Ralph Gower

The People of the Bible

"Christians are faced with problems of meaning when they come to the Bible. God's Word came in particular places, at particular times, to particular people. It is only as we stand in those people's shoes and understand what God was saying to them that the words can have full meaning for us. Part of standing in their shoes is to understand the language in which the revelation came. This has been made possible for most Christians through the work of Bible translations. 

The other aspect of standing in the shoes of Biblical people involves gaining a feel for what the terminology refers to. We can get such a feeling by placing ourselves back into the context of the Bible era's homes, countrysides, and marketplaces...

The life-style of the people has also been recorded in words and artifacts, in pictures, and even in the rubbish of the past. It is through the study of such sources that it is possible to recapture something of how things were in Bible times.

The people of the Bible may have been conservative in attitude, but their was a richness and variation in their culture. Within the so-called Fertile Crescent between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf there was great variety. Life for the poor was not the same as life for the wealthy; life in the hot valley of the river Jordan was different from life in the cool mountains surrounding Jerusalem; life in summer was different from life in winter; life for the nomadic herdsman differed from life for an urban tradesman; and in a land that was subject to continual warfare, life was different under the occupation of the Assyrians from life under the occupation of Greeks and Romans."