BibleProject Classroom

The Hebrew Bible can present particular challenges for different people, such as talking animals, genocide, the portrayal of God, and how to truly apply this ancient text to our modern lives. When approaching the Hebrew Bible, it is helpful to be aware of our own assumptions and questions and to pay attention to the intent of the biblical authors.

Jesus and his first followers portray the Hebrew Bible as a unified collection of wisdom literature that tells a story about a future anointed one who will rescue humanity. The Hebrew Bible is about an anointed representative who enters into suffering and death, goes through death and out the other side, and offers new life for humanity. By recovering a way of reading these texts that matches the contours of their design intentions, we willl earn to read the Hebrew Bible as Jesus did.

Jesus’ Bible was a three-part collection of scrolls called the TaNaK. TaNaK is a designation for the Hebrew Bible taken from the first letter of its three major sections. T stands for Torah, which is Hebrewfor "instruction;" N is for Nevi'im, meaning "prophets;" and K is for Ketuvim, meaning "writings." The three-part macro design dates to somewhere in the 3rd-2nd century B.C.E. This order is preserved in modern Jewish tradition and is well-attested in Second Temple Jewish texts and the New Testament.

The Dead Sea Scrolls preserve the technology of scroll making during the pre-Christian period, revealing what the Hebrew Bible would have looked like in Jesus’ synagogue. Within the specific technology of the time, the beginning and end of a scroll are two of the most likely places we can look to find intentional clues and hyperlinks.

The final sentences of the Torah and the opening sentences of the Prophets (“Seam One”) anticipate a coming Moses-like prophet who is promised but is yet to come. The final sentences of the Prophets and the opening sentences of the Ketuvim (“Seam Two”) anticipate a coming Elijah-like prophet who will call the people back to the Torah and restore the hearts of Israel to Yahweh.

Psalm 1 paints a picture of a righteous human who meditates on the Torah day and night, bringing forth life around him. Psalm 2 describes the righteous human of Psalm 1 as the future messianic king from the line of David who is appointed by God to rule the nations and overcome evil once and for all. The portrait of the Spirit of God woven throughout the Bible helps us see the collaboration between God and humans more clearly, revealing how the Bible’s origin truly is human and divine together.

The Bible’s narratives, poems, histories, letters, prophecies, and other writings come from a profound collaboration between humanity and God. Whenever the biblical authors talk about the Spirit’s activity, they describe the Spirit working with and through God’s human partners, not in spite of human partners. God’s divine word is communicated through the words of the human authors. So when we talk abou tthe human author, we are talking about the divine author at the same time.

The first three mentions of the writing of the Bible in the Torah give us important clues to the purpose of the Bible. The Bible shows us that it was written (1) to tell the story of how God has rescued and formed a people, (2) to invite those rescued people into a covenant partnership to represent him to the rest of the world, and (3) to call to account the betrayal of the covenant while offering hope for the future of God’s people and his world.

The Hebrew Bible claims to come from a tradition of prophetic leaders in Israel that stems from Moses. The texts reflect a minority report within ancient Israel that comes from those who were faithful to Yahweh and remained true to the covenant.

The Bible’s divinity and authority doesn’t negate the human processes that brought it into existence. The Hebrew Bible is a collection of collections made up of preexisting textual materials from different periods of Israel’s history and literature. We find clues throughout the Hebrew Bible that reveal how each book is an organized collection of preexisting materials that have been brought into, and play a new function within, a new composition.

The Hebrew Bible is a collection of scrolls that has been arranged with a mosaic (i.e., composite) unity. The Ketuvim (i.e., the Writings) acts as mini-commentaries on the themes and ideas at work elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible can be likened to a family quilt made up of individual pieces from various people throughout different time periods. And each individual piece adds new layers of meaning andsignificance when viewed within the context of the piece as a whole.

The Hebrew Bible can be likened to an aspen grove—it’s a collection of texts that are distinctive yet share interconnected origin points and grow together as a united structure telling one cohesivenarrative. Another way to describe hyperlinks is intertextuality, where a specific text only means what it means in light of the entirety of texts it is connected to. The meaning is found in the interconnection of the texts.

Learning to read the Hebrew Bible well requires an awareness of our personal “encyclopedias of reception” and a discovery of the “encyclopedias of production” assumed by the biblical authors as they communicate. The Hebrew Bible is carefully crafted literature with every word placed intentionally to convey a specific message. Learning to read the Hebrew Bible requires studying the specific conventions and ways the biblical authors wrote narrative, poetry, and discourse.

Hebrew poetry is shaped into a line-rhythm or verse. It is not metrical (based on syllable counts) but a form of free verse. Hebrew poetry uses intentional, creative language (e.g., heavy use of metaphor) with unique word combinations, repetition, patterns, and hyperlinking to other parts of Scripture. The biblical authors build out their theology of God’s character, essence, and purpose from within their worldview.

Poetry is a form of communication that invites the reader into a partnership with the written word inorder to discover its meaning. Learning the function of repetition and of literary design is the most fundamental tool for reading and understanding biblical literature. When reading biblical poetry, the fundamental communication tool is repetition with slight variations that create patterns that build anticipation and expectations for the reader.

Biblical authors often use parallelism in their poetry, which causes the readers to place two or more things in comparison with each other to show their relation. At its root, parallelism is a form of comparison and analogy. It assumes that to truly understand andexperience a thing, you need to grasp not only that thing but also another thing that is both similar and distinct at the same time. Parallelism employs comparison techniques such as analogy, complement, contrast, and sequence — each requiring and aiding the reader to discover the uniqueness and meaning behind the poetic lines.

In biblical poetry, the authors invite us to compare parallel words/images in lines that are not next to each other through the use of symmetry (e.g., a symmetrical design such as ABBA). The biblical authors often employ wordplay using graphically similar words in Hebrew to convey relationships and meaning.

When we read biblical narrative, we are reading an interpretation of the biblical events within the stylized poetics (i.e., conventions) of biblical narrative. Biblical narrative invites us into the narrative world of the authors, and it also invites us to view the world from the their perspective. The narratives work on you, and over time, they begin to affect the way we view ourselves and the world we’re living in. When reading the Hebrew Bible, it is helpful to familiarize ourselves with the basic elements of ancient Near Eastern culture to gain insight into the culture of the ancient Israelites. However, the main key to understanding the text is the text itself. For example, to understand one narrative in Genesis, we need to understand it in light of the entire Genesis scroll and the TaNaK as a whole.

The plot of a narrative invests the story with meaning—the conflict within a plot and how the conflict is resolved invests the narrative with its ethical message. Narrative meaning can also be found through plot sequence, or the use of conflict, climax, and resolution to convey a message. The same characters in the same conflict but with different resolutions of the climax can have a different message.

One way biblical narrative uses plot is through plot embedding, or layers of storylines working together to tell the overall story of the Bible. Individual narratives are framed within a larger context that gives them a meaning that transcends the individual events. The Hebrew Bible is about our need for the messiah, and the New Testament reveals that Jesus is the Messiah we need. Both Jesus and the apostles appeal to the Hebrew Bible to reveal Jesus’ true identity.

Biblical authors use characters as vehicles for their message primarily through showing rather than telling. Narrators rarely make comments in biblical narrative, and when they do, it’s with small details or brief phrases. Biblical authors give us the trace of a character but we have to fill in the rest based on the little we know. The minimalist policy is very intentional. It forces us, the readers, to participate in the making of meaning. Biblical authors use the setting as a tool in biblical narratives to evoke memories and emotions and to generate expectations about what could happen in the story.

The Bible is like a photomosaic with identifiable smaller literary units crafted and arranged to work together and create a larger, overarching message. Biblical authors use repeated scenes, often with slight variations, to develop themes throughout the story. A concordance is a very helpful tool for identifying repeated words and phrases in our Bibles.

Repeated words, phrases, and parallel themes connect individual stories across the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Biblical authors use repetition of lead words to create patterns that guide the reader’s focus and create expectations for the reader. A “lead word” is a word that repeats significantly in a text or group of texts. The biblical authors use variations of Hebrew word roots to create wordplay and repetition.

The message of the text is bound up with its literary form, and the literary form is part of the message. Like biblical poetry, biblical narrative is intentionally designed with an identifiable structure. Although it might not be helpful for everyone, for some, studying the literary design of Bible passages can be exactly what they need in their journey of reading and understanding the Bible.

The relationships between connected literary units can work in different ways (e.g., contrast, create a sequence), but at the core is an analogy. The reader is being asked to read a particular literary unit on analogy with another literary unit in order to discover a deeper meaning. Sometimes entire stories or scenes are designed to repeat elements of other stories. This involves not only repeated words but parallel narrative patterns, themes, and sequences. Sometimes the narratives to be compared are next to each other, like in Genesis 2-3 and Genesis 4. In these narratives, we watch Human and Life set a template for redefining “good” and “bad” on their own terms, which is replayed by the next generation.

Sometimes the narrative comparison is prompted by an identical repetition in distant narratives. Through the use of key word repetitions, biblical authors lead us to compare and contrast characters in order to advance the narrative argument. Biblical authors often compare narratives and create patterns in subtle ways. To find a pattern, watch for embedded key words and images that link stories together, like the repetition of “see and take” in Genesis 3 and Genesis 6.

The story of Abram and Sarai in Genesis 12:10-20 is set on analogy to Genesis 3 through the use of repeated words. The story is an example of one of the main themes of the Bible—the complex and tragic human condition as people give into temptation over and over again. This temptation pattern is marked by repeated words such as “see,” “take,” “desire,” and “good in their eyes.” The story in Genesis 12:10-20 is an example of a dynamic analogy. This means characters move dynamically in and out of previously established character slots from stories to which the author is hyperlinking. For example, in a story hyperlinking to Genesis 3, a character can play the role of the snake and also be an inversion of the snake because their deception brings life instead of death.

Throughout the entire storyline of the Hebrew Bible, there will be snake-people and humanity-people, and they are going to be at enmity with one another in narrative after narrative. In the Hebrew Bible narratives, people can switch back and forth between being a seed of the woman and a seed of the snake. Even the people God calls to be his blessing to the world can become the seed of the snake. The birth of the nation of Israel is depicted as the birth of snake seed. The whole drama of the Jacob story is how God is going to turn Jacob (the snake-like deceiver) into a human.

Design patterns are the main way biblical authors unify hundreds of stories. And every pattern develops a core theme throughout the whole biblical story that leads to Jesus. The stories of Jesus in the Gospels have been designed to carry the patterns of the Hebrew forward to their climax, namely, Jesus.