How (Not) to Read the Bible: Making Sense of the Anti-women, Anti-science, Pro-violence, Pro-slavery and Other Crazy-Sounding Parts of Scripture

by Dan Kimball

Old Covenant (or testament) is the agreement God made with the people of Israel (ethnically Jewish people) outlining in detail how they would relate to God and know him.

New Covenant (or testament) is the agreement God made with all people through Jesus, and in making this agreement, he did away with t...

New Covenant outlines how all people today of every ethnic background (not just the Jewish people) can ...

generally refer to the Old Testament as the First Testament or the Hebrew Bible, as most of it was written in Hebrew. The New Testament was written in Greek. “The Bible” is one volume of sixty-six books containing writings from two different covenants outlining the two major ways God provided for human beings to know him and relate to him.

The Bible was also written in three different languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek). This explains why you find different writing styles—these authors weren’t all writing at the same time in history.

written beginning around 1400 BC (the time of Moses) through around 100 AD (the time following the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the birth of the early church). That’s a time span of more than 1500 years!

You would never read and interpret something written 3,400 years ago in the same way you would re...

The library of books in the Bible was written by human authors who each had God’s Spirit inspiring and guiding them.* The library of books in the Bible was and still is a primary way God communicates with us, giving us guidance.

God wants us to know him, to know our origins and future, and to have guidance for life.

Every word in the original writings of Scripture was the exact word that God wanted people to have.† So we say there were many authors of the Bible, but only one “Author.”3

the library of the Bible are sections on history, law, poetry, prophecy, wisdom, and apocalyptic literature.

Just remember, whenever you open your Bible to a page, you are walking into an ancient historical library of sixty-six books written over a 1,500-year time period. The author was writing in a specific time period and addressing a specific culture.

may have been written in a specific genre as well.

Many of the psalms were written between 500 and 1000 BC. The book of Acts in the New Testament is a history book likely written in the late 60s AD. Knowing when a book was written impacts how we read it and helps us to make sense of the parts we encounter that sound crazy.

The second of the four facts you need to know to interpret the Bible correctly is that the Bible was written for us, but not to us.

We believe in God’s full inspiration and the total trustworthiness of the Bible. The books in the library of the Bible are for all people at all times and places to read and gain wisdom from.

the Bible wasn’t originally written to us. It wasn’t written in any modern language, and it wasn’t written with our contemporary culture and its assumptions and values in mind.

To get the most benefit from what God was communicating when he inspired the authors of the Bible to write, we need to enter their world to hear the words as the original audience would have heard them and as the author would have mean...

for what is ahead, and most of all, telling us who Jesus is. When Paul the apostle wrote a letter to encourage a young leader, he stressed the importance of the Bible in this way: “From infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith

in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”*

There are even warnings in the Bible itself that some of the New Testament books “contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.”‡

Peter admitted that not all of it is easily understood. It also says that people will “distort” the Bible.

Failure to do so is one of the primary reasons why people critique it and misunderstand what it says. Their interpretations are distortions of the original meaning.

We Have to Change Our Dangerous Way of Reading the Bible Most people, when they start reading the Bible, want to immediately know “what does this mean to me and my life?”

we view the Bible as mainly a “message for me,” we will be in great trouble. We will end up picking and choosing the things we like reading and want to apply to our lives. We often focus on the “nice” and comforting Bible verses, like the one on the coffee mug in image 2.2.

It’s encouraging to relate to David in this way because what he was experiencing of God’s blessings was true, and we can experience that same blessing too. But not every promise or blessing is something we can directly apply to our lives today. We might take Bible verses and promises that are not meant for us and then be disappointed in God when they don’t happen.

In the early 1980s, if someone had said, “I’m going to surf the web,” those words would not have made sense. A person hearing that would have thought of someone surfing on a surfboard somewhere in the ocean. They might have guessed that the web was some kind of spider web. But it wouldn’t have made sense because those words had different meanings at that time.

Eventually, though, we need to step back and look at the more fundamental question: What was the author originally saying? We cannot simply read our own understandings into the meaning of a word or statement someone else wrote or said. And when we look at some of the bizarre-sounding parts of the Bible, we have to try to discover who the original audience was and view the text through their lens, not ours. If we don’t, the possibilities for confusion are endless.

Never read a Bible verse. That’s right, never read a Bible verse. Instead, always read a paragraph at least. —GREG KOUKL, AUTHOR AND APOLOGIST, STAND TO REASON1

“Never read a Bible verse.” Obviously, this is an exaggeration, but it’s an exaggeration with a point. It’s a memorable way of telling us that we should never read a Bible verse in isolation from the context.

you might object that we do see Jesus and other New Testament authors quoting single verses. But back in that day, whenever you would quote a verse, it was understood that this was a shorthand way of referencing the larger section of Scripture from which that verse was taken. The Jewish people saturated their minds and hearts with the Scriptures in such a way that one verse was a trigger to help them remember the other passages surrounding it.

“Never read a Bible verse” is a reminder that every Bible verse is written in a context, in a specific time period and for a specific purpose.

Every Bible verse fits within a larger story, and whenever we read any verse, we want to: • Look at the specific Bible verse (many people stop here). • Look at the paragraph the verse is in. • Look at the chapter the Bible verse is in. • Look at the book of the Bible that the chapter and verse are in.

• Look at the specific Bible verse (many people stop here). • Look at the paragraph the verse is in. • Look at the chapter the Bible verse is in. • Look at the book of the Bible that the chapter and verse are in. • Look at where the book o...

Look at where the book of the Bible the verse is in fits in the Bib...

Much of the confusion over a single Bible verse comes from looking at that verse or story without knowing the full story. No single chart or graphic can capture the full complexity and beauty of the Bible’s storyline,

This reminds us that the Triune God (Father, Son, and Spirit) is eternal, even as God acts in time and history. God creates, which starts the storyline of the Bible, but God has always existed eternally before and after the events recorded and communicated to us in the Bible’s storyline.

Humans chose to doubt God’s generosity and not to trust in God’s guidance or the order he established. They wanted to define good and evil for themselves and to have God’s order be centered on them instead of on God.

The followers of Jesus started small communities with other believers in Jesus called “churches.” People would gather weekly at local churches to celebrate their new way of life as redeemed humans enjoying an intimate covenant relationship with God.

There is one final principle we need to understand. From the beginning in Genesis to the end in Revelation, all of the Bible points to Jesus. We don’t see Jesus’ name in the Old Testament, but as we have already pointed out, the storyline of the entire Bible revolves around him as the promised one sent by God to redeem God’s people and rescue them from the fallout of evil and sin.

When we understand that Jesus—the focal point of New Testament writings—is the one pointed to in the Old Testament, it leads to “aha!” moments as we read the Bible.

When we read the Old Testament, we need to keep this in mind. In speaking to the religious leaders of his own time, the people who were serious Bible students, Jesus warned them to not miss seeing him in the Scriptures.†

Based on a plain reading of these Bible verses, a critic will argue that God doesn’t want us to eat shrimp or lobster. God hates shrimp! When you say it this way, it sounds foolish and silly. This is one of many verses pulled from the Bible (often Old Testament laws) and used to degrade the credibility of the Bible in general. Verses like this are used to argue that Christians don’t know their Bibles and the crazy things the Bible says (which often is true). Or they are used to illustrate how Christians pick and choose the Bible verses they like to back their political or ethical opinions while ignoring other Bible verses (like these).

The goal is to demonstrate that the Bible is an archaic book filled with crazy sayings to discredit anything the Bible says.

And there are other verses, like Exodus 21:20–21, which says, “Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.” This is clearly wrong, yet the Bible seems to indicate it is okay to beat a slave as long as the slave doesn’t die. The allowance, and perhaps promotion, of slavery invites understandable anger.

How do we make sense of any of this?

The underlying question behind the questions we’ve been asking is this: is the Bible credible and trustworthy?

surface, even a strange or off-putting verse begins to make sense. Remember, “Never read a Bible verse.” We have to do the hard work of understanding the full context, and that’s what we’ll do as we more closely examine questions about shrimp, the skin of a dead pig, and slavery.

In the examples of United States laws about donkeys and bathtubs and ice cream cones in back pockets, the first step in understanding them is looking at the backstory. So let’s apply the same approach to the laws that prohibit shrimp, blends of fabric, and football. Who were these Bible verses written to? The ancient Israelites.

all these laws that God gave the Israelites were not intended to simply establish an ideal social system. It was God speaking into their ancient world and instructing them with codes of wisdom for them to know what living