It is important to ask what is at the root of such an approach to the Bible. Many people treat the Bible as a book of secret codes, and I suspect that has a lot to do with the fact that when they try to read the Bible the way they would a recently-authored book, it is hard to understand.
I’d like to suggest here that the reason for the Bible’s apparent obscurity is not some supernatural characteristic, but is simply a result of its antiquity and its being a compilation of works composed in other languages and cultural contexts. Anyone who has tried to read other literature of a similar antiquity in translation will have had the same sort of experience. It is like being dropped into the final Harry Potter novel and trying to figure out who Voldemort or Dumbledore are, or what Dementors are, only so much worse.
Those of us who have studied the Bible for decades can attest, on the other hand, that when one takes the time to learn the languages, the cultural and historical background, and the unfamiliar concepts, the Bible mostly makes sense, and those places where it still does not are recognizable as being due to gaps in our knowledge about the context, the ancient language in which it was composed, and other such factors.
When the Bible is hard to understand, that is an important clue – not that we should get a Bible wordbook and begin looking for words that sound like the name of a president, but that we should instead put effort into learning the relevant languages, history and other such background materials.
Of course, doing so may cause the Bible to lose for you some of that mystique that comes with the aura of mysteriousness about something only partially understood. But isn’t that a price worth paying if the result is the Bible actually making sense?
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