school teachers, preachers, and general discussions.
I would try to teach the Bible as a unity erasing as best I can the divisions between the books and the Testaments, the question of authorship, and attempting as best I can and illiminate the logical fallacy that I call the appeal to progress which holds that a later opinion is always superior to an earlier opinion. But today we are wiser than those in the centuries before.
I believe that the Bible is a unity. Although it has religious implications, interpretation is simpler, if I assume that God wrote the manuscript from the first word in Genesis to the last in Revelation. I will refer to him as the author, mostly to avoid all the baggage that textual criticism brings with it. Indulge me!
I will not make any of the passages I read conform to the theological presuppositions which may tend to struggle and twist the simplicity of what is being said.
I will try to establish, although I do not know Hebrew and Greek, with the word means that is used in the Scripture. Words can change meanings in a very short period of time and I will try as best I can to find out what the word meant when the author used it.
I will operate under the assumption that the book is a unified whole, in the best tradition of any novel or a history book or play.
I will also try to establish the events of the narrative or narratives within the time period that they occurred, since this will often explain why and how events occurred the way they did.
I may have some preconceptions it will be helpful for me to either admit that initially or have them pointed out to me. Already I will tell you that I believe the Bible is a unified work, that it was written by God through various number of human authors, that even the smallest detail is important and has meaning, that variants in the text are important and not an impediment to understanding our accuracy,
The responses I’m looking for our corrections or additional references which would expand and clarify what I am writing.
Again, the material in this blog is a first draft, and will appear again and again in a rewritten form. I do not want to have to spend a great deal of time crafting and polishing when I would much prefer to be reading and creating literary interpretations of the Bible.
My Bible Study Notebook 