Basic Biblical Interpretation

About the Book

This book is more of a guide to Bible Study than a text on the subject. It was originally written as 36 lectures for a college course in the Bible. It is for that reason written in a conversational style rather than a bookish style. You will find this a very readable book yet a book full of serious content and lots of material for reflection and study. Each chapter focuses on one major text of the Bible, such as the Creation Story, the Flood, the Covenant with Abraham, the calling of Moses in the Burning Bush episode, the Battle of Jericho, David and Goliath, the Exile in Babylon, John the Baptist’s birth and preaching, the Temptation of Christ, the Parable of the Talents, Mark’s teachings on the Kingdom of Heaven, Christ’s teaching on the End Times, the Lord’s Supper narrative, and the Resurrection of Christ. So the book surveys the Bible by focusing on the most important and most loved texts of the Bible. By working through the book and doing the Bible readings for each chapter, you will come away with an overall view of the Bible story without having to read and analyze the whole Bible so that if in the future you want to read other texts in the Bible you will know how they fit into the whole story of salvation.

The book also gives you an introduction to the basic methods used by biblical scholars in interpreting the Bible. You will learn how do such things as cross-referencing of texts, historical background study, explication (close reading) of texts, commentary analysis, topical analysis, problems analysis and more. The book will also introduce you to the basic religious concepts in the Bible, such as faith, grace, justification, law, hope and of course love. You will learn how to explore the meanings of these concepts doing word searches in the Bible using a concordance. And as an extra dimension of Bible study, you will learn to use the latest and most popular of the literary methods. These include such things as the exploration of levels of meaning, character study, plot analysis and even some lessons on style and setting in the Bible. You will learn, for example, why the Lord rejected Saul as king and chose instead David. There’s more to His choice than David’s slaying of Goliath, a lot more. You can learn what Saul did wrong and what David did right. Such matters involve the study of the character of Saul and David. The major advantage of studying the Bible using literary methods is that it makes the Bible real for us. It brings the Bible into our world by showing us how people and their interaction helped shape the Judeo-Christian faith and so how we can shape our faith by our actions.

A major emphasis of the book is the unity of the Bible, the Old and the New Testaments as a unified whole. Christ was a Jew and came first of all to the Jewish people. The importance of that perspective is it helps us see the basic unity of Christianity and Judaism. This is a view which is gaining strength in our day as Christian leaders make efforts at reconciliation with the Jewish people, such as the Pope leaving an apology to the Jewish people for Christian persecution of Jews in a cleft in the Wailing Wall during his last visit to the Holy Land. Past attempts to separate the faith of the Old Testament from the faith of the New Testament are now being seen as superficial and biased. We can now see that a full understanding of the New Testament is possible only if we study it in the context of the Old Testament. This book stresses the elements of unity in the two testaments, but it does so without obscuring the important differences between Christianity and Judaism.

Finally, this book is not locked into historical studies of the Bible but shows the reader how to apply the Bible and its messages in our daily lives. There is much contemporary material in the book tying the Bible to our own troubled and stressful times. There is also a lot of inspirational material in the book, material taken mostly from my own life and the

About the Author

Charles Koban is a retired English Professor with 31 years teaching experience in all areas of English Literature. He is now a commissioned Lay Minister in the Reformed Church of America and teaches Biblical Interpretation at the University at Albany in Albany, NY. He is an elder in the RCA and serves as worship leader and preacher in Albany area Reformed Churches. He has also taught Biblical Interpretation on-line for the State University of New York Learning Network.