Implicit Context Revisited: Genesis and Sports Analogies!

I got this note from a friend, and am posting it with permission. I’ve edited slightly for identity and readability. I don’t really do sports analogies. While I am very active in several things, I don’t follow any teams or watch any sports. Everything below is from my friend, until the very end.

Thought you’d appreciate hearing how I leveraged some of your Genesis materials in my 11-12 year old Sunday school class today.

We’re in Texas, so I figured a football analogy would be a great way to start. I asked the kids (I think I had 14 today, 7 boys and 7 girls, and about 6th grade…)

if I told you that the cowboys defeated the giants, what would you understand from just that sentence?

They immediately picked up that I was talking about an NFL football game, that the two teams were from Dallas and New York, and that one team had won the game while the other had lost. I pointed out that there was an AWFUL lot of extra context that they UNDERSTOOD just from my referencing two specific nouns: cowboys and giants…

I then said “what if I changed it and said the giants defeated the rangers?”

“Oh, now you’re talking about baseball…and the two teams are from San Francisco and…(Dallas) Texas”

“OK good. Now I want to imagine that you are living 150 or 200 years ago. Football and baseball have not been invented yet. In fact, sports as a pastime barely exists, and even then it is mostly just for gangs and lower classes in the biggest cities. You live in this same area of what is now Texas, which at the time was either a part of Mexico or an independent nation (depending how far back you choose to go in your time machine) and I’ve just told you one of those exact same sentences about the cowboys defeating the giants or the giants defeating the rangers…how do you think you’d understand my meaning now?”

“Well, we probably would either not know what you were talking about, or we’d think you were talking about really big people and maybe the actual real-life Texas Rangers…”

OK – good, so you see that context matters, and some of that context is not even in the text of the words in question: in the present day, you AUTOMATICALLY understood whether I was talking about NFL or MLB just from the team names, but those nouns also have other historical meanings that we might recognize if we’ve studied enough history or seen enough TV shows.

Now – here’s the important point as it relates to Noah and the Flood or the Tower of Babel story: when it comes to us reading those stories in the 21st century, we are the ones who do not have all the right context for what the authors of those stories understood when they wrote about flood waters covering “all the earth” or building a tower “to reach heaven” or about it raining “forty days and forty nights”…

Lightbulbs started going off at various points during the above…and then the questions started coming down like rain “so does that mean it DIDN’T rain 40 days and 40 nights?” (Unimportant – what’s important is that the author(s) were trying to convey “it was a lot of rain for a long time”)…”so does that mean the earth WASN’T created in seven days?” (Also unimportant – what’s important is that the author(s) were trying to convey “seven is a number that indicates completeness, and unlike the other Creation stories that the neighboring cultures to the ancient Israelites, the Genesis Creation stories show that God said His Creation was “good” and even “very good”)…. I just presented them with some additional tools to be able to read ancient texts without having to ONLY read them as if they were literal science textbooks so that when they get to high school and college they don’t lose their testimonies…”😇

Ben adds, I think it’s really important in Church classes and seminary not only that we teach the doctrine, but we also give students intellectual and spiritual tools to tackle scripture and history. In the case of Seminary, some of these students will go directly from their senior year of high school directly to the mission field, where they will essentially be on their own.

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