What does the Bible say knowledge is based on?
Proverbs 1:7 tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. So knowledge is based on the fear of the Lord. The fear of the Lord is to revere and be in awe of God. It is to worship him for who he is and what he does.
Only when we properly understand our place in creation compared to God’s place over creation can we begin to understand and have knowledge about the world or any other pursuit. Without revealing God for his transcendence over us, we will always rely on ourselves to gain knowledge.
The first knowledge gained in the Bible was a moral knowledge when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 3). Before they ate from this tree, the only command God gave them which they could not resist breaking, they had no fear about good and evil.
Genesis 2 ends by telling us that the man and woman were in the garden naked and they did not feel any shame. But immediately after the eight from this tree, they felt shame about their nakedness. Suddenly there was a moral barrier between seeing a human being naked and clothed.
Now we have to rely on our consciences to tell us what’s right and wrong, and they can be improperly calibrated. We became our own moral compass. But because our consciences can be wrong, we still need to go to God for moral understanding. This is the biblical understanding of the first bit of knowledge that was gained by humanity.
But there are other types of knowledge in the Scriptures. The Hebrew word for knowledge in which we use, “To know a person biblically,” means an intimate knowledge gained through experience. This is usually through the sexual relationship or is often used as a reference for it. –
The other major type of knowledge in the Bible is a factual knowledge. For instance, I know things about the president, but I do not know the president personally. This is a factual knowledge. You can know about someone or something. And then the experiential knowledge is to know something or someone based on personal experience and interaction.