I was thinking about how the Bible is the Word of God this morning. It seems to me that much trouble could be avoided if people could realize that the Bible is, in fact, a book. This seemingly obvious fact is apparently lost on many Bible scholars and clergy.
If one misses the essential message of the Bible, and the big ideas within its pages, then all of one's indepth scholarship is going to be scuballa (this is a technical/scholarly term from Koine Greek which means "crap").
Hebrew, for instance is a very poetic langauge by nature. The books of the Old Testament grew out of an ancient oral tradition. Thus one needs to let the word pictures guide one's understanding of the Old Testament more so than one's studies of particular words or passages. Basing one's theology on any one word or passage found in one place in the Old Testament without it being directed by the context of the whole is poor scholarship at the very least and down right shameful (especially in a case such as the dispensatinalists who use an obscure variant of a single word in the first%2
