Today’s reading: 2 Kings 19; John 18
What I want to say about 2 Kings 19 this morning is pretty brief, and is mostly just linking to an external resource, so before I do I wanted to take a second to point out why I very intentionally do not often use any external resources on this blog.
We have an absolute treasure trove of biblical material available to us today in English. There have been countless commentaries, books, and journal articles written over the years, each building on the ones before, coupled with advances in archeology, anthropology, and even genetics now playing in at times to biblical study and interpretation. As a result, when people talk about bible study today, they are often thinking about highlighting half of whatever page in the bible they are “studying,” counting/marking words with various symbols, blindly looking up those words in an outdated Greek lexicon or dictionary like Strong’s or Vine’s, and then reading through some number of commentaries on the highlighted passage to have a few scholars tell them what it means.
If this is what bible study necessarily looks like, then it makes complete sense why more Christians don’t read their bibles. This kind of study has a huge barrier to entry. What are you marking up and highlighting in your bible? How do I know what I am supposed to focus on? There are hundreds of published bible study methods out there, how do I know which one(s) I am supposed to follow? I’m supposed to look up the English words in the Greek? Do I look all of them up, or just certain “important” words? And how do I know what words are important? And where do I look them up? And if I want to have some integrity to my word studies, what the heck is morphology and how do I limit my word searches to usages based on context or connecting words? What commentaries am I supposed to be using? Sure there are free commentaries, but they tend to be very outdated or only skim the surface, so do I need to buy resources? Which ones am I supposed to buy? Are the best commentaries different from book of the Bible to book of the Bible? Etc. Etc. Etc.
One of the things I want to make abundantly clear to anybody and everybody willing to read this blog is that none of that is necessary, and, I would personally argue, the majority of the time those things are a hinderance to really understanding the Bible.
Certainly, if you are a biblical scholar, that type of study doesn’t even scratch the surface of what you need to be doing. Or if you are a pastor or teacher, then some amount of that kind of study may be necessary at times, though even then I would say most of the time probably not.
I would argue that the vast majority of Christians, the vast majority of the time, would be better served just reading the Bible. Sure, you could try to study that one New Testament paragraph really deeply, but if you don’t know the Old Testament well, you may completely miss that the imagery the NT author is using is very common imagery from the prophets and should be understood in that context. The more you see how biblical authors use various images and language, the more you will notice connections throughout the Bible, and the more you will understand what a given author is trying to communicate. That kind of understanding won’t come from reading the right commentary, but from reading the Bible. The more you read it, the more connections you will make, and the more you will understand it. At that point, you may have questions you can’t answer from the text, and then those resources are the right place to turn, but it is to answer a question, not to do all of your “bible study.”
This is why, on this blog, we look at the text. I actively call out when there is a question I have that cannot be answered from the text, rather than looking it up and just putting the answer in the post, because I want people to see when (and how seldom) those kinds of questions actually arise. I have actually purchased quite a few commentaries over the years, and for all the time I spend in the Bible, I almost never open them. They are nice to have around when I have a question I can’t otherwise answer, but I think, since I started this blog (9 or 10 months ago), writing a post about the reading just about every day since, there have been maybe 4 or so times that these kinds of questions have come up. That’s it. We have gone through most of the New Testament twice in that time, and about half of the Old Testament, and have been able to substantively talk about the Word and its implications on our lives without all the extra materials ever coming into play.
This is why I very seldom reference commentaries or other such resources, because those things are seldom necessary for you to read, understand, and grow even into a great depth in the Word, and I want to encourage people to do just that, to read, enjoy, and grow in your understanding of the Word through the Word, not through someone else’s process or materials.
All that said, I have an external reference for today! :D
This is just one I think is fascinating. 2 Kings 19 tells us about God’s supernatural defeat of Sennacherib’s army, which, as recounted in the Bible, can seem a little far-fetched from a historical standpoint. However, we have Sennacherib’s own writings about it, and while he records the siege he laid against Jerusalem, he himself records that he never actually captured it, which is out of character from the rest of his recountings of his military campaigns. So while he does not say that an angel killed 185,000 of his troops, causing him to leave, the biblical account lines up pretty well with his own account up to that point where he claims he just had to leave for other matters.
You can read more about it here if you’re fascinated by this kind of thing like I am: https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2014/assyria-to-iberia/blog/posts/sennacherib-and-jerusalem
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