Preface
This book is intended to be a companion to How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. That book was designed to help people become better readers of Scripture by taking into account the various kinds of literature that make up the Christian Bible. Through an understanding of how the various types “work,” how they differ from one another, and how they raise different kinds of hermeneutical questions, we hoped that one might learn to read the Bible in a more informed way.
The success of that first book has given us the courage to try another. The aim is still the same: to help people become better readers of Scripture. What we hope to do here is to go a step beyond the first book: Assuming the principles of the first book, here we try to help you read — and understand — each of the biblical books on its own but especially to help you see how each one fits with the others to form the great narrative of Scripture.
But this book has undergone its own form of evolution. Some years ago we were asked to write a Bible survey textbook of the kind that many students have been exposed to over the years. For a variety of reasons, but mostly because we could never get our hearts into it, that project simply did not work out. To be sure, we hope this book will still serve the purposes of survey courses, but we have intentionally tried to write something quite different. These differences, as we perceive them, are several.
First, our goal is not simply to dispense knowledge about the various books of the Bible — the kind of knowledge that allows one to pass Bible knowledge exams without ever reading the Bible! Such books and exams usually deal with a lot of data but very often with little sense of how the various books of the Bible function as entities on their own or of how each fits into God’s story. Our present concern is almost altogether with the latter. And in any case, the concern is with your becoming a better reader of Scripture; if you begin to learn some other things about each book along the way, all the better.
Second, we want to show how the separate entities — each biblical book — fit together as a whole to tell God’s story. So much is this a concern that our book is introduced with a brief overview of the biblical story — what those who study narratives call the metanarrative of Scripture. This is the big picture, the primary story, of which all the others form a part so as to shape the whole.
Third, in coming to the various biblical books, one by one, we follow a generally consistent format that isolates questions of introduction at the beginning as “Orienting Data for . . .” These kinds of issues (authorship, date, recipients, occasion, and the like) take up much of the space in most surveys. For these (sometimes important) matters there are several surveys, introductions, and Bible dictionaries for both the Old and New Testaments that you may consult. But these matters are often debatable and therefore consume a lot of time that is not always immediately relevant to the reading of the biblical text in its larger setting. Thus, we simply offer some options, or note the traditional view, or settle on one as the perspective from which this guide is written.
But a further word is needed about the matter of authorship, especially for the Old Testament books, since authors in that period did not normally attach their names to what they wrote (with the exception of letters — and there are none of these as books in the Old Testament). When individuals speak about themselves within a given book (e.g., Moses, Nehemiah, Qohelet [“Teacher” in Ecclesiastes]), we may learn something about probable or possible authorship that we wouldn’t otherwise know. But for the most part, modern concerns about matters of date and authorship were not given the same attention in ancient Israel; this is made obvious by their absence from most of these books. Many books (e.g., nearly all the historical and poetical books) are entirely anonymous. And even though the source of the content of some books is given — by way of an editorial title at the beginning — and assumptions can often be made that the source also functioned as author, the concern over the book’s actual author is not prominent in the book itself. As to dating, just four books — Ezekiel, Daniel, Zechariah, and Haggai — date any of their material, and of those only Haggai does so consistently. Thus we have chosen to minimize authorship in this reading guide, leaving it entirely alone when the biblical book itself is anonymous (one can say “unknown” only so many times!). Our interest is in your reading the biblical document in its final canonical form, not in debating the issues of dates, sources, and authorship.
Most of our energy, therefore, has gone into the three major sections of each chapter. The first, “Overview of . . . ,” is designed to get you into the book by giving you a sense of what the whole is about. In some ways it is a brief elaboration of the “Content” sentence(s) in the “Orienting” section. The second, “Specific Advice for Reading ...,” tends to elaborate the “Emphases” from the “Orienting” section. Here we offer a way of reading the text, some key themes to keep in mind as you do, or some crucial background material — all of which are designed to help you as you read the text for yourself. The final section, “A Walk through . . . ,” then takes you by the hand, as it were, and walks you through the book, showing how its various parts work together to form the whole. Sometimes this takes more of an outline form; at other times, because we have purposely tried to keep our chapters brief, you will walk with giant steps. The books of Psalms and Proverbs were understandably the most difficult to fit into this pattern; yet even here we have tried to help you see how the collections are put together.
Above all, we have tried to write a book about the books of the Bible that will not be a substitute for reading the Bible itself. Rather, we hope it may create a desire in you to read each of the biblical books for yourself, while helping you make a fair amount of sense out of what you are reading.
NOTE WELL: The key to using this book is for you to read the first three sections of each chapter (“Orienting Data,” “Overview,” “Specific Advice”), and then to read the biblical text in conjunction with the section titled “A Walk through . . .” If you read “A Walk through” on its own, it will become just more data for you to assimilate. Our intent is for you first to have some important preliminary data in hand, then truly to walk with you through your reading of the biblical book. This will, of course, be far more difficult for some of the longer books, just as it was for us to condense so much material into the brief parameters we allowed ourselves. But even here, while you may be reading over a more extended time period, we hope you will find this a helpful guide. A glossary is provided for those who need some guidance through the maze of technical terms that biblical scholars tend to use without forethought (see p. 191). We have also supplied a suggested chronological listing of the books for those who wish to read them in that order (see the appendix at the back of the book, p. 197).
We have tried to write in such a way that you will be able to follow what is said, no matter which English translation you are using, provided it is a contemporary one (see ch. 2 of How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth). For the New Testament, Professor Fee regularly had Today’s New International Version (TNIV) in front of him as he wrote; for the Old Testament, the New International Version (1984 edition) was used. Typically, when Bible verses are cited in this book, they are taken either from the NIV or from the New Testament edition of the TNIV.
A couple of words about presuppositions. First, while we have not assumed that the reader will already have read How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, we do refer to it from time to time (as How to 1, with page numbers always referring to the third edition [2003] so that we don’t have to repeat some presuppositional things from that book (for example, sources of the Gospels). In the case of Acts and Revelation, which received individual chapters in How to 1, that material is reset for this book, but one will still be helped by reading those chapters as well.
Second, the authors unapologetically stand within the evangelical tradition of the church. This means, among other things, that we believe that the Holy Spirit has inspired the biblical writers (and collectors) in their task — even though most often we speak of each document in terms of what the (inspired) human author is doing.
At the same time, in most cases we have tried to be apprised of and make use of the most recent biblical scholarship — although any scholar who might venture to look at this work may well wonder whether we have consulted her or his latest work. Along with our own reading of the text, we herewith gratefully acknowledge that we have incorporated suggestions — and even language — from others too many to mention by name. Those who might recognize some of their ideas in what we have written may, we hope, take pleasure in such recognition; we trust they will also be generous to us when we have chosen to go our own way rather than to be beholden to any other scholarly endeavor.
The authors with gratitude also acknowledge the following: Regent College, whose generous sabbatical policy made it possible for Professor Fee to work on the book during spring term 1998 and winter term 2001; colleagues and friends who have read selected chapters and offered many helpful comments: Iain Provan, V. Philips Long, Rikk Watts, John Stek, Bruce Waltke, and Wendy Wilcox Glidden. Professor Fee’s wife, Maudine, has taken great interest in this project by reading every word and making scores of insightful suggestions that have made it a better book. And during the month of March 2001, when Professor Fee was recuperating from surgery, she joined him in reading the entire manuscript and the entire Bible aloud — resulting in scores of changes to the book, as our ears often heard better than our eyes saw. We cannot recommend strongly enough the value of the oral reading of the Bible!
We dedicated How to 1 to our parents, three of whom have now passed on to be with their Lord. We dedicate this present endeavor to our grandchildren — as of this writing, twelve for the Fees, the oldest of whom are now teenagers, and three for the Stuarts. Thus, in some measure, this book is our own reflection on Psalm 71:14 – 18.