From early in my childhood, one of the often repeated stories I’ve heard about how to study the Bible is that of Agassiz and the fish. Summary: Professor Agassiz gives a new student a fish and makes him stare at it for like 4 days straight, and this teaches us the importance of observation when we study a passage in the Bible. The lesson seems to be to invest long, patient time into observing a single text of Scripture without external assistance. I basically agree with this, but I think that as told the story is more likely to discourage us from doing Bible study than to encourage us to do so. After all, who has whole working days to pore over a few verses or a few chapters of the Bible? I know I don’t. So let me instead propose a few easy lessons to practically apply the lessons of the Agassiz story.
Primary sources are the top priority.
Notice that Agassiz did not give his student a book about fish. He gave him a fish. If you want to know the Bible, read the Bible.
Because of seminary, I’ve read a lot of books about the Bible. What I can confidently say is that almost every time, reading a book of the Bible is far more instructive than reading a commentary on it. With rare exception, the classes I took that required me to read a commentary cover to cover were the least helpful classes I took in seminary. In preaching lab, I was required to cite a bunch of commentaries on each passage I preached on. This was almost always the least helpful part of the preaching exercise. I think I came across only three or four actually insightful commentaries during my time in seminary. Either commentaries asked very uninteresting questions of the text or were so devotional and applicational that I had to take several steps back to understand the passage before coming to the commentary for sermon illustrations or application ideas. Keep the priority on reading the Bible.
Read whole units. Don’t pore over texts in isolation.
Agassiz gave his student a whole fish, not just the gills or fins or some other part of the fish. The first thing he pushed his student to see was symmetry, a property that only makes sense of the whole fish, not its parts. If you spend days poring over nothing but three verses of the Bible, you’re likely going to have a bad time. Ideally, read whole books of the Bible, and just importantly, read through the whole Bible at varying speeds and varying depths. This leads to the next point.
Pace yourself for long projects.
So that you can make observations on whole units of Scripture, instead of cramming out a week of study for a devo on John 3:16, spend a month or more repeatedly reading through the whole book of John. Let teaching obligations or other touch-points to your Bible study draw from this reading project. Give yourself more time to actually learn some things about a protracted project that you can go deep on, instead of flitting between disconnected studies on a short term basis. The student spent weeks looking at fish before moving on to bugs; take your time to go through sections, not in all out sprints, but in a study jog over multiple months.
Know categories for Bible study.
When you read that the student noticed that the fish was symmetric, had your ever thought of that as a category for classifying animals or a property of fish? That’s not something easy to come to on your own. This is where secondary sources are helpful. What I dislike about commentaries is that they’re rarely insightful and often do not make explicit the categories they’re introducing for analyzing the text. Two other kinds of secondary sources do a much better job of this: Bible introductions (which does include the introductions to commentaries) and biblical theologies. Personally, since our goal in Bible study is to get to theology, which in turn gets us to application, I get the most out of biblical theologies.1
Make ongoing Bible study a way of life.
When it comes to learning the Bible, progress comes over years and decades of work more so than over days and weeks. Read through the whole Bible over and over again. Take notes and physically write things down. Put away your computer. You don’t have to keep your notes; this is more to help you process things as you learn. As you live and continue to grow on a regular habit of reading and listening to Scripture, your knowledge of the Bible will reap large rewards as well through the observations you’re able to make.
1 Some books that I think model this well are James Hamilton’s God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment, Thomas Schreiner’s The King in His Beauty, and Geerhardus Vos’ Biblical Theology. I’ve also learned a lot through interacting with various academic monograms, books (mostly by secular or Jewish authors) on literary interpretation of the Bible, and good classes that spend most of the time reading in the original languages.
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