Why we Need the The Baker Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary

Connecting the Bible to contemporary lives and cultures is a vital part of preaching and teaching. Whatever we call this task—application, contextualization, what the text means as opposed to what it meant—it is essential. Those who speak of application rightly enjoin us to be students of our current cultures, including social customs and structures, values, historical trends, literature, and the interaction between people and the physical world. But insistence on awareness of contemporary culture begs a crucial question. How can we apply the Bible to current cultures if we are ignorant of the ancient cultures from which the Bible originates? The text doesn’t mean what it never meant. As the publishers of BIBBC put it, We are far removed from the time and culture of the biblical world, and this distance easily leads to misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Our understanding and appreciation of God’s Word increase exponentially when we know the historical and cultural context in which the biblical books were written.

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Readers should know that this is not an impartial review. I contributed the commentary on the Johannine Letters for this volume. No, I was not paid to write this post, I actually wanted to.

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It’s been observed many times that the task of teaching the Bible is like that of a bilingual translator. Expertise in the original or donor language is as necessary as expertise in the destination or receptor language. I recently experienced this firsthand while doing an intensive seminar on interpreting the Bible for believers in Italy. My translators did a superb job because of their international expertise in English-speaking and Italian-speaking cultures. When we take on the task of applying the Bible, we need to acquire a familiarity with the biblical world to complement our native familiarity with our own world. The task is complicated by the historical, geographical, social, and linguistic distances between us and the Bible. This is why we need books like the Baker Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary.

The Baker Illustrated Bible Background Commentary is an excellent introduction to ancient biblical cultures. As one reviewer noted, although this is a big book, the articles and comments are brief and accessible. The scholars who contribute are writing for the good of the church, aiming for Bible students, Sunday School teachers, lay leaders, and busy pastors.

Readers will find accessible information in both general articles (by my count 62 of them) and running commentary through the Bible books on salient background matters. Edited by Scott Duvall and Daniel Hays (both of Ouachita Baptist University), the book is the product of 55 different contributors and runs 1456 pages. It is well-illustrated with full-color tables and photos on nearly every page.

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Go here for a video interview with Prof. J. Daniel (Danny) Hays about the book’s origins, content, and intended audience. Prof Hays explains why he and co-editor J. Scott Duvall are excited to see the long process of publishing this book come to fruition.

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I’ve heard well-meaning folks say that books like the BIBBC are unnecessary because the Holy Spirit directly implants biblical truth in the hearts of those who read the Bible prayerfully. We agree that the Spirit works in ways that we cannot fully explain, and that prayer is a prerequisite for Bible study, but this is not a pretext for intellectual laziness under the guise of piety. The biblical story of creation and redemption, leading up to and away from God’s Son entering history as a human being, ought to teach us to love biblical history and desire to understand it better. Jesus was born into a working class Jewish family in an obscure village under suspicious circumstances. God didn’t send us a subliminal message about Jesus through the Holy Spirit. Jesus entered human history “when the set time had fully come,” (Gal 4:4 ESV). This in itself ought to teach us that the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus is the God who began, who rules, and who will consummate history. We need to understand Bible backgrounds in order to more closely follow the providential and redemptive footprints of God in the sands of the land of the Bible.

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Go here for my post and interview on another fine publication on Bible backgrounds, Behind the Scenes of the Old Testament.

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For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope. (Romans 15:4)