Implicit Contexts in the Scriptures, but especially Genesis

As my wife and I were studying tonight, we hit upon a useful analogy for understanding scripture. It could be adapted for a class, depending on the students and the teacher.

We recently finished a year studying the D&C, and had a lot of tools for understanding it. Some of these were built in to our scriptures, like chapter headings. Then there were free Church-provided electronic and paper resources, like Gospel Topics essays, Revelations in Context, maps, etc.¹To say nothing of the cottage industry of books written to support the Gospel Doctrine year of study. But I want you to imagine that you are a new convert in, say, Taiwan or Russia, reading D&C 49 for the first time, with none of that stuff.

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D&C 49:1 says

Hearken unto my word, my servants Sidney, and Parley, and Leman; for behold, verily I say unto you, that I give unto you a commandment that you shall go and preach my gospel which ye have received, even as ye have received it, unto the Shakers.

Latter-day Saints might pretty easily guess that Sidney is Rigdon, and Parley is Pratt, but who is Leman? And who are the Shakers? The section then spends twenty-odd verses talking about no one knowing the second coming, baptism, forbidding to marry, and vegetarianism, and that the Son of Man cometh not forth as a woman.

…huh? What is all this?

It doesn’t really matter how many times you read this section on its own, the information  isn’t there in the section itself. There is an implicit context to this section, a number of things which “go without being said” because everyone at the time already knew that context.

The Church has now added to D&C 49 a long chapter heading, explaining that Leman Copley  was a convert FROM the Shakers, i.e. the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming. Copley hadn’t quite abandoned all his former beliefs. This is all part of that implicit context of D&C 49. If you know that context, then the content of the revelation makes a lot of sense; it’s arguing against Shaker beliefs, which included (per the now-existent chapter heading),

Some of the beliefs of the Shakers were that Christ’s Second Coming had already occurred and that He had appeared in the form of a woman, Ann Lee. They did not consider baptism by water essential. They rejected marriage and believed in a life of total celibacy. Some Shakers also forbade the eating of meat.

49:1 at least hints at the existence of this implicit context with its mention of Shakers, but I doubt most Latter-day Saints could tell you the details about the Shakers or Ann Lee that the chapter heading relates. Can you make sense of it without that context? Maybe, kinda, but you’re not really getting the full meaning.

How does this apply to Genesis 1-11? There is an implicit context to many of these chapters, and much of the rest of the Old Testament too. (I’ll give two examples around the Tower of Babel, below.) Israelites didn’t need to have the implicit context explained to them, any more than Leman Copley or his fellow missionaries needed a primer on Shaker beliefs. But we DO! And once you know the context, the content makes sense! (It might be uncomfortable or weird, but at least it will make sense.)

If you’re reading the D&C section in isolation from the heading and other tools, or only reading the KJV Old Testament text, you’re simply not understanding scripture as its audience did. We in 2021 are pretty far removed from both settings; we need an explainer of the implicit context. Those historical-cultural explainers are occasionally written-in to the chapter headings,²They’re not very useful for much of the Old Testament but more often, it requires something like Revelations in Context or even Gospel Topics Essays. That kind of context is absolutely necessary to interpret scripture literally. (See here for a D&C example.)

We don’t have  LDS versions of “Revelations in Context” or “Gospel Topics Essays” for the Old Testament. The closest thing is probably the 1980 two-volume Institute manual, which is both outdated and really problematic in spots. The Bible Dictionary can be useful, but it also is quite outdated and skewed.

That kind of contextual information is available from LDS scholars (and I do mean qualified scholars with relevant graduate degrees in ancient Near East/Bible/Religion, not just any random podcast/youtuber).

High-quality non-LDS  scholarship is easily accessible in Study Bibles. BYU’s Joshua Sears (PhD, Hebrew Bible) had a good interview recently with Y Religion, on Study Bibles and Latter-day Saints, which echoed his article from BYU’s Religious Educator journal (linked there.)

My suggested Study Bibles are

• the NRSV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible,
  • The Kindle version of the notes and essays in this Study Bible is currently on sale for $3.99, with the New King James Version translation instead of the NRSV. That’s not great as translations go, but you can’t beat the price for the notes and essays. I do not own this in kindle, and I have no idea about the utility of whatever format they’ve arranged it in. Rather, I own most of this stuff in Logos.
• The Jewish Study Bible (2nd ed, Oxford Press), and
• Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (which focuses on literary aspects, which are quite important.)

And that phrase, “goes without being said”? There are two books that explore that idea with a variety of concepts and passages in the Bible.

• Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible
• Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes: Patronage, Honor, and Shame in the Biblical World

What about some examples? This implicit context is one of the things Bible scholars get  who have studied Genesis in Hebrew, and the contemporary literature in Akkadian, Ugaritic, etc. That implicit context in Genesis 1-11— what it has in mind when writing but doesn’t say explicitly— is Babylonian claims about the nature of the creation, the nature of deity, the nature of humanity, and so on. I talked about these in my two posts on the flood (1, 2), in how I taught Genesis at Institute (the waters!), and the two recent Saints Unscripted videos I did. But here’s two more examples from these chapters.

Latter-day Saints tend to read the Tower of Babel episode as another scriptural example of cold journalistic history recounting historical facts.We tend to see that “history” “confirmed” in Ether, mistakenly in my view. ³I’m not claiming nothing like this ever happened, only that, like the Flood story, the authors have greatly expanded it for polemical purposes.  (See here for lengthy commentary before accusing me of not believing scripture.) But is there some “implicit context” in that story? Is it Babylonian? Absolutely.  There are at least two examples of implicit context.

Via Logos Faithlife Study Bible, for educational purposes.

First, the tower is quite clearly a ziggurat, a Mesopotamian⁴that is, Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian cultures artificial mountain, stepped, with a temple on top.  The language echoes Babylonian descriptions of ziggurats. Genesis 11:4 says they wanted to build “a tower with its top [literally “head”, rō’š] in the heavens.”

Throughout Mesopotamian literature, almost every occurrence of the expression describing a building “with its head in the heavens” refers to a temple with a ziggurat. As a sample, here is the description by Warad-Sin, king of Larsa, who built the temple É-eš-ki-te:

He made it as high as a mountain and made its head touch heaven. On account of this deed the gods Nanna and Ningal rejoiced. May they grant to him a destiny of life, a long reign, and a firm foundation.

It is this language, along with the indication that God “came down,” that gives textual confirmation that the tower is a ziggurat. This would have been transparent to the ancient reader.” – ZIBBCOT. ⁵The notes in the Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible are derived from this set.

Transparent to the ancient reader. But we are not ancient readers, so it’s pretty opaque… unless we’re taking advantage of these “best books”  per D&C 88:118. Again, once you know the context, the content makes sense.

The second implicit context is also Babylonian, but in a different way.  It’s a word play, also quite common in the Old Testament, but virtually impossible to indicate in translation. (I talk about these and poetry more in my videos.) Typically, wordplay in translation has to be pointed out in notes, like Alter’s. He skillfully translates Genesis 11:6-9 like this to bring it out.

…Come, let us go down to baffle their language…. Therefore it is called Babel, for the Lord made the language of all the earth babble.

He explains in his literary notes,

The Hebrew balal, “to mix or confuse,” represented in this translation by baffle and babble is a polemic pun on the Akkadian “Babel”…

That is, at the late time Genesis 11 was written, Babel/Babylon was thought to be a great source and center of culture, knowledge, and science. But Genesis 11 cleverly portrays it instead as a source of hubris, confusion, and apostasy.

Implicit context to scripture is the reason why we need more than a good translation (although that’s very helpful); we need more than the dictionary meaning of the words translated for us. We need the implicit context made explicit: the cultural significance, the allusions,  genres, wordplay, historical context. We need explanatory chapter headings, up-to-date essays, and Study Bibles. Once we know the context, the content makes sense! Otherwise, we’re not reading scripture as it was intended to be understood, and instead filling it with what we imagine it really says.

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