There's a recent post over at Boundless titled "Single Guy Living with a Widow" that caught my attention today. I appreciated the clever way the author grabs his audience and takes an Old Testament story and brings it to life. What I didn't like was the way the author strips cultural context from the story. Head over and read the article before you finish this post for my post to make more sense.
This author makes the mistake of overlaying our culture on a biblical story. Yes, such a story as a homeless single guy living with a widow and her son would be interpreted in a bad light in our society and culture. The problem is this story didn't take place yesterday, it took place thousands of years ago. Different culture, different norms, different expectations. Oh, and Elijah was a pretty well known prophet so he was hardly just some homeless guy.
As a result, the author seems to draw some off-base conclusions from inferring our assumptions on a story in a different time where we have very limited detail. This points to the caution we have in interpreting scripture and how cautious we must be in applying the Bible to today. Does this mean the Bible is not applicable to today? No! The Bible is very applicable to today and will continue to be so. But one must keep in mind the time in which it was written and what the norms of that day were.