Before It Became a Message for Us

Whenever I read an ancient religious text, there is someone I cannot ignore: the person who first heard it. Before the translations, sermons and centuries of interpretation, there were people encountering words within a world that was their present.

They had immediate concerns. They knew things I do not know. They recognised references that may now require a footnote, and they could not have anticipated every question later readers would bring.

I find it difficult to bypass those people. My curiosity goes towards the space between a speaker’s words and a listener’s understanding. What could those words have made available to that person? What would they have assumed without needing it explained?

Ancient scriptures have complex histories of composition and transmission, so an original audience is not always a single, recoverable gathering. Still, the question keeps me attentive to the people and circumstances through which a text became meaningful.

That attention leaves room for spiritual significance. A text may continue to speak across centuries. I simply want to understand something of the world it emerged from before deciding how completely it is speaking about mine.

When the unfamiliar needs familiar words

Take the vision in Zechariah 5. An ephah, a grain measure represented here as a container, holds a woman whom the interpreting angel identifies with wickedness. Two women with wings like a stork’s carry it towards Shinar. The detail is extraordinary, but it is also specific: these winged figures are women in a vision; the passage does not call them angels.^[1]

In Ezekiel 1, wheels appear beside living creatures; the imagery includes a wheel within a wheel and rims filled with eyes. Ezekiel 10 identifies the creatures associated with the earlier vision as cherubim. These passages offer a different scene and a different vocabulary. I want to hear each before gathering them into one explanation.^[2]

I am fascinated by what someone does when an experience exceeds their ordinary language. Do they describe a resemblance? Reach for an object they know? Draw upon an established sacred image? What happens when a comparison, repeated often enough, begins to sound like a literal identification?

Those are questions I bring to the passages. A vision can be literary, symbolic, religiously experienced or understood through several of those dimensions at once. Its unusual imagery does not, by itself, tell me which account of its origin is right.

The world around a sentence

Clifford Geertz helps me think about why context matters so much. Drawing on Gilbert Ryle, he considers the difference between a twitch and a wink. The physical movement may look much the same; what makes it a meaningful gesture depends on intention, shared conventions and the situation. His ‘thick description’ attends to those layers of significance.^[3]

I think about ancient words in a similar spirit. A description can be technically accurate and still miss what an action meant. We might catalogue every movement in a ceremony and fail to understand why anyone considered it worth doing.

This is where I find myself imaginatively entering the world of the listener. What makes a warning frightening? What makes a promise hopeful? What must already be believed for an image to carry authority? I want to understand the experience of meaning from inside that world, while remaining willing to revise the world I have imagined.

There is also a question here about power. When I immediately translate another person’s words into my own concerns, whose voice becomes louder? Have I listened to them, or have I recruited them into a conversation they were never having?

Letting another world interrupt ours

I recognise the same temptation in ordinary life. We hear someone’s story and quickly decide what kind of story it is. We offer the explanation we know. Sometimes we are helpful. Sometimes we have supplied a familiar meaning before allowing an unfamiliar person to speak.

For me, self-discovery includes noticing those habits of interpretation. The identities we inhabit influence what we expect to hear. Meeting another world with curiosity can make those expectations visible—and give us a little more freedom in how we respond.

Before I ask what these words might mean for me, I want to ask what they could have meant to the people who heard them first. I suspect that patience can deepen both understanding and wonder.

Edlin