Welcome to my new radio show! This is my fun first introduction to what Bible context is and why it is so important. To do this, I talk about a whole lot of funny and sometimes gross things that people do, wear, eat, and say that don’t make sense to people from other cultures. Bad news, parents, we’re going to talk about some of your fashion choices when you were kids. We’ll play the idiom game and discuss probably the funniest verse in the entire Bible and how, without context, it just sounds very ridiculous in Hebrew.
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Here’s the transcript for my hearing impaired context kids! Or for kids who would rather read (like me!).
Hey there, welcome to Context for Kids! I am Miss Tyler and I am so excited to be bringing you this brand new radio program about Bible context. Parents, stick around to the end if you want to find out how to find my website and the archives where I will post this and all future programs just in case you miss one, plus transcripts for the hearing impaired.
So what is Bible context anyway? Well, context is what you know and you assume that everyone else knows too. Depending on what country you live in, you might eat certain kinds of foods or dress in a certain way or live in a particular kind of house, or have traditions or ways of saying things that wouldn’t make sense to someone who lives somewhere else. And so, when talking to someone from another country, they might not understand what you are talking about or, worse, totally think the wrong things!
Like, what if I say the word food? What do you think of? If you are an American, probably lots of hamburgers and hotdogs and pizza. What if you are from China? Did you think of chow mein or fried rice? Or, how about Mexico? Bring on the tacos and burritos! Or Italy? Spaghetti!! Or France? Let’s just skip the snails and frog’s legs! Or Germany? They are famous for sausages. And how about some sweet African curry dishes? Even though all these countries have very different foods, they are also usually familiar because they use ingredients that we are familiar with—except for the snails and frogs legs, right? But in some countries, people eat tarantulas and ants and bats. They might think that pizza was really strange! So different people saying the same word, food, can mean very different things when saying it. That’s a great example of context. What something means to me is not necessarily what it means to you! And neither of us is automatically wrong, we are just looking at the same word through the filter of our own unique culture. To understand one another, we have to learn about one another’s lives and not assume that what is normal to us is also normal to them.
When we read something written by someone else, we need to know as much about that person and their life as possible or we might jump to the wrong conclusions!
How about clothes? Have your parents or grandparents ever shown you pictures of what they thought was cool when they were kids? When I was a teenager, we wore leg warmers, plaid shirts with ruffles and bows with huge shoulder pads, and terrycloth sports headbands—oh, and huge hairstyles that took a ton of hairspray. But what would I have worn if I lived among the Eskimos of Alaska? I’d wear a thick furry parka. Or the Mongolians of Northern China? It’s so windy there that they need thick clothing to keep out the cold. Or in India or Africa? In India, it is very hot and so they wear looser, more flowing clothing than we do. Some people wear beautiful clothes that look like costumes to us. I have African friends who wear clothes with beautiful patterns and friends from India who wear beautiful silk scarves. So, when you say clothes, it can mean different things to different people as well. But likely all of these cultures would laugh if they saw a picture of me with huge hair and dressed like I was going to the gym while still wearing normal clothes.
How about homes? For one person, home might be an igloo on a frozen tundra, or a hut in the middle of the jungle, or an apartment high up in a city building with no yard, or a big house out in the country with a huge yard. Or how about a house on stilts on a mountainside or in the water, or on a boat? Another person’s home might have paper walls on the inside or no walls at all. Their roof might be shingles or tiles or grass or ice!
What about the things we say? I love to play the idiom game. No, I didn’t say idiot—I said idiom. Idioms are phrases that say one thing but mean something entirely different. Like, if I said, “Who let the cat out of the bag” or “who spilled the beans” I am asking who told the secret or gave away the big surprise, but if someone didn’t know that saying, they would wonder why someone would object to letting that poor cat out of the bag and they might demand to know who would put a cat in a bag in the first place! And they might go grab some rags to help me clean up after whoever spilled the beans all over the kitchen floor. Let’s look at some more funny idioms from some other countries just for fun.
What if a German friend said, “I only understand the train station”? What do you think they would be telling you? They’d be saying, “I don’t understand what you are talking about.” What if a Swedish friend said, “There’s no cow on the ice?” They’d be telling you not to worry! If someone from Portugal says that you are pushing something with your belly it means that you are putting off doing something, you’re procrastinating. Like your homework or your chores! One of my favorites is when someone from Japan is telling you goodbye and says, “Stinky like fish!” It means “Don’t be a stranger,” or “Come back soon.” But if you didn’t know that you would want to go home to take a bath because you would be worried that you smell like a stinky fish.
But idioms can also get us into terrible trouble. I once said something to a native Vietnamese speaker that made her really angry. I told her that I was idiot-proofing something. She misunderstood and thought that I was calling her an idiot when the expression just means to make something so easy that anyone can understand how to do it. That’s always a risk when talking to someone from another culture. If we use idioms, expressions that don’t say what they seem to say, it can make communication very difficult. In this case, she never would talk to me again and no one could convince her that I wasn’t insulting her. She was from an honor/shame society and so she could not forgive what she thought was an insult—and we will learn about that too because honor/shame societies like we see in the Bible are not like American or European culture at all but people in Asia and Africa understand it perfectly.
Maybe you have even heard a joke that you didn’t understand or you didn’t think was funny because you didn’t understand the context, the story behind the story that made it funny. The next time you hear a joke, as yourself if it would be funny if you spoke another language or lived in a different time or were from a different planet even!
Now, these examples are all from right now in the 21st century but what if we go backward in time two thousand years to when Yeshua (or your family might call Him Jesus or Isa or Yesu depending on where you are from) was here on earth or even further back to the time of Abraham? For Yeshua/Jesus a home was usually made of stone with a roof of grass but for Abraham, home was a tent that he carried with him wherever they traveled. In fact, for you and me, home is a definite place but for Abraham, it was his tent, which could be absolutely anywhere. But if you have a military family, home might simply be wherever the people you love happen to be living at the moment.
The Bible is full of situations and ideas that no longer make sense to us unless they are explained, just like movies about different times and even like books about fantasy worlds like Narnia. The Bible, unlike movies and fantasy books, is true was written to a world that was very different than ours is now.
In the Bible is where we find one of the funniest idioms ever written down. In I Samuel 25:22,
21 Now David had said, “Surely in vain have I guarded all that this fellow has in the wilderness, so that nothing was missed of all that belonged to him, and he has returned me evil for good. 22 God do so to the enemies of David and more also, if by morning I leave so much as one male of all who belong to him.”
Now, David was about to make a terrible decision because he was angry and insulted. A very foolish man named Nabal was refusing to be kind and send food to David’s hungry men, even though they had been guarding his shepherds and his flocks while they were on the run from King Saul. Nabal insulted David and David was angry enough to kill him and every man in his household. But David would have been killing a lot of innocent people. Fortunately, Nabal’s wife Abigail stepped in and sent David a lot of food and wisely told him that he would be doing wrong if he carried out his plan—so David didn’t end up killing anyone. But this verse that I read to you is in English, in Hebrew it doesn’t say that David is going to kill every male in the house. It says that he is going to kill everyone who pees against the wall! That’s an idiom. Women can’t pee against the wall but men can and so that was an expression that meant male instead of female. Now, I don’t want you boys peeing on walls just to be all biblical, okay? They didn’t have bathrooms in the houses in those days and men would often pee against the stone walls. Hopefully outside. I know that during medieval times, in keeps and castles, they would put hay on the ground and men would pee on that. I actually don’t know what ladies did. I don’t really want to find out. I am so glad that we have toilets now!
What if we didn’t know about that idiom? What if we read David’s words as being that he was going to kill everyone who pees against the wall? Well, we might think that he was only going to kill people who pee against the wall so, “Attention everyone, stop peeing against the wall!” We might start warning people, “David doesn’t like it when people pee against the wall and he’s going to kill you!” No, I am sure that David peed against walls too, when he wasn’t living in caves and out in the open. Guys can be super gross, but that was their context. It was what they did. They might think it was totally weird to walk all the way outside to an outhouse in order to pee when there was a perfectly good wall available. And they were probably used to the smell. See how important it is to understand how different their lives were from ours? Otherwise, we might believe that the first thing that David did after becoming king was to pass a law making it a crime to pee on the walls. Maybe it should be a crime now that I think about it.
People from different cultures and different times will think that different things are right and wrong. It is what their parents and everyone around them believe and so they do not question it. Until someone comes around who says it is wrong, why should they do anything differently? In Bible times, people thought slavery was no big deal and that sons are better than daughters. They hated their enemies and didn’t feel bad about it. They even wrote poems about killing the babies of their enemies, which is really messed up. Their context was very different than ours. These things and these ways of thinking were normal for them because of sin and the Bible is God’s story about fixing their wrong thoughts and actions step by step. When they wrote their angry feelings into the Psalms, they were just being honest about their prayers to God. So, we have to be understanding while we read the Bible. We might want to get angry at them but we have to remember that they had laws from God and those laws were good and helped them to live in that world where people owned slaves and there was a lot of war. Those laws taught them how to love God and to love one another better and to protect people who were needy instead of harming them. But laws only change our outside behavior. Some people did really well and lived as righteous and loving people just because the commandments told them to, but most didn’t. The Bible isn’t a story about quick fixes. God has been working ever since Genesis chapter three to fix our sin nature, which He did by sending His Son to die for us on the Cross. The world we live in now, where we hate slavery and know that boys aren’t better than girls and understand that racism is wrong and that animals shouldn’t be treated cruelly, and that we should be kind to our enemies is the world that God has been making new ever since Yeshua raised from the dead and sent us the Holy Spirit to help change us from the inside.
Every believer has a special helper, the Holy Spirit, so we are never alone and never far away from God. Our prayers are always heard even if we don’t get what we ask for—as you grow up you will be glad that you didn’t get everything you asked Him for!
But I want to teach you about another special helper as we go along, and that special helper is context. It will help you to make sense of God’s Word so that you will understand who He is and what His character is and what He wants from us. Context will help us understand why Bible people did the things that don’t make sense to us and will help us to not make the same mistakes. Context will help you when people tell you that God isn’t real and that Yeshua didn’t really rise from the dead and that the Bible is just a book full of fake stories. We have a lot of proof that it is very real and I am going to share that with Genesis and we’ll also talk about the Miracle of the Feeding of the Five Thousand.
Now Parents, if you want to keep up with these broadcasts and miss a week, you can subscribe to my podcast channel free of charge at contextforkids.podbean.com or to my blog, where I post transcripts for the hearing impaired weekly, at contextforkids.com. There are already a lot of video teachings there to choose from. I also have a YouTube channel called Context for Kids and you can find it all linked from my podcast site. Kids, until next week, I want you to know that I love you and I am praying for you and I hope you have a wonderful week studying Scripture together as a family.