Saturday, November 26, 2011

Reading the Bible from Cover to Cover

This article was provoked by Donald Pennington's suggestion that most Christians have never read the Bible. I'd like to second his advice to Christians while promising them a different result:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/9183581/read_your_bibles_seriously.html?cat=9

It's true that the Bible is a big, thick, intimidating book full of obscure words for deep, heavy ideas, and lots of long genealogies. Many Christians don't think they can read it...so they don't try.

There are writers who've divided or arranged the Bible in various ways so that you can read it in one year. Well, if you just set out to read the words, you can plough through the text faster than that. If you read for understanding, one year is an achievable goal if you're already familiar with the Bible but might not be if you're reading it for the first time.

My father used to buy a Bible every few years and read through it, often at breakfast, often reading aloud (not the genealogies). While reading he'd write notes in the margins, so when we children looked up the bits Dad hadn't read aloud to us we'd find further instruction. So the concept of reading through the Bible is familiar to me.

To my surprise, my husband, a fellow ex-Adventist and a Phi Beta Kappa at McGill, had never read all the way through the Bible. We started reading the Bible aloud together on Saturday mornings, skipping only a few extra-long genealogies. We might read several chapters of a passage of straight history or obscure prophecies. We might read only part of a chapter if it contained ideas we wanted to think, talk, or study about in depth. We finished one of the new "copyright Bibles" shortly before he became ill, and didn't try reading through a different translation.

I recommend reading through the Bible with one or more family members. Yes, you will notice that it's a library of books written by different people, at different times, in different styles and for different reasons. There are repetitions and apparent contradictions.

There may be things with which you don't agree. Generally these things are likely to be a good guide to your personal shortcomings. Sometimes a marginal note in your Bible or reference to a commentary will clear up misunderstandings. For example, when the Bible tells people not to "suffer a witch to live," the reference was not to someone quietly practicing an alternative religion.

In Bible days most people practiced religions other than the one the Bible prophets were preaching. It wasn't possible to kill all of them, or even apparently considered legal to kill most of them. The word translated as "witch" could be translated in several different ways. The first translation of the Bible was into Greek, which has several words that could be used to translate different senses of the word for "witch," and the one the ancient Jews chose had the more specific meaning of "potioner" or "poisoner" or "drug manufacturer." "Seers" and nature worshippers are certainly not encouraged in the Bible, but were not subject to capital punishment. So reading "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" in the sense of "Poisoners are subject to capital punishment" is probably the most accurate way to understand this passage.

The Bible as a whole has invited a lot of criticism and needs to be taken on faith, but reading the entire Bible will clear up most of the quibbles about individual verses like this one. Many people will find surprises. One thing about the Bible that often surprises young readers, when they tackle the whole Book for the first time, is how raunchy it gets...family filters hadn't been invented yet. Another surprise is that, although the laws ascribed to Moses prescribe the death penalty for anyone proved guilty of several offenses, they often served to protect the accused when guilt could not be proved. One interesting topic to follow through the Bible is the close correlation between humanitarianism and a sound economy--when the ancient Israelites' survival needs were met we see them showing concern for the well-being of pets, as well as upholding standards for healthy and hygienic diet, and when they were hungry we see them eating not only filth but (preferably other people's) babies; and this is probably how humankind survived all around the world.

Thanks to Dad's attempts to make us Bible scholars ahead of schedule, my brother and I were reading the Bible seriously, with some understanding, by age ten. There are reasons why the traditional age to start serious Bible study was twelve or thirteen. In fact, there are reasons why some teachers have discouraged even teenagers from reading the Bible--one of which is that it's a very sensual Book.

Readers, I don't know who most of you are. When I was writing for Associated Content, the system encouraged everyone to write enough, and read enough of each other's writing, that I knew that a majority of my regular readers were Christian with a solid Jewish minority. At the time of writing, I'm not sure who's found me here yet; the only regular reader (other than contributors) who's identified herself to me is a Neo-Pagan. As of today, after a holiday during which many U.S. citizens don't go online, a majority of readers are in Russia; I don't know whether that means that their background is atheistic, or that they're part of the religious minority. I need your (yourall's) input here. The entire Authorized Version of the Bible is free for all of us to read online. Do you want to make reading through it and discussing it a regular feature of this blog?

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