It would seem that what could be more reliable than to directly and immediately follow what the Bible says? But in fact, it is not always possible to do it so simply, first you need to determine the degree of accuracy of the statement. For example, the book of Exodus describes how "all the cattle of Egypt perished" from the plague (9:6). Thus, the Bible clearly teaches that the Egyptians had no cattle left at all. But then we read that the Egyptian cattle that are fully alive become inflamed (9:10), then perished by hail (9:25), and finally "all the firstlings of the cattle" perish (11:5). Therefore, the words "all the cattle" in Exodus 9:6 can only be understood as an exaggeration (cf. the expressions in our everyday speech: "he spends all his money on vodka"). Of course, this also applies to many other cases of metaphorical and other figurative speech.

It is also necessary to check how accurately the interpreter himself gives the arguments, whether he expands, whether he does not narrow the boundaries of what is mentioned in the text. For example, in Acts 6:1-6 there are seven men who were deacons. The biblical text clearly shows that they were appointed to "take care of the tables," i.e., to engage in charitable work. Nowhere, however, is it said that their duties were limited to this, but nowhere is the opposite said. It has been suggested that since some of these men preached publicly (e.g., Stephen in the same chapter) and baptized converts, preaching and baptism were also part of the deacons' duties. But it does not follow from anything that those who preached did this precisely as deacons, and we do not even have evidence that all deacons did this. Only one conclusion will be legitimate: deacons were not forbidden to preach and baptize.

3.2.2. "The biblical worldview corresponds to..."

As has been said many times, context is crucial. But context can also become a source of errors and manipulations, especially context in a broad, historical and cultural sense, as a set of ideas and beliefs of the author and his first listeners or readers. Of course, we can say with certainty that they, for example, believed in God and knew nothing about modern science, that bread was the main daily food, and that people traveled on foot, or on donkeys and camels. But many subtleties are inaccessible to us, we can only guess approximately how people of that time saw the world, how they treated certain phenomena. Moreover, people were also different then.

Hence the first mistake of this kind: the creation of a certain integral system, conditionally speaking, of a "biblical worldview", which was allegedly shared by absolutely all biblical authors and positive characters, and in the same edition. For example, any references to "gods" in the OT, other than the denunciation of paganism, are interpreted in some other way (e.g., strong men or angels) on the sole grounds: for the "biblical worldview" there is only one God. But then we will have to admit that many biblical heroes, and even authors, did not adhere to such a worldview. For example, in Judges 11:24, the ambassadors of the Israelite judge Jephthah say to the king of the Ammonites: "Do you not possess what Chemosh your god has given you? And we possess all that the Lord our God has given us for an inheritance." And the author does not object in the least to such a comparison of the Lord with a pagan deity. Perhaps it is worth admitting that, at least for Jephthah and his ambassadors, Chemosh was no less real than the Lord, another thing is that only the Lord was the God of Jephthah, only to Him he was ready to sacrifice his own daughter.

The other extreme is the separation of OT and NT worldviews, or "Jewish and Hellenic mentality", which are opposed to each other even at the level of language. For example, the fact that there is no neuter gender in Hebrew, but masculine and feminine, is presented as confirmation that Semites tend to perceive the entire world around them as living. There is no doubt that different cultures have some differences in their perception of the world and that language to some extent reflects these features, but this reflection is always quite indirect, and it can be risky to draw unambiguous and direct connections between the phenomena of language and the features of mentality. If the neuter gender is necessarily something inanimate, then what about the Russian word "child" or the German word "das Kind"? Do they mean that for the Russian or German mentality, children belong to inanimate nature?

Often, when analyzing NT texts, researchers assume that in fact Greek words are used in them as a kind of replacement for Hebrew words: δικαιοσυνη has the same meaning as צְדָקָה ("righteousness"), etc. However, it would be even less adequate to try to take as a starting point some "biblical" definition of righteousness (based primarily on the Epistles of Paul) and automatically "read" it into the text every time the words δικαιοσυνη and צְדָקָה occur there. Each of these words has a whole range of meanings, partly they intersect with each other (and with the Russian words "righteousness" and "justification"), but partly they differ from each other (and even more so from the corresponding Russian words), so it is always necessary to take into account the context and peculiarities of the author's word usage[8].

A special article is the involvement of parallel places. Of course, reference to parallel passages from the Bible or even from other sources often helps to understand the meaning of an obscure expression. But it is worth comparing two different editions to make sure that parallel places can be indicated in very different ways and there is nothing easier than to choose one or two from the whole set of potential parallels that are suitable for proving the researcher's thesis, leaving all the others unattended. The simplest and most productive way is to look where else in the Bible the word is used and in what sense (and in the case of NT, you can also refer to other Greek texts of the time). However, it is necessary to take into account all cases when this word is used, and not just one or two suitable ones. In addition, it is worth remembering that the meanings of words can change over time, and even at the same time, words can be used differently in texts of different genres and by different authors, so if a word occurs in a certain meaning only in Homer or in Byzantine theologians, this is hardly of help us to determine its meaning in the NT.

3.2.3. "And in fact, this is what happened there..."

Such attention to the peculiarities of mentality is associated with a love for reconstructions. Indeed, in order to understand the exact meaning of the biblical text, it is necessary for us to have a clear idea of what exactly happened there and why it happened the way it did. Unfortunately, this cannot always be done with a sufficient degree of certainty (especially as far as OT is concerned), and here the researcher needs a considerable degree of sobriety and modesty in order to separate his own fantasies from fairly probable constructions.

An example of such a controversial and unclarified reconstruction is the question of how exactly the Israelites crossed the sea. Was it really the Red Sea, whose waters, contrary to the laws of physics, parted and became a wall? Or were they some swamps in the area of the current Suez Canal, which, under appropriate weather conditions (downpour or strong wind), could turn from easily passable into perishing swamps? In any case, the biblical text understands this event as a miracle, and the specific mechanism of the miracle can hardly be revealed.

Many such reconstructions are built on linguistic material. For example, in the OT there are words and expressions that are used only 1-2 times, and it is impossible to find out their exact meaning (other texts written in ancient Greek still help when reading NT). One of the most common ways is to find a word of the same root in other Semitic languages, such as Ugaritic or even Akkadian. How reliable such reconstructions are can be imagined by the following example: if we try to determine the meanings of Russian words from the dictionaries of the Bulgarian or Polish language, we will understand many words correctly, but there will be many mistakes: we cannot be completely sure that the Polish meaning will coincide with the Russian one.

3.2.4. "The author certainly means..."

Such reconstructions of the history of the text are often intended to clarify the author's position. Why, for example, does the Evangelist Matthew cite the detail that Luke omits, or vice versa? Here, as in the case of reconstructions, a certain amount of such reasoning is simply necessary, but it is difficult to stop in time.