Every page of the Bible had a first reader, and finding them is half of reading it
Who Is Speaking, and to Whom
A letter has an address on it. A law was given to a people standing somewhere. A psalm was sung by someone in some trouble. None of it was written to you, and all of it was kept for you. Both halves of that are true, and the order matters.
Lesson 2 of 12 · The first reader
A passage means first what it meant to the people it was written to, and it means anything to you by way of them. So the second question about any page, after what kind of writing it is, is who wrote it, to whom, and about what. Skip that and you will read a letter to Corinth as if it had been addressed to your street, or take a speech the Bible records as a speech the Bible endorses. Ask it, and the page opens the way it was meant to.
Letters have addresses
The plainest case first. A New Testament letter begins the way letters of that century began: the sender, the people it is for, and a greeting.
to the assembly of God which is at Corinth—those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called saints, with all who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in every place, both theirs and ours: — 1 Corinthians 1:2 · WEB
Read the comment on Called to Be Saints
To the church of God at Corinth. Everything in the next sixteen chapters was said to them: about their factions, their lawsuits, their meals, a man in their congregation, a collection they had promised, a doctrine some of them denied. A reader who forgets the address will find a chapter about meat offered to idols and wonder what it has to do with anything. A reader who keeps it will find a church arguing about a question its city forced on it, and a way of thinking about such questions that travels. The address is not a barrier to the letter. It is the door.
“and all the brothers who are with me, to the assemblies of Galatia:” Galatians 1:2 · WEB
To the churches of a region, plural, with a problem they shared.
“Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, and Timothy our brother, to Philemon, our beloved fellow worker,” Philemon 1:1 · WEB
To one man, about one runaway, in a letter the church kept anyway.
“John, to the seven assemblies that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace from God, who is and who was and who is to come; and from the seven Spirits who are before his throne;” Revelation 1:4 · WEB
To seven named congregations in Asia, before a word of the vision.
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Even the psalms name an occasion
A letter says who it is to. Other kinds of writing say where they were spoken, if you look. The book of Deuteronomy is a set of speeches delivered on the plain of Moab to the generation about to cross the Jordan, and Moses tells them so, in a sentence that is easy to read past.
Yahweh didn’t make this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even us, who are all of us here alive today. — Deuteronomy 5:3 · WEB
Read the comment on Not with Our Fathers, but with Us
With us, who are all of us here alive today. The covenant is being spoken to particular people on a particular afternoon, and the book expects you to know it. Or take a psalm that has no heading at all and still tells you exactly where it was written.
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yes, we wept, when we remembered Zion. — Psalm 137:1 · WEB
Read the comment on By the Rivers of Babylon
That is an exile’s song, from Babylon, after the fall of Jerusalem. Its last verse is one of the most terrible in the Bible, and readers have been embarrassed by it for two thousand years. It does not become less terrible when you know who wrote it. It becomes intelligible: a survivor of a sacked city, remembering what was done to its children, saying what such people say. The psalm is kept in the Bible as that. It is not kept as instruction.
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The voice inside the voice
The Bible records a great deal of speech that the Bible does not agree with. Job’s three friends talk for twenty-five chapters, in verse of the highest quality, arguing that Job must have deserved his suffering. Then God arrives.
It was so, that after Yahweh had spoken these words to Job, Yahweh said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “My wrath is kindled against you, and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job has. — Job 42:7 · WEB
Read the comment on The Verdict and the Restoration
You have not spoken of me what is right. So twenty-five chapters of scripture contain speeches that scripture itself calls wrong, and a reader who quotes Eliphaz as the Bible’s teaching has quoted a man God rebuked. The same is true of the serpent in Genesis, of the fool who says there is no God, of Pharaoh, of the crowd at the cross, and of a good many sentences that circulate on their own. Who is speaking is not a scholar’s question. It is the difference between the Bible and a character in it.
Ecclesiastes is the hardest case, because the speaker is never quite named.
קֹהֶלֶת qôheleth H6953
feminine of active participle from קָהַל; a (female) assembler (i.e. lecturer); abstractly, preaching (used as a 'nom de plume', Koheleth); preacher.
The word is a title rather than a name: the one who gathers, or addresses, an assembly. The book puts its bleakest sentences in his mouth, and its last paragraph steps back and speaks about him in the third person, weighing what he said. Whether every line of the Preacher is the book’s own verdict, or the book is showing you a wise man’s search before delivering its own conclusion, is a question readers have argued for centuries and still argue. Knowing that the voice is a voice is what makes the question askable at all.
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Then to you
None of this makes the Bible a museum. The same Paul who addressed the Corinthians about their own quarrels also told them how to read the older scriptures, and the way he read them is the way you may read him.
Now all these things happened to them by way of example, and they were written for our admonition, on whom the ends of the ages have come. — 1 Corinthians 10:11 · WEB
Read the comment on Written for Our Admonition
These things happened to them, and were written down for us. Written for our learning, he says elsewhere (Romans 15:4). The order is the whole method: first to them, then, through them, to you. A page you have read over its first readers’ shoulders will say more to you, not less, than one you have taken as personal mail, because you will be reading what it says rather than what you brought to it.
What that means for a law given to Israel, and which of those laws ask anything of a reader now, is the question the next lesson takes up, and it is contested. This lesson only insists on the order in which it has to be asked.
Take a verse you know by heart. Who first said it, to whom, and about what? Write the address on it, the way a letter carries one, and then say what it says to you by way of them.
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