I do have a slight bone to pick with one thing Chris said. I’ll quote it in full:

1. Start with the fundamentals. Help your students know that the Bible is quite simple about 1) God 2) humans and 3) how humans interact with God and each other for the sake of the world. For example, the creation narrative is not God’ science thesis it is a biography of God.

Chris, are we reading the same Bible? Because the one I’m reading is really quite complex about God, humans and how humans interact with God. I’m not even just talking about the complex, culturally bound rituals that the Israelites used to interact with God. That Old Testament paragon, David, has a rather complex relationship with God; to say nothing of his relations with other human beings! Job may be among the most complex stories about a human and his relationship with God ever devised. In addition we have a God who at times kills people for slight infractions (Nadab and Abihu) and at other times lets things slide (the aforementioned David). I’m not even talking about theological diversity within the text, or questions of hermeneutics. The Bible is complex, not simple.

I do agree that Genesis is not God’s science thesis. Chris is absolutely right there. But I’m not sure that what we need to do with students is try to make the Bible simpler. I think what we actually need to do is help them engage in the Bible’s amazing, beautiful and ultimately real complexity. Our lives are–at times–hopelessly complex, why should the Bible be any different? Students don’t want simple. They want authentic. The Bible is among the most authentic books I have ever read. I think it is high time that youth pastors and others who are spiritual mentors to teens begin showing students the full range of complexity in Scripture. Help them engage with that. Don’t tell them the Bible is simple and if they just read for five minutes a day their lives will get better. That’s a lie. Tell them the Bible is hard. It’s difficult to understand if you don’t study it. It is confounding sometimes. But it’s also worth reading because it’s the story of God and humans and how we interact and clash with God and each other. It’s about life. It can help you, but probably not with the paltry sum of five minutes a day devoted to it. This is what we need to tell the young people we shepherd.

So, if we ought to be telling people this, why do we so often tell them something quite different? I think, in this case, the answer is simple. Wrestling with the Bible in all its authentic glory is difficult for us just like it’s difficult for students. We want to be able to give them a neat package of faith that they can put under their bed and live with. It’s not only what we want, it’s what their parents want and it’s what our pastors want. But it simply isn’t what’s best for students. The other problem is that dealing with the Bible honestly means we have to study it more. That might mean less time to devote to planning that awesome game. How many youth pastors even know Hebrew and Greek, let alone some basic ancient near eastern history? Yet those same youth pastors think they can wrestle with the Bible in an authentic way, and teach their students to do the same? I have my doubts (requisite disclaimer: I’m not saying God hates people who don’t know Hebrew and Greek. I’m saying knowing these things is essential to digging deeply into Scripture). What’s worse, most of our curriculum in youth ministry is designed by people who have little or no formal training in Biblical studies. Who would use a biology textbook written by someone who has a single undergraduate degree in psychology? No one! Yet we essentially do the same thing when we use curriculum designed by someone who has an undergrad degree in youth ministry, but little formal training in Bible.

My point is not to disparage youth pastors and others who work with teens. Rather, it’s to say that we need to step up and do the hard work that we need to do to help students. There are countless online classes where you could learn Hebrew and Greek. Picking up a few books on ancient near eastern history and reading them is also easily accomplished. Building a collection of good commentaries and consulting them during lesson preparation is also a straight forward way of quickly beginning to equip yourself to study the Bible well. Alternatively, visit your local Bible college or seminary library to cut down on expenses.

In short, I think Chris is on to some good stuff, and in fairness he does say “start with the fundamentals,” not end with them. But still, we need to be upfront with students from the start: the Bible is a hard book to understand, but we still have to do our best.

As a brief aside, the fact that Scripture is written in a language means that it is culturally conditioned since all languages are–by nature–culturally conditioned.

Hurtado’s brief post is well worth the few moments it will take to read.

As some readers may know, I am interested in the Hebrew verbal system. That being the case it should come as no surprise that I find Andrason’s article extremely interesting. However, I would like to withhold any substantive comments until I’ve had a chance to process through his points in a more thorough manner.

Let me give an example. A conservative evangelical Christian might read any number of prophecies in the Hebrew Bible and automatically apply that prophecy to Jesus Christ, because she has been predisposed to do so. Whether formally or not, she has been taught to read biblical prophecy in a certain way. Similar things take place when a reader fails to understand when metaphor is being used and when it is not. Conservative evangelicals are regularly taught that the Bible is a history book. As a result, they expect it to conform to the norms of modern history books–much like I automatically expected Charles’ map image to conform to my modern idea of what a map is for.

One could look at this from another direction. I have often heard pastors declare that the Bible is God’s love letter to each individual in a congregation. Pastors often mean well when they say this, but I think that it again leads to a misunderstanding of exactly what the Bible is. This in turn leads to a misreading of the text because the reader expects one thing but encounters something that is, in actuality, something quite different. This is, of course, at the heart of the evangelical debates about inerrancy, creationism, etc. Charles points out that looking at cognate texts can help us understand the Bible. He’s absolutely right. Looking at other ancient near eastern texts helps the modern reader to approach the Bible in the proper light so that when it does not conform to a modern ideal of a love letter, or history book, or whatever else, we are able to understand why and interpret it properly.

As it turns out, the map that Charles displayed wasn’t inaccurate at all. My expectations of it were what was inaccurate.

The most recent review that Lenzi complains about may be found here. When I read this review I was taken aback by the following statement (also quoted by Lenzi):

Those who believe that the Bible is the literary product of divine revelation will agree that Oswalt has shown that the Bible is different from the other religious writings from the ancient Near East. Those who reject the notion that God has revealed himself in the history of Israel will remain unpersuaded that the Bible is a unique book containing divine revelation and that the religion of Israel is different from the other religions in the ancient Near East.

Why was I taken aback? Simple–I believe the Bible is a literary product of divine revelation, but based on the review I seriously doubt that I would agree that Oswalt had shown that the Bible is different from other documents in the ANE and thus divine revelation. I imagine I would come to the conclusion that Oswalt merely wanted to believe that to be the case, and so strung together a rather lengthy list of assertions to that end and called it a book. This is the kind of either-or thinking among Evangelicals that frustrates me. The thinking is that either the Bible must be entirely unique and unlike any human document or it is not divine revelation. I don’t understand why the Bible can not be quite similar to other ANE documents and still be divine revelation. Apart from this, the idea that one can prove that something is divine revelation is silly at best.

So, on the one hand I think that RBL needs to demand that reviews not simply summarize what is in a book, but rather offer thoughtful critiques of the good and bad within a book. On the other hand, I have no problem with RBL publishing a review of a book such as The Bible Among the Myths. I don’t even have a problem with the author of the review saying that in his or her opinion the book would be a good fit for some confessional schools (no matter how much I might disagree). However, there needs to be some critical engagement with the material. There needs to be a reason for why the reviewer concludes that the book might be a good fit for confessional schools. There needs to be some acknowledgment that the book steps outside the bounds of history, literary criticism, source criticism or anything else and enters into the realm of theology. My primary concern is that if one goes too far to the other extreme, any book written by a confessional scholar would simply be deemed “theology” and disregarded (e.g., Exploring the Old Testament: A Guide to the Prophets by J. Gordon McConville is published by IVP, and certainly comes at things from a confessional perspective. However, it interacts with critical scholarship and would be, in my opinion, an excellent introductory text for use at confessional schools). In other words, I think there is a place for scholarship that has a confessional audience in mind, but having a confessional audience in mind does not absolve it from the requirement that it be scholarly.

Balance is needed in this, as in all things.

John’s post is worth reading, and I encourage you to do that. I have only one thing to add: I’m really not sure how how might go about changing this. How does one impact the “popular” reading of the Bible in order to bring it around to something that takes the text itself more seriously?¹ A further challenge is that often certain readings of the Bible, which might be “mosquito netting” as John puts it, are part of the special doctrine of a particular church, denomination, cult or other group. This is an area in which, perhaps, pastors and other religious leaders need to take part in the discussion. But alas, many pastors read the Bible with the thickest mosquito netting possible.

I was asked in a blog post to share my thoughts on Biblical Hebrew: A Text and Workbook, by Bonnie Pedrotti Kittel, Victoria Hoffer, & Rebecca Abts Wright, and my comment just became too long, so I figured I’d post about it.

I used Kittel for first year Hebrew as a student in my undergrad and also use it as a teacher (laypeople, at the moment). One of the reasons I decided to use it when teaching is that I loved it as a student. In case you’re confused about the title of my post, we affectionately called the book “Bonnie” in my undergrad (a practice I continue with my students).

The book is very much what the subtitle says: “text and workbook.” It’s not a grammar, and it can’t really be used as one, so if the student wanted a beginning reference grammar he or she would require a supplemental book. However, for first year students I don’t really think that’s necessary. She does have a sizable and easy to read section in the back with all the verbal paradigms, which is nice for reference.

One of the reasons I love Bonnie is because it’s so inductive. Literally, lesson one (after learning the aleph-bet) starts you reading the Hebrew text. While I’ve not looked at every first-year Hebrew textbook out there, so far, Kittel’s is the only one I’ve found that does such a great job of getting you into the text quickly and easily. She accomplishes this by teaching what she feels are the most common elements of Hebrew first, and going on from there.

Now, some who have learned a little bit less inductively (which is most) might find the book to be a bit “disorganized,” but to some extent that is the nature of inductive study. She uses an example text (usually a phrase or sentence) for each lesson which exemplifies the aspects of Hebrew she wants to teach. Lesson One starts with ויאמר יהוה. Yes, she starts with the wayyiqtol 3ms, which is literally EVERYWHERE in the Hebrew Bible. The student doesn’t learn another PGN until several lessons later, and that’s the 3mp – finally, quite a few lessons later she springs the whole prefix paradigm on you. Intermingled are other new aspects – the qatal form, the Pi’el, singular and plural masculine nouns, etc. She almost always introduces a new form, stem, etc in part before she introduces it in full, using only elements the student already knows. Therefore, she might seem to “skip around” a lot – but once again, this isn’t a grammar, it’s a textbook.

It is also very much a workbook. She guides the student step by step through the lesson verse – asking key questions to nudge them in the right direction, making him or her fill in blanks along the way, and introducing new elements as one comes to them in the verse. As the student masters new concepts, she starts saying things like, “of course, you know by now that ….. means/is a _____:” and moves on quickly. Each lesson usually ends with some supplemental grammatical information, exercises (translation, as well as other types) that hammer on the new concepts learned that lesson, and instructions to memorize some more vocab (out of her list found at the back of the book).

She teaches parsing (and everything else) VERY diagnostically, so you could, theoretically, get away without ever memorizingverbal or noun paradigms when using her book (though she does recommend learning some of them throughout the book, she does such a great job there is very little that is required to be memorized). To some extent, how much needs to be memorized depends on the teacher. Nevertheless, her key word is recognize, not memorize. This last bit is one of the reasons I like using it for teaching the layperson: memorizing a ton of paradigms can be very daunting and a major stumbling block, and for just a 1st year reading knowledge of Hebrew, frankly, isn’t necessary.

Finally, at the end of the book she provides notes on reading and translating several handfuls of prolonged biblical texts (mostly narrative, some poetry at the end) that are meant to be worked through when the student reaches a particular lesson and has certain concepts under their belt (they start somewhere between lessons 12 and 19). I didn’t do this in my undergrad, as it’s optional, until after the fact, when I worked through several on my own. These help the student to begin working through longer texts using the knowledge they’ve learned, with some help from Bonnie.

This is not to say that the book doesn’t have it’s faults. There are things that I would change if I were writing a similar textbook (as I hope to do someday, geared for lay people, specifically). But, all-in-all, I still to this day (even though I’ve been shown other books that claim to be inductive) have yet to find a 1st year Hebrew textbook that does quite the job she does of getting a beginning student reading Hebrew quickly, and does it in an enjoyable way.