snowbird,
It works like this - the Watchtower starts out with the conclusion they want to arrive at. When you look at a typical paragraph in a Watchtower magazine, the para contains the argument and then a Scriptural reference is appended as a supposed support. This is a backward way of reasoning; it is termed eisegesis, which says that a meaning is read into a text of Scripture. They are looking for "support" of their position.
Instead of dong this, we need to extract the meaning. The proper way to understand any Scripture is to recognise that they are human creations, with each written at a particular point in time and with its own immediate context. None of them was writing to us or for us. In each case, the writers intended to influence their own immediate community.
Therefore, to understand what any of them was saying, we need to know the full context, not only literature structures, chiasms, and such, but equally importantly, we need to know the contemporary context of the writers, the editors (redactors), such as their secular and religious politics, geography, idiomatic expressions, and so on.
Let me give you just two examples: (1) Much of the Hebrew Scriptures [religious propaganda by one section of the community] was formed during and as a result of the neo-Babyonian captivity/exile - the so-called Deuteronomic History, (2) Although Isaiah lived in the 8th century BCE, from chapter 40 on of the document that bears his name was written 200 years later, again during that captivity period.
Knowing these contexts helps us understand the "what", "why", and so on.
The Watchtower Society hides the Bible from its followers as completely as did the Church of the Middle Ages.
Doug
