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.

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