Practice on Your Own
Learning all this historical information takes time, but you don’t need to know everything about Jewish history or culture to use this method. Some of the strategies outlined earlier for language study work for this method as well. The easiest way is to find a good study bible with detailed comments and footnotes. (See below for examples.) Oftentimes the footnotes will provide basic information about life in biblical times or some major historical figure or event that helps you understand the passage you’re reading. Another option is consult a commentary that offers a bit more information than a study bible. There are many commentaries out there, but some are more user-friendly than others. A good one-volume commentary for the entire bible is the New Jerome Biblical Commentary or the new Paulist Biblical Commentary. To go even more in depth, you could find a commentary on just one book of the bible. The best ones for laypeople are the volumes in the Sacra Pagina (New Testament) / Berit Olam (Old Testament) series, but there are many other types as well.
For more advanced study, you could find a book that provides a simple overview of life in biblical times. A quick read is Daily Life in Biblical Times by Oded Borwoski, which comes to only 126 pages. Also good is The Social World of Ancient Israel by Victor Mathews and Don Benjamin. For a bit more detail, coupled with information from archaeological discoveries, you could try Life in Biblical Israel by Philip King and Lawrence Stager. Each of these books will give you a general sense of biblical history and – more importantly – culture, and when you read through the bible, this background knowledge will become useful as you encounter specific items you didn’t understand before.
Whether you utilize these resources or not, remember that forming the right questions is nearly as important as finding the right answers. You really can’t do the latter without doing the former. When you read through a passage, consider if anything in the text strikes you as unusual. For language study, you might be curious about a particular word or phrase, so you’ll want to find out more about the meaning of the underlying Hebrew or Greek text. For historical study, you might come across something in the reading that doesn’t quite fit or you don’t quite understand, and you suspect that learning more about the customs or events of the time will shed some light on it. For example, why do Jewish leaders present Jesus with a story about a woman who married seven brothers (Mark 12:18-27)? The scenario they describe seems preposterous, but a good study bible or commentary will tell you about the practice of levirate marriage where a man is obligated to marry his brother’s widow if he dies childless (Deut 25:5-10), and it will also tell you that Jesus’ debate partners (the Sadducees) didn’t believe in resurrection from the dead. They’re trying to catch Jesus in a trap, and these two pieces of information help us see how skillfully Jesus works his way out of it. He doesn’t dispute the Law of Moses by challenging the custom of levirate marriage but tries to stretch the Sadducees’ thinking about life and death, and he also points to the three foundational figures of their religion (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) to establish common ground with them, making them more inclined to agree with him. However, in order to get to this information first, you have to read carefully so you can ask the right types of questions. Try to develop a watchful eye for items in the text that make you curious about history, and then see what you can learn about biblical people, places, and cultures from the sources recommended here.
Resources
Study Bibles: The Catholic Study Bible or The Anselm Academic Study Bible
Commentaries: The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, the Paulist Biblical Commentary, or the many volumes in the Berit Olam and Sacra Pagina series.
Books about biblical history and cultures: Daily Life in Biblical Times by Oded Borwoski, The Social World of Ancient Israel by Victor Mathews and Don Benjamin, Life in Biblical Israel by Philip King and Lawrence Stager
Introduction to the Old Testament: Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction by Lawrence Boadt (2nd ed.)
Introduction to the New Testament: Introducing the New Testament by Mark Allan Powell