The setting of Scripture

i) Writers like John Walton, Peter Enns, Paul Seely, Bruce Waltke, and Tremper Longman are lobbying to redefine inerrancy. Trying to shift how we view the Bible. Yet they also claim that, in a fundamental respect, they are not saying anything new. They are simply attempting to make evangelicals more consistent with hermeneutical presuppositions that conservative scholarship has accepted for some time now.  

We ought to understand the OT in its ancient Near Eastern context or setting. That's part and parcel of the grammatico-historical method. Who could object to that? 

There's something  right in what they are saying, but there's something wrong in what they are saying. And that makes it initially difficult to identify the source of the problem. I've seen their critics struggle to formulate the problem.

ii) One aspect of the problem is easy to identify. Although they talk about the original setting, their real frame of reference isn't the ancient Near East but the HMS Beagle. They think science has decisively refuted Gen 1-11. There's no going back from that. 

So in that respect, all their talk about the ancient Near Eastern context of OT scripture is an exercise in misdirection. Mock pious window-dressing. The scientific establishment is their real standard of comparison. That's what they measure the Bible by.

iii) But there's another aspect to the problem that's less overt. What do they mean by the ancient Near Eastern "setting" or "context"? What do they mean by "background information"?

Briefly put, they lay myopic emphasis on comparative literature. Walton, for one, talks about the "cognitive environment," or "world of ideas" which OT writers held in common with their neighbors and contemporaries. If you stop to think about it, that's a very revealing and very narrow way to frame the issue. That's a seriously deficient definition of background information.

Notice what is implicitly missing in his comparison. He accentuates the literary setting rather than the geographical setting. The cognitive environment rather than the physical environment. The world of ideas rather than the world of nature.

Writers like Walton, Enns, et al. focus on ancient Near Eastern literature rather than the actual world which informed or produced ancient Near Eastern literature. They focus on the effect rather than the underlying cause.

Now, there's some value in comparative literary approach. That can help us to identify the genre of an OT book, or rhetorical conventions. That helps us to interpret the book.

But consider all of the background information which comparative literary analysis ignores. Climate. Terrain. Fauna. Flora. Diet. Natural resources. Technology. Transportation. Architecture. Politics. Economic systems. Social structures. Urban life. Rural life.

For me, that kind of background information is far more useful to reentering the world of the OT than comparative literature. That helps a modern reader reconstruct what it was like to live back then. A day in the life of an Egyptian fisherman in the 2nd millennium BC. 

If we could step into the time machine, and go back to prediluvian times, what would we see? What's an average day in the life of Noah? 

When, for instance, commentators talk about Eden, they focus on intertextual allusions to the tabernacle, or alleged parallels to other ancient Near Eastern literature. They spend little if any time trying to realistically envision a day in the life of Adam and Eve. The climate. The terrain. They stay outside the text rather than projecting themselves into the world the text describes. 

Likewise, when they talk about the flood, they focus on Mesopotamian flood traditions. They spend little if any time on the technicalities of flooding. They fail to discuss various types of flooding (areal, riverine, estuarine, coastal), and which type of flooding matches the Genesis account. They don't discuss whether the water table would affect the duration of the flood. They don't make the same effort to situate the event in a real-world setting outside the text. 

This deficiency is due in part to the limitations of their training. Their specialization lies in the language and literature of the ancient Near East.

This deficiency is due in part to their lifestyle. Most OT scholars have a lifestyle that doesn't bear any resemblance to the lifestyle of an ancient Near Easterner. They aren't primitive hunters or farmers or fisherman. They don't live off the land. 

As a result, commentators talk about what they know about. But what they don't know about may be far more germane to understanding Gen 1-11 than comparative literature.

iv) Bill Arnold is another good example. Two things stand out in his commentary on Genesis:

a) He views the stories in Gen 1-11 as redacted traditions or redacted legends. Literature interacting with other literature. They don't go back to real world events. 

b) His viewpoint is methodologically naturalistic. And that's because, I daresay, his personal experience is effectively secular. Angelic apparitions are alien to his experience. Things like that never happen to him, so they have an air of unreality. Same thing with other liberal commentators (Alter, Brueggemann, Childs, Driver, Fretheim, Gunkel, Sarna, Skinner, Speiser, von Rad, Westermann). For them, Gen 1-11 is obviously mythological. It radically conflicts with their plausibility structures.  

Far from attempting to view the world from within the outlook of the narrator, they keep that at a studied distance.