Big Questions: What is the Historical and Cultural Context?

In the first three posts in this series re-introducing my Integral Hermeneutic method by exploring the ‘big questions’ it’s important for us to ask in our attempt to read the Bible better, we have looked at the questions that fall under the first two steps of that process, Experience and Encounter. Today we’ll move on to the Explore step, which contains the most questions and requires the most work, and at times even research. The first of these questions is ‘What is the historical or cultural context?’

One of the fascinating things about the texts in our Bibles is that they are both very particular to a time, place and culture (or I should even say times, places, and cultures) very different from our own (and each other), yet also speak universally to us today. This is the unique challenge posed by sacred Scriptures: That in a legend told around hearths in the Ancient Near East (ANE), in a liturgical prayer sung by pilgrims on the way to their Temple, or even in a letter written by an early Church leader to one of the struggling communities under his care, we are able to encounter God and find a transformational message that speaks to our own lives. But that means there’s a gap that we must cross to do our due diligence that we aren’t misunderstanding a text’s message. The Bible writers had a different set of presuppositions about the world and our place in it from our own, different cultural markers, different archetypes, different politics, literary conventions, symbols, and metaphors. Learning as much as we can within the resources available to us can therefore bring us a lot of added insight and prevent us from misunderstanding.

This learning can come from a lot of different sources, largely from archaeology and history. For most of us this can be as simple as looking into a trusted Bible commentary or academic study Bible, but these will gather together the insights of various scientific or social-scientific fields. (In other words, going to a commentary isn’t a matter of not asking these questions, but is a shortcut to finding possible answers, by allowing those with more experiences, resources, and knowledge to do the work for us.) But to me where we get our answers is less important than ensuring we’re asking the questions in the first place. This is because, just as we saw in the first post that being open and honest about our life experiences and how they can impact our initial reaction to a text is an important piece of intellectual honesty, so too is bringing to mind the cultural distance between us and the texts in our Bibles. Even if we don’t have the tools to build the bridge to cross that divide, at the very least we need to acknowledge that it exists so that we’re not making bad assumptions.

Let’s remind ourselves of three examples that have figured prominently on the blog in the past:

• One concept that has recurred here is that of the ‘Deuteronomistic History’, which recognizes a shared editorial point of view among many — but crucially not all — Old Testament texts. The result of this is that for the most part our Bibles have a Judahite bias for the period of the divided kingdoms. Archaeological evidence seems to strongly suggest, however, that until the northern kingdom fell to the Assyrians, it was by far the more important, developed, and connected, and wealthier, country, with Jerusalem and Judah being a minor backwater in comparison. This doesn’t mean that our Bible texts are wrong in preferring Judah to Israel, but it does provide context to how we read passages that focus on the religious, cultural, and political differences between the two countries.
• Last Summer, we saw how the archaeological discovery of ANE creation myths revolutionized the study of the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2-3. These biblical texts were shown neither to be wholly unique and original creations, nor copies of stories common in the area, but rather smart and subversive re-tellings of the myths of neighbouring cultures (especially imperial conquerors), in order to promote the unique Hebrew conception of God.
• Back in 2022 in the series on Ephesians, we saw that Ephesus was a major cultural centre, not just of religion but also of magic and what we might call the occult, something which likely informed how Paul crafted his message. In that same series, we also saw how understanding the common ‘pop psychology’ of the first-century Mediterranean is tremendously beneficial in understanding how the New Testament writers, especially Paul, write about sin and ethics.

Once we start asking these questions, we’ll find that there’s a lot in the Scriptures themselves to let us into the cultural gaps between us and the texts. For example, something that’s often shocking to a lot of Christians is that the Old Testament does not contain a unified understanding of the nature of God. There are texts that seem to have a polytheistic background, some that have a monolatrous or henotheistic understanding (in which there are many gods but a person or nation is devoted to only one), and some that are monotheistic. Similarly, there are texts in which God is presented as primarily caring for a particular family or nation, some in which God is presented as in battle with other gods, and others in which God is understood to tend to the concerns of the whole world. These differences don’t suggest that God changed over time, but that people’s understanding of God matured over time. So it would serve us well to ask ourselves, when encountering an Old Testament text, what understanding of God it’s working with. (We’ll look at this example more in a later post.) Or in an example that has had a wide-ranging impact on Christian theology over the centuries, there was long a belief among Christians that the sacrificial system within Judaism transferred the indvidual’s guilt to the animal sacrificed. This created the intellectual pathway for understanding Christ’s death on the cross in this same, substitutionary, way. But if we read our own biblical records of how that sacrificial system worked, we find the idea of substitution to be almost entirely absent; in fact the only ritual that explicitly involved substitution in the Old Testament was the scapegoat ritual, which was not a sacrifice! (The original Passover ritual could also possibly be seen as involving a kind of substitution, with the blood of the lamb substituting that of the family’s firstborn, but even if this was the case, that ritual too is not a sacrifice!)

The point of asking these questions about a text’s historical and cultural background is not a buzz-killing automatic skepticism and far less is it an attempt to explain away an uncomfortable text. (I have, unfortunately, seen it used this way, where someone will say “Well we have to understand this in its historical context” but then proceed to not say anything about that historical context and simply ignore the text and any difficulties it may present.) Rather, the goal is the opposite: By doing whatever is in our power to learn about the cultural and historical background of a text, we try to limit misinterpretation and misapplication of the Bible, so as to interpret and apply it in a better, more robust way. It’s not about saying ‘no’, but clarifying what a text is saying so we can say a more informed ‘yes’. One example from the blog is the ‘clobber text’ of Romans 1.18-32; placing that text in its cultural context did not ‘explain it away’, but instead made it actively applicable for all Christians (as it was intended) rather than being a text that targets gay people.

So in conclusion, asking about a text’s historical and cultural context is an important step in helping us to understand it and apply it better. Even if we don’t have ready answers, even asking the question can help us avoid some pitfalls. The point isn’t to explain texts away or silence texts that make us uncomfortable, but to better under where they’re coming from so we can clarify how they might be applicable today.

Reflection Questions

1. What are some resources available to you to find possible answers to the question of a text’s historical or cultural context?

2. What are some possible historical or cultural considerations raised by the following verses? (Scroll down to the bottom to find some that came to mind for me. You may have thought of others!)

a) “Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, bore him no children. She had an Egyptian slave-girl whose name was Hagar, and Sarai said to Abram, ‘You see that the Lord has prevented me from bearing children; go in to my slave-girl; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” (Genesis 16.1-2)

b) “Ephraim has become like a dove, silly and without sense; they call upon Egypt, they go to Assyria.” (Hosea 7.11)

c) “In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” (Matthew 2.1-2)

d) “While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and also in the market-place every day with those who happened to be there. Also some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him. (Acts 17.16-18)

 

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Some possible answers to question 2

a) Genesis 16.1-2: What, if anything, do we know about stigmas around childlessness in the ANE? How common was slavery in the ANE and what signification did slavery have? What laws or traditions would govern this situation?

b) Hosea 7.11: Is there any significance to the use of the name Ephraim here instead of ‘Israel’ or ‘Samaria’? When might this text have been written? What was happening geopolitically in the ANE at the time? What were the relationships between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Assyria respectively? Do we know what Judah’s relationships with these powers was like at the time?

c) Matthew 2.1-2: Who was King Herod and what does history tell us about him and his reign? Who are these ‘wise men’ and where in ‘the East’ did they come from? What do we know about ancient astrology and what might have led them to go to Judea?

d) Acts 17.16-18: What was Athens like in the first century? How large was the Jewish community there? Why would Paul be debating in a market-place? Who were the Epicureans and Stoics, and why might they be singled out here?