Reading and Teaching the Old Testament: Suggestions and Resources for Seminary Teachers and Parents (and Everybody else)

Soon we start the Old Testament. It’s a challenging book to read, study, and teach, but it’s also my favorite. I have a few suggestions this year, which I’ve simplified.

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Why is the Bible hard?

I suspect parents and teachers will get a lot of questions: “What is an emerod? Why in the world is (insert prominent biblical figure here) doing THAT?! Wait, so you could kill people BEFORE the Ten Commandments?! Why are there slaves?!” And so on.

If we have trouble instinctively understanding, it is because we are eavesdropping on someone else’s revelation, from another place, time, and culture.¹In reality, the OT depicts not one but several different and changing cultures. Abraham’s nomadic lifestyle and language were quite different from, say, Isaiah’s urban existence hundreds of years later.

Our expectations from the Book of Mormon being “written for our day” are misapplied if we bring them to the Bible; the biblical prophets and authors were speaking primarily to their day, their needs, and their understandings, not ours.  President John Taylor taught,²my emphasis. I cannot locate the original citation.

“the Bible was written for the people of its day…. Isaiah, Ezekiel, etc. had revelations for themselves, not us.”

Evangelical Bible scholar John Walton puts it this way in several of his books.

the Bible is written for us, but not to us.

We’re not the primary audience. Sidney Sperry wrote in The Ensign,

we ofttimes read our Bible as though its peoples were English or American and interpret their sayings in terms of our own background and psychology. But the Bible is actually [a Near Eastern] book. It was written centuries ago by [Near Eastern] people and primarily for [Near Eastern] people.

Misunderstandings easily arise, because we instinctively try to read it as a modern, current document for us. Tremper Longman, another Evangelical Old Testament scholar argues that

one of the biggest mistakes we can make in interpretation is to read [the Old Testament] as if it were written for us today.

As an Evangelical, Longman certainly does not mean the Old Testament is irrelevant to us, only that reading it as if written to us in our day results in confusion and distortion.

Since the original authors and audience of the anthology now known as the Bible were largely contemporary with each other, much could go without being expressed.

The problem [i.e. not understanding] is not with the Bible. It was inspired by God and written by people in a culture. It was clear to the original audience. But we live in a very different time, in a very different culture. There are cultural gaps between the biblical world and our own. We are puzzled because we don’t have the right cultural pieces to put in the gaps. Worse, when we don’t understand, we often automatically fill the gaps by trying to squeeze in pieces from our culture, where they don’t fit. Recognizing these cultural gaps and the pieces that go into them helps us to understand the Bible better….

Interpretation is based on cultural assumptions, so we must recognize that the cultural gap between the biblical world and us may cause different interpretations … Every writer assumes the reader can “read between the lines,” so there is no need to state the obvious.… But when people from two different cultures try to communicate, meaning gets lost in translation. This explains why readers today might misinterpret aspects of the Bible—we don’t share a common culture.

[These central concepts and assumptions] operated in the background, they aren’t clearly printed in Scripture. They were obvious to the original audiences. ‘Everyone knows that.’ Yet we don’t. These dynamics are not obvious to modern Western readers.

– Richards and James, Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes: Patronage, Honor, and Shame in the Biblical World

So, if we want to understand the Old Testament the way the Israelites did, we need to try to learn what they knew. If we want to hear the Old Testament speak, we need to try to learn its” language.”

Parents and teachers, I think, should know more than they teach, or at least, know where to look for cultural background and contextual information.

This is my list of resources to provide that kind of information, and help the Old Testament at least make sense. Doctrine and personal application I leave to you.

First,  Bible translations and notes

I can’t overstate how much of a game-changer it is to use a modern translation. Everyone I have known who picks up a modern translation and uses it has gained greater appreciation and understanding of the Bible. If you only have the budget or time for one new book this year, go for this. Latter-day Saints shouldn’t feel any theological reluctance in consulting other translations, since prophets and Apostles have done so in The Ensign and General Conference. (See here.)

1. The NRSV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible. I do not know why this is currently so expensive in hardcover, but there’s a cheaper leather edition. It’s also in Kindle or (the way I own the notes) at Logos, which is like a Kindle on crack.³Logos is what Gospelink or LDS Infobases might have become, but a generic Christian version The other available translations with these notes are… “less effective” in missionary speak (KJV, NKJV, or NIV). Edit: It doesn’t do me any good, but if it’s in stock, the hardcover is cheaper from Christian Book and Discount.
   1. The notes here are derived from from a much longer and more expensive series, also available electronically in Logos.
2. For a complimentary deeper dive, and from a Jewish perspective, I highly recommend the Jewish Study Bible (also in Logos). Note that it is Jewish, so it does not include the New Testament, and tends not to interpret Isaiah in terms of Jesus, for example. Some really fantastic essays and notes that go places the NRSV Cultural Backgrounds does not.
3. And for a great translation and literary insights, I’d compliment those above with Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary. Alter is a Jewish professor of literature and Hebrew Bible, and this has some great stuff. It’s a beautiful three-volume hardcover set.

Now, Seminary students are likely headed out on missions soon. Whether they serve English-speaking or foreign, they will encounter other Bible translations, and probably even use one. The Church-approved Bible app for missionaries has multiple translations, for example. (See comments.) Grant Hardy has a great article on the KJV and missionary work. It might be useful sometimes in difficult passages to have someone read from another translation (or several!) and model talking about different translations, why they exist and why they’re different. (For information on that, see the three Religious Educator articles listed here.)

It’s important to know that our usage of the KJV, while official, is also largely traditional and not exclusive; Various General Authorities have modeled studying and quoting from non-KJV Bibles. Elder Holland this year has been using a study Bible. Moreover, unlike dedicated KJV-Only churches, we make no claim that it’s the best translation.

Now that said, I think seminary students and youth do need to know the KJV language; if you don’t, you miss all of the allusions in our modern scriptures to the Bible. So it’s important to know the KJV for connections and history, but a modern Study Bible for understanding.

For a list of resources on LDS and the Bible see my page here. (From that list, I highly recommend Mark Ward’s book on the KJV and Philip Barlow on Latter-day Saints and the Bible, plus the three Religious Educator articles on Bible translation, by me, Dan McClellan, and Josh Sears.)

For more, my old post here.

Second, paradigm-changers! 

How can we read scripture through Israelite eyes? Or more directly, how can we help our students and children not reject scripture because it’s “too weird”? There are a number of books I recommend because they both explain differences between our ways of thinking and those we find in the Bible. More importantly they model ways of explaining how a book can be both inspired and deeply flawed, human, and even offensive, at the same time. Our students and children need to know such accessible resources exist.

Frankly, these are all great, and I wish everyone would read all of them. (They’re also mostly available in Logos, which is how I own them. Logos is free, you pay for books and packages. Links are to Amazon)

• Misreading Scripture With Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible
• Misreading Scripture Through Individualist Eyes: Patronage, Honor, and Shame in the Biblical World
• Schlimm, This Strange and Sacred Scripture: Wrestling with the Old Testament and Its Oddities
• Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament 
• Kenton Sparks, God’s Word in Human Words and Sacred Word, Broken Word: Biblical Authority and the Dark Side of Scripture.
  • The first looks at ideas about revelation, scholarship, and the nature of scripture, within an Evangelical context. The second, written for a more general audience, expands on those topics to ask how Christians can accept a book as inspired (or even inerrant!) that is at times factually wrong, assumes the validity of slavery, is misogynistic, genocide, etc. Both of these books have been highly influential on me.
• I’d also suggest watching my Sperry symposium talk on reading the Old Testament in context.

(For more on paradigm-changers, see here. And all my old “Resource” posts here.)

Third… Jim Faulconer’s The Old Testament Made Harder: Scripture Study Questions. This is available free, and consists almost entirely of guided thought questions from a wonderfully thoughtful and scripturally-oriented BYU philosophy professor.

Fourth, particularly for parents of younger children or teenagers, or people looking for lesson ideas

• John Walton, the Bible Story Handbook: A Resource for Teaching 175 Stories from the Bible 
• Peter Enns, Telling God’s Story: A Parents’ Guide to Teaching the Bible

Both Enns and Walton are good Old Testament scholars.

That’s basically it, this year, for books. I firmly believe, and it is my experience, that when we are actively seeking to understand scripture “out of the best books,” we will better appreciate, believe, and love scripture. And that knowledge and enthusiasm will carry on to the faith and testimony of our students and children.

For some introductory videos on the ancient Near Eastern context of the Old Testament “The world of the Old Testament,” and an introduction to it “Reading the Scriptures Jesus Read,” see my videos here.

Now, when we hit Jan 1, Genesis brings a lot of issues and questions, and I have a lot of material arranged nicely here to help you get a handle on it: creation? Age of the earth? Science? Evolution? the Flood? Church history? What about Moses, Abraham, and the Temple? The JST?

I’ll also be putting up a weekly post, so stick around.

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