A Beginner’s Guide to Using Commentaries

I avoided commentaries for a long time because I thought they were for smarter Christians than me. The kind who knew Greek and Hebrew and owned shelves of matching hardcovers. I assumed using one meant I was cheating somehow, like I hadn’t earned my understanding yet.

That belief kept me stuck longer than I want to admit.

When I finally picked one up, it wasn’t because I felt confident. It was because I was tired of misunderstanding passages and then blaming myself for it. I needed help, and pretending I didn’t wasn’t doing me any favors.

What a Commentary Actually Is

A commentary isn’t someone telling you what to think. It’s someone standing beside the text and saying, here’s what was happening when this was written, here’s how the original audience would’ve heard it, and here’s why this mattered in that moment.

That shift alone changed how I read Scripture. I stopped treating the Bible like a modern self-help book and started seeing it as something rooted in real history, real people, and real problems. A commentary didn’t replace my reading. It gave it depth.

I Read the Bible First, Always

This was a mistake I made early on, and it’s worth naming. When I let a commentary lead instead of follow, I absorbed someone else’s conclusions before I’d even noticed my own questions. That flattened the experience for me.

Now, I read the passage first. Sometimes slowly, sometimes frustrated, sometimes confused. I underline what stands out and mentally note what doesn’t make sense. Then I open a commentary, not to get answers handed to me, but to see what I might be missing.

That order matters more than I realized.

Commentaries Helped Me Separate Culture From Character

Some of the hardest passages for me were hard because I assumed they were saying something about God’s character when they were actually addressing a specific cultural situation. Commentaries helped me see the difference.

Understanding ancient laws, social structures, and audience expectations didn’t make the Bible feel distant. It made it feel more grounded. God stopped sounding erratic, and Scripture stopped feeling like a series of disconnected statements.

It didn’t remove tension, but it gave it context, which is different.

I Use More Than One, On Purpose

I don’t trust a single voice anymore, including my own. Reading more than one commentary showed me that faithful people can land in slightly different places while still taking Scripture seriously.

That was freeing. It taught me humility and discernment at the same time. I learned to listen, weigh, and return to the text instead of looking for the one right interpretation that would shut down my questions.

I Don’t Read Them Cover to Cover

Commentaries aren’t devotionals. I don’t sit down and read pages at a time unless I’m studying something specific. Most of the time, I use them surgically. One verse or one paragraph or one specific section.

I stop when I’ve gained clarity or perspective, not when I’ve exhausted the resource.

They Didn’t Kill My Faith, They Stabilized It

I was afraid that digging deeper would unravel things. What actually happened was the opposite. The more I understood how Scripture works, the less fragile my faith became. I didn’t panic as easily when something confused me. I didn’t feel threatened by questions anymore.

Using commentaries taught me that needing help doesn’t mean I lack faith. It means I’m taking the text seriously enough to slow down and listen.

I still sit with passages that unsettle me. I still wrestle. I still don’t have everything figured out. But I no longer feel alone in that process, and that’s made all the difference.

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