Hear Ye the Word of the LordНамуна

Setting the Stage

Interpreting the Bible well requires more than being spiritually sensitive to the truths of God. If we want to receive the message of God, we need to be on the same wavelength with it—like tuning into the right frequency on a radio. In this study, we will focus on the oral nature of God’s Word. We encourage you to listen to the audio for each day’s scripture as you work through this plan.

What we do with words—whether oral, written, printed, or digital—affects how we use our faculties, how we relate to people, how we spend our time, and most important, how we think. The cultures of hearing and reading are not the same; there can be different ways of being and doing, calling on distinct functions of our brains. Which means, to understand Scripture correctly, it’s essential to recognize how reading differs from hearing.

The initial culture into which God spoke was functionally oral. In those days, people knew of written documents, but only a limited number could read, and fewer still could write. The extent of ancient oral culture’s influence on Scripture can be mind-blowing to our modern-day sensibilities. The communication of divine truth was generally delivered orally and expected to be received aurally. God didn’t write; he spoke, he breathed (2 Tim 3:16). And select people spoke for him. Yes, eventually they recorded in writing what they had heard or spoken themselves. But the authors were fewer than the speakers. And the hearers were more than the readers.

Reflect on these questions as you hear the Word of God: If people were largely dependent on hearing instead of reading, what did that mean for how they learned what they came to know? How confident do you think they were in that knowledge? How did this affect how they passed on what they knew?

Practice: Read the scripture silently and then aloud. What did you notice when you read the scripture out loud?