Delve Into The Old TestamentSample

Day 1: Background Information

Early in his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T. S. Eliot speaks of fog rubbing its back against a windowpane, licking from pools with its tongue, leaping off a terrace, and curling up and falling asleep. These lines are difficult to make sense of at first. 

But when it’s explained that Eliot is describing the fog as if it were a cat, they make a lot more sense. (Read them in the poem itself and you’ll see.) If it’s explained further that this great poet, playwright, and literary critic was also a cat lover, the lines begin to be fun to read as well. 

In fact, this erudite man of letters, who was educated at Harvard, Oxford, and the Sorbonne, actually composed whimsical poems for his godchildren in which cats spoke about their lives and interactions with one another. These poems were gathered together and published as Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and this book became the basis for the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats. With this background information, a reader can engage this part of Eliot’s poem with much greater understanding and enjoyment. 

Of course, there’s much more to his writing, and much more to this complex poem, than this single piece of information can give us insight into. But the example does illustrate how knowing something of the story behind a writer and his work can make reading less difficult and more satisfying. 

The same principle applies to the experience we can have with the books of the Bible. Those books were written many centuries ago, in forms that aren’t always familiar to us today. If we don’t know anything about the stories behind them, they can be difficult to read. But if we have some good background information, we’ll find that they’ll make a lot more sense to us and that they’re a pleasure to read. 

PRAYER: Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in Your law. (Psalm 119:18)