Reading Scripture through the Proper Lens

It‘s all too easy to read Scripture as if it was written yesterday. But when we read the Bible through a modern lens, we open ourselves up to major misinterpretation. If we want to understand the Bible, we need to see it through the eyes of someone from the culture in which it was written. Logos’ Cultural Concepts tool helps you study the Bible in light of the historical and cultural context of the people who wrote—and lived—the stories in Scripture.

We’ve identified more than 1,000 cultural concepts from the world of the Bible—concepts like atonement, the image of divinity riding on a cloud, sin offerings, building an altar, and much more. We’ve taken those cultural concepts and connected them to Factbook entries, primary texts from ancient Near-Eastern and Hellenistic cultures, and other Bible-study resources. This helpful tool lets you easily cross-reference scriptural passages with other literature written during the same period, explore customs practiced by biblical people, and much more. Because we’ve done the research for you, contextual work that used to take hours can now be done in seconds by anyone.

The Cultural Concepts Collection is a hand-curated collection of 20 volumes that have been specially tagged to supercharge the Cultural Concepts tool and give you great information for an amazing price. Here are just a few of the works included in the collection:

Charlesworth’s Old Testament Pseudepigrapha

Written after the completion of the Hebrew Bible and before the writing of the New Testament, the Pseudepigrapha is the work of numerous authors across hundreds of years. It includes elaborations on biblical stories designed to convey theology, cultural values, or simply entertain the reader. These tales provide unique insight into the world and culture that produced the New Testament and the interplay between Judaism and surrounding cultures, religions, and philosophies.

The Context of Scripture (3 vols.)

The Hebrew Bible is filled with references to people, places, deities, customs, beliefs, practices, and traditions of the ancient Near-Eastern world. Egyptians, Assyrians, Canaanites, Hittites, and Babylonians appear as central figures in many biblical narratives. This collection gathers some of the most important literature from those civilizations, demonstrating how they shaped the biblical world.

The Encyclopedia of Judaism (5 vols.)

You can’t understand Christianity without a proper understanding of Judaism, and this five-volume encyclopedia provides just that. It gives you highly readable accounts of the entire range of Judaic belief and behavior throughout history.

These three collections alone are worth $769.85, but with the Cultural Concepts Collection you get these three plus dozens of other ancient cultural works to help you study the Bible for only $469.99. That means you get 20 volumes for less than the price of those three. Best of all, each one of these volumes is specially tagged for the Cultural Concept tool. So the next time you’re researching levirate marriage in Ruth, or burnt sacrifices in Leviticus, Logos will cull relevant information from the Cultural Concepts Collection so you can access it at once, in just a few clicks.

Get the Cultural Concepts Collection today!