Reading the Old Testament well is less about finding the right commentary and more about asking the right questions every time you open it. Dr. Esau McCaulley, who teaches New Testament at Wheaton College, works with four: Where am I in the story? Is this being described or commended? What is the main point? What kind of text is this? Asked together, they keep a reader from turning every story into a rule and from skipping the parts that trouble them. This guide trains those four questions into a habit.
You can use it alone or with a group. A group session runs about seventy-five minutes and needs Bibles, paper and someone willing to keep time. After the session, a four-week practice carries the habit into ordinary reading. You will not need any background in biblical languages. You will need patience with passages you might normally skim.
Begin with a cold read
Before learning any method, read Genesis 12:10-20 on your own. Abraham goes down to Egypt during a famine, tells Sarah to say she is his sister, and Pharaoh takes her into his house. Read it once, slowly.
Then write one sentence: The lesson of this story is… Finish it however seems right to you. Do not discuss it yet. Fold the paper and set it aside. You will come back to it at the end.
Leaders, resist the urge to correct anyone at this stage. The point of the cold read is to capture how each person reads now, so the group can see later what the questions changed.
Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, named a common pattern in this conversation. A great deal of preaching draws principles from Old Testament stories and applies them to life today, which is often fine. The trouble comes when listeners take a principle as an order from God. In her words, “they confuse principles with commands.” Keep that warning in mind as you look at what you wrote.
The four questions
1. Where am I in the story?
McCaulley describes his first habit as a reader this way: “One of the things that I try to do as a reader of the Bible is keep an idea where I am in the narrative when something is occurring.” A passage means something different depending on whether it falls before the covenant at Sinai, during the years of the kings, in exile or after the return.
To practice, draw a simple line across a page and mark six points: creation, the promise to Abraham, the exodus and the law, the land and the kings, exile and return, and Christ. Place Genesis 12 on that line. Notice how early it falls. God has just promised to bless Abraham and make him a great nation, and within a few verses Abraham is lying to protect himself.
The line also runs in both directions. McCaulley asks, “how do later events throw a fresh light on the things that I’ve read earlier?” Later in Genesis, God keeps his promise to a man who did very little to deserve it. That later light matters for how you read this early scene.
2. Is this described or commended?
McCaulley states the second habit plainly: “everything that is described is not therefore commended.” Narrative often reports what people did without stopping to grade it. The judgment comes through consequences, through the wider story, or through what the rest of Scripture says.
Go back to Genesis 12. Does the text praise Abraham’s plan? Look at verses 17-20. Who suffers for the lie? Who has to rebuke whom? McCaulley reads the story this way: “Abraham isn’t necessarily engaging in behavior that is commended by God, but it’s showing that God is being gracious to him despite these things.” On that reading, the subject of the story is God’s faithfulness, not Abraham’s example.
3. What is the main point?
McCaulley cautions preachers, “don’t make a mountain out of a narrative detail that isn’t necessarily that important to the narrative itself.” The question is whether the detail you find interesting actually serves what the author is doing.
Read Judges 7:1-8, where Gideon’s army is cut down and the remaining men are chosen by how they drink water. Some readers build lessons on the drinking posture. McCaulley, speaking from memory and urging listeners to check the commentaries, suggests the point may simply be that God wanted a small army so that he received credit for the victory. The narrator gives a reason in Judges 7:2: “lest Israel vaunt themselves against me, saying, Mine own hand hath saved me.” When a passage states its own purpose, let that statement govern the details. McCaulley’s rule for every passage is short: “we need to keep the main point of the text, the main point.”
4. What kind of text is this?
Genre changes what a passage is doing. McCaulley points out that the law is the Torah, the first five books, “which actually doesn’t just mean law, it means instruction.” Genesis belongs to it. So does the exodus story. When God gave his people a way to build a life, McCaulley says, “he didn’t just give them rules, he told them a story.”
You can see this at the top of the Ten Commandments. Before a single command, God identifies himself in Exodus 20:2: “I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” The commands follow from who God is and what he has done. Other genres have their own rules. McCaulley notes that Proverbs speaks of what is generally true, not always true, and that in the Psalms “the prayers are allowed to be messy.” A psalmist’s angry prayer is an honest prayer, not a forecast of what God will do.
Where the questions lead
All four questions point toward one orientation. McCaulley urges readers to keep the whole sweep of the Bible in view, with Christ as the star of every story. He also warns against a shortcut. Connecting a passage to Jesus is “different than just a Jesus addendum to the sermon.” The link should grow out of the passage’s place in the story. Luke 24:27 shows the risen Jesus doing this with his disciples: “And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.”
Seeing Christ in Old Testament patterns is an interpretive move, and some connections are stronger than others. The safest ones are those the story itself builds toward and the New Testament takes up. Hold weaker connections more loosely.
Group exercise: trace one thread through the whole story
This exercise shows the first question at full strength. Divide into four small groups and give each group one stop on the thread McCaulley traces:
- Deuteronomy 28:15 and 30:1-3, where Moses warns that Israel will break the covenant, go into exile, and later be called back.
- 2 Kings 25:1-11, where Jerusalem falls and the people are carried to Babylon.
- Nehemiah 9:32-37, where the people who returned confess that they are still servants in the land God gave their ancestors.
- Galatians 3:13, where Paul writes, “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us.”
Each group reads its passage and answers two things: who is speaking, and to whom? Then report back in order. Mark each stop on the story line from earlier.
McCaulley’s argument is that this thread keeps a reader from lifting the curses of Deuteronomy 28 out of Israel’s covenant and assigning them to some other people in a later century. He points to Nehemiah 9 as evidence that the people experiencing the curses were the ones who had returned to the land. Some in your group may have heard Deuteronomy 28 taught very differently, perhaps from a pulpit, perhaps from a movement that reads it as describing a particular people’s history of suffering. That pain is real and deserves respect. Leaders, let people say what they were taught before the group weighs it, and keep the focus on what the passages themselves say.
Test the habits on a hard text
The fair objection to these questions is that they could become escape hatches. Call the troubling story “description.” Call the awkward detail “unimportant.” Keep only what you like.
Test that objection on the conquest. McCaulley does not soften it. “It makes me uncomfortable,” he says. He also refuses to read those chapters in isolation. Read Joshua 2:8-14 and Joshua 7:1, 10-12 side by side. McCaulley observes that the conquest account opens with Rahab, a foreigner who recognizes Israel’s God and receives mercy, placed beside Achan, an Israelite who is judged. Then read Genesis 15:16, where God tells Abraham the land will be withheld because the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.
None of this makes the passage comfortable, and McCaulley does not claim it does. He describes his trust in God here as resting on God’s character across the whole of Scripture, and adds, “this is not a blind trust.” The four questions did not remove the difficulty. They removed misreadings that would have made it worse, so that the real difficulty could be faced.
Here is the check that keeps the habits honest. Every time you call something description, point to where the text shows its judgment. Every time you call a detail secondary, point to what the author says the main point is. If you cannot point to anything, you may be dodging.
Questions for discussion
- Which of the four questions do you already ask without thinking, and which one have you rarely asked? What do you think shaped that?
- Think of an Old Testament story you have heard used as an example to follow. Run it through the second question. Does the text itself commend what the character did?
- In the Gideon passage, why might a reader prefer a lesson drawn from a detail over the narrator’s stated point? What is gained or lost either way?
- How does knowing that Torah means instruction, and includes story, change how you would approach Leviticus or Deuteronomy?
- Faithful Christians differ on how the Old Testament’s regulations apply to believers today. What would you want to understand about the main views before settling your own?
- Where is the line between letting a hard passage remain hard and using a method to make it disappear? How would you know if you had crossed it?
A four-week habit
McCaulley wants Bible teaching that a listener can repeat at home, teaching that has, as he puts it, “modeled for me a way to read the Bible myself.” Habits form through repetition, so this practice uses the same four questions on a different kind of passage each week.
- Week one, narrative: 2 Samuel 11. Place it on your story line. Then read 1 Kings 11:1-13 and ask how later events throw light on David’s sin.
- Week two, law: Deuteronomy 5:1-21. Notice where God’s identity as the one who freed Israel appears, and how it frames the commands.
- Week three, wisdom: Proverbs 10. Pick three sayings and ask whether each describes what is generally true or what is always true.
- Week four, prayer: Psalm 13. Ask what kind of text this is and what it permits you to say to God.
Each week, write one sentence for each question and one sentence on where the story is heading. Keep the sentences on a single page so you can see the habit build over the month.
If you meet with others, add a teach-back. Each week one person walks the group through their passage using only the four questions, in under five minutes, without bringing in other verses. McCaulley observes that most people “don’t need 15 passages” when one passage explained well will do more good. The test of a teach-back is whether the listeners could do the same thing with a different chapter.
Return to your first sentence
Unfold the paper from the cold read. Read your sentence about Genesis 12 again. After working through the four questions, would you keep it, revise it, or replace it? If you would change it, which question did the work?
Whatever your answer, notice which question you most need to remember. Write it on the inside cover of your Bible, or on the first page of whatever you read from. The next time an Old Testament passage confuses or troubles you, start there before you decide what it means.