Hermeneutics 098

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This brings me to point three, understand the context. One of the easiest mistakes is to read a verse by itself, and take out of it what we think it means as a stand alone point this is called Eisegesis. Rather we should desire to let the bible speak for itself and find the intended context of the whole chapter or even the whole book, this is called Exogesis. We have to read versus in context of chapters and chapters in context of books. Sometimes what we think of as a whole or complete thought is merely a part, so it helps to read the surrounding passages. Honestly this is what we do with all other literature naturally, but the bible we try to read into every word every verse and sometimes detach it from its intended purpose. I would even say it is important to understand entire books within the context of the bible as a whole. The bible is not going to contradict itself, so even sometimes it is helpful to take into consideration what the bible has said elsewhere when coming to conclusions. Some questions to ask at this point: Does the bible speak to this issue elsewhere? Has the bible used this language and even imagery elsewhere? Does the bible answer this question elsewhere? ect. A lot of times the answer is yes and we just have to find it.

Next we have to consider the genre. The bible is full of different kinds of literary approaches. There is poetic, historic, prophetic, narrative, parabolic, instructional, proverbial, and even musical. The idea then is to not force one genre interpretation on another. So we should not force parabolic stories into literal history, or for that matter to confuse actual history with parables. To understand that poetry and prophecy sometimes use fantasy type imagery to communicate a point while historical parts do not. Just as instructional is meant to be taken literally and proverbial is not. Just like a narrative might not be exhaustive in all the facts but communicates a important theme. So we need to understand when the bible is using these different genres and appropriately interpret them.

more to come...