In chapter 7 of Reading the Bible with Rabbi Jesus, Lois Tverberg dives deep into a description of what it means to be from a collective society (community-oriented).
She begins by pointing out itself how the language in the Bible is community-oriented. A primary example is the word "you". In English, we don't have an official word for "you plural"... unless you count the southern "y'all" (and I do!). Officially, "you" can mean 1 person or a group.
But many languages, including Hebrew, differentiate between the two forms. And Tverberg says that many places in the Bible where English speakers see "you" and automatically think "me" should think "us". For instance, on page 132 she uses the example of 1 Corinthians 6:19, where Paul says, "Don't you know that you are the temple of the living God?" The "you" there is plural (y'all). How does that change how we read this verse? Or Jesus saying, "You are the light of the world"?
This concept ties in directly with the idea of the importance of family and group identity, as we talked about in the last post, and it is mind-boggling (in a good way) for a Western reader.
How would our understanding of the Bible be different if we looked for the "y'all" in the context?
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