Misreading Scripture Through Western Eyes
By: Adam O. Kyle
We can easily forget that Scripture is a foreign land and that reading the Bible is a cross-cultural experience. To open the Word of God is to step into a strange world where things are very unlike our own. Most of us don’t speak the languages. We don’t know the geography or the customs or what behaviors are considered rude or polite. And yet we hardly notice. p. 11
This book is one of the select few that I have come back to time and time again. I believe, for more than one reason, that every serious layman student of the Bible, a category for which I include myself, should not only casually read Misreading Scripture Through Western Eyes, but earnestly attempt to challenge the cultural mores with which we subconsciously interpret scriptures.
Western culture places individualism, freedom, and self’s ability (some would dare even say responsibility) to do the most good for his own life despite whatever obstacles he may face. American sentiments take these values to further extremes than other western countries. Are these values wrong? I would say no (at least not socially and economically) and the book doesn’t make that case, either.
No, the book’s sole mission is to show us that some of the values our culture assumes as virtuous and obvious have not always been so in human history, especially not in the historical contexts in which the biblical authors wrote. And what’s astounding is that this is not at all a statement about political or philosophical values, but relational and practical.
Language is a huge concept one must tackle when looking at culture. Language changes very quickly as time goes on and there’s a reason we are told when learning a second language that we won’t really know it until we spend time around native speakers of that language.
It’s interesting to reflect on common idioms we Americans use, and it gets downright comical to think about the ones we Ozarkians have coined. For example, if I say the word “Ope,” there are very few Ozarkians who don’t know what it’s referring to (the sound one makes immediately after bumping into a stranger or before trying to squeeze through a crowded area, in which case the term is often followed by the phrase, I’m gonna sneak right past ya’ here). Or, take the phrase “bite the bullet.” We know exactly what these phrases mean, but that’s because we hear them in conversational context. Imagine someone in France learning English. How would someone in a French classroom learn the English translation for that phrase and have any idea what it meant? At the very least, even learning what the idiom means, they wouldn’t be able to relate because French and American values have stark differences when it comes to bullets and firearms. In France, the best you can usually hope to own is a shotgun for bird hunting. Here in America, our children learn to shoot before they can walk and I don’t even go out to eat without my full-auto, military-grade AA-12 shotgun with a 200 round drum magazine and red-dot optics. ‘Murica.
I digress, this is an example of how difficult language can be across cultures and across times. Have you ever considered why seminary students don’t learn Greek and Hebrew, but ancient Greek and Hebrew? Those languages aren’t dead, yet they have changed so much over time that learning each requires different curriculums! That’s why reading the King James Version can be difficult. It’s not so much the archaic language, but the words we have in common often meant something completely then than they do now!
Why is this important? The book makes a great point: although biblical authors were inspired by the Holy Spirit, they didn’t always know that for themselves at the time. As a consequence, we have to learn not to just read what is being said, but also what is assumed and what is unsaid. Much of this learning, for a layman like me, comes from reading people who know the culture much better than I do and who come from a similar worldview. By doing so, we start to see the world of the Bible much clearer.
One of the most valuable sections in the book, in my opinion, is how Americans typically don’t like ambiguity in speech. We like definitions, lists, clarity. However, in ancient near-east society, as well as in eastern cultures today, strict definitions aren’t as important as descriptions. Here’s a perfect biblical example. The fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5 is an often-misunderstood passage. Notice, first of all, that the word “fruit” is always singular when translated, not plural, as in “fruits.” But there are several adjectives listed that we assume are the individual “fruits” of the Spirit. This likely isn’t so.
Paul, when writing to the Galatians, was writing in Greek, and when he was describing the Fruit of the Spirit, he was explaining a concept that was easier to describe in his native Hebrew than it was in Greek. So, to describe the fruit of the Spirit, he lists all of these adjectives as a way to explain one concept/state of being, or one could say, the fruit describing how you act when you are in the Holy Spirit. So, these many words are describing one state of being. We prefer the list of adjectives because we like clarity and we like how it tells us exactly how we are to behave, when in all likeliness, that wasn’t the intention. The intention was likely to describe a general concept. In my opinion, they providentially lead to a very similar conclusion, so the lack of having a Greek word for what Paul was describing is good for us Westerners, but that’s my opinion.
This is one example of the many cultural gems found within this book. The authors discuss many more cultural mores such as honor and shame, duty, guilt and innocence, hospitality, sex, gender, etc. It is incredibly informative, and I think it will open your eyes as to how careful we need to be about making sure we understand what we are reading on the cultural paradigm.
If you’d like to go farther into learning about biblical culture, I’d recommend the NIV’s Cultural Background Study Bible (I got a hardback for $20, so it’s cheap) and the book Jesus and His World by Evans.
SDG