A method you can use on any passage

Four steps to work the surface, then four levels to go under it. Neither replaces the other.

Start on the surface, and stay there longer than feels necessary.

Most misreadings happen because a reader reached for meaning before they had finished looking. These four steps are slow on purpose. Work them in order, and write your answers down, because the act of writing catches the places where you were about to skip.

Read it whole, out loud

Once, start to finish, without stopping to look anything up. The passage was written to be heard, and the shape of it arrives before the detail does.

Mark what repeats

Words, phrases, actions, numbers. Hebrew narrative signals importance by repeating rather than by emphasising, so repetition is the author pointing.

Find the gap

Note every place the text could have told you something and chose not to. Motive, feeling, and appearance are usually the missing pieces.

Ask the question it refuses

Put the gap into a question and hold it open. A study that ends in a better question has gone further than one that ends in a tidy answer.

Four ways down into one verse.

PaRDeS is a classical framework in Jewish interpretation. The word means orchard, and it is read as an acronym for four levels of reading. Work them in order, and let each one stand.

The verse

“And they called Rebekah, and said unto her, Wilt thou go with this man? And she said, I will go.”

Genesis 24:58, JPS 1917

פַּרְדֵּס

PaRDeS, an orchard. The word is read as an acronym for four levels of reading, and the tradition uses it to keep the plain sense and the deeper sense from crowding each other out. You go down in order.

Read only what the sentence says. Rebekah is asked a question and she answers it. The answer is two words in Hebrew, and the narrator spends no time on her reasons. Before you interpret anything, be able to say plainly what happened.
Listen for a word that has been used before. Her answer is אֵלֵךְ, elekh, "I will go", built on the root ה-ל-ך. It is the root of the command given to Abram in Genesis 12:1, לֶךְ־לְךָ, lekh lekha, "go for yourself". The family's journey starts a second time, and this time nobody had to command it.
Put the two scenes side by side and ask what the pairing is doing. Abram is told to go. Rebekah is asked whether she will. The same departure arrives once as a command and once as a question, and the story lets her say the verb herself.
The tradition reads the well as a place where covenant is recognised rather than arranged, and reads water drawn for a stranger as the sign of it. Held that way, the chapter is less about finding a wife than about how loyalty makes itself visible before anyone has agreed to anything.

One warning about the deeper levels.

The levels below the plain sense are ways of reading, not facts about the text, and the tradition that uses them says so. A reading at the third or fourth level never cancels the first. If an interpretation requires the plain sense to be wrong, the interpretation is the thing to question.