the world. They were no less shaped by the times in which they lived than we are. Too often, modern readers want to know what the Bible means for them rather than viewing it as the product of time and space. We must first endeavor to understand what the Bible meant, before we can know what it means. To put it another way, God’s greatest revelation of Himself was Jesus (Heb. 1:1–2; John 1:1), yet Jesus was a figure of human history, who lived at a specific moment, in a specific place, like Alexander