How We Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture’’s Style and Meaning

＂The Bible is interpreted in a variety of ways and through a myriad of lenses. But how we interpret Scripture depends first of all on how we read it. This handbook focuses on the process of reading itself, taking a cognitive-stylistic approach grounded in recent research on language and the mind. Through accessible explanations of twelve key stylistic elements, How We Read the Bible provides all who study Scripture with the tools to understand what happens when we read and draw meaning from biblical texts. Rather than problematizing the divide between authors from the ancient world and a modern-day audience, Karolien Vermeulen and Elizabeth Hayes bridge the gap by exploring the interaction between the cues of the text and the context of the reader. With numerous examples from the Old and New Testaments and helpful suggestions for further study, How We Read the Bible can be used within any framework of biblical study-historical, theological, literary, and others-as a pathway to meeting Scripture on its own terms＂--

Karolien Vermeulen is FWO (Research Foundation-Flanders) Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Jewish Studies, University of Antwerp. Her research focuses on meaning construal in the Hebrew Bible and the role of various linguistic-stylistic elements in that process. She has published on the style of the biblical text, particularly on wordplay, metaphor, performative language, and spatial imagination. She is the author of Conceptualizing Biblical Cities: A Stylistic Study.

Elizabeth R. Hayes is affiliate assistant professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary. Her research focuses on the interrelationship between author, text, and reader, and how this interrelationship affects meaning construction for the present-day reader. Her publications focus on the style of the biblical text, with an emphasis on the experiential basis of literary features such as metaphor and metonymy.