What triggers Bible Background?

LimJK said:

I have the same question a month or two ago after reviewing what I get in the Cultural Concepts Section in Passage Guide.  So, I did a search for "Cultural Concepts" on Logos Product Page and found the link above. Hope you find that useful.

Can you tell us in what way you found the cultural concepts collection useful and how it helped you with understanding Bible background?

Schumitinu said:

This makes much more sense to me than the cultural concepts collection. Because in the cultural concepts collection are primarily ancient texts that might shed light on the issue one looks at or not. I find it hard to know what to do with these texts, how to interpret them in light of the biblical passage one studies. So I need a commentary that does it for me.

Schumitinu,

Thanks for pointing that out, I suppose part of the collection ... such as these are still relevant [:)]

• Context of Scripture: Volume 1,2 and 3 edited by William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger, Jr. ($299.95)
• A Cultural Handbook of the Bible by John J. Pilch ($26)
• Easton’s Bible Dictionary
• The Encyclopedia of Judaism ($349.95)
• The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary, revised and updated ed.
• Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary ($26.95)
• The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, 1915 ed. ($79.95)

Assuming purchasing these separately it is in the region of $782.80, whereas purchasing the 20 Volume Cultural Concepts Collection is $469.99 or the applicable dynamic pricing if one owns certain of these resources.

And I would add that while John's approach has a lot of merit to it and should be used, there are also some limitations, not least the fact that dictionaries depend largely on picking the right headword to find relevant articles. By contrast, tags -- which are by no means unfailing -- are designed to point to a concept rather than a word, concept which may be represented in different dictionaries by different headwords.

A headword search in a background collection could be supplemented by a Bible reference search, and multiple headwords, but then the syntax becomes more complicated and a number of users will that more difficult to use than a collection. The topic guide may also provide an entry point that is less dependent on picking the right headword, but also not specifically narrowed to cultural concepts.

Yet when I say that John's method should be used, I mean that the collection reflects resources that have been tagged for cultural concepts, and you may well have very relevant resources that are not so tagged. So depending entirely on the cultural concepts approach could make you miss out also.

In terms of ease of use though, I would suggest using cultural concepts as step 1 and a customized search as step 2 if step 1 produces no result or if one wants to compare results between a larger number of resources.

Finally, with regard to the Context of Scriptures type of resources, this is obviously less immediate than just being told by a dictionary what the deal is. Nevertheless it has its place and value when one wants to acquire more culture about ancient practices. The idea here is not just to tell you what Jews did as marital customs, but -- for instance -- show you ancient texts that describe marriage ceremonies in other ANE cultures. In the process you acquire a broader exposure to what was being practiced and can perhaps appreciate more some of the similarities and differences between different practices. Admittedly, this may be more than many users care for. 

JoshInRI said:

Is there anything that would let me know more about women bathing and why? (Was it common for women to bathe on roofs while the men were off at battle?  Was she indoors with the windows open maybe?  Was she ritually unclean before David saw her?)

I have a collection of background commentaries I use for this sort of thing. I'd also use the Factbook entry on "Bathing".

Looking quickly, New Manners and Customs of the Bible tells me that roofs had parapets, and…

"because of the heat in that climate, the family would often sleep on the roof at night (1 Samuel 9:26) and even eat meals there. Even palaces had such roofs. It was from a roof that David saw Bathsheba bathing (2 Samuel 11:2), which she may have been doing on her roof, which was often done because of the coolness of the night and the ease of emptying water. Most of the time, however, a screen was placed around the bathing area, or bathing was only done within parapets built specially high for that purpose."

It's possible that the height of the palace roof meant that David could see what would be hidden from the view of lower roofs.

Other commentaries suggest that "Bathsheba’s bathing is probably an act of purification following her menstrual cycle (see 2 Sam 11:4). This would be based on the laws of ritual purity as described in Leviticus 15:19–24."

From the Factbook I found entries in Bible dictionaries that suggested people bathed on their roofs partly because they could collect rainwater for that purpose, and wouldn't therefore have to transport large volumes of water in order to bathe.