How to read the Bible
The single most useful idea I know for reading Scripture well comes from Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart's How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth: every passage has two separate questions attached to it, and they have to be asked in order.
- Exegesis — what did this mean to the people who first read or heard it?
- Hermeneutics — what does it mean for us, now?
Almost every bad reading of the Bible I've come across skipped straight to question 2. The fix isn't complicated, just disciplined: don't answer "what does this mean for me" until you've answered "what did this mean to them." A verse ripped straight out of its own moment and applied directly to yours will usually mean something the author never intended — sometimes harmlessly, sometimes not.
Ask these questions, in order
1. What kind of writing is this? A psalm, a letter, a law, a parable, and a vision are read differently, on purpose — see Reading by genre below. Knowing the genre before you start tells you what kind of questions are even fair to ask of the text.
2. Who wrote it, to whom, and why? The historical occasion — author, audience, date, and the actual circumstance that called the passage into being. A letter answering a specific controversy in a specific church reads differently once you know what the controversy was.
3. What comes immediately before and after? Don't exegete a verse in isolation from its paragraph. Ask what the author's own train of thought is — what's the point of this unit, in the author's own argument, not a point you already had in mind before you opened the book.
4. What do the words actually say? Most of the time the words are plain enough in translation. When a specific word is doing real theological work, or two good translations render it noticeably differently, it's worth checking the underlying Hebrew or Greek rather than guessing — see Hebrew Studies for a start on the original languages this site leans on.
5. What's tied to that moment, and what carries over? Some things in a passage are bound to its original cultural setting; some things transcend it. This is the actual hinge between exegesis and hermeneutics — get honest about which is which before you draw a principle out of the text.
6. Does this hold up elsewhere in Scripture? Don't build a doctrine on one obscure narrative detail or an incidental remark. A narrative usually illustrates a principle taught plainly somewhere else; it rarely establishes one by itself. If you can't find the principle stated directly anywhere else, hold the conclusion loosely.
Reading by genre
Different kinds of biblical writing were written to work differently, and reading all of them the same way is where a lot of bad interpretation starts.
| Genre | Read for |
|---|---|
| Epistles (letters) | What problem in the original church occasioned this passage? Does the author himself mark a claim as universal ("in all the churches"), or as local practice? |
| Old Testament narrative | Narrative records what happened — it doesn't automatically endorse it. Does the narrator, or the rest of Scripture, evaluate this as good or bad? Or is that left for you to notice? |
| Acts / historical precedent | Was the story's own point to establish a repeatable pattern, or is the detail incidental to something else the author's actually making a point about? A pattern isn't automatically a command. |
| Gospels | Which Gospel, and what's that author's own emphasis and audience? Read each Gospel on its own terms before harmonizing it with the others. |
| Parables | What's the one main point the original hearers would have grasped? Who is Jesus needling, and what situation provoked the story? Resist reading meaning into every incidental detail. |
| Law | Moral, civil, or ceremonial? Even where a specific rule doesn't carry over today, what does it reveal about God's own character? |
| Prophets | Read first as God's people being held to an existing covenant — blessing for faithfulness, judgment for breach — in the prophet's own time, before reading it forward to any other time. |
| Psalms | What kind of psalm — lament, praise, thanksgiving, a royal psalm, an imprecatory one? A psalm is usually a prayer addressed to God, not a proposition addressed to you. Let its form shape what you expect from it. |
| Wisdom literature | Proverbs are generally-true observations, not unconditional promises. Hold that hopeful realism against Job and Ecclesiastes' more honest counterpoint, rather than flattening one against the other. |
| Revelation / apocalyptic | Find the Old Testament imagery a vision is drawing on before assigning it a novel, modern meaning. Remember it was written to seven real churches first — that pastoral purpose sits right alongside the future-oriented vision, not instead of it. |
A few habits worth keeping
- Compare translations. Where two solid translations render a verse noticeably differently, that's worth noticing, not smoothing over.
- Use commentaries last, not first. Read the text yourself before you read what someone else concluded about it — a commentary should check your reading, not form it for you.
- Name your sources. If a conclusion came from a commentary, a lexicon, or someone else's teaching, say so. It's not a weakness to cite where an idea came from; it's how a reader can go verify it themselves.
Further reading
- Gordon D. Fee & Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth (4th ed.) — the source of the exegesis/hermeneutics framework this whole page is built on. Worth reading in full; this page is a summary, not a substitute.
- Hebrew Studies — for step 4 above, when a word is worth checking in its original language.
- eBible.org — for comparing translations, step 5 under A few habits worth keeping.