What If You’ve Been Reading the Bible Wrong This Whole Time?
Most of us were never taught how the Bible actually works.
We were handed this ancient book and told to believe it, apply it, or memorize it. But nobody explained how it was designed to communicate meaning in the first place.
And when you read any book the wrong way, confusion and frustration are almost inevitable.
I’ve had countless conversations with people who feel stuck with Scripture. They want to engage it. They sense there’s something profound waiting for them. But every time they pick it up, they walls. The stories seem disconnected. The commands feel arbitrary. The whole thing reads like a jumbled collection of random religious texts.
What if the problem isn’t the Bible? What if the problem is how we’ve been trained to approach it?
That’s exactly what biblical scholar Tim Mackie helped me understand in a conversation that continues to shape everything we do at Faith Lab. Tim is the co-founder of The Bible Project and one of the most gifted communicators I know when it comes to opening up Scripture for ordinary people.
What he shared fundamentally changed how I read the Bible. I think it might do the same for you.
The Stories You Were Told About This Book
Before we even open the first page, most of us carry invisible assumptions about what the Bible is.
As Tim pointed out in our conversation, “In religious communities that grow up around the Bible, there are unspoken storylines about how these texts came into existence that tend to not ever get talked about very explicitly.”
Some people imagine golden tablets dropped from heaven. God dictated every word, humans had minimal involvement, and the whole thing arrived pristine and perfect.
Others land on the opposite end. The Bible is just primitive shepherd literature. Ancient folk tales that somehow got elevated to sacred status.
Here’s what decades of scholarship have revealed: both of those pictures miss the mark.
We’re not dealing with a supernatural fax from heaven. But we’re not dealing with crude ancient scribbles either.
“We’re dealing with highly intelligent, educated, brilliant, ancient literary artists and theologians,” Tim explained, “who want to communicate the most profound truths about the kind of world that we’re living in and human nature and the mystery of who God is and his purposes in the world.”
This matters because your assumptions about what the Bible is will determine what you’re looking for when you read it. And if you’re looking for the wrong thing, you’ll miss what’s actually there.
Not a Plant Nursery—An Aspen Forest
One of the most helpful images Tim offered completely reframed how I think about the structure of Scripture.
Imagine walking into an urban plant nursery. Potted plants everywhere, neatly organized. Small trees over here. Rhododendrons over there. Each one is a discrete object, independent from the others.
That’s how many of us treat the books of the Bible. Sixty-six separate containers. Genesis does its thing. Psalms does something else. Romans covers different territory. Pick the one you need and grab a verse.
But that’s not how the Bible works at all.
Tim compared it to an aspen forest in Colorado. I’d never known this, but aspen groves are actually a single living organism. Underground, there’s one massive root system binding everything together. Every tree you see is just a younger or older expression of that same interconnected life.
“That’s exactly how the Hebrew Bible works,” Tim said. “You have some of the oldest growth. But those oldest growths have themselves spawned and are deeply connected to newer growths that are built from the same type of cell structures.”
This shift has huge implications.
If the Bible is a unified literary ecosystem, then meaning doesn’t emerge from isolated verses yanked out of context. It comes from understanding how the whole story fits together. How themes develop over time. How later authors intentionally build on earlier ones.
The repetition you notice across Scripture? That’s not sloppy editing. It’s the root system showing itself.
Genesis Teaches You How to Read
Tim made a claim that stopped me in my tracks.
Genesis chapters one through three function as a tutorial for reading the rest of the Bible.
Think about it. Almost anyone who reads page one of Scripture notices the pattern. Seven days. Each day structured similarly. “And God said.” “And there was evening and morning.” “And God saw that it was good.”
The repetition jumps off the page.
But Genesis isn’t just telling you what happened at the beginning of creation. In fact, Tim pointed out, it might not be doing that at all. That’s a whole other conversation.
What Genesis is definitely doing is training you how to read.
“This is what your mind is doing all the time,” Tim explained. “We’re coming out of the womb and your brain is at a subconscious level hypertracking with repeated experiences and varied experiences, similarities and difference.”
Your brain is wired for pattern recognition. You learn by tracking what stays the same and what changes.
Genesis one leverages this. The repetition teaches you to pay attention. And then the subtle variations carry meaning.
Here’s an example Tim gave that blew my mind.
On every day of creation, there’s a pronouncement that what God made is good. Except day two. Nothing is called good on day two.
Then on day three, there are two pronouncements of good. As if the text is aware of the absence and making up for it.
If you’re not paying attention to repetition and variation, you miss this entirely. But if you’re tracking the pattern, suddenly you’re asking questions. Why no good on day two? What does that mean? What’s the author trying to communicate?
That’s how the whole Hebrew Bible works. Repetition and variation. Patterns that build on each other. Stories that echo and amplify earlier stories.
Tracking the Word “Good” Changes Everything
Let me show you how this plays out in practice.
The word “good” appears seven times in Genesis one. God makes something. God sees it’s good. By the end, when God surveys everything together, it’s not just good—it’s very good.
So you finish page one knowing: good matters. God is the source of good. Good is something God creates and gives to others.
Then in Genesis two, God speaks for the first time about something that’s not good. “It is not good for the human to be alone.”
When something isn’t good, God moves to make it good. He creates partnership. One humanity made of two humans. And that’s good.
Then comes the next appearance of the word. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Now the storyline gets complicated. Humans have a choice. Will they trust God’s provision and knowledge of good? Or will they seize the power to define good and not-good on their own terms?
“That’s a really profound set of claims to make about human nature and the human condition,” Tim said. “And it’s all happening through the hyperlinking of these stories about good.”
You probably know how the story goes. A crafty snake shows up. He twists God’s words just slightly—changing “eat from any tree” into “don’t eat from any tree.” That tiny distortion plants suspicion about God’s generosity.
And the humans reach for what looks good to them.
The Pattern Keeps Repeating
Here’s where it gets really interesting.
The very next story is Cain and Abel. Different characters, different circumstances. But if you’re tracking patterns, you notice something.
In the garden, God did something puzzling. Why that tree? Why the prohibition? It’s never explained.
In Cain’s story, God does something equally puzzling. He accepts one brother’s offering but not the other’s. No explanation given.
Both stories hinge on how humans respond when God does something that doesn’t make sense to them.
Then Cain gets angry. And God speaks to him using language that echoes straight back to previous chapters.
“If you do good, you will be lifted up. But sin is crouching at the door and its desire is for you—but you can rule it.”
Did you catch that? Sin crouching like an animal—echoing the crafty serpent in the previous story. Its desire is for you—the same word used to describe the relational conflict between the man and woman. You can rule it—the same mandate given to humans on page one.
“Every single story as you go through the Bible is a set of networked patterns on earlier stories, almost always going back to Genesis one through eleven,” Tim explained. “It’s as if Genesis one through eleven is like a playbook. It’s giving you a template of what humans are and what humans do.”
The rest of Scripture? Hundreds of variations playing out that same playbook.
The Star Wars Principle
At one point Tim asked if I was a Star Wars fan.
If you’ve seen both the original trilogy and the newer films, you’ve noticed the intentional repetitions. The Death Star appears in both. The trench run to destroy it plays out similarly. The scenes echo each other on purpose.
“When we encounter this in other forms of communication, we don’t even think about it,” Tim said. “We’re like, oh yeah, that’s how it works.”
You compare the similarities and differences. You understand new characters by seeing how they mirror and diverge from old ones. The meditation on what’s the same and what’s different carries the meaning.
This is basic human communication. Repetition and variation.
The Hebrew Bible uses this tool as its primary medium.
When you realize that, suddenly all the repetition you’ve noticed in Scripture makes sense. It’s not accidental. It’s not sloppy. It’s the authors deliberately connecting moments across the story to help you understand.
What “Literal” Actually Means
Tim also helped me rethink what we mean when we talk about reading the Bible “literally.”
“The word literal is so fraught with complexities and baggage and emotions in our moment,” he said. “Anytime the word literal versus metaphorical comes up, you just have to say, try your best to define what you mean.”
Here’s what Tim means by literal: he’s looking for the literary meaning.
Whenever someone crafts written communication, they use literary conventions—words, paragraphs, repetition, structure. They mean something by what they write. They want readers to understand what they’re saying.
The literal meaning is the meaning the author wanted to convey.
In modern conversations, we’ve collapsed “meaning” into “understanding what historically happened.” If I can identify the event the text describes, I’ve understood it.
But events don’t have inherent meaning. Tim used a simple example. “I don’t know the meaning of what brushing my teeth meant this morning. I don’t know the meaning of why I’m at my in-laws for Thanksgiving.”
Meaning emerges when we craft a story about events. When we see how they connect. When we interpret their significance.
The biblical authors weren’t trying to give video camera footage. They were giving faithful representations of their history—arranged and shaped to communicate meaning.
“Chronology is not the utmost value,” Tim noted. “They’re constantly rearranging events. And they don’t even hide it.”
This isn’t a flaw. It’s not deception. It’s a different culture’s way of representing history—and we have to learn to read these texts on their own terms.
Why This Matters for Your Faith
Once you realize the Bible isn’t trying to answer every modern question with scientific precision, something shifts.
This isn’t a book designed to give you rules for every situation. It’s not a textbook with facts to memorize.
It’s a story that shapes wisdom through pattern and repetition. It’s an invitation to slow down, pay attention, and let the text form you over time.
That might sound less certain. Less immediate. Less practical.
But I’ve found it’s actually more honest about what Scripture is and how it works.
And when I stopped fighting the Bible to be something it was never meant to be, I finally started hearing what it’s been saying all along.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Bible Project and who is Tim Mackie? The Bible Project is a nonprofit organization that creates free videos, podcasts, and resources to help people experience the Bible as a unified story leading to Jesus. Tim Mackie is a co-founder who holds a PhD in Hebrew Bible and spent years as a professor before dedicating himself to making academic biblical scholarship accessible to everyone.
Does reading the Bible as literature mean it’s not true? Not at all. Recognizing the Bible as sophisticated literature says nothing about whether its claims are true. It simply means we need to understand how ancient authors communicated before we can grasp what they were claiming. Truth and literary artistry aren’t opposites—they often go hand in hand.
How do I start noticing these patterns myself? Begin by reading larger sections rather than isolated verses. When you notice a repeated word or phrase, pay attention. Ask yourself: where else have I seen this? What’s similar? What’s different? Reading with curiosity rather than hunting for quick applications opens up the text in surprising ways.
What if I’ve been taught the Bible differently my whole life? Many of us have. Shifting your approach doesn’t mean abandoning faith—it often means deepening it. Tim’s framework isn’t about undermining Scripture. It’s about taking it more seriously on its own terms rather than forcing it into categories that don’t fit.
