Culturally complicated story

Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes by E. Randolph Richards and Kenneth E. Bailey is an introduction to applying cultural, linguistic, and what I'd call historical, anthropology to the Bible. It's full of insight for anyone interested in making sense of what our culture's ancestral text meant in its own time -- and even what it might mean in our time to people whose societies are not "Western" -- I think we can substitute "European" for that label. Richards, a professor of Biblical Studies at a Baptist university, had his understanding of the Bible blown up while serving as a missionary in Indonesia. Bailey, a Presbyterian theologian, contributes much linguist insight.

They explain what they are doing this way:

You are probably familiar with the language of worldview.

Many people talk about the differences between a Christian and a secular worldview. The matter is actually more complicated than that. Worldview, which includes cultural values and other things we assume are true, can be visualized as an iceberg. The majority of our worldview, like the majority of an iceberg, is below the water line. The part we notice -- what we wear, eat, say and consciously believe -- is really only the visible tip. The majority of these powerful, shaping influences lurks [sic] below the surface, out of plain sight.

More significantly, the massive underwater water section is the part that sinks ships! Another way to say this is that the most powerful cultural values are those that go without being said. It is very hard to know what goes without being said in another culture. But often we are not even aware of what goes without being said in our own culture. This is why misunderstanding and misinterpretation happen.

They apply this perspective to a broad range of Biblical subjects. Some of this seems obvious: our social customs are not those of the people in Biblical stories nor do we operate with the same understanding of "racial" and ethnic categories. (Think Cushites or Galileans...)

Some of their topics require understanding of far more difficult cultural differences. We are individualistic; unless we are consciously working on a wider view, we think what matters supremely is each of us. The Biblical societies were collective/communal. (As well as patriarchal and sometimes tribally exclusive.) Their chapter on the value structure of honor/shame societies brought me closer to understanding this widespread way that humans have organized ourselves than anything I have ever read. (You don't have to read the Bible to run into this incomprehensible-to-us value system: the Norwegian author Sigrid Undset won a Noble prize in literature in 1928 for the novel Kristin Lavransdatter, which turns on these values.)

Misreading encourages an open mind, openness to different translations, and discussion with others to help modern students move toward a more culturally complex understanding of the Bible. I found their study suggestions worth thinking about and the whole worth reading. ***That said, I found this book itself a cross-cultural experience. Richard and Bailey write for Biblical literalists, if not quite what I'd call fundamentalists. They expect their readers to be trying to take in and make moral and practical sense of every line in the Good Book.

That's not how I read the Bible. For me, the Bible is potent story, a sweeping collection of narratives, metaphors, and images that uncover something about reality, wisdom, and humanity. I encounter the book within a community-prescribed lectionary cycle. I'm sure I hear it within "western" preconceptions, but perhaps not quite the same ones as those to which these authors are writing. That only adds a layer to why I found Misreading interesting.