Asking Questions of a Biblical Text

An excellent technique for digging deeper into a Bible text is to formulate questions about the text, and then look for answers to those questions. I discuss this briefly in my essay Reading the Text Precisely.

A starting point for this is simply to ask basic fact questions about the text. Many difficult and angry debates about the meaning of a text result from one or more persons not carefully reading what the text says. Very frequently, a person is making a very good point, but the text they are quoting doesn’t explicitly support that point. Asking fact questions about your text can prevent you from making this error. In your sharing, you can also help defuse such arguments by suggesting that all parties go back and look at the text. That may not make you agree, but it will help clarify what you are discussing.

Here are some good example questions:

1. Who is speaking in this passage?
   We have a narrator who tells us what God observed (v. 5) and how God responded (v. 6). Then we have the words of God, reported by our narrator, saying God’s attitude and God’s intention to act (“I will wipe . . . humanity from the face of the ground”). Then we have the narrator again to inform us that Noah found grace (v. 8 ).
2. What is God’s response?
   God repents or is sorry.
3. What does God promise to do?
   To destroy human beings and all living things.
4. Who finds grace?
   Noah.

There are a few more possible questions and some of these are bound to seem overly simple to you. But it is a good idea to make sure that you notice precisely what the passage says.

In addition, you need to look at questions about the meaning of the text from different perspectives. Let’s take as an example my previous entry on Genesis 6:5-8. Frequently when I am teaching from this passage the first question from the study group deals with God’s justice, and whether God would actually kill that many people. Were they all absolutely evil? Was there no way to save them? Those questions show a personal perspective–What is God telling me today from this verse? But you have to first ask what the passage meant originally, and then follow the track through.

I can identify at least three viewpoints on this passage, and Bible students should be able to think of a fourth pretty quickly. First, we have Noah himself, to whom God first addresses these words. Noah is inside the story and things are happening to him. The second perspective is that of the Israelites, for whom the story was written. Whether you believe this was written by Moses himself, or produced later and compiled, it was still intended to address the people of Israel, presumably about some situation(s) that they faced. Finally, we must look at what this story means to us. (If you’re wondering, a fourth view that might be helpful would be that of Jesus (Matthew 24:38-39), who used the flood as an illustration of the last days, which also might suggest looking at the text from the perspective of one living in the very last time events.)

In the first instance, we can ask what Noah’s situation might have been when God approached him. If we take the story as it stands, we might expect that Noah felt besieged and hopeless. It is possible that he was threatened by violence. You can ask yourself just what was Noah’s situation when God sent the flood. It’s OK to speculate on that, and in fact that is much better than to simply make an assumption without thinking about it. I find that most people assume a world that is carrying on quite nicely, but God doesn’t like it, and is upset about a little bit of bad behavior, so he gets Noah to go build an ark. Noah has no problems, builds it, and escapes.

But supposing instead that there was a world on the edge of cataclysmic destruction. We don’t know what they were up to, but they could have been about to die in a plague, or they could have been about to wipe themselves out in wars, and take Noah with them. It’s not impossible to imagine that the flood, with the ark itself, simply saved one righteous family from a destruction that was going to happen one way or another. I don’t necessarily mean that they were going to bring a flood on themselves. They could have merely been about to go kill Noah and his family and then wipe each other out in wars over a period of time. Sometimes the application of a limited amount of violence (and the flood was limited, even though those limits were pretty broad) can be used to prevent even greater violence and destruction.

With that thought in mind let’s move forward to the time of the Israelites who would be reading this story for the first time. I don’t care if you think they first read it during the Exodus itself, during the time of the judges, the monarchy, or even after the exile. A similar message can be heard. The crowd can go massively against God, and can get into sin (think “behavior that is destructive of self and of others) beyond the point of no return. God will judge and intervene at some point, but God will also provide a way of escape. Even if there is only one righteous family that needs rescue, God will provide a way of escape. Can you see how that message might have been heard as one of grace under those circumstances? (Consider Abraham’s argument with God over Sodom. He talked God down to 10 righteous people–if there were only 10 righteous people, then God would save Sodom. Do you notice that there are less people than that who are saved in the flood? God’s grace doesn’t require a certain number.)

To look again from our perspective, what does this tell us? Well, ask how we are similar to the Israelites and how we are different? How much must the message change for this text to apply to your community, your church, your world?

In reading a Bible story, ask the questions in that order, starting with the people who are inside the story, then looking for those for whom the story was first written, then looking at how your situation is similar to and/or different from the situation of those in the story or its first hearers/readers. You’ll be amazed at how often the story becomes directly relevant.

I think there is much more that can be said about the presentation of the flood story, and I intend to do so as I continue my series, but I think these few notes on asking questions points the way to a deeper understanding.