of view the Bible must be read ‘like any other book’. This means that the interpreters have to take seriously that they face an ancient text with its own historical horizons. Their task is to let the text speak, whether they agree with it or not, and this demands that they understand what the text meant in its original situation. In James Smart’s words, ‘All interpretation must have as its first step the hearing of the text with exactly the shade of meaning that it had when it was first spoken or