You can drive a screw with a nail file or pound nails with a rock. Sometimes that’s just the fast, reasonably efficient, solve you’re looking for. We wouldn’t recommend relying on that particular set of tools if your goal is adding a room to your house.
Big jobs call for more sophisticated tools. A few basic language and history tools can help you build a better understanding of the Bible than you might otherwise cobble together from what’s stored in your memory.
Fortunately, interpretive tools are plentiful and, mainly, inexpensive (if not free on the internet). Test some of these tools to see if they make your job easier…
- Read the text in another translation (or two; or five). Lots of versions are available on the internet at sites like:
- Check the meaning of unfamiliar words in a Bible Dictionary or Bible Encyclopedia.
- Look behind an English word to it’s roots in Hebrew or Greek in a Bible Concordance.
- See what Bible experts and preachers have said about hard-to-understand passages in a Bible Commentary.
You can find examples of these resource texts online at sites like:
It’s worth noting that these tools attempt to uncover what’s not obvious in the text and none of them claims to be the final word. That’s why they don’t always agree with each other and why it’s not a bad idea to look at more than one source while you’re at it. When there’s a disagreement, first class Bible scholars certainly make their case for one meaning over another, but they’re generally too humble to claim they’ve cornered the market in truth. An example to us all.
