Consider the following statements:⁠  1

  • I married my cousin.
  • I was boxing all night.
  • Lisa said that Phil knocked her up.
  • Jerry was really pissed last night.
  • Every once in a while I find a random goldfish in the sheets.
  • Did you manage to find helium for your shark?
  • I’m sure I can stash your wallet somewhere in my taco if need be.
  • So, if you like Canadian Bacon and don’t have a uterus, you’re welcome to come.

Some of them might seem straightforward, others bizarre. But how does your understanding of these sentences change with some context provided?

  • I married my cousin.
    (Spoken by a Lutheran pastor)
  • I was boxing all night.
    (Said by the owner of a packaging company.)
  • Lisa said that Phil knocked her up.
    (Said by a someone from Britain, where knock up means “to wake up by knocking on someone’s door”)
  • Jerry was really pissed last night.
    (Spoken by a Brit for whom pissed means “drunk.”)⁠2
  • Every once in a while I find a random goldfish in the sheets.
    (Said by someone discussing how he liked to eat crackers in bed)
  • Did you manage to find helium for your shark?
    (Spoken to someone with an inflatable shark balloon)
  • I’m sure I can stash your wallet somewhere in my taco if need be.
    (Said by someone wearing a taco costume for Halloween to someone in a costume without pockets)
  • So, if you like Canadian Bacon and don’t have a uterus, you’re welcome to come.
    (Said by someone inviting people to a men’s group breakfast)

In each case, once some context was provided, the meaning of the sentence likely changed, in some cases even gaining meaning where before it had seemed nonsensical.

In his book Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything, David Bellos notes: “what an utterance means to its utterer and to the addressee of the utterance does not depend exclusively on the meaning of the words uttered.”⁠3 Essential to understanding any utterance beyond the linguistic meaning of the words uttered is an understanding of context and the identities and relationship between the speakers.

This is an incredibly important point when it comes to the interpretation of Biblical texts. In courses I have taught that involve Biblical interpretation, I am usually repetitive to the point of obnoxious on this point: context matters. None of the texts of holy scripture arose in a vacuum or descended from the sky pre-chiseled on stone tablets. They arose in a specific place, at a specific time, in a specific historical context. Yet, the tendency to read the scriptures as if they had been written by a white, English-speaking, suburban American Methodist is extremely commonplace. It makes me wonder whether a thousand years from now interpreters will make the same attempt to understand our culture without any attempt to understand the context.  Imagine for example what statements like “Dave Roberts stole home” and “Elvis is King” would mean to people who didn’t understand baseball or know that the United States was a republic. And yet we routinely attempt to interpret and apply Biblical texts without truly understanding what an abomination is, for example, or what the Biblical rules of purity really are.⁠4

The question to ask in interpreting Biblical texts is “What did this mean to the people who wrote it and first read it?” Once there has been an appropriate inquiry into the context that helps us to answer that question, then we can ask, “Given that, what does it have to say to us?” But without understanding the original context and the meaning within that context, we will never be able to truly understand how to translate that meaning into our context and situation.

1 Many of these are from originalsentence.com

2 These last two support George Bernard Shaw’s statement: “The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.”

3 Bellos, David. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? : Translation and the Meaning of Everything. 1st American ed.  New York: Faber and Faber, 2011, 74.

4 Few people know that abomination translates the Hebrew word תועבה to’evah, which refers to improper worship or a detestable cultic practice and not a moral wrong (perhaps the sound of the word is partially to blame). In the same way, contemporary Christians frequently misunderstand Jewish rules of ritual purity to be statements of moral purity.