bible

Without cultural context it’s way harder than you might think to understand what is really going on. You can get a very general idea of this when you read very old writing- without context in Romeo and Juliet the line “I bite my thumb at thee” makes little sense- but at the time this would be an insult. We can sort of think of it like flipping someone off. We at least have that context historically- but scholars and fans can attest that many people miss quite a few subtleties of hear older works because they take it at face value or gloss over the subtext because they don’t have the cultural or linguistic background to know they just missed something that matters in that era. You get a better idea as you age and get old enough to really start to see language and it’s usage change, to see society and the norms change.

There is much that many younger people are aware of in the pre internet pre cellular days and much many aren’t. Just as people my age grew up in a world with people who had lived without cars most of their lives and know about that but can’t picture certain everyday things or can be surprised by little anachronisms of history and artifacts from that lifestyle. The further you go back the harder it becomes to understand the world you weren’t here to see and only have glimpses of. Living veterans of the second world
War are hard to find today- but those who are babies now will likely grow up in a world where finding anyone to speak to about WW2 who was there won’t be possible. They’ll have books and stories. People as young as their 30’s can already see younger people on the internet questioning established truths that a generation ago were first or second hand knowledge to most but the extremely ignorant or obstinate. People detached from the events and the people who lived them and..

.. far removed from the after effects discuss and perceive those events in a totally different way. Those born after 2001 never knew a pre 9/11 world but they’ve seen the remnants and heard accounts from those who knew that world. They’ve heard the opinions and lived in the wake of the event as societies and people tried to reconcile. Their kids or those kids- to them it will be distant history. To put it in perspective- those around their 30’s who grew up hearing about WW2 etc and thinking WW1 was some distant ancient thing- to kids born around 2000 WW2 would be about the same age to them as WW1 was to you. The newborns today- WW2 will be like the US civil war to their kids. Now we multiply that by something like 20 times and we are talking about biblical events.

So there are these unspoken things when we write we don’t feel the need to specify. Or it’s counter productive to specify. If one is telling a Joke about “Donald Trump” they generally don’t tell you who he is and describe the political divisions around him and all this- they assume you know and it’s extraneous. This is actually a more serious thing than one might think. We take it for granted- but look at a simple recipe. Ancient history has problems with that sort of thing. It seems simple- “add a cup of flour, 2tbsp sugar, 2 eggs. Blend well in large bowl and then set on counter overnight…”
Simple right? Not so. If we are lucky and there’s enough documentation we may be able to figure out what a “cup” is or a tablespoon- we might have enough evidence to know or guess pretty closely or we might not. Measurements change. The cubits and such above should denote that concept. So maybe we find some measuring tool or something that we can then figure out a unit by comparing it

To modern tools, or maybe we don’t and we get lucky and find mention of a house being X cubits king and we find a house intact enough to measure and maybe a few more and we say: “ok. Now we know how long that is.” A fundamental problem is that wether we find a tool or an example, we don’t know how accurate this particular one is. You can measure for a new desk and buy a desk online that’s exactly those dimensions and when it arrives you find it doesn’t fit because the manufacturer measured poorly or you measured poorly or the furniture is made to a loose spec and is slightly different than the exact measure right? So just getting the measurement can be hard enough. But let’s say we are confident we know what a cup of something is. Ok… a cup of what? Our recipe calls for a cup of flour. Most people know that will generally mean all purpose bleached white (wheat) flour. Generally if a type of flour other than all purpose white (wheat) flour is called for it is specified.

The same is true with “sugar.” When something says “sugar” it generally means granulated white cane sugar. If it is brown sugar or beet sugar or any other type of sugar it will say. “Salt” is white “table” salt unless it says sea salt, Himalayan sea salt, coarse salt, etc. “milk” is a cows milk usually “whole” and pasteurized, skim milk, unpasteurized milk, buttermilk, soy milk, goat milk, etc etc. will usually say specifically. But to a person removed from our time and culture and language- that might not likely be so intuitive. What is most common or standard at the store or in the home for items like this changes with time and location. So it actually is a pretty serious thing as far as a historical perspective. Even things like tools- we have all manner of alloy and sometimes we give a general idea like “billet t-404” but not always and even that is not exact. “Steel” “titanium” “aluminum” are very broad terms. A soda can is aluminum and so likely is your cars engine- they aren’t…

.. the same aluminum alloy. So these are examples of where tiny details can be obscured or lost. My own father upon hearing the term “sick” enter mainstream slang to mean “cool” assumed that “bubonic” meant “really cool” by inference. Of course most people are well aware that “bad” as in “that’s a bad ride man..” became slang for “good” or “cool.” Older folks were perplexed (myself included) the first time we heard the slang term “Gucci,” without access to younger people to explain or examples to provide context the meaning of many of these things could easily be lost in those who are separated from that specific culture and time.

TL:Dr and in summary- I suppose to this audience the most succinct way to put it to think of the “Bible” as a meme. You get words like “based” and “bet” and can see just a single picture and understand a complex concept. Now picture a “normie” who is totally lost. You can see a meme format evolve to a point where you can’t even recognize the original meme in the new format but you understand, someone who didn’t see it go from a 6 panel sponge Bob comic to a 3 panel of Taylor swift to a single image of a cat to a wojack would be lost or even if they could get the overall meaning they wouldn’t get the entire impact or context. But the Bible is a meme so old that no one is alive who saw the original meme and no one has been alive for a long time who had. Then the meme was used by two insurance companies and a politician and that changed it around a bit too. So it’s pretty precise but you have to have the context to understand it or else it’s just that one geico Super Bowl ad with cringe.