Chapter 40 · ~12 min read
A Small Toolkit
what you have been doing
The reader who’s come this far has been doing something specific, chapter after chapter, even if she hasn’t yet given it a name. She’s been reading scripture in a particular way. She’s been pausing at small English words to see if they were doing larger work in the original. She’s been asking what the first audience would have heard. She’s been holding ancient cultures in her ear when she read passages that touched on them. She’s been listening, at quiet moments, to readers who came before — the church fathers, the medieval monks, the long line of Christians who’ve been reading these same texts for two thousand years. The book’s been teaching her these moves without quite naming them, because the moves are best learned by doing rather than by being lectured about.
Now, near the end, it’s worth naming them. Not so that the reader can memorize a procedure. Naming the moves is more like giving someone a small set of tools that fit in a pocket. The tools aren’t the point; the work the tools enable is the point. But the work goes more easily once the tools are named, and the reader knows which one to reach for in which situation.
What follows is a small toolkit. Five practices, drawn from what the book’s been doing through forty chapters. The reader who takes these home will be reading scripture the way the book has been quietly inviting her to read all along.
the five moves
One. Slow down at small words.
The single most reliable move the book has taught is also the most basic: when the English Bible uses a small, ordinary-looking word in a passage that seems significant, pause. Ask whether the word might be carrying more weight than the English suggests. Fear in connection with God. Helper describing Eve. Lord applied to Jesus. Blessed in the Beatitudes. Love in passages about God’s faithfulness. Kingdom in Jesus’s teaching. Each of these is a small English word covering a larger original — Hebrew or Greek or Aramaic — that the first audience heard with weight the English has flattened.
The reader doesn’t need to know the original languages to do this move. The instinct is what matters. Is this small English word doing larger work than it looks? If the answer might be yes, a good study Bible’s footnotes, or a basic word study resource, or any decent commentary, can take her the rest of the way. Slowing down is the first move. The investigation follows when the slowing down has spotted something worth looking at.
Two. Ask what the original audience heard.
The second move is the orienting question for almost everything the book has done. When the reader sits with a passage, the question isn’t what does this mean to me? — at least not first. The first question is: what did this mean to the people who first heard it?
The original audience weren’t modern Western Christians. They were ancient Jews, in the case of most of the Old Testament. They were first-century Jews and Gentiles, in the case of the New Testament. They lived under Roman occupation, or in Hellenistic cities, or in Galilean villages. They read or heard scripture in Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek, sometimes a mix of all three. They had cultural expectations the modern reader doesn’t share — about honor and shame, about patron-client relationships, about temple sacrifice, about wisdom literature, about apocalyptic vision. They lived in a different world.
Asking what they heard means trying, however imperfectly, to put oneself in their shoes. Reading the Beatitudes as a first-century Galilean peasant would have heard them. Reading Paul’s letter to the Romans as a first-century house-church member would have heard it. Reading John’s gospel as a Greek-speaking Jew who knew the Septuagint by heart would have heard it. The reader can’t fully recover the original hearing. But asking the question reshapes everything that follows. It’s the difference between reading scripture as a modern document addressed to her personally and reading scripture as an ancient document the people of God have been receiving for two thousand years.
Three. Look up the Septuagint reading.
The third move is more specialized, but its payoff is large. The New Testament writers, almost universally, were quoting the Old Testament from the Greek translation called the Septuagint, not from the Hebrew. The Septuagint sometimes phrases things differently from the Hebrew. Those differences aren’t random; they shaped how the New Testament writers heard their own scriptures. When the reader hits a New Testament passage that quotes the Old Testament — and there are hundreds of these — looking up the Septuagint reading of the quoted passage will often reveal something the English alone cannot show.
This is the only move in the toolkit that requires a specific resource. A copy of the Septuagint in English translation — the NETS (New English Translation of the Septuagint) is a good one — lives in any decent Bible-study library. Many study Bibles include Septuagint notes in their cross-references. Some modern commentaries make a habit of pointing out where the New Testament writer is reading the Greek rather than the Hebrew. The move doesn’t require Greek; it requires only the willingness to ask, what was the Greek version saying when the apostle reached for it? The answer will often be: more than the English alone reveals.
Four. Notice the cultural distance.
The fourth move is the broadest. The ancient world ran on assumptions modern readers don’t share. The reader has met some of these throughout the book — the patron-client system Paul drew on in his theology of grace, the honor-and-shame dynamics behind Jesus’s encounters with religious leaders, the household codes of the New Testament epistles, the divine-council backdrop of the Psalms, the apocalyptic genre Jesus and his contemporaries used, the second temple Jewish library the New Testament writers shared.
When the reader hits a passage that feels strange — that seems to assume something the modern world doesn’t assume, that uses imagery she has to work to follow, that handles questions of family or money or status in ways that make her uncomfortable — the move is to notice the strangeness rather than smooth it away. What was the world like when this was written? What did people take for granted that I do not? What did they not take for granted that I do? A short search in a good Bible dictionary or a cultural-background commentary (the IVP Bible Background Commentary is one accessible option) will often answer the question. The strangeness, once seen, becomes the doorway. The passage stops being a thing to bring across the gap; it becomes a window through the gap, into a world the reader can almost stand inside.
Five. Sit with the patristic comment.
The fifth move is the slowest. The early church fathers — the second through fifth-century theologians and bishops and preachers — read scripture with depth, care, and patience that the modern reader often doesn’t have time for. Reading them isn’t always easy. They wrote in Greek and Latin, mostly; their works are translated unevenly; their argumentative styles are unfamiliar; some of their readings have aged better than others. But the patristic tradition is the deepest well of careful Christian reading the church has, and even brief contact with it changes how a modern reader reads.
The reader doesn’t need to read the fathers systematically to benefit from this move. She can pick up a single patristic commentary on a single passage and sit with it for ten minutes. The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture series (InterVarsity Press) gathers patristic comments on every passage of scripture into accessible volumes, with each comment attributed and dated. Picking one comment on a verse she’s reading, sitting with it for a few minutes, and letting it answer back to her own reading — that’s the move. The fathers don’t always agree with her. They don’t always agree with each other. But they’ll almost always show her something she hadn’t seen. That’s what they’re for. They are the readers who have been doing this for two thousand years.
what the moves have in common
The five moves aren’t five separate techniques the reader is supposed to switch between. They are aspects of one habit — the habit of reading scripture with patience, with attention to its original setting, with humility about her own modern assumptions, and with awareness that she isn’t the first reader. The five moves are doors into the same room. The room is reading scripture as the people of God have been reading it for two thousand years.
What makes the habit possible isn’t expertise. It isn’t a seminary degree or a working knowledge of Greek or Hebrew. It isn’t access to expensive resources. It is, more than anything, the willingness to slow down. The reader who slows down at the small word will find the rest of the moves naturally available to her, because slowing down is itself the heart of the practice. The slowing down opens the time for the question about the original audience. The slowing down makes room for looking up the Septuagint. The slowing down lets the cultural distance become visible. The slowing down creates the space in which the patristic comment can speak.
The recovery the book has been making, in chapter after chapter, has been the recovery of slowness — the willingness to give a verse the time it deserves, to look at it from more than one angle, to let it speak before deciding what it means. The five moves are the practical shape of that slowness. They’re what slowness looks like when it has been disciplined into a habit.
what the reader does not need to do
A practical word, before the toolkit goes home with her.
The reader doesn’t need to do all five moves on every passage. Some passages will reward the small-word move and ask for nothing else. Some passages will demand the cultural-distance move and leave the others to one side. The reader chooses which move fits the passage, and the choice gets easier with practice.
The reader doesn’t need to recover every finding the book has made. The point of forty chapters of investigation isn’t that she should memorize the conclusions. The point is that she should learn the practice. If she remembers, ten years from now, only that yirah means awe more than dread, and hesed means committed love that has decided to stay, and kyrios is a charged title, and the Beatitudes pronounce a present-tense flourishing, and the Magnificat is a wild prophetic song — that’s enough. The rest of the book’s specific findings can be looked up when she wants them. The practice cannot.
The reader doesn’t need to become a scholar. The toolkit isn’t designed for academic work. It’s designed for ordinary Christians who want to read their Bibles more carefully than the modern habit of fast reading has trained them to. The investigations in this book have leaned on the work of scholars — N. T. Wright, John Walton, Richard Bauckham, Robert Alter, Larry Hurtado, Bruce Metzger, James K. A. Smith, and many others — because the work those scholars have done is what makes the toolkit possible. The reader doesn’t have to do that work herself. She only has to know that it has been done, and that the fruit of it is available to her when she asks for it.
The reader doesn’t need to be liturgical or non-liturgical, Catholic or Protestant or Orthodox, evangelical or mainline, traditional or progressive. The toolkit works across traditions because it’s about reading scripture, and every Christian tradition has been doing that. The reader takes the toolkit home to her own tradition. She uses it inside the church she’s already inside.
What the reader has been given, across forty chapters, isn’t a new Bible. It’s the same Bible she had when she started, read more carefully. The text hasn’t changed. The words mean what they meant. What has changed is the reader’s ear. She can hear, now, what she couldn’t hear before. She can slow down at the small word. She can ask what the first audience heard. She can find the Septuagint behind the New Testament quotation. She can notice when the cultural distance is doing work in the passage. She can sit with what the fathers said, and let their reading answer back to hers.
These aren’t the only ways to read scripture. They aren’t even the most important ones. The most important ways to read scripture are still the simple ones — open the Bible, pray for the Spirit to teach, read what the church has been reading. The toolkit isn’t a replacement for that. It’s a supplement to it. The simple reading remains the deepest reading. The toolkit only sharpens what the simple reading was already doing.
The book ends, in the next chapter, with a closing word about what all of this has been for. But the practical part of the work is now in the reader’s hands. The text is what it always was. The reader is the one who has changed. She has the tools she needs. She has the practice she needs. She has the time, in whatever measure she has been given, to keep reading, more carefully than she did before, the scripture her ancestors in the faith have been reading for two thousand years. That’s what the book has been building toward all along. It’s now her work, not the book’s.