The blunder in our Bible reading

I’ve been talking to the trainees at CBS about how to read the Bible.

Like most of you, they already have a decent idea of how to do this. They know about the reading process of COMA—Context, Observation, Meaning, Application. And (again like most of you) they have also learned to read the Bible by doing it over many years, and by hearing the Bible taught and preached well over many years.

But I love a good clarifying definition, so I’ve put together this one to sharpen their understanding of what’s involved in reading the Bible (or ‘exegesis’, if we want to make it sound more impressive). I’m suggesting that:

The aim of good Bible reading is to listen and respond to what God is doing in this text—through these sentences addressed to their implied original readers within the larger biblical context of God’s saving revelation of his Son

There are all sorts of interesting things we could explore in this definition.

But the aspect I want to explore in today’s post is the seemingly innocuous phrase “through these sentences”. Our goal in Bible reading is to see and respond to what God is doing through the sentences and paragraphs that make up the passage that we’re reading.

A statement of the bleedin’ obvious if ever there was one.

But this obvious statement is necessary because of what it denies: we don’t say things or do things with words—only by arranging those words into sentences. Sentences are how we say something (or do something) through language.

Why am I teaching you to suck eggs like this? Because I think we have a problem in this area.

Perhaps it’s because we love the Bible and its words so much. But judging by the exegetical arguments I keep hearing us make, we sometimes seem to think that meaning is conveyed by words rather than sentences—as if words are little suitcases that carry around with them all kinds of meanings and concepts and ideas that can be unpacked into any given sentence. Or that what a word is doing in this sentence can be discovered by noting what it was doing in that sentence over there.

This is the blunder I keep seeing us make in our Bible reading and exegesis and preaching. (And I have done it myself more than once!)

Let me try to explain what I mean with a non-biblical example.

Let’s say that when the Moore College scholars of the future are poring over the 18 leather-bound volumes of the collected works of Tony Payne, they read these two sentences about boys, one in volume 3:

God blessed me with two boisterous, clever boys—Luke and Nick.

And another in volume 7:

I separated the two boys who were fighting, and told them to stop being so stupid.

In these sentences, the lexical sense or meaning of the word ‘boy’ is the one we’d find in the dictionary: a male child or young person, or possibly a slave or servant. This is the semantic range or field of the word ‘boy’. We discern which part of the semantic range applies in any particular sentence by … reading the sentence in its context—that is, whether the boys in question were are someone’s male children (as in the first sentence) or just young males generally (more likely in the second) or slaves (unlikely in either).

So far, so easy.

However, various concepts are also associated with boys in these two sentences—boisterousness, cleverness, fighting, the fact that they come as blessings from God. But these concepts aren’t super-glued to the word ‘boy’, as if they follow it around wherever it goes. This is one of the key mistakes we make in Bible reading and exegesis. We take concepts that are associated with a word in one sentence, and transfer them into another sentence in a completely different place.

We say things like this as we write our biblical commentary: “Payne often associates boys with cleverness (see vol. 3, p. 27). For Payne, ‘boy’ is cleverness language. It’s likely therefore that the two fighting boys in volume 7 were having an intellectual dispute, not merely a physical one, and that when Payne tells them not to be ‘stupid’ he is referring to a temporary lack of good sense, not impugning their innate cleverness.”

This is linguistic balderdash.

Boy is not ‘cleverness language’. Cleverness doesn’t ride around on the coat-tails of the word ‘boy’ waiting to jump into any given sentence that ‘boy’ appears in. ‘Boy’ means a ‘young male or male child’, and if you want to say that this or that boy is clever (or stupid), you do that by making a sentence. In everyday English, we know this, and would never make such a basic linguistic error. We know that you don’t say things by using a word and expecting your hearers or readers to know or remember how you might have used that word on some completely different occasion, and then read those associated concepts or referents into the sentence that is coming out of your mouth.

But somehow, when we come to read the Bible, we find ourselves doing strange things like this quite often (and I confess I have done so myself).

For example, have you ever read (or made) an argument like this one?

Many opinions of working women have been shaped by the word in Genesis 2:18, ‘helper’. This word therefore merits some greater attention. Was the woman to be merely a helpful assistant to the man? In our day we use the word ‘helper’ in the sense of a plumber's assistant, handing the boss the right wrench for the job. But that is far from the meaning of the Hebrew word used to describe the first woman.

God created the woman as an ‘ezer’ [the Hebrew word in Gen 2:18]. The word ‘ezer’ occurs twenty-one times in the Old Testament. In two cases it refers to the first woman, Eve, in Genesis 2. Three times it refers to powerful nations Israel called on for help when besieged. In the sixteen remaining cases the word refers to God as our help. He is the one who comes alongside us in our helplessness. That's the meaning of ‘ezer’. Because God is not subordinate to his creatures, any idea that an ezer-helper is inferior is untenable.

This author wants to counter the idea that because Eve is Adam’s helper, this renders Eve somehow inferior or subordinate to Adam. And the argument starts well by pointing out (quite rightly) that just because we often associate the word ‘helper’ with junior apprentices or assistants in our linguistic context, we can’t then read those concepts back into Genesis 2—as if the concepts of ‘inferior status’ are attached to the word ‘helper’, and can be unloaded into whichever sentence ‘helper’ appears in.

Unfortunately, however, the author then makes precisely the same mistake with the OT usage of the word. It’s quite true that the word ‘helper’ is used elsewhere in the OT to refer to God, with associated concepts of superiority or salvation or ‘coming alongside us in our helplessness’. But this doesn’t mean that these concepts are attached to the word ‘helper’, and can be applied in any other sentence that ‘helper’ appears in. The word ‘helper’ doesn’t mean ‘a superior or powerful person who comes alongside us in our helplessness’.

The word ezer in Hebrew means almost exactly what the word ‘helper’ does in English: ‘someone who offers help or comfort or assistance’. Whether that ‘helper’ is superior or inferior or subordinate or divine or powerful or incompetent can only be determined by seeing what sort of helper they were—by reading what the author said about that helper