What one looks for in the texts and seeks to understand is more basic patterns of behavior; . . . The objective is not to establish
realityin some positivistic sense–this or that actually happened–but to suggest a broader social reality that was a part of the context in which the texts were produced and that continues to be reflected in the texts, despite their subsequent literary history.Thomas Overholt,Cultural Anthropology and the Old Testament, Cultural Anthropology and the Old Testament, p. 19
If the context of the words we confront is a culture different from our own, that raises the problem to another level but does not alter the basic assumption. Language is still grounded in concrete social situations, . . .
Ibid., p. 20
The goal is to utilize cross-cultural similarity to look for a general, underlying context that enables us to understand symbols and settings in a biblical text. From that point of similarity, one can then allow the historic, archaeological, and textual particulars to alter that understanding so our general similarities take on particular dissimilarities. Then we have reason to say why something is a certain way, but also why it isn’t some other way.