The actions and teaching methodogy of Ezra and the Levites in Nehemiah 8:1-8 serve as a precise example of how to treat axiomatic and authoratative scripture: an ancient text exists, a linguistic/cultural distance has developed, and the task of the expositors is not to import a new meaning but to recover and communicate the meaning already there.
"And then they read from the book, from the Law of the God, being (thoroughly) clarified [for the result] to give the sense, and then (subsquently) caused [them] to understand the reading."
Three expressions form almost a miniature hermeneutical method:
1. מְפֹרָשׁ — məphōrāš — “distinctly / clearly / with explanation.”
It comes from פרשׁ (p-r-š), carrying the idea of making something explicit, distinct, or separated out. Ezra's company does not merely read words aloud. The text is being made clear. As a Pual participle ("being thoroughly made clarified"), both intensity and ongoing descriptive action describes this effort of achieving clarity. The immediate context reinforces this because Ezra, leading this effort, read from "early morning to midday" while thirteen specifically name Levites along with plurality of other Levites were explaining to the entire assembly gathered! This was intense and ongoing. Accountability and immediacy of clarity was expected.
2. וְשׂוֹם שֶׂכֶל — wəśôm śekel — “and giving understanding/sense.”
This is the remarkable phrase behind the KJV's “gave the sense.” The first major result was to give sense. Śekel concerns insight, understanding, intelligent comprehension. The objective is therefore not simply pronunciation or translation. The hearer must apprehend what the words actually signify.
3. וַיָּבִינוּ בַּמִּקְרָא — wayyāḇînû bammiqrāʾ — “and they caused/attained understanding in the reading.”
The root בין (b-y-n) is about discernment—distinguishing, perceiving, understanding. Miqrāʾ here is the reading/that which is read.
Ezra's audience was separated from their Holy scriptures by linguistic and cultural change due to many decades of Babylonian captivity which lasted seventy years. Look at how fast language changes from generation to generation! The purpose of the Biblos site is to show how Modern readers are separated from it also by two additional millennia of linguistic, theological, institutional, artistic, and translation accretion.
So Ezra's and the Levites' answer wasn't:
“What has this come to mean to us?”
It was essentially:
“What does this text mean, and how do we make that sense understood again?”
That is extraordinarily close to “But from the beginning it was not so.” They did not engage in making the text somehow applicable in their future reality in what ever rendering they desired for whatever purpose they desired. They let the Word speak authoratatively to be a call for action and correct remembrance in alignment with foundational axioms considered to be Divine Truth.
Going Further
Tradition cannot presently prove that Ezra wrote Psalm 119. But Psalm 119 represents precisely the kind of textual culture associated with Ezra: preservation of the Hebrew text, disciplined instruction, memorization, and the pursuit of understanding. Its elaborate alphabetic architecture is an abecadarius establishing many roots words and concepts of the Hebrew language in situ, interwoven with synonynms for this authoratative body of scripture in its many facets (law, judgements, statutes, memorials et. al.) and was designed to carry the commitment Ezra and Levites faithfully into succeeding generations.
And there is an even larger historical point in what you're seeing. Ezra belongs broadly to the extraordinary first-millennium-BC transformation of human intellectual and religious history, the period sometimes called the Axial Age ("When the Greatest Minds Walked the Earth"). Gautama Buddha, Confucius and other major traditions belong to that larger era.
While civilizations were producing new systems of wisdom, Ezra's great act was recovery.
He returned to an inherited ancient text, read it, clarified it, gave its sense, and brought a people back into understanding of the Word of the God that had already been written. Ezra did not modernize the text to accommodate his generation. He labored to make his generation understand the text. This sets forth the exact hermeneutical approach to properly establish and apply Biblical truth.