In my last post, I brought up the first of three steps to studying the Bible. We looked at the role of observation and examined five ways to help us do it better. In this post, we will explore the second step of studying the Bible: interpretation.

Step 2: Interpretation

I have had the unique privilege of traveling to several foreign countries. I love the adventure of exploring new scenery, foods, cultures, and people. One of the frustrating things, however, is not being able to speak the language. I always feel so limited in figuring out where to go and what to say, given that I do not speak their native tongue. The remedy, of course, is to have an interpreter. Someone who can take the words and phrases and help them make sense to you.

Studying the Bible requires the ability to be an interpreter. It’s one thing to observe words, syntax, and the like. But the next step is figuring out what it means. 

Interpretation focuses on the question, “What does the text mean?”

A great biblical story that demonstrates the need for interpretation is found in Nehemiah 8. The book of Nehemiah takes place in a time when Israel was in exile and the city of Jerusalem (along with its Temple) was destroyed. God used Nehemiah to rebuild the wall so that the people could return and worship Him. In Nehemiah 8, we read that the Law of God was rediscovered. It’s hard to imagine, but Israel had fallen so far away from God that most of the people had no clue where to find a copy of the Law. Ezra, the priest, finds a copy of the Law and gathers the people together to read it. He gets help from several other priests, and they read the Law to the people of God. The Bible states, “They read from the book, from the Law of God, translating to give the sense so that they understood the reading” (Nehemiah 8:8). Do you see it? Someone had to not only read the Law but help to give a sense of it so that people can understand what they are hearing. They are practicing the step of interpretation.

If you are a believer in Jesus, you are indwelled by the Holy Spirit and have all the tools you need to help interpret the Scriptures (This is not to imply that you do not also need teachers and preachers to help, especially since the Bible tells you that you need teachers). But you can discover for yourself much of what the Bible means by using helpful methods of interpretation.

5 Helps for Bible Interpretation
1. Know the Context. If the number one rule of real estate is location, location, location, the number one rule of Bible interpretation is context, context, context. To truly understand a biblical passage, you must know what comes right before and right after the text. Moreover, how does the text fit into the overall passage, book/letter, and testament? In Inductive Bible Study, Kostenberger and Fuhr discuss three different facets of context: theological, historical, and literary. Perhaps we will look at these in a future post, but all three matter in determining biblical context.

2. Compare Scripture with Scripture. It’s easy to build a faulty theological foundation if we only rely on one verse. For example, you might read Jesus saying, “Ask for whatever you wish” (John 15:7) and think that God is some kind of a genie in the sky who wants to give you whatever you want, whenever you want it. When we read that verse in light of John 14-16 and the Gospel of John as a whole, it would be impossible to take such a viewpoint. Use cross-references in your Bible to look at associated passages. These help you to interpret Scripture in light of other Scriptures that shed more light on the matter.

3. Understand Biblical Genre. The Bible is referred to as a book, but technically, it is a collection of 66 books. Moreover, the Bible contains several genres. For example, the Bible has historical books, wisdom books, poetry books, prophetic books, narrative books, epistle books, and apocalyptic books. These are broken down into various sub-genre books. For example, the four New Testament Gospels are primarily narrative in their genre, but they have in them parables, which are a separate genre unto themselves. Just as you read a blog article differently than a love letter, we read biblical passages in light of their category of genre.

4. Do Word Studies. Understanding what words mean helps us to interpret Scripture properly. Most of us do not have a working knowledge of biblical Hebrew or Greek. However, we have many great tools at our disposal that can help us better understand words. Many Bibles have a concordance or dictionary in the back which gives the meaning of words. There are also many helpful websites, such as biblehub.com, which allow you to look up words. I should warn you that just because you discover the meaning of an individual word, this does not always help you understand a passage. But, understanding words, accompanied by understanding the context in which they are used, can go a long way in helping us interpret the Bible. 

5. Use Commentaries. You may hear me or another pastor refer to using a commentary. Commentaries are the attempts of a scholar (or scholars) to interpret the passage in an understandable way. Commentaries are written for each book of the Bible. Most commentaries have descriptions of each verse along with introductory material that can help us better understand the overall book. These resources can be very helpful in helping us to interpret the Bible better. (One caveat: commentaries are not infallible as they are the product of human thought. Scholars have theological convictions that are projected onto what they write. Therefore, there is a spectrum of theological beliefs given in commentaries. Do some research on the author/scholar to better understand his/her worldview).

These are five helps, of many, to help us better interpret the Scripture. 

Figuring out what the text means isn’t always easy, but it’s always worth the effort. 

Next, we will look at the third and final step of Bible Study Methods: Application.