Then God Said: Let There Be Words

E. Randolph Richards and Brandon J. O'Brien, Misreading Scripture With Western Eyes: Removing Cultural Blinders to Better Understand the Bible

The Bible wasn’t written for Americans. Nor was it written recently, by somebody speaking English and sharing our theological values. Most Christians probably know this, if not consciously, then implicitly: the world described in Holy Writ is distant in space and time. What, though, does this mean? When we Westerners, especially White Americans, find values and standards in the Bible, how does our cultural background change what we’ve read?

Professors “Randy” Richards and Brandon O’Brien have experience communicating ancient Near Eastern cultural standards to American divinity students. They propose, in this book, to offer a synoptic introduction to cross-cultural reading. They accomplish this purpose well enough for general audiences, though they arguably sometimes miss their own presuppositions. It’s necessary to read them with the same questioning eye that they turn to reading the Scriptures.

From the introduction, our authors emphasize one question: “what goes without saying?” Anybody who has ever studied linguistics, or even learned a second language, knows that cultures are built of metaphors, prior assumptions, and shared beliefs. This applies to America, and also to Biblical Israel. And the Biblical authors wrote for an audience that didn’t share our culture. Therefore our authors ask what, in each moment, goes without saying?

This question has no single answer. They start with obvious components: Israelite customs weren’t like American customs. They had different, but no less potent, views on race and ethnicity than us. They had perceptions of time based on working in the fields, not factories. As the book progresses, our authors’ examinations of Biblical culture become increasingly minute, focusing on, say, individualism vs. collectivism, or guilt vs. shame.

Our authors make a robust effort to explain the distinctions, which aren’t obvious. It’s difficult to explain cultural divides when the words used to explain them are cultural. What, for example, did “grace” and “faith,” two of Christianity’s most important words, mean in New Testament Israel? Richards and O’Brien struggle to explain, drawing metaphors from Coppola’s Godfather movies as metaphors to explain the duties and responsibilities these concepts involve.

Here’s where problems start creeping in. Because these differences are so vast, and define culture in such sweeping ways, they’re difficult to examine directly. Our authors often address these questions indirectly, through anecdote or analogy. Even the authors admit these tools are imprecise, and require judicious application. But elsewhere in the book, they acknowledge the desire for precision is one of modern Western culture’s unspoken presuppositions.

E. Randolph Richards (left) and Brandon J. O'Brien

Prior reviewers, for instance, have noted that Professor Richards draws numerous analogies from his time teaching Christian seminarians in Indonesia. He frequently uses Indonesian tribal culture as stand-ins for how he imagines Biblical Galilean culture might’ve functioned. He never proves this comparison, though. Richards, at times, dances perilously close to perceiving “non-Western culture” as monolithic and global, and worse, unchanged by the intervening millennia. The problems they describe are circular.

Though I don’t completely buy this criticism, I see why harsher reviewers consider it persuasive. In describing racism in the Bible, for instance, it’s worth noting that “race” means something different in Bronze Age Judea than in modern America (see, for instance, Dr. Ibram Kendi, a race scholar whose positions emerge from his Christian upbringing). Therefore our authors’ comparisons will always be approximate, more like poetry than science.

Please don’t misunderstand me: this reflects the critics more than it reflects our authors. Richards and O’Brien specify early that the questions they seek to answer, are woven so deeply into the respective cultures, that they require some poetic license. Unfortunately, because linguistic precision is a Western cultural value (which the authors describe), some people will never accept metaphor and poetry. Richards and O’Brien can’t fix that.

I understand why some readers have problems. Remember, in high school English class, our teachers asking “What is the poet trying to say here?” That’s the problem we face, a presumption that language is a skeleton key. Richards and O’Brien need to use language to explain why language is subjective and imprecise; they never had hope of reconciling this gap. Maybe, arguably, it’s a flaw in their book’s very premise.

If readers can suspend Western expectations and think poetically, this book offers much-needed insights into what Biblical words meant to the audiences who first read them. The authors admit their list isn’t comprehensive, and entire libraries have been written on that theme. But as an introductory course for generalists and seminarians, this book has the potential to be a step in the right direction. If you can read it correctly.