Understanding Judaism in Antiquity

The item of importance when attempting to understand the culture and lifestyle of the ancient Israelites is in finding similarities and common points of intersection between such a severely different time period and our own. The single point of entry into assuming a means of curiosity and appreciation for Ancient Israelite life, is found in observing and seeking commonalities. If I do not relate the culture of Ancient Israel in its most human forms to my own humanity, I will cease interpreting it in a way that bears any importance when reading the Bible for personal soul reparation. If I cannot understand the cultural background behind the writings, I will apply my own cultural presumptions to my reading, resulting in a drastically flawed reading of the Bible. If I cannot ascertain what the writings meant culturally and socio-politically to its readers and writers originally, I disadvantage myself, and severely taint what I bring out of the text. Beginning with a simplistic understanding of Jewish life in antiquity, I begin to understand the importance and relation of the text to an individual's life at that time. If I begin to understand this, I can then strip down culturally derived, hermeneutically unsound principles of Biblical interpretation, and replace them with studied cultural examinations as precedent to examination. Isolated, personalized ideas about the interpretation of the Bible are unfounded, static and schematically inapplicable. The merit in wanting to understand the culture of Ancient Israel is that it brings about a more holistic understanding of the context in which Jesus came. In understanding the Jewish culture in which the patriarchs lived, Christ's cultural and religious deviance for the purpose of the extension of the Kingdom of God and employment of God's grace can be realized and understood in its own culture. Failing to understand the ways in which Christ replaced the culture he was born into with the embodied culture of the Kingdom of God, how can we expect to understand Christ's relation to our own culture? Without understanding the Jewish historical context in which Jesus lived, is it possible that we can understand Jesus apart from our tainted, Westernized, historically and culturally ignorant perceptions of Him? Understanding the Jews and their culture is pertinent to understanding Christ I think. Thoughts or criticisms from the lone reader?