Cotton Mather's Bible

A while back I dipped into Cotton Mather's sprawling, meandering commentary on Genesis. I was curious to see how an educated man of his period (1662/3-1727/8) understood Genesis. Men of Mather's generation and earlier have, at best, only the sketchiest inkling of ANE chronology, geography, and fauna. They are at a total loss to understand some passages. Biblical archeology has greatly aided our understanding of some Bible passages. 

And not just archeology, but the ability to hop on a plane and go see the area in question. F. F. Bruce wrote a classic, landmark commentary on the Greek text of Acts during W.W.II. He revised it towards the end of his life. Among other things, he says:

At a more amateur level, I have myself in more recent years visited that area [Asian and Galatic Phrygia] and most of the other places which figure in Acts. This has supplied a further perspective which was not available when the first edition was being prepared…" (xvii).   

In some respects we understand parts of Scripture far better than our forebears. However, modernity creates its own blinders. I was reminded of this when reading Iain Provan's interpretation of Gen 2. 

To begin with, Provan–like many Bible scholars–doesn't think that matches reality. They come to Genesis with the prior assumption that at least some what of Genesis describes can't be true. We "know" that's not how it happened. 

Therefore, they don't even attempt to explore the meaning of the passages in case that's realistic. They just assume it must be metaphorical. It has to stand for something else. So they talk about that instead. 

On a related note, their own lifestyle is so far removed from the lifestyle of Bible times that they really can't imagine what it would be like. Provan can't even visualize Gen 2. He can't see that scene in his mind's eye. For him, the river and the garden must be purely symbolic. A bucolic allegory of the temple or tabernacle. 

It reminds me of Samuel Johnson reviewing of Paradise Lost. Although it's set in the garden of Eden, Johnson remarked that Milton's description of the garden read like a man who never set foot in a real garden. It was just a literary construct, pieced together from Classical sources like the garden of the Hesperides.

And that's not surprising. Milton was a very bookish man. And he was flaunting his literary erudition. Moreover, people in Milton's time didn't necessarily share our romantic love of nature in the wild. 

Knowing Hebrew, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and cuneiform languages doesn't automatically equipt you to understand the OT. There are some passages in Scripture which a rancher, farmer, hunter, trapper, or fisherman would instantly understand that eludes the average Bible scholar.  

This extends to the supernatural dimension of Scripture. For instance, in parts of the world where ancient witchcraft lingers, some of the "unbelievable" scenes in the Bible are suddenly familiar and true to life. But because the average Bible scholar never has occasion to experience anything out of the ordinary, that's incredible.