Food for Thought

From David H. Aaron, Biblical Ambiguities: Metaphor, Semantics, and Divine Imagery (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 43:

Four hurdles face the scholar attempting to write the theology of ancient Israel. The first is the problem of establishing the best reading of our text; the second is the composite nature of a literary unit in which there are conflicting data; the third is the problem of balancing conflicting voices from disparate texts; the fourth concerns the relationship between textual evidence and the actual beliefs of the populace.