Week 3: How Language and Culture Illuminate and Complicate Reading the Bible

God’s Word comes to us from different languages and cultures across two millennia. What was familiar to those ancient cultures is foreign to us and what is familiar to us in a passage may not be the intention of the original author. As a result, our minds overlook what an ancient reader would have seen in a text. We will attempt to unpack a selection of passages and their peculiarities and ponder not only the strangeness of the ancient world, but what the verses tell us today about God and the Bible.