The Bible is words--it is, at the end of the day, nothing more than that. How those words have been read and understood has formed the basis of everything from private faith to public policy for two thousand years. Yet for the most part, casual readers--and even many professional interpreters, clerical and scholarly--are unaware of how culture has impacted the commonly accepted meanings of so many words and terms.

To read the Bible well is to understand that the text is not the same as its interpretation and translation. To care about the Bible is to recognize where the past two millennia of cultural change have shaped our understanding of the biblical text, and to sift through it, to see what the Bible once was so that we can better understand what the Bible now is--and how we, its readers, came to be who we are.