Exegetical Bible Study Tips

Notes taken from Dr. Micheal Heiser’s Laws for Bible Study: Learning to Study the Bible part 1, Naked Bible Podcast 016 . Dr. Micheal Heiser’s Laws for Bible Study: Learning to Study the Bible part 1, Naked Bible Podcast 016. You can find more from him at his site: drmsh.com . He is extremely well studied and well read and down to earth. His site is a great resource for trustworthy biblical interpretations to help understanding.

My intentions with this blog post and reiteration is to direct believers to information that can assist them to deepen their walk with God. This topic has been on my heart, desiring to stay close to the text and build a stronger biblical theology.

Introduction:

Bible reading is not bible study. So what most people think is bible study, isn’t real biblical research. This usually includes reading/listening to uninformed source material that is producing positions and are not text driven, poor arguments that are personal and not textually based. There is more presumptuous thought and less scriptural truth or relevance. This tends to be most of our pastors, leaders and well known names and authors. Poor sources and poor interaction with biblical text is at the heart of this. Most of us who do not have a practice in exegetical studies or ancient languages fall prey to this. Especially when we are looking for answers and feel incompetent with textual understanding and look outward for others guidance.

This type of bible study is not digging into the word. We are more less reading about the bible, not really penetrating the text. We want to know the text, not just gain some spiritual insights about our lives. Now, knowing the text and living right before God are not mutually exclusive. And we don’t all need to know the Greek and Hebrew, or have years of scholastic studies to do bible research. But it’s good for a believer to be doing something that encourages more attention to the text.

This is intended to equip you with some tools anyone can use to build competence in order to feel less dependent on the opinions of others and English translations. Dedication to the text and only the text wont answer every question we have, but it will, if we allow it, direct us to a more biblical theology. Every believer should desire to not have to rely on others to grow closer to God. Here are some tips on how any believer, at any time in their walk can do this.

So why do you want to do this? Because you cant draw closer to God without knowing Him and you cant obey Him if you cant hear His voice. We need the Scriptures to do this. If you are believer, this is part of the spiritual practice. One isn’t spiritual just because they call on the name of God or use the name of Jesus and claim Christianity. Our faith is a walk; its the narrow road. We need to seek God out with all our heart, mind, strength, spirit and understanding. It has been my personal experience that these things develop: come to know God, spend time with God, open my heart to Him and receive His heart, know good from evil, right from wrong and truth from lies, refute false teaching and practices, refute false spirits, prepare myself as a bride for Christ, imitate Christ, pursue Christ and more by understanding the Word of God better.

We have to ask, ‘how does one get at truth and why do we believe its true?’. As Sons and Daughters of God we were not intended to rely on other believers to tell us about God and believe what they say is true simply because we feel inadequate and they seem to know. No, we can know. God did not intend everyone to be well studied or well read but He has made it possible for anyone who desires to know Him to be able to do just that.

To start off, we want to be truth finders and not only be seekers. If you know already that God’s word is the true and only true doctrine, great! Seriously! Truth found and claimed. Build on this rock – God’s word is truth. Remember that you are seeking truth out, not just expecting it. Lies are so deceptive, many believers themselves aren’t even aware they they have lies woven into their beliefs. You need to always bring it before God before you start believing everything and anything everyone claiming to be a christian says. When someone gives you a ‘this is what God says, this is what the bible says’ ask “is this scriptural?” We need to take everything we hear to the scriptures. Further we need to ask “is it correctly interpreted?”. Simply bringing it to the scriptures isn’t always enough. Who is interpreting the scripture and are they doing so with correct textual understanding?

A lot of Christians, myself included often will take a passage out of its context and apply it for their will in any argument. Then declare that it is scriptural to back up an argument. We need to have the bigger scoop, so reading through the entire bible is important to help us understand it and apply it correctly. Know you can hold firm to discrediting anyone who is refuting the scriptures and God, claiming to have understanding, when they have nothing to back it up – meaning they haven’t read through the word, studied it deeply or engaged in a personal relationship with God.

Tips:

1) There is no substitute for close attention to biblical text. How can one say they hold to a biblical theology without being able to root what they believe in the biblical text? Most people have a creed theology - such as I’m baptist, or I’m catholic, etc, or a my pastor says theology, or a my parents believe this theology, or that book in the christian book store said this theology. This is all second hand, based on another persons para-phasing of a second hand translation(English bible). None of this is terrible per say or deeply flawed, but they fall short of a carefully thought out biblical theology derived from the text.

2) the Bible is a divine human book. Treat it as such. It’s not just a divine book or a human book. Both parts of this equation are crucial and necessary and have been chosen by God with respect to how the thing called the bible would be produced. God chose intelligent people to write the biblical text and people write using grammar, in styles understood by their piers and contemporaries and with deliberate intent. It didn’t just drop from heaven. Study it as though some person actually wrote it, not like the result of some paranormal event.

3) If a passage is weird, its important. What we see in the text is there for a reason, it’s not random. In context, the context to where it is immediately found in the bible, then the larger context of the whole book and then the even larger context of the biblical world view. It’s not stuck in there to fill space or creep people out in future times, it has a role to play in biblical theology.

4) The biblical text should be observed in the original languages. Now if you cant do this, it is good to never take one translation of a passage alone. Check other translations and learn to understand why these translations are different and why the interpreter translated them as they did. One of the unfortunate realities is that every language has a poetry, a melody and when a work gets translated this aspect of the text gets lost. Words in Hebrew had rich, deep meaning with strong numerical connections that are outside the cultural context of the Gentile mind. we are out of our element indeed when taking on the old testament. Therefore we must be more diligent or at least less quick to jump to conclusions.

There are many online bible resourses available. Biblehub has multiple translations with easy surfing, to look at a passages in multiple translations at one time. It even provides the Greek and Hebrew, that you can look at with English translation so you can know the original word and parsing (grammatical use in the sentence). It’s good to learn grammatical terms and concepts so that you can support yourself when following commentary on what the scripture is saying, not just what someone is feeling about it. Learning more about translation philosophy or thinking fallacies is good too. Clear thinking includes knowing what can be said and what cant be said about a given word or passage. Everyone can gain a lot of data but without clear thinking, good results wont come. Even the most schooled individuals trip up and misinterpret.

5) The bible must be interpreted in context. That is, in the culture it is from and the time period. The bible was written for us, but not to us. This context isn’t ours. It’s the context that produced it. It is good to get into the mind of the ancient and modern Israelite.

When we let our cultural appropriations filter the bible to us, we aren’t doing bible study. We need to understand the writers from when they were writing, what their traditions were, what their laws and customs were, how they talked to each other (this includes idioms & common way of using words and speaking), what the common thinking was, what culture they were brought up in and who their contemporaries were. (Side note: reading who these writers read can teach a great deal.)

A lot of the biblical teachings we modern day Christians have accepted as ‘biblical’ were appropriated during the time of the enlightenment and reformation period when authors such as Augustine, Aquinas, Martin Luther, Calvin or Reed were writing. They are all foreign to the biblical context and are most often how we modern day believers filter the bible to us. Yes there is a theological practice but its not biblical.

Example – the understanding of sex and the stereotype that Christians think sex is evil and bad and why many denominations will encourage this viewpoint has to do with the writings of Anselm of Canterbury, another reformation writer and contemporary of Thomas Aquinas (side note: The reformation era was when the catholic church began to be questioned and lose there power and foothold as the voice of God and true ruling entity in the western world).

another much more simple example – consider what a seeker of truth hundreds of thousands of years from now, finding old blogs and such might think reading, “That sermon was on fire and the pastor was blowing up!” If they do not take it in context, and don’t understanding the slang of this time or apply it, there will be confusion and misinterpretation.

6) If after the grunt work of context driven exegesis, what the biblical text says disturbs you, let it. If you aren’t bothered by the bible, you aren’t reading it closely. If your head isn’t filled with questions about what you’ve read, about how the idea you’ve gotten from one passage needs to be bonded with another passage, then you really haven’t studied the bible. You may have read it and gotten a spiritual buzz but you aren’t thinking the thoughts you could. And the buzzes only get better the deeper into the text you go, the more you allow God to reveal Himself to you.

7) Build a network of exegetical insights you can keep drawing on. The connections are the results of a super natural mind, guiding the human writers. The only way to think Gods thoughts are to follow the bread crumbs in the text where they lead, one at a time. Try even reading the bible as if it is a fictional novel. A reader instinctively knows when reading fiction that the writer is doing something to you - drawing your attention, or deflecting it, leading you somewhere or misdirecting you, for some cleaver reason. We read a novel and know we will see this or that come up again, or hear that piece of dialog again, or see that character again. We notice strange and repetitive use of words and phrases, we look for themes, plot, use of symbolism and allegories that the author is using to do something with. The reader just knows because the human mind is wired in a certain way that is triggered when we go into our ‘reading a novel mode’. We see the words differently, as opposed to the minds instinct reactions to reading a text book. There is a lot of support here to understand God as uncreated Creator and Author and Jesus standing as the ultimate protagonist, the hero of heroes. What Story is He telling? How is He telling it? Where is He taking us and why? Amidst all the little stories what is the big picture?

8) The new testament use of the old testament is the key to how prophecy works. One inspired piece of literature ought to inspire another. If you believe the new testament writers were inspired when they quote the old testament writers, which were also inspired, isn’t it a good idea to see how they quoted it? Keep in mind also that they were quoting the Septuagint.

Example – song of Solomon often gets said to be the symbolized relationship of Christ with the church. But no new testament writer says this at all, there is no scripture in the new testament to support this. So thinking this old testament book is about Christ love for the church may give warm fuzzy feelings but its not biblical theology.

9) Putting bible verses in category of meaning really isn’t helpful and can be misleading. Such as ‘these are about faith, these are about truth, these are about love’ etc. and is even less helpful when you take someone elses list of categories who hasn’t done a careful analysis of the text. This is what you are getting with most translation based study books and theology books.

10) Patterns in the text are more important than word studies. Going beyond bible reading usually brings one into word studies. This is a starting point, not an end point for thinking about the text. The resources out there such as concordances are more like free for all pick and choose lists in which you basically pick what you like from a list of possibilities.

Patters again are more important. Look at how terms keep popping up with close proximity to other terms and other phrases, perhaps in the same order or in juxtaposition with another cluster of items. Word studies wont get us to this type of observation and wont even suggest it.

Word study for example - Scripture says in Hosea 4:6 ‘my people are destroyed by lack of knowledge” or another translation says ‘lack of knowing me’, another says ‘for refusing to obey’, another ‘refusing to acknowledge me’ another ‘because they are ignorant’. The original Hebrew is daath, which is knowledge from the root yada. Yada is a knowing that comes from a personal experiential relationship and awareness of another. This is different than chokmah – meaning wisdom. Just as sophia in Greek is different from gynosis, the first referring to intellectual wisdom the second referring to an experiential knowing (It is almost always the second in which the Greek writers talk about knowing God by knowing Jesus – implying a needed relationship).

All these translations give a bigger scoop of what is being said and are also all very different while making each translation bring more clarity. But which one is translated the most accurately? And why do you think this? What evidence do you have to support your claim? Do you feel like you can understand the bigger meaning behind this verse without any of the other translations? Does it beg the question “what does it mean to know the Lord?’ and then ‘how can I know The Lord better?’. Do these verses imply that one knows God when they obey Him, acknowledge Him as the one true God? That one has entered into a relationship with Him when they obey Him? Is that scriptural or inferred from personal feelings? This is word study and it hasn’t even broached the bigger contexts.

Example of Pattern study – Take these verses for example that have righteousness/truth/justice and mercy/graciousness/love juxtaposed. The Author has something to say through this pattern and so we see them together throughout the scriptures. Do they show us God’s justice and love working hand-in-hand or in tension with each other?

Psalm 85:10: Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

Psalm 89:14: Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne; mercy and truth go before your face.

Psalm 103:6-8, 17: The LORD executes righteousness and justice for all who are oppressed. He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the children of Israel. The LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in mercy. The mercy of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children’s children.

Psalm 111:3-4: [The LORD’s] work is honorable and glorious, and his righteousness endures forever. He has made his wonderful works to be remembered; the LORD is gracious and full of compassion.

Psalm 116:5: Gracious is the LORD, and righteous; yes, our God is merciful.

Jeremiah 10:24: O LORD, correct me, but with righteousness; not in your anger, lest you should bring me to nothing.

Daniel 9: 16, 18-19: O Lord, according to all your righteousness, I pray, let your anger and your fury be turned away from your city Jerusalem . . . . O my God, incline your ear and hear; open your eyes and see our desolations, and the city which is called by your name; for we do not present our supplications before you because of our righteous deeds, but because of your great mercies. O Lord, hear! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, listen and act! Do not delay for your own sake, my God, for your city and your people are called by your name.

Hosea 2:19: I will betroth [Israel] to me forever; yes, I will betroth you to me in righteousness and justice, in lovingkindness and mercy.

Romans 3:24: [We are] being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

Romans 5:17, 21: For if by one man’s offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the one, Jesus Christ. So that as sin reigned in death, even so grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Titus 3:7: That having been justified by his grace we should become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.