[Textcritic]

The second point that I should like to make is that the Bible is quite often read under a cloud of cultural ignorance that greatly affects its meaning and application.

What I mean by this is simply that the cultural and socioeconomic circumstances that governed Scripture production and transmission are quite foreign and contrary to the modern worldview. The vast majority of the biblical texts were composed and edited in the context of a sacrificial cultic environment, in which the Jewish second Temple and its institutions were THE primary element in religious observance, doctrine, and practice. As such, there are a great number of Scriptures that are subject to a "Temple theology" that has virtually disappeared. Even in the New Testament, nearly half of the Christian canon (Mark, Luke-Acts, Galatians, Philippians, I–II Corinthians, Romans, I Thessalonians, Philemon, and Hebrews) was likely composed before the Temple of Herod was finally destroyed by Roman legions in 67 C.E. I cannot underemphasize the importance that the Temple had in both Judaism and in the seminal roots of Christianity, and the fact that the very memory of the Temple is fragmented and idealized means that the writings produced in its shadow are also highly susceptible to misinterpretation. In the wake of its destruction, both Christianity and Judaism transformed themselves from religions of the "presence" (shekinah in Jewish ideology and parousia in the Christian concept) to religions of the book. Canonization itself was a product of the crisis that occured with the destruction of the Temple, albeit, it was a lengthy process.

Other places in which cultural ignorance tends to misconstrue biblical literature is in ancient social structure: the "biblical world" was agrarian, pre-scientific, pre-rational, and most certainly NOT gender neutral. The entire Jewish sacrificial system, and the Jewish calendars are structured around planting, harvest, and the breeding and slaughter of livestock. People of the ancient world were much more intimately connected with the earth and depended a great deal more upon the the natural environment that we are at all accustomed to. Because of this, religious practices and festivals were also thus closely connected with the observance of nature, which in many ways defined them.

Finally, the fact that the people of the ancient world were highly illiterate, and learned mostly through participation, practice, or spoken instruction, this made for a profoundly different experience in receiving “the Word of God” which was ALWAYS either spoken or read, but always a performative event. Studies of thoroughly oral cultures show that the way in which illiterate societies—that is people who have no ability to read or write—conceive and process information is cognitively quite different than in “textualized” societies. It tends to be much less abstract, and much more practical, and this will frequently lead to varied and frequent adaptations within oral traditions and stories to suit the contemporary needs of their audiences. As such, it becomes perfectly understandable to see what we perceive to be doctrinal, philosophical or logical inconsistencies in the Bible, which really was not constructed with preference for such an abstract idea as consistency.

But perhaps the greatest fallacy among both biblical critics and religious enthusiasts alike, is to domesticate the ancient world, and to soften or even attempt to eliminate the great number of these cultural and social differences. This is an especially popular procedure among Evangelical biblical critics, as they strain to show how much the present, modern world is like the biblical world, in an effort to rehabilitate the Bible and project it as an eternally relevant document. One area in particular in which this has received an inordinate amount of attention, is in the transformation of the ancient, Jewish polemics against idolatry into a much more pedestrian concept. A recurring theme in Christian apologetics is the idea that "idolatry" can be defined in a modern context as quite simply prioritizing something, anything ahead of God. It is quite common to consider not only the replacement of God by money, greed, material wealth or pleasure as akin to the cardinal sin of "idolatry", rather, one can even replace God with virtues such as family, charity or hard work. This is but one example of how for many, the present world may be read back into the biblical world and vice versa. And in my opinion, this practice remains a serious impediment to a clear understanding of not only the biblical world, but of the literature that became Scripture for the Church as well as for Judaism.