Best book around for learning HOW to read and understand the Bible. Anything by Gordon Fee is great, but this book is accessible for anyone to read. ( )

How To Read the Bible for All It is Worth provides an approach to a study of the Bible that is sensible, practical, balanced and wise. The authors argue that before attempting to apply the biblical text to the “here and now” (which is how they narrowly define the principle of hermeneutics) it is important to perform exegesis (how the text was understood in the “there and then”).

The authors provide exegetical guidelines for the various types of biblical texts that will be encountered in reading the Bible. For example the prophets need to be understood by recognising and delineating the various oracles they record, the epistles need to be broken down into paragraphs, the psalms into types, etc. The authors show how to do this using common sense and Bible helps such as dictionaries, commentaries and Bible Handbooks. So, this is not just a book to read but to be used as a textbook for study.

The authors also give guidance on the types of Bible translations and their various strengths and weaknesses, whether the translation is literal, dynamic equivalence or paraphrase, and how to use these types of translation.

Overall this is an excellent book for providing a common sense approach to Bible study, I highly recommend it. ( )

It's easy to forget that the bible is a collection of books. Each book belongs to a genre. This book shows you how to interpret each book correctly. I think the author did a fairly good job explaining how to do exegesis and hermeneutics in a concise manner. ( )

My favorite book for understanding the different genres of literature in the Bible ( )

Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart’s book builds on some of the basic skills of observation, interpretation and application, by looking in more detail at the various genre found within the Bible: epistles, Old Testament narratives, gospels, prophets, etc. They suggest various difficulties that can surface when reading each genre, techniques that can help along the way, and provide many examples of each of these things in practice. It doesn’t demand quite the hands-on approach of earlier books, so more discipline is required from the reader to ensure that the skills learned are put into practice, but if you’re willing to do this, it’s a great help.

This review is part of an article called Better Bible Study at the 4-14 christian theology website. ( )