The Bible is not one book but a library of 73 books, written over about a thousand years in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, by kings, shepherds, priests, prophets, fishermen and a doctor. Yet it has one divine Author. Inspiration means that God worked through human authors, with their own gifts and styles, so that they wrote everything He wanted written, and only that.
Because God is its author, the Bible teaches “firmly, faithfully and without error” the truth God wanted written down for our salvation. This is called inerrancy. It does not mean the Bible is a science or history textbook in the modern sense, but that what God intends to teach through it is true.
To understand what God is saying, we first ask what the human author meant. That means paying attention to literary forms: poetry, history, parable, prophecy, letters and apocalyptic visions are each read differently. A psalm calling God a rock is poetry; a parable is not a news report; the creation accounts teach real truths through symbolic language.
The Church gives three more guidelines for reading Scripture well:
- Read the Bible as a whole: one part sheds light on another.
- Read it within the living Tradition of the whole Church.
- Keep in mind the harmony of the faith: the truths of faith never contradict each other.
Scripture has two senses. The literal sense is what the words mean as the author intended, and everything else builds on it. The spiritual senses see how the things in the text are themselves signs:
- The allegorical sense: how it points to Christ. The crossing of the Red Sea points to Baptism.
- The moral sense: how it teaches us to act.
- The anagogical sense: how it points to our final goal. Jerusalem points to the heavenly city.
Catholics have always treasured Scripture: monks prayed it day and night, and the Mass is full of it. Saint Jerome said that ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ. A great way to pray with it is lectio divina: read a passage slowly, meditate on a word or phrase, talk to God about it, and rest silently in His presence.