A close and respectful reading of the biblical text is bound up with immense information about its historical background.
Medical doctor and surgeon and biblical scholar graduate from Harvard University and the University of Michigan, Dr. William Shea brings to the world of biblical studies the acute intelligence of the diagnostician in the emergency room and the broad information of the historian and of the linguist proficient in several Semitic languages.
Dr. Shea has published hundreds of articles and several books dealing with various topics, ranging from ancient inscriptions to the meaning of biblical prophecy. Presently, Dr. Shea is a member of the Biblical Research Institute, an international organization located in Washington, DC, dealing with biblical and theological issues pertaining to Seventh-day Adventist doctrine. Among his numerous works, we count Famines in the Early History of Egypt and Syro-Palestine (1976), Daniel and the Judgment (1980), and Selected Studies on Prophetic Interpretation (1982).
Shabbat Shalom*: As a medical doctor, what influenced you to abandon that career, which was your first choice, to concentrate on Bible studies? Could you tell the readers of Shabbat Shalom about the journey that brought you to this interest?
Shea: As a child, I grew up with almost no religious influence at all. Finally, during my last year in high school or secondary school, I came to believe in the divine inspiration of the Bible. When I went to college, I studied both courses in religion and science since I had an interest in both. I finally decided to make medicine my vocation and religious studies my avocation. When I finished my medical studies, I went to two different countries outside of the United States to practice my profession because I felt that I might be able to do more good in areas where medical care was not so readily available. Those two countries were Nicaragua and Trinidad. During my work in Trinidad in the West Indies, there was a Seventh-day Adventist denominational junior college a half-hour drive from the hospital in which I worked. They were short of teachers in the religion department, so I volunteered. My particular interest was history during the period of the Hebrew Bible and the light that archaeology can shine upon it. I taught at that junior college for over two years.
While I was doing this teaching stint, I decided that if I was to do more of this, I would need to become better qualified in the field, so I spent three years at the Harvard Divinity School studying Hebrew Bible, language, and related subjects. While I was there, I received an invitation to join the faculty of the Seventhday Adventist Theological Seminary. I taught there for a total of fourteen years before I accepted my present post, which is a kind of combination between research and administration. My “pilgrimage” into biblical studies was a slow and gradual one to finally come to the place where I am today.
Shabbat Shalom: You are a member of the Biblical Research Institute. What is it? What is your contribution as a biblical scholar?
Shea: The Biblical Research Institute is an information resource department located at the headquarters of the Seventh-day Adventist Church near Washington, DC. Many members of this denomination, and of other communions too, write us with questions about the meaning of passages in the Bible or the teachings of the church. We probably receive nearly 3,000 letters of inquiry per year, and we have a full-time staff of four scholars and two secretaries to handle this flow of inquiries.
We also receive manuscripts to evaluate. Some of these have been requested, and some of them have just been volunteered. On any given day, I might receive as many as three manuscripts on various subjects that I am supposed to evaluate.
In addition, we have our own publishing projects here. We have published a series on prophecy. We are currently working on a systematic theology, and we have completed and are editing two other projects, one on the nature of the church and another on the subject of human sexuality. We have many writers who contribute to these projects; we do not write them all ourselves.
Finally, we also run a study center in Jerusalem, Israel. It operates from March to October. During this season, we have one quarter of study for seminary students (ten weeks) and several shorter groups that come for two or three weeks at a time. These shorter-term groups may come from different parts of the world. Some are from North America, and the next largest number of them come from South America. Several groups have come from Pacific countries like the Philippines. These are study and tour groups. They have the opportunity to study the Bible land as they tour through it.
Shabbat Shalom: What is your method, or is it the best method to read the Bible? Could you give the reader a few recommendations on how to read the Bible?
Shea:There are two main ways to read the Bible. One is the scholarly-intensive way. For that approach, I use what has been called the historical-grammatical method. This means that the reader must pay close attention to the analysis of the words present in the original language. The historical setting and the literary structure of the text must also be taken into account. Of course, there are many scholarly tools that can be used for such a purpose. These include concordances, dictionaries, commentaries, and encyclopedias.
The average reader may not wish to go into such depth. In that case, one can read simply for personal devotional or spiritual benefit. One way in which to read the Bible for this purpose is to read the passage or book that one is delving into several times. Each time it is read, more meaning will appear to the reader. In addition, as one reads, one should look for key words. These are the words that are used more frequently in the passage. The Bible writer has used these words over and over again because he wishes to emphasize them. One can take each of these occurrences and see just how the word is used in each case. That will give the reader an idea of the range of meaning in these words. All of these different avenues lead up to the idea that this is God’s Word and through it, He is speaking to us.
Shabbat Shalom: The Bible is far from us, enshrined in a remote past and a foreign culture; what would be your guidelines to help the reader and the student understand its message?
Shea: Some of the methods just described above may be helpful here. Another approach is to look for repeated themes as one reads through a passage or biblical book. It is not just a question of words being repeated over and over again but also of their being used successively in different passages. One can take important words like “salvation, redemption, covenant,” etc., and follow them all the way through a biblical book. An example would be to study the theme of the covenant, the agreement between God and man, in the book of Jeremiah. The chapter at the apex of this idea is chapter 31, but one might also look to see where covenant ideas are found elsewhere in Jeremiah, both before and after that climatic passage. One could also look for covenant ideas, not just the word covenant. It is often said that the prophets served as God’s attorneys to bring God’s case to the people when they had gone astray. In Hebrew, this is called a rib, “a covenant lawsuit.” A good idea of this can be found in Micah 6.
The Psalter is another good place to take up this kind of study. There are many different types of psalms, and one needs to think about what each one is dealing with. The subject is complicated when treated in depth, but to make it simple, one might think of psalms that come out of one person’s experience, like the Davidic Psalms, and also those psalms that come out of a corporate or congregational experience, like the Psalms of Korah and Asaph, the temple singers during the time of the first or Solomonic temple. Then too, there are Psalms of joy, praise, and gladness, and other Psalms that are more mournful and of a lamentative nature. These stem from the experiences of the people. When some sort of affliction had overtaken the whole nation of Judah, the people composed, sang, or chanted these congregational laments. Then, too, there are Psalms that were composed for special occasions. Frequently, the titles of the Psalms give an idea of what those occasions were.
The reader should also remember that commentaries can be very helpful. The beginning student of the Bible should avoid detailed commentaries like the International Critical Commentary series. More appropriate for such uses are simple, short commentaries like the Tyndale commentary. Even for long biblical books, they can be quite short, so the reader can grasp the thought in a brief time.
Shabbat Shalom: What is the Bible for you as a person and as a Christian?
Shea: To me, it is the Word of God, God’s thought made audible—or legible—to me individually. It also tells me where I, as an individual, and we, as a people, as biblical Israel or the church, have been and are going. Thus, the Bible is multifaceted in its application to our lives. It tells us about our past, present, and future. Since so much of the Bible is history, it has been said that the Bible is the record of God’s Mighty Acts. Since He acted on behalf of His people like that in the past, we can rest assured that He can also act that way in our own personal lives. In that way, He can show us the road to salvation.
Shabbat Shalom: For someone who accepts the authority of the New Testament, what does it imply in regards to the Old Testament? Is the Old Testament somewhat inferior or less relevant than the New Testament?
Shea: There is no greater or lesser in God’s Word to me. It is all inspired, or it is not inspired. There is no halfway point about it. There may be some portions that are particularly precious to each of us personally because of the part they may have played in our lives. But I happen to believe that the Bible is the objective revelation of God. This means that the Bible is true, whether I have had experience with it or not. We may believe the Bible, or we may choose not to believe it, but from an objective point of view, it is still true regardless of the attitude of the reader.
It should be remembered that the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, was the Bible of the Christian church for at least three centuries of this era. First, it took almost a century for the letters of the New Testament to be written. Then it took the church a couple more centuries to decide what books should belong in the New Testament. All the time that the church worked on this, intermittently, it continued to use the Hebrew Bible as its Bible. As a reader of the Scriptures, I get benefit from all of its portions too.
Shabbat Shalom: In what way are Christians indebted to Jews in their understanding of the Bible, whether it is the Old Testament or even the New Testament? What can we learn from the Jews to better understand the Bible?
Shea: There are many ways in which we are indebted to the Jews for providing the Bible to the world. In the very first place, they preserved the Bible. We have such beautiful examples of this in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947, the oldest copy of the Hebrew Bible was the Aleppo Codex, which was found in a synagogue in Aleppo, Syria. According to the scribal notation found with it, it was copied by a scribe in the year 895 C.E. It should also be remembered that the Jews were the first ones to make translations of the Bible into other languages, principally Greek and Aramaic at first. The Septuagint was a product of Jewish scholarship in the third century B.C.E. The targums, or translations into Aramaic, come a little later. We have a translation of portions of the book of Job into Aramaic that comes from the second or first century B.C.E. It was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
There is not only the matter of the writing, preservation, transmission, and translation that we must attribute to the Jews, but there is also their preservation of the language in which it was originally written. Among Christians, the study of Hebrew was only revived during the times of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Jews, on the other hand, never lost use of it. No wonder we can turn to them for such rich insights into the meaning of the text.
Shabbat Shalom: You have extensively written and lectured in the field of biblical studies; in a few words, could you delineate the nature of your contribution in that domain?
Shea: My particular interest, as I mentioned above, has been in the area of history and archaeology, as it has related to the first and second temple periods. I am interested in biblical history, and I am interested in the history of the Ancient Near East, especially in Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, and Canaan. I am especially interested when these two main disciplines converge. To take but one simple illustration, something like eight kings of Israel and Judah are mentioned in Assyrian inscriptions, and about the same number of Assyrian kings are mentioned in the Bible. It is not just that they are mentioned by name; the text also tells us what these individuals were doing. Second Kings 18–19, for example, tells us of an encounter between Hezekiah and the Assyrian king Sennacherib. Sennacherib’s inscriptions tell us about Hezekiah and what he did as well. Thus, these two pieces of evidence can be fitted together to fill out the whole picture. These are the kinds of things that I like to study and write about.
Shabbat Shalom: What arguments would you like to share with our readers that “prove” for you that the Bible is, indeed, the word of God?
Shea: There are many answers to this question, but only one will ultimately tell the tale to an individual: that of personal experience. The Bible is consistent from beginning to end in terms of the themes that it develops. Could this really have happened with 20, 30, or 40 ordinary human writers who worked and wrote over a thousand years? I don’t think so. I believe in the property of predictive prophecy, and I believe that it is manifested in the Bible. Why doesn’t the Assyrian nation live among the nations of the world at this time? If it were, it would prove the predictions about its final fall to be wrong. Nevertheless, the Bible is still true in what it says about the absolute end of Assyria. Assyria was so thoroughly destroyed that men of modern times did not even know where its capital, Nineveh, was located. It was completely lost from the collective memory of mankind until it was found again in 1840.
There is also the historical accuracy of the Bible. All of the wonderful inscriptions, reliefs, and statuary that have been turned up from the ancient nations have contributed to telling us more about the world in which the people of the Bible lived. Sometimes they tell us directly about specific events in the Bible. Nebuchadnezzar’s Chronicle, for instance, tells us that he conquered Jerusalem in the year that we call 597 B.C.E. It even tells us the date upon which that event happened: 2 Adar in the Babylonian calendar or 16 March in our calendar.
But the most important evidence for the Bible is the changes that it makes in the lives of people. Recently, I visited the home of a friend of mine who is working on the island of Truk. The fact that he is even there is a virtual miracle. This young man went through a period of about four years when he doubted the Bible. Eventually, especially through the witness of his family and his believing wife, he came back to faith. Not only did the Bible do this in his life, but he can see the same changes taking place on the island of Truk, where he currently works. I think that it was the philosopher Pascal who said, “The miracle of God is every believer.”
Shabbat Shalom: What is the Bible for Seventh-day Adventists? In what way does this approach to the Bible differ from other Christians and from Jews?
Shea: Seventh-day Adventists are firmly Bible-believing Christians. There are those Christians who take a more sociological view of the Bible. There are also differences in attitudes about the Bible in Judaism. Thus, in both of these great faiths, there are those who take the Bible very seriously, and there are those that take it less seriously. Seventh-day Adventists share similar views about the Bible with those believers, both Jewish and Christian, who take the Bible very seriously. They take it as the Word of God communicated to us. Nevertheless, they believe that the human agent played a part in the transmission of God’s word to the people. He was not just a typewriter upon which God typed. He shared in the process; he expressed the thoughts that God gave in his own way and words. As an interesting illustration of this, there is the fact that dialect shows up in different books of the Bible. Hosea, for example, wrote in a northern dialect of Hebrew, while Amos, even though he was a prophet sent from Judah to Israel, wrote in a southern or Judahite dialect of Hebrew. This would not have been the case if the prophets had merely taken dictation from God.
Seventh-day Adventists differ from conservative Jews and Christians not so much in their general attitude towards the Bible as they do in terms of the portions of the Bible that they emphasize. They believe that certain portions of the Bible, especially apocalyptic prophecy, are especially geared for or aimed at these times in which we live. They are especially relevant now and should thus be emphasized. When speaking to Christian groups, Seventh-day Adventists commonly emphasize the Sabbath. That is because they still believe that the Sabbath is a binding obligation, even for modern man.
Shabbat Shalom: What are the great truths that the Bible has taught you?
Shea: Well, it has taught me many things, and none of them should be minimized. But I suppose that two elements that I would pick out to emphasize here are that God is our Creator and that He is our Redeemer. Just as God created the world at the beginning, so He has created us through the processes that He set in motion at that time. The Bible also tells us that mankind is lost. It is lost through the fall. Therefore, we need to be redeemed from evil. All of this we can find in God. Also, the Bible teaches us how to live.
Shabbat Shalom: What attitude toward the Jews did the Bible inspire in you?
Shea: The Bible has taught me to have great appreciation for the culture and life of Jewry. They are the preservers of this great tradition found in the Bible. They have preserved and revived the language in which those truths were preserved. They have also preserved the land, which was the cradle from which the Bible arose. One can learn from the Bible anywhere in the world, but one can learn the most from the Bible in the place in which it was created, Israel. The Jew or Christian who goes to the Bible Land to see how it all happened there will come back a much better Jew or Christian, with a greater and deeper appreciation for the Bible. It is a sad thing to see in some of the countries of the Middle East that this heritage is not preserved as well as it is in Israel. One could only wish that this viewpoint would spread among all of the peoples of the Middle East.
Shabbat Shalom: What could Jews learn from Christians to better understand the Bible?
Shea: I have spoken above on several occasions about prophecy in the Bible. Jewish scholars whom I know have done a great deal to provide the background for these prophecies so that we can understand them better. I wish that they would take more into account the genuinely predictive nature of those prophecies. I think that more and more today, the Christian New Testament is being studied from the viewpoint of its Jewish nature. From the Christian viewpoint, the Old Testament flows naturally and logically into the New Testament, and they should both be found together as complementary.
Shabbat Shalom: What does the Bible bring to you in your daily life?
Shea: To start with, it provides the answers, as no other human document does, to the three great questions of life: Where did we come from, what are we doing here, and where are we going? What that means is that the Bible gives the greatest meaning to life. In addition, it can provide internal spiritual peace. The poet speaks about a time when “all about you are losing their heads and blaming it on you.” Even in such times, a Bible believer can have peace. And it seems, with the hurried pace of today’s society, that there are more and more such times.
John Wesley was a member of the clergy of the Church of England. After he had come to visit the colony of Georgia, he was returning to England by ship. Somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean, a tremendous storm came up, so much so that everyone on board the ship feared for their lives. John Wesley was a clergyman, but he still did not have that peace with God that could bring him through such an experience. Then he noticed a group of Moravian Christians kneeling calmly in prayer. He said to himself, “That is the kind of faith that I would like to have.” He eventually found peace with God through the study of the Bible in a little chapel in London. That same peace through a personal relationship is available to everyone who reads and studies their Bible in faith. I too have found that peace through faith in God’s Word.
*This interview was conducted by Dr. Angel Manuel Rodriguez, an associate director of the Biblical Research Institute.
Image: The bible used by Abraham Lincoln for his oath of office during his first inauguration in 1861. Public Domain
