The Word of a Humble God

The Origins, Inspiration, and Interpretation of Scripture

By: Karen R. Keen

Narrated by: Tanya Eby

“Scripture is a spring of life-giving, life-altering truth, but when we don’t understand how and why it came to us, we end up misusing it.”

How did we get the Bible? And why does it matter? History reveals that Scripture can be used for both life-giving and destructive purposes. Discovering the Bible’s origins makes all the difference for fostering redemptive interpretation of Scripture. Bringing together both historical criticism and theology, this investigation examines ancient scribal culture through the lens of faith. What we find is a divine-human collaboration that points to the character of God and the value of human agency.

In this concise presentation of a breadth of scholarship usually only found across multiple volumes, Karen Keen offers a vital introduction to the material origins of the Bible, theories of inspiration, and the history of biblical interpretation—with reflections on what this all means for us as we listen to Scripture today. Through the ins and outs of these important topics, and with the aid of thought-provoking questions and learning activities at the end of each chapter, Keen argues that the Bible and its origins reveal a humble God who invites us to imitate that humility—a humility that is itself the most powerful antidote to the misinterpretation and abuse of Scripture.

©2022 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (P)2022 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Excellent content, marred by narration

In this book, Karen R. Keen does a remarkable service for Christians who care about the Bible, where it came from, and how it’s been mis/understood and mis/used over the centuries. Keen offers an accessible introduction to the Bible’s origins, transmission, canonization, interpretation, and application, expressed well for everyday readers, necessarily selective but not oversimplified. Non-Christian readers will want to know up front that Keen does address the book to Christian readers, and often prescribes Christian spiritual practices; the book even ends with a devotional guide. The book would be good for personal study, church groups, and even Christian high schools or Christian colleges where students are engaging with academic study of the Bible for the first time. (My day job is teaching just such classes at a Christian university, and I would be comfortable assigning this book, with a few supplements or caveats for non-Christian students.) Keen's conceptual construct of “divine humility” comes to play a central role mainly in the second half of the book.

I gladly recommend this book to anyone who wants to see a Christian biblical scholar taking critical methods and interpretive history seriously. However, I would steer readers toward the print version of the book (sorry, Audible). Tanya Eby’s reading voice is very pleasant and expressive, but she mispronounces many proper nouns and technical terms, or pronounces them inconsistently. To cite just two examples: (a) Eby pronounces “Antiochenes” at least four different ways, sometimes up to two different ways within the same paragraph; (b) Eby mispronounces the familiar Hebrew word “shalom” as if it rhymed with “uh, mom.” I could provide a dozen more examples of mispronounced or inconsistently pronounced names and terms. Audiobook narrators can’t necessarily be expected to know all the necessary pronunciations when they agree to a project, but surely the editor(s)/producer(s) should notice and correct any errors that do occur. It’s almost as if the publisher didn’t ask anyone knowledgeable in biblical studies to “proofhear” the book, or they didn’t want the expense or inconvenience of doing retakes for the problem paragraphs. I plan to spend more time with the print version of this book, but not the audio (unless the publisher brings the narrator back in to remedy the mispronunciations).