Back to: How We Got The Bible
Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics is the science and the art of biblical interpretation. It is a science because there are rules for interpreting Scripture, just as there are rules for driving a car. If you do not know the rules, you will not know how to drive properly.
Beyond knowing the principles, however, you must also know when to apply them. Because of this, hermeneutics can also rightly be called an art. Since Scripture is not monolithic because it contains multiple genres and was written over a vast period of time, by many authors, in different languages, it requires discernment to know which rules of interpretation to apply to any given text to find its intended meaning.
That, ultimately, is the goal of hermeneutics: to understand how to interpret the text to find its intended meaning.
-Jared Jeter
Source: https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/what-is-hermeneutics
Exegesis vs Eisegesis
Theological scholars have long been preoccupied with interpreting the meanings of various passages in the Bible. In fact, because of the sacred status of the Bible in both Judaism and Christianity, biblical interpretation has played a crucial role in both of those religions throughout their histories. English speakers have used the word exegesis—a descendant of the Greek term exēgeisthai, meaning “to explain” or “to interpret”—to refer to explanations of Scripture since the early 17th century.
Exegesis
Interpreting and understanding biblical texts is the province of exegesis. Exegesis is closely related to hermeneutics, which involves the principles according to which Scripture is approached and interpreted. It is, therefore, the application of hermeneutics to a particular passage.
Interpreting the Bible faithfully means reading a given passage as it’s meant to be read.
Reading in this way pays attention to things such as genre and figures of speech and takes account of the historical and literary context of a given passage, making note of how the words used were understood at the time the text was written.
This method is often called historical-grammatical exegesis, and it is intended to uncover what the author intended to convey by focusing on the words he used and their meaning in context.
Reading the Bible faithfully begins by asking some key questions about the text, including: Who is the author? What was the context of his writing? What was his purpose in writing? What is the genre of the text? The answers to these questions can often be found in the text itself, but sometimes outside resources such as commentaries and Bible dictionaries can be helpful.
-Kevin Gardner
source: https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/what-is-exegesis
Eisegesis
Greek eis = “into” versus ex = “out” (ex. exhale/inhale)
Have you heard that phrase, when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail?
It’s something we’re all prone to: a cognitive bias which means we can be over-reliant on the same repeated way of seeing the world, and the same repeated way of relating to it, even when that may not be the right approach. It’s actually called “Maslow’s hammer”. The psychologist Abraham Maslow explained it like this: “[It] is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
This is one way of describing “eisegesis”. Eisegesis is when we approach the Bible as if we were a hammer, which means that we inevitably treat every text as if it were a nail.
Eisegesis literally means “to lead into”, as in “leading our own ideas into the text”. The opposite is “exegesis”, which means “to draw out”. So eisegesis is when we “read something into” a biblical text that may not actually be there. And exegesis is when we try to “draw out” of the text what is actually there.
-Barry Cooper
source: https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts/simply-put/exegesis-and-eisegesis