Axiomatic in my teaching of the Bible is the notion that all texts are produced in a context.

For most of my beginning students, such a notion poses little threat to their faith convictions. Even the “more controversial” claim of non-Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch wanes in intensity after a few lectures on redaction history.

Their uneasiness, however, lingers not with arguments on a text’s particular historical context but with the claim that all readings of the biblical text are the outcome of historical processes. Said differently, no reading, informed or uninformed, takes place in a social vacuum.