Bridging the gap

The Bible reader’s role is further complicated by the fact that he or she today is significantly removed from the author’s original, intended audience. Indeed, a dominant premise of this study is that there actually is such a temporal divide between today’s audience and an original audience and also that this divide needs to and can be bridged. This is the end in mind when attempting to reconstruct the ancient cognitive environment surrounding our passage in Genesis. We are trying to reconstruct, in other words, the “givens” of the particular cognitive environment that the author and original audience shared.—Toward a Poetics of Genesis 1-11, page 27