Seek and Read

I’m Jim Kennedy. My homepage is about anything that concerns the interpretation of the Bible. Its title, “Seek and Read” comes from Isaiah 34:16. The entries express my views about biblical interpretation from a variety of angles but most significantly from a literary one. After all, the Bible is literature.The ancient Israelites did not leave us a systematically organized poetics and so we cannot know how they would have referred to what modern readers call literary figures, such as onomatopoeia, alliteration, and so forth. But the Bible’s writers were certainly not unaware of the force of words that are artfully and evocatively arranged. I plan to use much of this home page exploring the literary artistry of the Bible. To appreciate its art at deeper levels, I consider it absolutely necessary to be aware of the Bible’s cultural and historical contexts. The Bible is an ancient Near Eastern document and to read it as though it were hermetically sealed from ancient Near Eastern cultural influences is to adopt a docetic–so to speak–approach. I hope the site will be interesting. Keep in mind that I never consider anything in these pages as finished.