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

I share this to show how easy it can be to take our worldview and then press it into something we read or hear, interpreting it through our lens. We can look at specific words and dissect them and use complicated contemporary analysis to do all this. 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.