Chapter 6: Clue Finder

So what do you do when you don’t know the story that is going on behind the scenes?   Sometimes we have a story with details.  In fact much of the Bible is straightforward storytelling.   Working with a direct story is helpful as many of the particulars are filled in. 

But sometimes the details behind a story or a writing is not as clear.  We find this in places like the Psalms where sometimes we don’t have any background information as to why it was written or by whom, not even “of David.”    But just because we don’t know the story outright doesn’t mean we can’t understand what’s going on. 

Consider an example from a diary entry.  What would you be able to discern about the back-story of a comment made from one of my family member’s writings:

“Today the radio was blaring news of war.”

1)  Which war do you think this might be?

a)  Civil War

b)  WW I

c)  WW II

d)  Iraqi War:  Enduring Freedom

2) Approximately when do you think she would’ve written this?

a)  1812

b)  1915

c)  1943

d)  1991

In question number one, we can rule out the Civil War and WW I because radio wasn’t a means of communication during those times.  Both WW II and the Iraqi war are both viable options because radio was around, but we would probably be more likely to infer WW II as that is when radio was the most prevalent form of communication.  After the proliferation of TV and internet, radio fell away as a primary means of news broadcast.

For the second question then it leads naturally that this was an entry written in 1943 based on the options.  And notice how the question was set up?  I didn’t mention the word “journal” as “journal” was not a primary word used in the 1940’s.  What we call journals were “diaries” even up to 20 years ago.

When we are given an indirect back-story, we use clues given within the writing to fill in the possible background.  But what if we don’t have hardly any of the actual back-story? 

This is where we look at what is being written and make inferences to what’s going on behind the scenes.  Perhaps a Psalm is crying out for God’s protection.  We could infer that the psalmist was being attacked in some way.  Perhaps it is a psalm of praise and worship.  We could infer this might be a temple song or a response to something God has done.  The text itself often gives us clues.

FIND A STORY

When we’ve done our best to infer a scenario that could be going on, then we either 1) place the text in a probable scenario in the life of a possible author, or 2) we create a true scenario from our own lives that we could place that story in and that the context would fit. 

Why is this important?  Because every text needs a context to build the story.  We do our best to build the story based on what we know from Scripture or possible scenarios, but when there’s nothing to go on, we create a real scenario that the text could fit.  This will become more clear in the next step.