Toward Understanding the Bible: Hermeneutics for Lay People

“ [T]his work is offered in the hope that it will help those seeking biblical answers for today's problems to find a coherent and consistent way of using the biblical text. . . “Hermeneutics . . . is not so interested in the specific explanation of individual passages, but in a more general way with the object or goal of exegesis. If in exegesis the aim is to discover the meaning of a passage, how will we tell when we have gotten this? In this essay we see that the task of hermeneutics is to teach us how we may tell a valid explanation from an invalid one--what constitutes a correct understanding of a passage." -- from the Introduction

Perry B. Yoder is Professor of Old Testament at Goshen College, Elkhart, Indiana. He is coauthor of 'Seeing the Text: Exegesis for Students of Greek and Hebrew' (Abingdon, 2001).