Fortress Press

Insights into Cultural Anthropology is not another method, alongside so many other methods, for interpreting the Bible! Instead, Karl Kuhn provides the reader with a foundational approach to interpreting the Bible that closes a serious lacuna in biblical scholarship. At every stage of this work, Kuhn illustrates how cultural anthropology and its models provide essential insights for interpreting and understanding the biblical text that “refine the aim of interpreters to make sense of the biblical texts within their own social and historical contexts.” The beauty of this work lies in the way Kuhn introduces the reader to an understanding of cultural anthropology, and how he applies the insights that emerge from cultural anthropology to illuminate the interpretation of specific biblical texts.

Karl Allen Kuhn’s Insights from Cultural Anthropology is an accessible and scholarly introduction to cross-cultural anthropological models that help today’s readers see the historical and cultural world of Jesus in action. Teachers, preachers, students, and scholars alike will come away from this carefully researched book with the skills necessary to narrow the cultural distance between the world of the Bible and our twenty-first-century North American world.

With clear, engaging, accessible writing, Karl Allen Kuhn provides a fascinating journey into the cultural worlds of the Bible. This book deepens one’s understanding of the worldviews and experiences of various groups of people in biblical times, which can help inform our contemporary application of the Bible to address issues of oppression, injustice, ethnic diversity, and inequality.

"Kuhn uses archery as an analogy for the discipline of biblical interpretation. His book hits the center of his target: he introduces cultural anthropology as a method of investigating the Bible by providing enough theoretical underpinning that the reader is quickly and accurately oriented to the method; and he illustrates the approach by insightful studies of a wide range of texts from both testaments. His readings of passages often stand over against standard North American readings and open up texts in eye-opening and exciting ways that are themselves worth the cost of the book. Both neophyte and expert will learn much from this volume."