Most of my life, I read the Bible the way I was taught: like an instruction manual, each verse standing alone, perfectly clear in its meaning without any errors. If it said the world was made in six days, then six literal 24-hour days it was. If Jesus said, pluck out your eye if it causes you to sin, well, thank God no one took that literally… but we understood most of it that way—at face value. As if the text had been written last week, by God himself, in plain English for a modern American audience.
Turns out, that’s not how books—especially ancient books—work.
The word bible actually means “the books”, and if you took Spanish you may already know that it is etymologically tied to the word library. Most Protestant and Evangelical churches teach the Bible as a monolithic univocal document dropped from the sky in its final form, rather than the living, breathing, deeply human library of writings it actually is. And when we flatten it, we lose its beauty, depth, and—ironically—its truth.
The problem, however, is not the Bible itself. The problem, my friends, is how we often read and interpret it. The way in which we read the Bible (or our hermeneutics for short) changes everything. What happens if we read it literately instead of literally? What if we took it seriously enough to see it as it actually is—a collection of books with different genres, written by different people across centuries, in different cultural contexts, with different purposes? Suddenly, the Bible doesn’t just make more sense. It comes alive.
What Does It Mean to Read the Bible Literately?
To read literately means reading with an awareness of what kind of text we’re dealing with. Is it poetry? Prophecy? Myth? Parable? A first-century Jewish sermon? A legal code from a nomadic desert tribe? A deeply symbolic apocalyptic vision?
Imagine streaming Breaking Bad like a DIY tutorial. You’d walk away thinking anyone with a Winnebago and a chemistry set can build an empire. That’s how many modern Christians read the Bible—mistaking poetry for science, metaphor for history, and cultural laws for eternal commandments for all people throughout time.
A literate approach considers the:
• Genre – Are we reading history, poetry, wisdom literature, prophecy, a letter, or an apocalyptic vision? Each one of these requires an entirely different lens.
• Author & Audience – Who wrote this, who were they writing to, and why? A letter from Paul to a church in 1st-century Rome isn’t a universal law for all people for all of time.
• Original Language – Words in Hebrew and Greek often don’t translate neatly into English. Nuance gets lost. A single word, sometimes even a letter, can change everything.
• Historical and Cultural Context – What was happening in their world when this was written? What cultural assumptions would the original readers have had? Where is the setting?
How We’ve Gotten It Wrong
Let’s take a look at a few well-known passages and see how a literate approach changes things:
• Genesis 1 – The creation story here is structured poetically, with rhythmic repetition and symbolic numbers (7 days, representing perfection and completeness). It’s less a scientific blueprint and more a beautiful theological statement: God, our Source, brings order from chaos. And did you know there are actually 2 different creation stories in the book of Genesis? And if we try to read it literally, the creation stories have some pretty significant differences, including which name it calls God.
• The Book of Job – Often misunderstood as a historical account, Job reads more like an ancient drama exploring human suffering and the nature of God. It opens with a heavenly wager between God and “the Satan” (which means ‘the accuser,’ not necessarily the devil who is never even mentioned in the Hebrew Bible) — a setup that sounds more like a stage play than a court transcript.
• The Parables of Jesus – The Good Samaritan isn’t just a nice story about kindness. To Jesus’ audience, Samaritans were despised outsiders from another country. His point was and still is scandalous: The “enemy” is the one who is showing God’s love. A literal English reading often misses that gut-punch.
• Revelation – Apocalyptic literature is highly symbolic. Reading Revelation like a future newspaper misses its original purpose: to offer hope to persecuted Christians under Roman rule. The Beast isn’t your least favorite politician from that other evil party — it most likely represented Emperor Nero. You know… in Rome?
How This Can Change Your Faith (For the Better)
If you stop reading the Bible like a list of divine tweets straight from God’s thumbs and start reading it as a collection of ancient, sacred, deeply human writings wrestling with the divine, something happens.
- It becomes way more interesting – No more boring, redundant rulebook. Instead, you’re diving into ancient poetry, mystical visions, political resistance literature, and letters of encouragement to underground faith communities.
- It opens itself to mystery – Instead of needing everything to be perfectly clear, rigid, and factual, you may start embracing subversive language, paradox, symbol, and meanings with deeply rich layers.
- It frees you from harmful interpretations – A literal reading has been used to justify war, slavery, misogyny, homophobia, and genocide. A literate reading recognizes when a text is describing something, not prescribing it.
- It deepens your connection to the Divine – Rather than a static set of rules and doctrines, you encounter a dynamic conversation with God, one that invites you, like its characters, to wrestle, question, doubt, misunderstand, and grow.
Jesus Read the Scriptures This Way… So We Should Too.
Jesus himself did not read Scripture literally. He was so intimately aware of the spirit within the words that he reinterpreted, reframed, and challenged the common readings of his time. “You have heard it said… but I tell you…” was his way of saying, Hey, you’ve been reading this wrong. Let me show you what it actually means. Let me show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
When we move from literalism to literacy, we’re by no means abandoning Scripture—we’re respecting it. We’re engaging with it the way it was meant to be engaged: as an unfolding revelation, a window into the divine, a story that pulls us deeper into love, justice, peace, and transformation.
I think that’s part of what Jesus meant when he said, “The truth will set you free.“
And maybe, just maybe, it starts by learning how to read.
Resources
If you’re curious about diving deeper, here are some authors and books that have been helpful to me:
• Inspired by Rachel Held Evans
• The Bible Tells Me So by Peter Enns
• What Is the Bible? by Rob Bell
• Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright
• Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes by Kenneth E. Bailey
• The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr
Also check out the fascinating public scholar work of Dan McClellan. He’s about to release his first book since he took his work public called “The Bible Says So: What We Get Right (and Wrong) About Scripture’s Most Controversial Issues” on April 29th. In the meantime check him out on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube. I also have a resources tab here, but I haven’t had the time to really put much together over there yet while I focus on writing and getting this blogging thing started.
Happy reading.
And happy un-reading, too.
The Way of the Source 
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