Training · Grasping God's Word
The historical-cultural context
The world the text was written in, what to find out about it, and the traps in background study.
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Why does historical-cultural context matter?
God spoke to real people in real situations, and what he said is tied to those situations. A text cannot mean what it never could have meant to them.
This is the ground rule that keeps Step 1 of the journey honest. If an interpretation would have been unintelligible to the first readers, it is almost certainly not what the writer meant.
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What three things should you find out about a passage's historical-cultural context?
The writer, the audience, and the historical-cultural elements of the time — the social, religious, political, and economic setting.
For the writer: who he was, his background, his relationship to the readers, and why he was writing. For the audience: their circumstances and what they were facing. The third category is the world both lived in.
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At what two levels should you study the historical background of a passage?
The background of the book as a whole, and the background of the particular passage.
Knowing that Paul wrote 1 Corinthians to a divided church gives you the book level. Knowing what idol meat was and where it was sold gives you the passage level for chapter 8. Both are needed.
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How does knowing Paul's circumstances and the city of Philippi change how Philippians reads?
Paul wrote it from prison, yet it is one of his most joyful letters. And Philippi was a Roman colony, whose people prized Roman citizenship.
The first fact turns "rejoice in the Lord always" from a mood into a choice made in chains. The second is why "our citizenship is in heaven" would have landed with particular force in that city.
But our true home is in heaven, and we're waiting for our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, to come from there.
Philippians 3:20 -
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Why is the "eye of the needle" gate a warning for background study?
Because there is no ancient evidence that a small Jerusalem gate by that name ever existed. It shows how inaccurate background information — outdated, exaggerated, or invented — gets repeated as fact.
The story says camels could pass through the gate only by kneeling, which conveniently softens one of Jesus' hardest sayings. That is exactly why it spreads. Check a background claim in a reliable reference before building an interpretation on it.
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How can background study go wrong even when the facts are accurate?
Letting background become more important than the text itself, and collecting background facts for their own sake.
Background serves the text. The moment an interpretation depends on a background detail the text itself does not signal, or the study becomes a hobby of interesting facts, it has lost its purpose.
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What tools help you learn the historical-cultural background of a passage?
Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias, background commentaries, Old and New Testament introductions, Bible atlases, and good study Bibles.
Start with the introduction to the book in a study Bible or survey, then go to a dictionary or background commentary for particular details. Prefer recent, well-reviewed scholarship to older popular works.
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What should you find out about the writer of a biblical book?
Who he was, his background, his relationship with the readers, and why he was writing.
Paul writing to the Corinthians, a church he founded and that had become critical of him, is a different situation from Paul writing to the Romans, a church he had never visited. The same apostle writes very differently in each.
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What should you find out about the audience of a biblical book?
Who they were, what they were facing, and what they already knew and believed.
Hebrews assumes readers who know the sacrificial system well and are tempted to go back to it. Without knowing that, much of the letter's argument seems to be answering a question nobody asked.