Running To and Fro

One thing I've learned about reading Scripture is that you really need to spend a significant, and I mean SIGNIFICANT, amount of time reading it as literature and not as a set of disconnected proof texts. I think there's this idea that has dominated Christian circles, and often in Jewish ones as well, that when you read a book of the Torah, (like Beresheet  or "Genesis") or a book of the Prophets (like Shoftetim or "Judges"), or even a book of the Besorah ("Gospel", like Yochanan or "John"), that you need to treat it like some kind of Scriptural scavenger hunt, figuring out how to put the small "verses" together from disparate sources.

While there is certainly truth to that, that is mainly true because of literary borrowings between different authors of those scrolls/books.  And frankly, you really can't even get to the point that you can effectively put such references together into a meaningful whole until you are fully familiar with the Scriptures as a set of literary units, read in context of the time, place and culture of its writers, with a mind to mine out the literary styles and tropes from within the more self-contained content of each scroll/book you are reading. That this has been done so often without this breadth of knowledge and study has been a sincere problem with every religious group I've been a part of in the past, and most I've observed from the outside, even the Sabbatarian ones.

The writers/editors of these individual scrolls/books had a picture in mind, and they used their understanding of their own time, place and culture, along with the literary styles of their language, to express an overall meaning. They weren't just reporting history or law or promises -- they were putting that history, that law, those promises, into an intentional context.  How that intentional context-fitting itself fits into Elohim's more masterful plan is important and requires careful analysis across scrolls/books, but you cannot even get to the point where you are capable of doing this if you aren't able to read the book as the individual author(s) intended and to apply discipline in your analysis.  In fact, you are in danger in the absence of such a disciplined approach of taking some verse way out of context and attempting to mismatch it with another statement from another book/scroll which may only seem to be similar but lack a real connection, simply because you didn't understand the intent of one or the other (or frankly, either) verse to begin with.

Taking Scripture out of context in an attempt to do all of your Scriptural study either as some kind of self-centric application to your own life, or as some kind of attempt to proof-text all day long, is possibly the biggest thing that has led Christianity, and to another parallel extent, Judaism, astray.  Imagine finding two pieces of a puzzle in a puzzle box.  They seem to look alike on the surface picture, and though their pieces don't really fit, they can be made to fit with only a little bit of work.  You may get much of the rest of the puzzle put together properly, but there is always something "off" about the "finished" product.  In such a case, you might be tempted to just leave it that way as good enough, with only a few of the more astute among the puzzle builders trying to find out where they went wrong, because for so many, it really is good enough in their own eyes.  Now imagine if this is something you did for MOST of the puzzle.  Imagine if your completed picture of the puzzle was basically way off, but you just told yourself that this is the case because the puzzle maker's intent wasn't to necessarily make sense, or used some trope of your own to justify it, like "the puzzle maker's ways are not my ways, and I'm not meant to understand".

That's how most of Christianity, and to a parallel extent, Judaism, treats Scripture.  They pretend not to understand until they decide it is useful to claim understanding as evidence for a point-of-view they already had before they ever started studying Scripture in the first place.  This is the leaven of proof-texting puffing up any other attempt at proper analysis.  Daniel was told "But you, Daniel, seal up the book until the time of the end. Many will run to and fro, and knowledge will be increased."  But that translation is itself rather unfortunate.  A better translation of this would be something like "But you, Daniel, roll up the scroll and seal up its words until the time of the end.  Many will run around, going  here and there, to increase their knowledge." And he is later told "none of the evildoers will understand, but those who are wise will understand."

Typically, "run to and fro" is taken as a trope about doing research, and so seems to be telling us that by this research, knowledge will be increased.  But there's also a stronger ironic sense in the other translation I listed that the research that is going on is ungoverned, and though it is done in an attempt to increase knowledge, the implication is that this attempt could be in vain because it is too disparate and undisciplined to bring fruitful results.  I think what we're being told here is that many will try to understand the words of the scroll/book, but only the astute, clear-thinking individuals, the "wise", will understand.  And they won't do that by running around from verse to verse without context in an attempt to win arguments with each other.  They can't piece the pieces of the puzzle together without first understanding the context of those pieces, and so the puzzle competition between them leads to a set of resulting pictures they pretend to understand.  They become puffed up in their own handiwork, so that when they see a more properly completed puzzle later with a much clearer picture of the puzzle-maker's intent, they can't see it clearly.