Test

Hermeneutical principles must guide an attempt to understand the Biblical text written long ago, in languages representing both Western and Eastern vocabularies and expressions, and especially as it is used interpretively to claim authority in the decisions, choices and faith of millions upon millions of lives.

The governing method by the Bible's own standards so we would know is:

Return to the earliest recoverable linguistic layer and require every subsequent interpretive layer to justify itself.

For each example, begin with the Hebrew, Aramaic, or Koine Greek rather than the traditional English expression. Distinguish carefully between:

1. What the original word actually means in its historical linguistic setting.

2. What the grammar and syntax actually establish.

3. What parallelism or immediate context establishes.

4. What the ancient cultural setting contributes.

5. What later meanings or theological concepts became attached to the word or passage.

6. When those later meanings appear historically, where that can be determined.

7. How English translation may preserve the later interpretation.

8. What familiar imagery, artwork, preaching, or theological tradition has added.

9. What we can confidently recover after stripping those accretions away.

10. What remains uncertain.

Do not assume that a traditional interpretation is wrong simply because it is traditional. The objective is to distinguish text from interpretation and then determine whether the interpretation survives examination.

Likewise, do not favor a novel interpretation merely because it is novel. Apply the same evidentiary standard to it.

Give special weight to the Bible's own internal interpretive controls: immediate syntax, Hebrew parallelism, usage by the same author, repeated biblical usage, acrostic structures, root relationships, Septuagint translation choices, quotations by later biblical writers, and historical linguistic evidence.

Very unfortunately, views labeled "Christian" centuries and a proliferation of them today have become unbiblical and with particular assault on core tenants established by Christ and his Apostles most significantly (redemption and ecclesiology et. al.).  They can be understood by one or more of these types of intrusions:

Semantic anachronism: importing a later meaning into an earlier word.

Retrojection: importing a later institution, theology, cosmology, social category, or conceptual system backward.

Eisegesis: supplying something the syntax/context does not establish.

Interpretive accretion: layers of preaching, art, translation, harmonization, commentary, and tradition accumulating around the text until readers no longer distinguish them from it.

Interpolation: actual additional wording entering the textual transmission. This belongs to textual criticism and should remain rigorously separate.

Explain here from Acts

Full explain the error

The actions and teaching methodogy of Ezra and the Levites in Nehemiah 8:1-8 serve as a precise example of how to treat axiomatic and authoratative scripture: an ancient text exists, a linguistic/cultural distance has developed, and the task of the expositors is not to import a new meaning but to recover and communicate the meaning already there. 

"And then they read from the book, from the Law of the God, being (thoroughly) clarified [for the result] to give the sense, and then (subsquently) caused [them] to understand the reading."

Three expressions form almost a miniature hermeneutical method:

1. מְפֹרָשׁ — məphōrāš — “distinctly / clearly / with explanation.”
It comes from פרשׁ (p-r-š), carrying the idea of making something explicit, distinct, or separated out. Ezra's company does not merely read words aloud. The text is being made clear.  As a Pual participle ("being thoroughly made clarified"), both intensity and ongoing descriptive action describes this effort of achieving clarity.  The immediate context reinforces this because Ezra, leading this effort, read from "early morning to midday" while thirteen specifically name Levites along with plurality of other Levites were explaining to the entire assembly gathered!  This was intense and ongoing.  Accountability and immediacy of clarity was expected.   

2. וְשׂוֹם שֶׂכֶל — wəśôm śekel — “and giving understanding/sense.”
This is the remarkable phrase behind the KJV's “gave the sense.”  The first major result was to give sense.  Śekel concerns insight, understanding, intelligent comprehension. The objective is therefore not simply pronunciation or translation. The hearer must apprehend what the words actually signify.

3. וַיָּבִינוּ בַּמִּקְרָא — wayyāḇînû bammiqrāʾ — “and they caused/attained understanding in the reading.”
The root בין (b-y-n) is about discernment—distinguishing, perceiving, understanding. Miqrāʾ here is the reading/that which is read.

Ezra's audience was separated from their Holy scriptures by linguistic and cultural change due to many decades of Babylonian captivity which lasted seventy years.  Look at how fast language changes from generation to generation!  The purpose of the Biblos site is to show how Modern readers are separated from it also by two additional millennia of linguistic, theological, institutional, artistic, and translation accretion.

So Ezra's and the Levites' answer wasn't:

“What has this come to mean to us?”

It was essentially:

“What does this text mean, and how do we make that sense understood again?”

That is extraordinarily close to “But from the beginning it was not so.”   They did not engage in making the text somehow applicable in their future reality in what ever rendering they desired for whatever purpose they desired.  They let the Word speak authoratatively to be a call for action and correct remembrance in alignment with foundational axioms considered to be Divine Truth.

Going Further

Tradition cannot presently prove that Ezra wrote Psalm 119. But Psalm 119 represents precisely the kind of textual culture associated with Ezra: preservation of the Hebrew text, disciplined instruction, memorization, and the pursuit of understanding. Its elaborate alphabetic architecture is an abecadarius establishing many roots words and concepts of the Hebrew language in situ, interwoven with synonynms for this authoratative body of scripture in its many facets (law, judgements, statutes, memorials et. al.) and was designed to carry the exegetical commitment of Ezra and Levites faithfully into succeeding generations of expositors.

And there is an even larger historical point in what you're seeing. Ezra belongs broadly to the extraordinary first-millennium-BC transformation of human intellectual and religious history, the period sometimes called the Axial Age ("When the Greatest Minds Walked the Earth"). Gautama Buddha, Confucius and other major traditions belong to that larger era.  

While civilizations were producing new systems of wisdom, Ezra's great act was recovery.

He returned to an inherited ancient text, read it, clarified it, gave its sense, and brought a people back into understanding of the Word of the God that had already been written.  Ezra did not modernize the text to accommodate his generation. He labored to make his generation understand the original text and applied .ost accurately.  This sets forth the exact hermeneutical approach to properly establish and apply Biblical truth.

After 500 years of...

The Master Teacher himself would prompt those claiming a certain interpretation to "go back to the beginning" for the correct understanding of what was written. Examples include:

Pauline writings... also "comparing spiritual (things) with spiritual (words)."

Paul's cognizance in identifying the correct words to match the spiritual truths implicated by the expansion of Christ's teachings.