ABSTRACT
The Bible as an ancient set of documents as well as a set of texts that make up the sacred scriptures of Jews and Christians presents the modern reader with some peculiar interpretive challenges. One of the most basic is the reader's personal and conceptual distance from the text. This chapter argues that somewhere between the extremes of immediate and remote. This plotting will vary from reader to reader, and it may in fact vary for individual readers as they approach different parts of the Bible. Religious communities that wish to take the Bible seriously and responsibly need to overcome the remoteness of the biblical text, but they also need to avoid the trap of immediacy. Interpretation of the Bible is a complex undertaking, not least of all because it involves a study not only of the world of the biblical texts but also of the reader's own world and conceptual frame of reference.
