Reading the Old Testament - 3. Remember the Old Testament is old

The Old Testament was written a long time ago. That's stating the obvious, but we don't always remember the obvious. We come to the text expecting it to be easy to read and immediately relevant to our daily lives. Why is that? Perhaps it's because we think of it as the 'living word of God' True, God is always up to date. He's as familiar with the Internet as he is with camels and the pyramids. The truth of his word is always new and relevant. But the actual text of the Old Testament is old - very old.

The last book in the Old Testament was written several hundred years before Jesus' birth. The earliest books were written at least eight centuries before Christ. (Much older dates are proposed by some scholars.) That would make them as old as Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and hundreds of years older than books by Herodotus, Confucius, Plato and other 'ancient' authors. How many of us would pick up one of their books and expect to immediately understand everything we read?

Human nature hasn't changed. But human cultures change all the time. We see that happening in the Bible itself. Over the period covered by the Old Testament the culture of the Israelites and the people around them changed considerably. How much more have things changed since then.

We shouldn't expect the Old Testament to speak in a way that's in tune with our own culture, any more than we'd expect Homer's Iliad or Sophocles plays to be culturally familiar. That's not to say that the Old Testament has nothing relevant to say to us, but the cultural setting of any text needs to be remembered and wisdom used in understanding and applying it to our time. It's not 'cheating' to use Study Bible notes, commentaries, and other resources to help us understand the background and setting of what we're reading.

This post is part 3 of a series on reading the Old Testament:

Reading the Old Testament part 7 - Is the Old Testament misogynistic?
Reading the Old Testament part 6 - Not-so-simple questions about the Old Testament
Reading the Old Testament part 5 - A simple set of questions to use when reading the Old Testament 
Reading the Old Testament part 4 - The Old Testament wasn't written in a day
Reading the Old Testament part 3 - Remember the Old Testament is old
Reading the Old Testament part 2 - Getting an overview
Reading the Old Testament part 1 - Know your history