What Did the Author Mean? The Questions to Ask of Every Text

We want to understand the Bible as it is written. That means reading it without interpreting it from our own perspective and without colouring it. Most often that is exactly what happens: we colour the Bible with our own understanding and our own point of view.

First, Do Not Misunderstand

Before we can understand anything rightly, we must take care not to misunderstand it. Most often, a misunderstanding becomes the basis of our theology. We build our lives and our theology on it. It becomes deeply rooted in us, and then it is very hard to get away from. So the order is this: first, do not misunderstand; then, understand rightly.

Two Questions

There are two questions we must ask of every passage of the Bible, every verse and every text.

The first question is: what did the author mean? What did he intend to communicate? What did he have in mind as he wrote or spoke? “This is what I understand when I read it” is irrelevant. What I understand from where I stand is irrelevant. What the author meant is what matters. That is true of any book. The author has written and has spoken, so the question must always be: what did the author mean?

The second question is: to whom was he writing, and how did they understand him? These two questions guard against reading our own agenda into the text. When Moses says, “In the future, when your son asks you…” (Deuteronomy 6:20), some ask why the daughter is not mentioned, and call the Law misogynistic. That is a question the passage was never meant to answer. In that society the father taught the son, who would one day make the household’s decisions. Nor is every promise for every reader. “The LORD your God will cut off before you the nations” (Deuteronomy 12:29) was said to one nation, at one point in history. It is not a promise for every believer to “claim”. The Law was given to one people, with one culture and one language, some 3,500 years ago. The practice may not carry over to us; the principle always does.

These two questions are not restricted to the Bible. They are the questions to ask of anything we want to understand. When we read Shakespeare, we must ask what his audience understood, because the same words may mean something else to us.

This is true even among contemporaries. Languages differ, dialects differ, and even non-verbal communication differs. Body language is not the same everywhere: the way we move our hands, where our eyes look, whether our feet point towards the person we are speaking to. It tells us whether people are bored or interested, whether they are smiling while saying something else, whether they are afraid. Europeans have their own gestures, the Far East its own, India its own. If we must ask about the audience even with writers and speakers of our own time, we must certainly ask it of a passage written thousands of years ago.

When we ask these two questions of the five books of Moses, the answer is plain. Moses is writing to the Israelites as he leads them out of Egypt. Even the opening chapters of Genesis, which speak of what happened long before, were written by Moses as he led the Israelites out of Egypt. As he did so, he wanted them to understand who God is.

The Author, Not the Reader

There is an approach to texts called reader-response criticism†. It asks how I respond to the text. That matters far less than understanding what is in the text. I give importance to hermeneutics†, which is understanding the text as it is, rather than looking at it from my own perspective.

We pass through different stages of life, different circumstances and different moods. When people are sad, there are passages they love to read: “I go to this passage, and it lifts my spirit.” That happens because they are already in a particular situation and read the passage from within it. That is entirely subjective. Read that way, every passage looks different to every reader: this one is for me, that one is not.

I have been asked one question many times, from my childhood: “Read a passage of the Bible. What spoke to you?” That question demeans the Bible. It means that something struck a chord, something I liked, and so I am reading myself into the passage. That is not how the Bible is to be read. The question is not which verse spoke to us. The question is what God was saying, through this passage, to the people to whom it was written. Then we ask what we understand from it, and how we apply it to our lives. So I take great care to read the text for what the author meant.

Do Not Ask Questions the Author Never Meant to Answer

Every author has something in mind that he wants to present. He has a particular intent and motive. We must respect that motive, rather than ask questions the author never intended to answer. This is a problem with a great many of us. We take a book and ask it questions its author never meant to talk about. We cannot ask a book any question we like and expect it to answer.

Moses wrote the books of the Law with a particular motive. Even the book of Genesis was never written to give people the exact history of what happened. When we ask, “When did all this happen?”, Moses’ answer is “In the beginning” (Genesis 1:1). He does not pinpoint where it all started, because that is not the point of the narrative. The point is that God created the world beautifully, with a beautiful purpose. He did not create it for His own good, but for the welfare of the human beings He was yet to create. That is why He created everything else before He created human beings. He also created them in a completely different way: to show how much they matter, and that the whole world exists so that they may have a happy life. And they could never be happy without a relationship with God, a relationship based on their obedience. That is what Moses meant to teach, and those are the questions to ask. We ask questions from within the text, not from outside it.

Five Analyses

Every text, and every biblical text especially, calls for five kinds of analysis†. All five go into every passage I study, even when I do not name them.

The first is lexical and syntactical analysis: the words and the grammar. Lexis is the word, and its lexical meaning is its dictionary meaning. Syntax is the way the words are put together. Why are certain words placed side by side, or separated by a phrase? How are the sentences built?

Take Moses’ words: “Do what is right and good in the LORD’s sight, so that it may go well with you, and you may go in and take over the good land” (Deuteronomy 6:18). “Right” and “good” are not synonyms. What is right is good for everyone. What is good is good for me. Most of the time we concentrate on what is good for me. But the Law is always good for everyone, and so doing what is right comes first. When the whole society benefits, I benefit as a part of it, and so what is right becomes good for me as well. Moses places the two words side by side deliberately. The “you” in the verse matters too. It is never a singular “you”. It is always the plural “you” of the whole community, the nation that listens to God and obeys Him. And the land is called “the good land”. The land itself is not what is good. It is called good because it will benefit everyone. That is a transferred epithet: a quality that belongs to one thing, attributed to another. These writers were not writing in a haphazard manner. They wrote with intent, and every word was chosen.

Words also keep their spelling but lose their meaning. When Moses promises that the people will prosper, he means everyone having what they need, not one person having more than others. And not every detail is the point. Whether seventy people went down to Egypt (Genesis 46:27; Deuteronomy 10:22) or seventy-five (Acts 7:14) does not matter. We are not statisticians. Moses’ point is how few they were and how many they had become.

The second is historical and cultural analysis. How did this work at that time, in that history, that culture and that society? Why did the people do what they did? What cultural meaning lay behind it, and what was the social structure?

The third is theological analysis: how God is presented. Is God speaking about Himself, or is someone else speaking about Him? And even when God is speaking about Himself, why does He speak as He does? Is He using anthropic language*, so that the people can understand Him, or is He describing Himself as He is? What words are used of Him? Sometimes we cannot even tell whose voice we are hearing. Moses does not bring a new idea. He repeats what God has already taught, and at times puts it in his own words to help the people understand. So when Moses asks what the LORD requires of them, “for your own good” (Deuteronomy 10:12–13), it is Moses speaking and God teaching.

The fourth is contextual analysis. This is not only the context of the passage. When we read a verse in Deuteronomy, we do not read that verse alone. We read it in the context of Deuteronomy itself: why, for example, the Law is being repeated. Then we widen the circle, and read Deuteronomy in its relationship with the rest of the five books of Moses. Then we read those five books within the whole framework of the Bible.

The fifth is literary analysis: what kind of writing this is. Is it narrative, which will have its exaggerations? Is it law and commandment? Is it poetry? Is there a metonymy, a simile, or anthropic language? Exaggeration in a narrative is not meant to deceive anyone. It is a literary device, as when cities have walls “up to the sky” (Deuteronomy 9:1), or the people are “as numerous as the stars in the sky” (Deuteronomy 10:22).

Beyond these five, every passage must be connected with others. Social and theological concepts from elsewhere in Scripture, philosophical and theological ideas both ancient and modern, and the influence of paganism within Christianity are all brought alongside it. That is why such study takes time. This is how we should study the Scriptures for ourselves, even in our personal reading: take a passage and work through all five analyses in turn.

Context in Layers

Context gives us the meaning, not the sentence alone. Context has several layers. There is the context of the whole book: why was it written? There is the historical and cultural setting of the book and its teaching. Within the book there are pericopes. A pericope† is a unit of thought, with a beginning and an end, after which the book moves on to another. And there is the textual context of the verse itself. All of these are context, and every one of them must be kept in mind. So we always ask why a book was spoken, and why it was written down. Otherwise we miss the broader context.

Chapter and verse divisions are not part of that context. They are not inspired. Moses did not divide his writing into chapters and verses. The divisions were added later, for our convenience, so that we can find our way around the text. Verses are our own division. A single paragraph of Moses may be split across several of them, as in Deuteronomy 9:4–6.

It is an interesting study to take a passage and count its words: not the small words that join a sentence together, but the significant words that carry a concept. Thoughts are expressed in words, and counting the significant words of a passage or a book can show its thrust. I have not counted them, but in Deuteronomy the words that come up again and again are observance, obedience, the Law, commandments and statutes. This is what Moses wants to communicate, because the more words an author spends on something, the more it matters to him.

Whenever we read the Bible, we must give importance to the author and the thrust of his message. We must not seize on a random verse that has little support even in its own passage. Nor must we seize on an analogy given to explain one thing, and then build an endless theology around it. One word lifted from its passage, such as “jealous” (Deuteronomy 6:15), can derail our understanding of God. It belongs to the picture of a covenant marriage, not to a statement about who God is.

The bird’s-eye view matters far more than the worm’s-eye view. An overall picture of each book always helps with the details. Getting the details without the overall picture is very difficult.

Every Word Was Intended

Every text in the Law, the Prophets and the Gospels is intentional. Each author wrote down what he knew mattered most, and he thought it through before he wrote it. It was not like typing into a word processor, with the luxury of deleting and editing. We moderns are so spoilt that nothing is serious for us. We always have the backspace key.

Even in the days of the typewriter, people typed with great care, because mistakes were costly. Ribbons had to be paid for. Once we made a mistake, we either typed over it and made a mess, or pulled the sheet out, threw it in the bin and typed it again. Or we painted over it with correction fluid and typed on top. If that was costly, think of vellum, a material that was very hard to come by. Writing was an expensive affair, and the authors were deliberate. They had to think things through, form them in their minds and then write them down, because they could not go back and redo them.

The prophets who wrote did so sacrificially, at great cost to themselves. The writers of the Gospels and the Epistles gave time and effort to their writing. Monarchs and the poets who worked for them were in a different position, because their writing was sponsored: it was paid for from the royal treasury. That is why poetical and monarchic literature must be treated differently. But the prophets wrote at great cost, the apostles gave time and effort, and they all wrote with intent. So we must understand their point of view.

Repetition Is Emphasis

That is also why repetition matters. In a science examination the answers are objective. In mathematics, the solution is either right or wrong. In an arts examination there is room for thought, expression and subjectivity. Absolutes matter less. There is no right or wrong in that sense, any more than in a painting by Picasso. Or take one of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings: the paint is dripped across the canvas in lines, and the artist says, “This is how I see the world.”

In a three-hour arts examination, a student takes a concept and goes on substantiating it. He builds an argument, fills thirty or forty pages and writes until the bell rings, with still more to say. Some write that much because they have so much to say. Others write the same thing again and again because they do not know the answer, and want to show that they have written something.

Moses was not filling pages. Writing was expensive, and ancient writers were as brief as possible. So when Moses repeats something, it is not to fill pages. In three verses he says the same thing three times: it is not because of your righteousness, but because of the wickedness of these nations (Deuteronomy 9:4–6). It is so that the people will not miss it and it will sink in, because it is true and they must understand it. A deliberate repetition means that the author wants to imprint the point on the hearts of his audience. And Moses had a reason to repeat. He was not speaking to an obedient people. They had been disobedient again and again, and that justified repeating the call to obey. Repetition also helps people remember. Moses takes them back through their own history (Deuteronomy 8:2; 9:7; 11:2–7), for a teaching purpose: so that they will remember what God has done, come to their senses and be more faithful to His commandments.

A teacher does the same when he says, “This is important for your examination.” A parent does not tell a child only once to be careful when crossing the road; the most important things are said again and again. Whatever is important is usually repeated. And the most repeated thing in the whole of Scripture is obedience.

The same is true of words piled one upon another. Moses speaks of commandments, decrees, statutes, stipulations, laws and requirements: “Be sure to keep the commands of the LORD your God and the stipulations and decrees he has given you” (Deuteronomy 6:17). Is there a difference between them? Their lexical definitions, the definitions in the dictionary, differ a little. A commandment is an imperative, and it is more personal. A stipulation is a requirement. A decree is an official statement, issued through official channels. It is a king’s order, and it is usually understood as serving the monarch rather than the people, because the king has spoken. But in these passages God uses them as synonyms, and we need not split hairs. Otherwise we would have to sift through all the commandments of the Law and sort them into decrees, commandments and laws, and that is not how they are given. Every one of them demands obedience, and every one has the welfare of humanity at its core.

Several words are used for one thing for the sake of emphasis. We sometimes repeat a sentence in different ways to stress something. The Hebrew way is to do it with words. When Moses says, in one sentence, “Love the LORD your God and keep his requirements, his decrees, his laws and his commands always” (Deuteronomy 11:1), what he is saying is: obey, obey, obey, obey. It is an artistic use of language, and in one brief sentence it gives obedience the greatest importance.

Moses even uses words as synonyms to make a point that goes beyond emphasis. “Be careful that you do not forget the LORD your God, failing to observe his commands, his laws and his decrees” (Deuteronomy 8:11). To forget God is to fail to keep His commandments. Moses makes God and His commandments one: to forget the commandments is to forget God, and to have a relationship with God is to obey His commandments.

Culture Only Where the Text Needs It

To go looking for the culture behind everything is to go down a rabbit hole. We go deeper and deeper, and often we cannot tell whether what we find is true. We have to rely on archaeological or scholarly claims beyond our control, where one person says one thing and another says something else. That is not our concern. We look at culture only where it is tied to the text itself, and otherwise we do not stray. When Moses speaks of the Anakites, how strong and tall they were (Deuteronomy 9:2), we need to know that Israel faced a formidable people. A study of their anthropology is beyond the scope of what the text needs.

Simple, Not Diluted

If we know something, we should be able to explain it simply, in simple words and simple sentences. Verbosity is not knowledge. A detailed explanation is sometimes needed, but the core of anything should be explainable very simply. That is how we know that we actually know what we are talking about.

The test is simple. Can we say, in a nutshell, what theology is? Can we say precisely and lucidly what the Kingdom of God is, or what the Law is? Each should be written down as simply as possible, with all the thoughts brought together. Simplify the Bible without diluting it, and we are left with a few core ideas.

When We Have the Text

When we have the text, why depend on other people’s theologies at all? We can do the analysis ourselves. There are tools for analysing a text. Any online Bible can be searched for “obedience” and “commandments”, and anyone can see that this is what God repeats again and again, in the Law, the Prophets and the teaching of Jesus. No one need take my word for it. The text is there to be checked.

Nowadays no one, it seems, needs to “know” anything: all one needs is Google or ChatGPT at one’s side. But we should never depend on Google, Wikipedia or ChatGPT for this. We should never prepare a sermon with them, nor study the Bible with them. I use such tools to create media, which is perfectly all right, but never to prepare an exposition, because a passage must be studied by the one who teaches it. For mathematics or medicine, where everyone’s knowledge is pooled and shared, they are very good: a collective knowledge rather than one person’s mind. I have put passages into ChatGPT and Claude, purely as an experiment, knowing I would not use the result. What comes back is a very conservative analysis: what everybody says. It is never actual study, and I prefer to do the study myself anyway. Using artificial intelligence to organise one’s own material is acceptable. Asking it to produce biblical content is not.

Can Memory Be Trusted?

In Moses’ time, history was passed on by word of mouth. That was the most powerful way of letting people know what had happened. They had no books in which to write things down, so they relied on memory. For them memory was all they had. Their history and their teaching were kept in it. We have written and digital records, and we forget what happened fifteen or twenty years ago.

We say that memory is volatile and unreliable, and so it is, for one person. But this was not one man’s memory. A whole nation had witnessed the same things, and what a whole nation passes on is far more reliable. Some today might speak of mass hysteria or mass hypnosis, but that was not the case here. A whole nation witnessed everything God had done, and the whole nation taught the next generation, not merely one parent teaching one child. The chance of the truth being distorted was negligible, and so their teachings remained intact.