This is the eighth and final post in a series on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?

Part 2: What is inspiration?

Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture

Part 4: Inerrancy vs. infallibility

Part 5: The literary-generic principle

Part 6: The authority of Scripture

Part 7: Case study: the Fall

So anyway what about the Fall? If no one human is the cause for our sinful natures, what is?

Depravity for me is summed up by self-centered living, which is inexcusable for a species that has achieved consciousness of the divine. We are all sinners because we all start off life living for ourselves, which, after early childhood and the awareness of Otherness sets in, becomes sin. Sin is a state of estrangement from God. Over long eons, God brought His children up biologically so that mankind became sentient and came to know that it had a Maker. At that point, God chose a different means to mature our species. We still struggle to subdue and tame our own biological impulses that lead to our detriment and God’s displeasure, but we master them not through natural selection, but by the overcoming power of the Spirit of God. Christianity is the next (and final?) phase in the evolution of God’s creation.

This is the seventh in a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?

Part 2: What is inspiration?

Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture

Part 4: Inerrancy vs. infallibility

Part 5: The literary-generic principle

Part 6: The authority of Scripture

The traditional doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin teach that the first human’s first sin caused a rupture in the whole race’s ability to interact with God. How the death that Adam experienced because of his sin was passed on to all his descendants has been explained in various ways: the federal view says that Adam’s fall from God’s favor was effective for all humanity because he was the “head” of the race. Another view is that the Fall corrupted Adam’s very genetic makeup, causing humanity to be a slave to its own sinful and fallen flesh, which explains how it was passed on to his children, and thus the whole race.

Regardless of how they explain it, most Christians believe that God considers all humans straight out of the chute as culpable of sin, a stance of separation from God called “Original Sin”. This position explains why every human sins, and why we automatically start out life estranged from God. That we all sin and by nature act in ways that do not please God from early childhood at least is apparent to all. For this reason, it is accurate to say that unredeemed mankind is, as a race, “falling”, but as for “fallen”, what did we fall from? Or, more importantly, what caused this Fall? Allow me to present you with an alternative interpretation based on a view of the Genesis account as etiology.

This is the sixth of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?

Part 2: What is inspiration?

Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture

Part 4: Inerrancy vs. infallibility

Part 5: The literary-generic principle

Preliminary Remarks The purpose of these next few posts is to examine my perspective of the doctrine of the Fall, and specifically how it is influenced by my view of the Bible. The purpose of this post is apologetic rather than polemic: my purpose is less to convince anyone of the view I hold and more to explain how someone who holds it deals with doctrinal issues. The earlier posts in this series argued that our Scriptures are not inerrant and are not in fact completely without scientific and historical errors. I also made a plea for interpreting the Bible as literature: that is, we need to recognize that the words of Scripture were not completely isolated from the words written by their authors’ contemporaries and we must therefore identify the literary genre in which they were composed as a first order of business when interpreting the Bible. I cautioned against a view of the nature of Scripture that overspiritualizes its origins, pointing out that if God had wished to set down a series of unanalyzable propositions free from all impurities and the influence of man’s fallibility, He could definitely have chosen a more suitable means than using words written in three different languages over several centuries that must in turn be passed down through many more centuries and translated into countless other languages. Moreover, Christians are left bickering and head-butting each other while trying to determine the supposedly undistilled, pristine, immutable, and uncontradictable truth for almost any given passage. The fundamentalist might understandably wish that God had provided an inerrant and infallible key to interpretation, one decidedly more reliable than the deceptively straight-forward “literal whenever possible” model, which itself all too rarely yields a single, indisputable outcome in its application.

The problem is that the idea of not having an inerrant and hence perfectly uncontestable final authority makes many Christians uncomfortable, and sets many to wondering how rejecting inerrancy limits the Bible’s value and usefulness. The next few installments of this series are meant to address two concerns related to that question. First, I will summarize my belief in the Bible’s origins and nature; second, I want to present a case study of the resultant hermeneutic, with a brief and tentative exposition of how I interpret the passages that have resulted in the doctrine of the Fall.

This is the fifth of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?

Part 2: What is inspiration?

Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture

Part 4: Inerrancy vs. infallibility

The Importance of Determining Genre

Because the Bible is a compilation of literary works, in order to get the sense of it, we must interpret each of them in the manner in which it was intended, viz. according to the appropriate literary category. Surely the principle of interpreting things in the manner in which there were intended approaches tautology, but how many Christians ever really follow it through? As mentioned before, the assumptions that determine the “manner in which it was intended” are too often based on what meets the eye alone. So what do I mean by interpreting the Bible as literature?

You read a novel in the same way that you read the newspaper, realizing that they are both forms of narrative. How you interpret the narratives in each, however, depends on your recognition of the type of literature you are reading. No one would say that Great Expectations was “errant” or “a pack of lies” unless he thought it was written as history. The same goes for the Bible, which is far from uniform in literary genre. We have farmers, shepherds, doctors, and kings for authors; what thoughtful person, recognizing that God chose this diverse crowd rather than three or four prophets or priests to bear witness to Himself, would conclude that God would homogenize their testimonies into one nameless genre, erasing the distinctiveness of each one in His quest to dole out a series of unanalyzable propositions? Instead, within the pages of Scripture we find a broad range of writing styles that includes poetry, wisdom literature, prophecy, apocalyptic, and epistle.

Moreover, there is not always a one-to-one genre-to-book correlation. Not every segment within the book of Genesis, for example, is to be interpreted as the same sort of narrative, as is somewhat obvious to someone doing comparative literary analysis on the type of stories being told. The Creation part of Genesis shares many characteristics of Ancient Near Eastern mythology, whereas the stories of the Patriarchs remind us of the Icelandic sagas, collections of family stories that give a group of people a common heritage.

The historical-grammatical (or grammatico-historical) method of biblical interpretation is the practice of taking into account the original language and the culture of the original audience when researching the original meanings of Scripture. By and large, though, inerrantists have used this principle as a defensive and reactionary measure to clear up problems rather than as an active interpretive method: for instance, it is responsible for the observation mentioned before that Judah (and later Israel) used accession year dating, because Edwin Thiele looked at Persian (and that of other ANE cultures) record-keeping and saw that this explained a lot of long-supposed errors in the dating of the kings. The historical-grammatical method has been modified by many exegetes to act as a sort of middle-ground that suspends the value of a plain reading if by any means it helps to demonstrate the scientific inerrancy of the Bible. What is missing from that version of the historical-grammatical hermeneutic is the principle we have been discussing that insists upon interpreting the Bible in terms of the literary characteristics, devices, and genres that make it up. We may call this the literary-generic principle; this principle is a tool that cannot be neglected by anyone claiming to use the historical-grammatical method of interpretation and exegesis.

This is the fourth of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?

Part 2: What is inspiration?

Part 3: The nature of inspiration and the purpose of Scripture

In the discussion of the mode of the Bible’s inspiration I pointed out that the Bible is a compilation of literary contributions empowered by God and intended to thoroughly equip His people for every good work. My main point could be summarized that God authorized the Scriptures, but was not the author of them.

An admittedly limited analogy of this point draws a parallel between the Bible and the King James Version of the Bible. King James commissioned it, and it is therefore known by his name, although the translators and not he carried out his intentions. In reading the KJV we are realizing one of the ultimate purposes King James had for it. One of the chief purposes for the Bible’s commissioning was for our instruction, and we fulfill that goal when we allow ourselves to be taught by those men He commissioned to write it. One of the limitations of this analogy is the observation that God had a lot more to do with the Bible’s content than King James did with the Authorized Version: specifically, we discussed how God invaded the literature to deliver specific messages through His prophets. Even in these instances, however, the actual sentences and structure with which they framed these messages constituted their own works of literature.

Each of these literary contributions must be approached on its own terms, and never held to the preferred standards of the day and culture in which it is interpreted. Currently, the two standards that are the default for many Christians today are the standards of plain reading and scientific inerrancy (this term is discussed below). This view says that God constructed the Bible so that the most obvious reading is the intended one so that no one, even (some say especially) the least educated would be deprived of the truth, which is always presented in a way that precisely mirrors all relevant historical and scientific facts. Any part meant to be understood using anything besides a literal interpretation is plainly explicit. This approach might be understandable if the “plain” interpretation were consistent across the board, but things that are plain to some are not plain to others: for example, when does Jesus say that His parables are fictional? It is sometimes hotly debated whether the story of the rich man and Lazarus is history or a parable, due to the fact that he actually names a character rather than referring to him obliquely as “a certain man”. Someone from a remote culture with an animistic background might find comfort in a literal reading of Psalm 91:4, where God’s pinions are promised to cover the believer. When does Revelation say that the dragon or the vials or the Lamb are symbolic of other things? Obviously, even the most adamant “plain reading” advocates are making judgments on genre and style in their “plain reading”. This standard is “plainly” inadequate. How about the standard of scientific inerrancy?

This is the third of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?

Part 2: What is inspiration?

We can summarize the previous discussion by saying that 2 Timothy 3:15-17 teaches that these writings collectively known as the Bible have been infused with the breath of life from God’s own lips, and we may confidently infer that the Bible has therefore taken on all the practical properties for which God ordained it. This post examines those properties.

This is the second of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

Part 1: “All or “every” Scripture?

This leads us to the specific meaning of the word theopneustos. The phrase “inspired by God” seeks to render this enigmatic near hapax legomenon which is a compound adjective with the components theos ‘God’ and pneustos ‘breathed’, represented quite literally in many translations as “God-breathed”. It is often argued whether this word designates Scripture as the manifestation of or as the target of the breath of God: God’s breath is either the source of Scripture or is merely the reason each writing is divinely effective. This last option is closely related to the source of the term “inspiration” pertaining to this doctrine, because the Vulgate translates it “divinely inspired”, or literally, divinely in-breathed. It has been claimed that this reading would require a missing Greek preposition en- ‘in’ before pneustos, so that we should have theëmpneustos.^[1] This form may perhaps have been more conclusive,^[2] but aside from the fact that this is in effect an argument from silence, such a preposition is not grammatically or semantically necessary. The extra-biblical usage of this word is altogether indecisive on the precise mechanics. Are there any other factors that might give us some direction?

Paul used a compound so exceptionally rare that even then it likely had the potential for confusion if left to its own inherent meaning; this suggests that Paul did not use it in complete isolation and probably assumed it would be understood in terms of some implied context. Is there a reference elsewhere in the Bible to God’s breath being manifested as an object, as is claimed with the notion of “writings exhaled by God”? Although I am unaware of an example of this, the argument from silence is of course no more instructive for my argument than for anyone else’s. Rather the strength in my argument comes from asking the same sort of question about the other proposed meaning: what other Scriptures can be found that reference God’s breath infusing something? If so, what is God’s breath doing there?

The notion of God-breathing seems to be a rather explicit allusion to the Genesis account of man’s transformation into a “living soul” as a consequence of God’s “into-breathing” - His inspiration. This was very probably what Jerome had in mind in the Vulgate’s rendering. With an already existing (albeit obscure) compound, it would likely never have occurred to Paul to insert a directional preposition such as the proposed en- (or eis-) before the deverbative element when the allusion was clear enough without it. Paul said “God-breathed” knowing that Timothy would immediately associate that expression with Genesis 2:7.

God’s breath consecrated and empowered the writings of Scripture formed from the dust of the ground (men), and not dictated or handed to man on tablets of gold by the Almighty. As C. S. Lewis put it, this body of the literature of men sovereignly foreknown and ordained was “raised by God above itself, qualified by him and compelled by him to serve purposes which of itself it would not have served”^[3].

This is the first of a series of posts on inspiration, inerrancy, and hermeneutics.

In determining the value and purpose of the Bible, we have to begin by looking at its origin. While a description of the process that put the words of the Bible on the page in mechanical terms is interesting, the theological and philosophical answer to the question of origin is foundational. This we refer to as the issue of inspiration.

The passage in Scripture usually cited as the primary source of the doctrine of inspiration is 2 Tim 3:16-17. This begins, “Every Scripture is inspired by God…” The syntax of the phrase is the most problematic aspect, because in the Greek the word “is” (the copula) does not occur, a situation common in Greek that does not always carry any detectable significance. The ambiguity of where we should understand the copula is significant in this case when you factor in the word kai, which could be translated either “and” or “even” based upon where you insert the understood “is”: in other words, should we render this verse as “Every Scripture [is] inspired by God and [is] useful…” or “Every God-inspired Scripture [is] also useful…”? In the first, the point of the statement is that God inspired Scripture and hence it is useful for doctrine, etc. In the second version, inspiration seems to be the qualifier, and that seems to suggest that there are Scriptures that are not inspired and that those are not necessarily useful.

But would it really mean that? Keep in mind that the word graphe meant simply “a writing” when the word was used outside the New Testament, but within the New Testament it is always understood to mean “sacred writing” or “Scripture”. My understanding is that theopneustos, commonly translated “God-breathed”, was probably intended not to strengthen the already specialized “Scripture” sense of the word but rather to act as a specializing qualifier for the more general meaning “writing”, thereby forming a phrase meaning literally “God-inspired Writing” and hence “Scripture”. Besides this, the usage data gathered by Robinson and begrudgingly confirmed by House seems fairly conclusive about the use of that particular syntactic construction throughout both the NT and the Septuagint: in almost every instance the adjective is attributive (i.e. it modifies graphe to mean “every God-inspired Writing”).^[1]

If this interpretation is taken, we translate kai as “also”. So what is the significance of the phrase “also useful”? What was it useful for in the first place? Here, the context strengthens the case. If we look at the previous verse, we see that the start of this inspiration passage is not verse 16, but verse 15:

This is the conclusion of a series. The first two installments are:

Part 1: Romans 7 and 8

Part 2: Gracious Sovereignty

As I stated in Part 2, I reject the notion that foreknowledge is prescriptive. I hold to the conviction that there is an interplay between man’s choice and God’s choice. One cannot rationally hold a robot responsible for the destruction it wreaks if it merely follows the software intentionally programmed to make it destructive. Yet the Bible throughout calls people and nations into account for their own choices and decisions.

In Romans 9, Paul gives two examples of “vessels of destruction”, Esau and Pharaoh. Reformed theologians will often argue that these vessels only have the appearance of choosing wicked behavior: in actuality, they (like everyone else) have no free will to choose; my position is that they had the actual ability to choose, and if God were left out of the equation, their nature and character was bent so that they could only hardly have chosen any other way than they did This may seem a trifling distinction in practice, since if God creates people in full knowledge of what good or evil they will do, if He chooses the “hardware” with which they make their decisions, it’s hard not to see that God is passively determining the path of certain people one way or another. However, do not forget that He is said to not be willing that any should perish (2 Pe 3.10), that He takes no delight in the death of the wicked (Ez 18.32), and that “God desires all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Ti 2.4). Taking these passages into consideration implies that, as a rule, He supplies mankind with “hardware” that could go either way, and only occasionally has He stacked the deck one way or another, as it were. I explained in Part 2 why Pharaoh, for instance, was chosen to be a vessel of destruction; Paul is very clear that vessels of and honor and destruction were chosen only for the purpose of fulfilling “His purpose in election” (Ro 9.11). What is this purpose?

I had to cut the last post short, somewhat abruptly as you might have noticed. But presenting bite-size chunks is better for blogging anyway (not that you would know it from my posts!), so I went ahead and posted it. Here’s a continuation.

What I’m trying to do is present an audience-relevant view on certain passages that have, since Augustine and continuing in the Reformed tradition, been taken out of context and made into what is known as the Calvinist doctrine of election.

On the outset of this one, allow me to cut to the chase for some of you. I do not have a problem believing that God can, and that He in fact has, predestined certain individuals for life and some for destruction. I’m not one who says that God cannot determine someone will for them, or at least provide the circumstances that will tilt someone toward one choice or another. However, is every decision by every human determined by God? This is clearly not so, as a multitude of Scriptures clearly indicate. Here’s something I ran across that presents many of these passages along with some good old fashioned logic.

Many Calvinists aware of these passages feel constrained nonetheless because of certain passages such as Ephesian 1 and Romans 9 that explicitly talk about predestination based on God’s election. The Reformed doctrine of election is the solution to a puzzle with many pieces missing; tragically, many of these pieces are right there in Scripture but result from the misunderstanding of other doctrines. I think the key misplaced piece is eschatology. I am laying a lot of groundwork before expounding my understanding of election. That’s because we can’t view these Calvinist proof-texts in isolation from their original context.

As long as I can remember, I have struggled hard against the Calvinist understanding of the doctrine of election. Recently I have been observing and interacting with a number of people of the Reformed persuasion, and I am astounded at the intellects of some of the people wholly sold on a teaching that requires so much nonsense ad hoc philosophy and theology in order to sustain it. In order to make the Calvinist God “sovereign” as they understand that concept, people such as John Piper have to redefine “love” — you know, the love that God says He is and that He requires us to have one for another — to mean its polar opposite: selfishness. All this to prop up an unscriptural understanding of the quite scriptural doctrine of election.

The confusion is magnified because of bad eschatology. This next couple of posts will address eschatology and the doctrine of election at the same time. Sound like fun?

John McPherson, in his article called “A Biblical Perspective on Election”, pulls out one of the most famous proof-texts for the Calvinist take on election, Ephesians 1:4 and 5. Let me supply his annotated version of this passage (vv. 3-12) in context, and I want you to see if you can grasp our point before I spell it out.

“3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ: 4 According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: 5 Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, 6 To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved. 7 In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace; 8 Wherein he hath abounded toward us in all wisdom and prudence; 9 Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he hath purposed in himself: 10 That in the dispensation of the fullness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him: 11 In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will: 12 That we should be to the praise of his glory, who first trusted in Christ.”

Did you catch the importance of that last sentence? It defines the “we” and “us” everywhere throughout the passage: Paul was referring to his first-century, firstfruits audience!

Leaving that aside for the time, we are going to talk about Paul’s use of the term “adoption”. What is going on in Ephesians 1?

Earlier I was talking about the consistency of sound changes, what the nineteenth-century German grammarians called the Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze (the “exceptionlessness of sound change”) . The catalyst for this belief, which was in turn the catalyst for the existence of the discipline of historical linguistics, was the product of the work of two men, the first of whom was a German named Jakob Grimm (one of the Brothers Grimm who compiled the German folktales) in 1820.

Grimm, like others, recognized that the Germanic languages (among which are German, Dutch, Gothic, the Scandinavian languages, and English) share a common ancestor with Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, based on a large number of vocabulary words whose phonetic similarities are too similar to be coincidental. Grimm’s important insight was that, in almost every word that appears to be related among Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and the Germanic languages, words that had the consonants p, t, or k in the non-Germanic languages showed up in Germanic with the consonants f, þ (the “th” in think) or χ (as in German Bach) instead. He also noted that Gk/Lat/Skt b, d, g generally corresponded with Gmc p, t, k. The Gk, Lat, and Skt consonants that we now know come from Indo-European *bh, *dh, *gh he saw as corresponding with Gmc b, d, g (simplified here from a close phonetic variant). All three correspondences make up what we now call Grimm’s Law: in other words, he saw a method to the madness and was able to accurately predict the sorts of sounds that made Germanic the odd man out where Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit agreed with one another. Here’s an example.

Skt. pitar, Lat. pater, and Gk. pater obviously correlate in some way with English father and German Vater (the “v” is pronounced like an f): so we have relationship between Gk/Lat/Skt p and the phonetically similar Gmc f, which was originally pronounced with both lips together. Likewise, Skt bhratar, which comes from Indo-European bh, shows up in Germanic in the English word brother; bh vs. b.

Grimm’s Law explains one way in which Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit (most of all) better reflected the original Proto-Indo-European (PIE) pronunciation of the stops p, t, k, b, d, g, bh, dh, and gh. One of the defining markers of the Germanic subgroup was this sound change that turned all those original consonants above into f, þ, χ, p, t, k, b, d, and g respectively. In tabular format:

First series: PIE p, *t, *k > Gmc f, þ, χ Second series: PIE b, d, *g > Gmc p, t, k Third series: PIE bh, *dh, *gh > Gmc b, d, g

This sound law accounts for many, many consonant differences between Gmc and Indo-European, but not all. The voiceless stops p, t, and k occasionally did not show up as f, þ, and χ as expected from the first series, but as b, d, and g (the output of the third series)! It was not until 1875 that the Dane Karl Verner explained that all those exceptions to Grimm’s Law had their very own systematic explanation. The times when the PIE consonants did not undergo the expected sound change were cases in which 1) the consonant was not at the beginning of the word or 2) the vowel in the syllable immediately preceding the consonant carried the accent. This is now called Verner’s Law.

With the discovery that even the “exception” to the otherwise very regular (consistent) Grimm’s Law was itself regular, these early linguists were handed exciting evidence that sound change is carried out very regularly and systematically throughout the language, and hence can be reverse-engineered, “reconstructed” with a significant level of certainty that what is reconstructed will be accurate. Thus was the science of the comparative method born, and so the discipline of historical linguistics.

Is sound change truly exceptionless? Perhaps not, but no one ever really claimed it was: there are many cases in which the sound change for a few isolated words seems to have been reworked or replaced by other forms to make things seem uniform (the process called “analogy”). These exceptions are usually explainable on their own terms, and do not invalidate the sound change that took place on a broad scale for the vast majority of words; for instance, a particular word can be adopted from another language or dialect in which the sound change was absent or not as thorough-going. Nonetheless, instead of “exceptionlessness”, we now speak about the regularity of sound change that allows us to create sound laws that occasionally admit an exception here or there.

• In case anyone came down here to look for what the asterisks stood for, let me explain that unattested (reconstructed) sounds and words are marked by a preceding asterisk. Any word, root, or affix cited as being a PIE form should have an asterisk, since no one ever wrote anything down in PIE.

My last post dealt with the anthropological side of my discipline. Most of what we know about the history of the Indo-European people groups comes not from historical records per se, but from analysis and comparison of the languages in which those historical records were composed. Philology (”love of words”) is an old term used to describe those who read literature for appreciation of the language. Naturally, most philologists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were multilingual and well-read. It was this familiarity with multiple languages that led some to recognize similarities between the languages they were reading in, and as curiosity was given room, many of these philologists set out to figure out exactly the relationships between them. In so doing, they became intimately familiar with the language itself, not as it exists in practice, but in shared tendencies and similarities that must be chalked up to the innate nature of human language. Thus began the modern science of linguistics.

Because of ground-breaking work done in the 19th century, scholars discovered that sound change in language is a remarkably thoroughgoing, exceedingly systematic, and almost exceptionless process. These linguists realized that if they could determine what sound changes occurred in a given language, they would be able to reverse engineer the process and uncover an earlier state of the language. That principle of reconstruction is what historical linguistics is all about.

Systematic sound changes and changes in other aspects of language (such as in syntax, semantics, or morphology) are referred to as “laws”. For instance, a sound law that happened fairly recently in the transition from Middle to Modern English (c. 15th century) is known as the Great Vowel Shift, which was a drastic change in all the long vowels of Middle English and was responsible for the major differences between the way we pronounce and write our vowels and the way Spanish or other European languages do.

What historical linguists do is reconstruct language based on known laws using a combination of the comparative method and internal reconstruction.

Germanic and Indo-European studies. What the heck is that? Well, let me start with a summary of the anthropological side of the discipline.

Once upon a time, in an area hypothesized to be along the steppes of Russia, on the north side of the Black Sea, lived a people called the Indo-Europeans. They spoke a language we refer to as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Gradually over the period of 3000-2000 BC, tribes within that culture began to migrate to other areas, taking their particular dialects of late PIE with them. Eventually, this culture ended up splintered into several groups that spanned from Europe in the west to India and the Xinjiang region of northwest China. As time passed and isolation from other tribes increased, each of these dialects became their own distinct languages and evolved as languages always do so that by the time of recorded history there was little real mutual intelligibility between the non-contiguous tribal dialects; these dialects became the branches, or language families, of Indo-European.