Hermeneutics Meaning: What is Biblical Hermeneutics In Simple Terms?

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

The word “hermeneutics” can sound intimidating, especially when examining its biblical applications. Before I knew what it meant, it sounded like a difficult procedure for which you’d need a vast and highly technical knowledge. However, I can tell you now that whether you know it or not, you’ve been engaging in hermeneutics your whole life.

In this article, I'll explore hermeneutics’ meaning, tracing its origins from Greek philosophy to its current function in Christian thought. Whether you're new to biblical hermeneutics or just looking for a clearer understanding of its principles, I’ll introduce it here.

Definition of Hermeneutics

In simple terms, hermeneutics is the study of interpretation. In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Theodore George notes that hermeneutics plays an important part in many disciplines because it focuses on “the meaning of human intentions, beliefs, and actions.”

These disciplines include law, medicine, and the social sciences but have often focused primarily on theology and biblical studies.

One important concept in hermeneutics is known as the hermeneutic circle. It says that a person’s comprehension of any text as a whole is established by reference to its separate parts, and that one's comprehension of each separate part is, in turn, established by referring to the whole.

For example, some Christians have interpreted the Gospels as the parts of the Bible toward which the entire Hebrew Bible pointed. At the same time, the assumption that the whole Bible is about Jesus helps these same interpreters understand the Gospels in their own way.

The hermeneutics meaning also includes understanding the presuppositions one has about what they are interpreting. As such, hermeneutics has been a part of both philosophy and Christian thought for centuries. Let’s take a brief look at some of that history.

History and Biblical Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics’ definition is derived from the Greek word hermēneuō, meaning “translate or interpret.” The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE) wrote a work called Peri Hermeneias or On Interpretation, which initiated the study of interpretation into philosophy.

In Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, Jean Grondin writes that hermeneutics was originally discussed in a sacred context to interpret divine messages. (Affiliate Disclaimer: We may earn commissions on products you purchase through this page at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting our site!) These messages, whether received through a text or through oracles, were often initially unclear. It was up to someone with a reliable and rational hermeneutic to interpret them correctly.

The Talmud, the principal text of rabbinic Judaism after the Hebrew Bible, contains hermeneutic principles for interpreting the Hebrew Bible. In  Judaic Logic: A Formal Analysis of Biblical, Talmudic and Rabbinic Logic,  Avi Sion notes that these included ordinary rules of logic but also more specific hermeneutical rules.

The Talmud’s hermeneutical rules began with the presupposition that the Hebrew Bible was without error, an assumption that Christians would carry over to the New Testament. Thus, if an apparent error was found, it simply meant that the text was interpreted incorrectly.

There were also more specific rules: one said that a passage from the Hebrew Bible could be deciphered by alluding to another passage in which the same word appears.

One of the first Christian authors to cover biblical hermeneutics extensively was Origen of Alexandria (c. 185- c. 253 CE), who wrote that Scripture has three distinct levels of meaning, which he called somatic, psychic, and pneumatic. The somatic or bodily meaning was literal, merely reading a narrative, for example, and understanding what happened. The psychic or soul meaning gleaned moral lessons from the same passage, while the pneumatic or spiritual level of meaning would interpret the same passage allegorically to derive the deepest spiritual meaning from it.

Much later, leaders of the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, such as Martin Luther, would formulate the doctrine of sola scriptura or “Scripture alone.” This doctrine said that the Bible was the only source of authority for Christian faith. Using this presupposition, still current in many Protestant denominations, Christian thinkers created various hermeneutical methods around the Bible.

One is encapsulated in the Latin phrase scriptura sui ipsius interpres or “Scripture interprets itself.” This presupposition meant that there was no room for individual interpretations of the Bible because Scripture was entirely self-contained. Biblical passages that were unclear could be clarified by referring to passages that were clearer. This assumption continues to guide many Protestant theologians today.

Examples of Hermeneutics in the Bible

Interestingly, while we are talking about the history of biblical interpretation, some of the biblical authors themselves engaged in biblical hermeneutics as well. For example, take a look at this passage from Galatians 4:22-28:

For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by an enslaved woman and the other by a free woman. One, the child of the enslaved woman, was born according to the flesh; the other, the child of the free woman, was born through the promise. Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants. One woman, in fact, is Hagar, from Mount Sinai, bearing children for slavery. Now Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the other woman corresponds to the Jerusalem above; she is free, and she is our mother… Now you, my brothers and sisters, are children of the promise, like Isaac.

Paul interprets this story from Genesis such that each character is a symbol: Hagar’s son Ishmael represents those Paul believes are enslaved by the Jewish law, just as Hagar was Abraham’s slave, while Sarah’s son Isaac is born to Abraham’s free wife and represents those gentiles to whom Paul promises salvation without the law.

One of Paul’s presuppositions here is that biblical stories can be interpreted allegorically, not unlike what Origen would later outline, to provide messages for future interpreters.

Paul’s writings are the earliest in the New Testament, but the Gospels are another example of hermeneutics in the Bible. In general, they presuppose that Jesus is the predicted Messiah and then interpret the events of his life as fulfilling prophetic scriptural passages.

For example, in Matthew 2:13-15, we find the story of Jesus’ and his family fleeing to Egypt to escape the wrath of King Herod who is slaughtering infants in an effort to kill Jesus. To explain the significance of this, Matthew says it happened to fulfill the prophecy from Hosea 11:1, which he quotes as saying “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” This is interesting and makes clear a couple of Matthew’s presuppositions.

The first is that this brief phrase must refer to Jesus (and that many prophetic verses refer to him as well). However, when you read the verse from Hosea in context, this is what God says:

When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.

From this, it’s clear that the passage is referring to the whole of Israel as God’s “son,” not one person, and to the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt. However, this brings us to Matthew’s second presupposition, one he shares with those Jewish scholars who employed the Jewish method of interpretation known as midrash: any tiny excerpt of Scripture can be taken and interpreted without referring to its original context or meaning. By doing this, the phrase from Hosea can be interpreted to refer to the infant Jesus’ escape to Egypt.

A final example of a biblical reference to hermeneutics is found in 2 Peter 3:14-16:

Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by [God] at peace, without spot or blemish, and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation. So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, speaking of this as he does in all his letters. There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.

While the author (most scholars agree it wasn’t really the apostle Peter) isn’t engaging in hermeneutics in this passage per se, he does refer to others interpreting Paul’s writings. He states that, because Paul’s letters are sometimes hard to decipher, some people are interpreting them incorrectly.

The author’s presupposition is that Paul’s letters are good and worthy of reading, so that anyone interpreting them outside the bounds of the author’s view of Christian faith must be “ignorant and unstable.”

Hermeneutics vs. Exegesis

I want to make one more note here before going into the how-to section of this article. In biblical interpretation, you’ll often find the words hermeneutics and exegesis. What is exegesis in simple terms, and is it the same as or different from hermeneutics?

As I said at the beginning, hermeneutics is the field of study concerned with types or methods of interpretation. Exegesis, on the other hand, is the actual act of deriving meaning from a text by using those methods. So in order to do biblical exegesis, you first decide what hermeneutic you will use to interpret the text.

In the passage above from Galatians, I noted that Paul did an exegesis on the story of Abraham’s two sons from Genesis. Paul’s hermeneutic included the presupposition that Scripture, in his case the Hebrew Bible, was divinely ordained to give later readers messages about the future and that its stories could, therefore, be read allegorically. Using that hermeneutic, he did an exegesis of the passage.

How to Use Hermeneutic Principles

The first thing to remember when thinking through hermeneutics is that when we read the Bible, we are, consciously or not, using hermeneutics to interpret it. We all have presuppositions about the Bible taken from how we were raised, the church we attended. or the larger culture. So the first step is to discover what you believe about the Bible.

Is it the inspired Word of God (whatever that means to you)? Is it completely without error? Is it a set of interesting ancient texts that help us understand the history of ancient people? Is it a predictive tool that can give us answers that fit our modern context? Think about it and discover your own presuppositions. Then, make sure that these are the presuppositions you want to stick with.

For instance, I grew up in an evangelical Christian church. We believed very strongly in sola scriptura, that the Bible contained everything a Christian needed to live and understand life in a divinely-approved way. Over the years, I discovered that other denominations, while they certainly revered the Bible, also depended on other sources, including church tradition and even personal experience, for this information.

As a historian, I now believe the Bible’s narratives are not historical, except in the sense that they give us information about how some ancient people thought. That is my current presupposition and what, therefore, guides my interpretations. In fact, for historians, the Bible gives us information about ancient hermeneutics, among other things.

Having determined your presuppositions, choose a biblical passage, perhaps something not entirely familiar to you, and interpret it. Your presuppositions are the “lens” you use to interpret the passage. For example, if my presupposition is that the Bible is completely without error, how will I interpret two passages that seem to contradict each other (believe me, there are many)?

While you’re at it, read up on some of the hermeneutical methods that people, past and present, have used to interpret both the particular passage you’re looking at and the Bible in general. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when so many before us have come up with interesting methods.

Conclusion

Hermeneutics’ meaning is the study of interpretation, in simple terms. It doesn’t have to be applied only to the Bible, but that is probably its most common context in the modern world. It began (and continues) as a philosophical discipline but also had some sacred applications. 

We know, for example, that rabbinic Jews used various hermeneutical methods called midrash to interpret the Hebrew Bible. These included the presupposition that the Bible was without error, as well as particular principles of interpretation.

Christian interpreters such as Origen of Alexandria built upon these and came up with their own hermeneutical ideas as well. In Origen’s case, he wrote that there were three valid senses of Scripture: the literal, the moral, and the spiritual. Christians used these notions of biblical interpretation for centuries.  

Early Protestants in the 16th century, however, presupposed that the Bible contained literally everything necessary for Christian life, which affected their hermeneutic. Using this presupposition as well as the notion that the Bible was infallible, they focused solely on their version of the correct interpretation of the Bible, reasoning that Scripture was the only way God spoke to Christians in their era. This made for a much more individualistic form of Christianity, in which individual readers interacted with the text and did not rely as much on clerical authority.

While it may sound like a technical science, anyone can “do” hermeneutics. In fact, we’ve all done it all our lives without realizing it by merely interpreting what we read. To engage in hermeneutics more consciously, though, simply become aware of your own assumptions about the Bible, then interpret a passage through the lens of those assumptions.