Any bilingual person will tell you that if you try to translate a joke from one language to another, it may not be funny anymore because understanding the humor is dependent on understanding the joke’s original language.
Similarly, without knowing the Bible’s original context, it’s hard to understand it. The Bible wasn’t written in English, it wasn’t written in this century, and it wasn’t written by Americans. This means that there is a linguistic, historical, and cultural context that will confuse us if we aren’t careful. Wordings that might have one connotation to English-speaking Americans of the 21st century had a very different connotation to Aramaic-speaking Jews in the first century.
In order to understand the Bible, we have to look at it through the lens of the context that it was written in. Posted on this page are some commonly misunderstood Bible verses dealing with women and what they really mean when we look at them through the proper lens.
