Heiser’s Laws for Bible Study
- There is no substitute for close attention to the biblical text.
- You should be observing the biblical text in the original languages. If you cannot, never trust one translation in a passage. Use several and then learn skills for understanding why they disagree.
- Patterns in the text are more important than word studies.
- The New Testament’s use of the Old Testament is the key to understanding how prophecy works.
- The Bible must be interpreted in context, and that context isn’t your own or that of your theological tradition; it is the context that produced it (ancient Near East/ Mediterranean)
- The Bible is a divine-human book; treat it as such.
- If it’s weird, it’s important (i.e., it’s there for a reason; it is not random).
- Don’t hire someone to stock the grocery shelves who can’t read the labels. Or, don’t put your meds in the daily pill tray unless you can read the instructions. Put another way: Systematic theology isn’t helpful (and can be misleading) if its parts are not derived from the exegesis of the original text. Biblical theology is done from the ground up, not the top down
- If, after you’ve done the grunt work of context-driven exegesis, what the biblical text says disturbs you, let it.
- Build a network of exegetical insights you can keep drawing upon; the connections are the result of a supernatural Mind guiding the very human writers. The only way to think that Mind’s thoughts are to find the network, one node at a time.
