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

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. When the brilliant and highly respected Old Testament scholar John Walton spoke at my church, he repeated this phrase multiple times: “The Bible was written for us, but not to us.” He explained that the Bible is 100 percent inspired by God, and we can have confidence that every word in the original documents of the Bible is exactly what God wanted it to say. 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. But 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 meant them to be understood. We must read the words on those terms.