to the NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible
Editor’s Note: This study Bible draws on the contributions of various scholars. The Old Testament (OT) comprises three-quarters of the Bible, and to provide study notes and articles on this body of work, Dr. John Walton has drawn on the works of various contributors, including his own work, in the Zondervan Bible Backgrounds Commentary: Old Testament. Also drawing on a range of research, Dr. Craig Keener, author of The IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament, authored most NT notes, but others contributed some sidebars and “Quick Glance” notes.
Both scholars have published heavily documented works that support the sort of background that is provided here on a more accessible level. Both have been studying, writing and lecturing around the world about the field of the Bible’s cultural backgrounds for the duration of their decades-long careers as academics.
For whom has this study Bible been designed?
This study Bible is for those who want more out of the study of the Bible than they can get by just reading the text on their own. The notes, illustrations, charts and other study tools offer content for understanding that goes beyond most study Bibles. It is for the reader who isn’t content with being told what they should understand from the text, or with being given what they could figure out on their own. It is for the reader who already understands the importance of reading in context and seeing each book of the Bible as a whole. It is for the reader who is serious about the Bible itself, but has not had advanced training in the world in which the message of the Bible first came alive.
Can’t I read and understand the Bible just from the text itself?
Study Bibles often focus on helping readers apply the Bible to daily life. To be sure, applying the Bible to daily life is very important. Yet those who read the Bible enough can glean most principles from the Bible directly. After all, God’s story in the Bible is designed to be understood by children. As Jesus said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children” (Mt 11:25), and “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt 18:3). Hearing God’s personal challenge from the Bible itself is more direct than hearing a challenge from someone else’s comments. Spiritual life comes from God’s Word itself.
The complication is the gulf between the world of the Bible and the modern reader’s world. The problem is normally not that the modern reader doesn’t know their own world; it’s that the reader is not familiar with the world of the Bible. It is here that a study Bible can help most by explaining the language, literature and culture of the Bible.
How does this study Bible differ from others that are available?
What these notes supply is background—the missing pieces of information that the Biblical writers did not need to state explicitly because their original audiences intuitively knew them. Understanding these nuances help the reader “hear” the Bible in a way much closer to the way the Bible’s first audience heard it. Although the best study Bibles today include some background, this study Bible is unique in the massive wealth of background that it provides.
How will understanding the Bible’s cultural background improve my faith walk?
There is no such thing as a story or a teaching that doesn’t have a cultural setting. That is not to say that a story or teaching is not relevant for another setting, but to remember that it comes to us from a particular place and in a particular language. God sent his Son Jesus Christ in the flesh, in a specific home, nation, town and era. Likewise, God didn’t send the Bible as a transcultural feeling or impression, but gave it to us through the experiences that real people had in real historical situations. This Bible’s notes are meant to help readers hear and visualize the story closer to the way it was originally written, so they can get to know the people and places in the Bible more on their own terms.
Readers from different cultures bring a range of experiences and insights to their Bible reading. The place where we come together, however, is when we read God’s Word in the concrete framework in which he gave it. It is especially when we hear the message in its authentic, original cultural setting that we can reapply it afresh for our own different settings most fully, because we understand what issues were really being addressed. You should keep this purpose in mind as you read the notes.
Please tell me more about the notes in this Bible.
The study tools in this Bible are not meant to tell the reader everything about the Biblical text—especially not what will be self-evident from the context. They do not always tell readers what is most important or what applies most directly to life, because these are points that mature readers can learn to do on their own. What they do is equip readers to study the Bible more on its own terms so they can discover its most valuable treasures for themselves.
Not every proposed background is equally relevant or certain, though the authors of the study notes have tried to screen out the least relevant and least certain proposals. New discoveries, especially in archaeology, also periodically invite us to revise older views, but the vast information available already allows us to affirm much Biblical background with full confidence.
How can we know for sure what the Bible’s ancient culture was like?
As a result of the recovery of over a million texts from the ancient world and a century of persistent research by scholars, we are now in a position to add significant nuances to our understanding of the life and thought of those who lived in Israel in Bible times. The end result is a more thorough and comprehensive understanding of the text.
Through understanding the background, we can better understand why people spoke and acted the ways they did and can better identify with them. Besides helping us understand the world in which people in the Bible lived, study of ancient texts from the cultures in the Biblical world can provide information that we really need to understand the Biblical material. If, as readers, we are isolated from the cultural background of the Bible, we might be inclined to think that the ideas in the Biblical text have no anchors in time and culture.
How was Israelite culture shaped by its surrounding culture?
Though the Bible is unique in its inspiration, we find that God often communicated through culture rather than in total isolation from it. Becoming aware of this continuity with the ancient and classical worlds can help us see these ideas in a larger context. God was replacing his people’s views of God with a better one, but he was not replacing all of their culture.
Even when a Biblical text persuasively corrects its contemporary culture, we must be aware of how the text interacts with then-current thinking and literature. The Biblical text formulated its discussion in relation to the thinking found in the ancient literature. It would be no surprise, then, if areas of similarity should be found. This is far different from the contention that Israelite literature is simply derivative mythology. There is a great distance between borrowing from a particular piece of literature and resonating with the larger culture that has itself been influenced by its literatures.
Can you provide a modern example of this?
When Americans speak of the philosophy of “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” they are resonating with an idea that has penetrated society over thousands of years rather than simply borrowing from the writings of Epicurus. In a similar way, an observer from the distant future would fail to understand American culture of the 21st century if they did not understand the foundations of individualism, personal rights or consumerism (just to name a few of the influences). To offer a more specific example: a reader in the distant future would need some historical background to understand a familiar American question from the early twenty-first century: “Where were you on 9/11?” The question assumes a shared understanding of background that the asker does not bother to state.
Successful interpreters must try to understand the cultural background of the Bible just as successful missionaries must learn the culture, language and worldview of the people they are trying to reach. This is the rationale for us to study the Bible in light its cultural context. What we would contend, then, is that comparative work has three goals in mind:
1. We study the history of the Biblical world as a means of recovering knowledge of the events that shaped the lives of people in the ancient world.
2. We study archaeology as a means of recovering the lifestyle reflected in the material culture of the ancient world.
3. We study the literature of the ancient world as a means of penetrating the heart and soul of the people who inhabited that world.
These goals are at the heart of comparative studies and will help us understand the Bible better.
How do we understand the Bible—a book that billions have turned to over multiple centuries and many cultures—as literature in its ancient context?
Readers today approach very differently such different sorts of writings as satire, news reports or a declaration of war. Knowing how a work was intended is an important key for understanding it. It should therefore be no surprise that the inspired authors adapted genres (literary types) that already existed in the larger culture; otherwise the first audiences would not have known what these works were meant for. Whether we are looking at wisdom literature, hymnic literature, historical literature, legal literature or the letters in the NT, we find generous doses of both similarities to and differences from the Biblical text and the literature of the time.
Understanding the genre of a piece of literature is necessary if we want to more fully understand the author’s intentions. Since perceiving an author’s intentions is essential to our theological interpretation of a text, we recognize that understanding genre contributes to legitimate theological interpretation. Some genres will operate differently in the ancient world than do the most similar genres in our own culture so we must become familiar with the mechanics of the genres represented in the ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world.
In light of all of this, we can logically concluded that without the guidance of comparative studies, readers in cultures removed from the ancient world are bound to misinterpret the text at some points.
But why is the study of cultural backgrounds so important?
This field of research is important because grasping the original audience’s perspective helps us understand the setting to which the inspired authors communicated their message.
A text is a complex of ideas linked by threads of writing. Each phrase and each word communicates by the ideas and thoughts that they will trigger in the reader or hearer. Biblical writers normally could take for granted that their audiences shared their language and culture; some matters, therefore, they assumed rather than stated. But what happens when later readers from different cultures approach these texts? As each person hears or reads the text, the message takes for granted underlying gaps that need to be filled with meaning by the audience. (To use a previous example, in a message today, we might take for granted that our audience understands the term “9/11.”) Interpreters have the task of filling in those gaps, and when we are interpreting authoritative texts, it is theologically essential that we fill them appropriately.
This approach is critical to practical application, because information from the original culture often fills those gaps in ways different from those we might guess, and these differences can sometimes yield quite theological insights. As readers who are interested in understanding the text’s message, we should value comparative studies that highlight conceptual issues intended to illumine the cultural dynamics behind the text.
Another importance to cultural backgrounds, then, is that by becoming aware of the ways that ancient people thought, we can see the differences between them and us. If we know nothing of the ancient world, we will be inclined to impose our own culture and worldview on the Biblical text. This will always be detrimental to our understanding.
What do I need to know before I begin?
Readers should carefully weigh how to use information in our notes, which we have deliberately kept concise. Information present may show contrasts as well as similarities. Here are therefore some principles to consider when comparing Biblical texts with their ancient contexts:
1. Both cultural similarities and cultural differences must be considered.
2. Similarities may suggest a common cultural heritage rather than borrowing from a specific piece of literature.
3. It is common to find similarities at the surface but differences at the conceptual level or vice versa.
4. All elements of the text must be understood in their own context as accurately as possible before cross-cultural comparisons are made.
5. Proximity in time, geography and spheres of cultural contact all increase the possibility of interaction leading to influence.
6. A case for literary borrowing can rarely be made and requires identification of likely channels of transmission.
7. Similar functions may be performed by different genres in different cultures.
8. When literary or cultural elements are borrowed they may in turn be transformed into something quite different.
9. A single culture will rarely be monolithic, either in a contemporary cross-section or in consideration of a passage of time.
10. Specificity in marking dates for events in the ancient world is inherently debatable. There was no universal cultural reference point with which the ancients could mark time (such as our dates BC and AD). Different cultures used different historical reference points when marking time, so that even when researchers find recorded dates in ancient cultural literature or on artifacts, these can rarely be cited as definitive. The differences in dates for specific events in the Old Testament notes reflect this reality as various contributors reflect their own assessments. The earlier the time period, the more tenuous the dating becomes.
11. Cultural terms in the text of the notes (e.g., use of the term “Palestine” in the Old Testament, which refers to the larger region in which the Hebrew people lived), do not refer to current political realities unless the notes indicate as such.
For more information, please see the article “Major Background Issues from the Ancient Near East.”
—John H. Walton and Craig S. Keener