Fairy Tale Spotlight: Reading Without Interpretation

It is absolutely infuriating talking to people about the Bible. With almost anyone, the subject of interpretation ultimately comes up. It's one of the most aggravating things that I have to deal with when talking about my read-through. My statement is this: I did not do any interpretations of anything in the Bible when I read it. I merely read it.

The problem is that there are many people out there who do not think that the Bible can be read without certain parts needing an interpretation. Some even think the whole book needs to be interpreted. "By who?" I should ask. Some sort of Biblical scholar I don't even know? Me? Should I do it? Have I done it? People seem to think I must have, for, to read the Bible, one cannot do it without interpretation.

When I reviewed each book of the Bible, I never commented on anything I didn't understand. I also never assumed I knew more than it did. If the book was plain in saying something, as it often was, I simply took note of it. If it was not clear, I moved on.

What a lot of people take for granted is that the Bible is, more often than not, extremely and even redundantly clear in the way that it speaks. It just boldly states things and then moves on. All I had to do was just read it. That was it. Yes, there were parts that were confusing, but I didn't linger in those parts. Also there are some legitimately stupid parts of the Bible that don't have any real spiritual meaning. 

"Song of Solomon" is a worthless, meaningless book filled with gushing poetry from one human to another. People had to use interpretation in order to get to "It's about man's loving relationship with God." That's malarkey. If you actually just read it, it has nothing to do with that.

Yet through all this, I still seem to be getting accused of doing an interpretation. The official line is that anyone who reads the Bible is doing an interpretation. They are doing their own, because anybody can have their own interpretation. This means the things I learned from the book are perfectly useless since they are only valid to me personally. In that case, why even bother writing a blog review of any of the books? All you have to say is that you interpreted it differently. But the thing is... I didn't do an interpretation of anything.

Let's look at an example unrelated to the Bible. Here is a statement:

"Jason traveled across the desert."

Without interpretation, this sentence tells me that someone named Jason, likely a man, circumvented a desert from one end to the other. He went from Point A all the way to Point B. It doesn't tell me anything else.

If I were to use interpretation, I would get a lot of extraneous things. I might say that the journey must have taken a long time, even many years. I could say what sort of conveyance he used, such as a donkey or a camel. I could talk about the struggles of crossing the dessert, how water was limited and such. I could talk about how crossing the desert was God's way of testing him. Lessons could be gleamed from this short sentence about the struggles we all have to face. These are all interpretations. These are the things I did not do when I read the Bible.

The only thing I can get from the statement I gave you here is that someone went from one place to the other. Most times, that's all the Bible is doing. It's just telling you things. It explains what people saw. It tells you what God said in certain places. It just says things.

Yes, there are confusing mysterious things in the Bible that probably needs interpretation of some kind, but I didn't do that either. I ignored those spots, although I still somewhat remember them. I just felt that, if I didn't understand something, it wasn't my responsibility to dictate what it was all about. And to be fair, those places in the Bible are actually in the minority compared to the parts that are easy to understand. Most of the Bible is pretty bold-faced and simple in it's narrative. It is so simple in fact that the idea of interpreting any of it likely means you are turning it into something that it isn't.

So even though it likely does not matter, let me just say it one more time just too officially get this on the record: I did absolutely no interpretations when I read the Bible. I just read it and found it predominantly easy to understand from beginning to end.

And "Song of Solomon" still doesn't belong in it!

This blog was written on August 19, 2022.

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