The Bible contains 66 books, containing widely different types of text, different authors, and composed at different times. Scholars will argue over their age, but we shall not be far wrong to say generally that they come to us from a distance in time of several thousand years.
The Old Testament is written in Hebrew (with the exception of parts of Daniel, which are in Aramaic), and the New Testament in Greek. These languages are now dead, meaning that though modern variants exist, their antecedents are no longer spoken.
Scholars have done a mammoth job for us in learning these languages, their grammar and syntax, their vocabulary, so that these documents can be accurately translated. Then before translation, there is the job of deciding what the text should be from the manuscripts that exist. In the case of the Old Testament, the Masoretic text (in Hebrew) and the Septuagint (in Greek), but in the New Testament over 5800 manuscripts exist – more than for any other ancient documents (a topic for another time).
All this means that when we have a Bible before us, we have the results of several major scholarly undertakings!
We may say as Christians that these documents were written for us, but we may certainly not say that they written to us! And this very fact that they are ancient, and of a diverse nature is going to impinge on how we read them. No text is written in a vacuum. All texts belong in a context, a cultural, historical context, where they were also read. Knowledge of this context as well as determining the type/genre of text, is going to inform interpretation.
Neither must we read into the biblical texts, questions, scientific or otherwise, from our own time, which they were not written to answer.
Rather, we must learn to read out of the texts what they have to say to us today, about God and the way we should lead our lives.
There is a common misconception in some quarters that the Bible is a “handbook to Christian living”. If you buy a new washing-machine, you will require a handbook. The idea being that you can look up (in alphabetical order), any problem you might have related to its use. It will not require any thinking on your part, other than that you are instructed by what the book says. All parts of the book are of equal importance etc… I believe I have explained above why this description is unhelpful, if not directly misleading.
