Psalm 137 opens by the rivers of Babylon. Exiles have hung their harps on the willows, and they ask, "How shall we sing the LORD'S song in a strange land?" (Psalm 137:4). Read slowly, the psalm makes sense as the grief of people whose city has been destroyed. Then comes verse 9: "Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones." A reader can know the setting, the genre and the history and still be shaken by that line. Genesis 22, Exodus 21 and 1 Corinthians 14 can have the same effect. Reading hard passages starts here, with a text read carefully that still troubles the reader.
The sources point to a clear way forward. Start by sorting the trouble. Some of it comes from cutting a verse away from its passage. Some comes from reading one kind of writing as if it were another. Some comes from claiming words addressed to someone else, or from mistaking a law that limits a wrong for a law that approves it. Close reading clears much of this away. What is left is a different kind of difficulty: you understand the passage well, and it still strains against what you know of God. Dr. Esau McCaulley, a New Testament scholar and Anglican priest, does not treat that as a breakdown. In his words, "that means you're doing theology."
The sessions below each train one interpretive step on actual texts. The first works on the literary unit in Matthew 7. The second works on genre in Proverbs 22, Psalm 137 and Genesis 4. The third works on audience and purpose in 2 Chronicles 7, Matthew 19 and Exodus 21. The fourth works on the tension that remains, in 1 Corinthians 14 and Genesis 22. Each session begins with the page in front of you and ends with exercises on that page. Only near the end do the sessions turn to a passage of your own. By then you should be able to say what your passage means, which parts of your trouble careful reading removed, and what to do with what is still there.