What is Historical and Literary Context?

As a Filipino SEO expert, I read not only information about search engine optimization but also scholarly books related to scripture. In studying the scriptures, it is very important that we are aware of the context, the historical context, and the literary context.

“Historical” context usually refers to the political, social and cultural  context of the original texts or of their authors. It situates the biblical texts in their first century environment, answering such questions as who was ruling, how was social status determined, what was the role of slaves, what were the religious practices  and relations of the time, both among Jews and Gentiles. It is useful to have answers to such questions when thinking about texts that deal involve those themes. So, for a simple example, the parable of the Good Samaritan has a very sharp point when you read it in the light of Jewish-Samaritan relations in the first century. A despised outsider is lauded for doing the right thing.  Texts present historical problems when the disagree on details, e.g., the length of the ministry of Jesus, or the Lukan report about a universal census.

 

“Literary” context refers primarily to the formal features of a biblical text. What type of literature is it?  How does that kind of text work as a whole or in its parts? The gospels are narratives, with plots and characters and at least one, the Fourth Gospel, uses a lot of dramatic irony.  How does all of that work to influence a reader? Within the gospels there are smaller literary forms, similes, parables, polemical denunciations, prophetic proclamations. Pauline epistles have many features that are at home in ancient rhetoric, including matters of style and argumentative structure.  So, for example, it is useful to know that “speech in kind,” imitating the style of a certain kind of speaker, was a rhetorical device. Paul uses it in the opening chapter of Romans, which begins with language denouncing the decadence of Greco-Roman society. That language might be typical of a preacher or cultural critic. Paul soon turns the tables on that critic and even such righteous judges are guilty of sin. That move serves his larger argument in Romans about the pervasive character of the sin that God addresses in Jesus.

Answering literary questions can have a “historical” dimension as well, explaining literary forms by comparison with features of literature from the period. Narrative and rhetoric can work in a distinctive ways in antiquity, and some devices are culturally specific. So Paul and such elaborate rhetorical pieces as Hebrews and 1 Peter make many points using Biblical texts. In interpreting those texts they use interpretive devices found in contemporary Jewish sources (geaera shawa for example, connecting two disparate texts with a common word).  Or some texts, such as the Book of Revelation, rely on the imagery and symbolic conventions of apocalyptic literature, widespread in Second Temple Judaism.