From 1993 to 2006, I wrote a bimonthly article in The Bible Today (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press) under the heading “A Window into the Biblical World.” The aim of these articles was to show how insights from Middle Eastern culture drawn from the social sciences (Cultural Anthropology, Middle Eastern Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, and others) helped to situate the Bible in its proper cultural context. For example, the “salt” statements of Jesus recorded in the Gospels (Matt 5:13;