If you haven’t read any of my previous posts about this, a friend of mine last year mentioned that I should do a book review of the Bible on here. Even though he was meant it as a joke I thought it was a pretty good idea, if not a little daunting. The only problem was that I had to actually read the entire thing, cover to cover, when previously I had only read bits of it here and there.
So I decided to follow a schedule where I could read the entire Bible in 88 days, which I mostly stuck to. I began on January 1st (no, it wasn’t a resolution) and things fell apart in the middle of March, the month I was supposed to finish. But I was able to get through it all very recently. It looks like I’m only partially holy.
While I was thinking about this review, it was difficult to really whittle down what I really wanted to say about it, given the expanse of the subject matter and style of writing. There were many ways I could go with this, so I decided to examine it objectively (impossible), with no value judgments (impossible), and as a book documenting the actions and beliefs of a group of people throughout thousands of years — and take note of the general sway of things, as one reading free of any predetermined belief system concerning religion or culture (impossible, but it was an attempt).
First, some basic facts. The most important thing to note is that the Bible is not a book, but a compilation of books spanning thousands of years, each books with their own set of purposes and contexts. There are 66 of them in Protestant versions, while the Catholic one has an additional 7. The Old Testament, the pre-Christian, Jewish texts, was written in Hebrew, while the New Testament was written in Koine Greek — and there are smatterings of Aramaic throughout.
The Bible is translated straight from “original copies” (i.e, there are 5,366 separate Greek manuscripts of New Testament writings) that are written in those original languages — not from a translation of a translation of a translation, etc., as some skeptics have erroneously offered.
This compilation of books cover a wide variety of subject matters, and plenty of it was only lightly-salted with the supernatural: poetry, military conquests, political intrigue and the rule of kings, genealogies, advice for correct living, letters to churches concerning behavior, and theological exposition and implications. Surprisingly, grandiose examples of a transcendent deity are sparse. More on that later.
The Old Testament, which makes up the bulk of this compilation of books, narrates the beginning of the universe and pre-historic events in the Jewish tradition, the establishment of the tribe and nation of Israel, ways in which Israel’s tribes would worship and serve their God, prophetic writings about both the fate of Israel and its enemies, many poems and different kinds of verse.
One of the first few things I noted about the Old Testament, besides superficialities like the repetition of information, was the constancy of the Jewish God’s judgments. I don’t mean “constancy” necessarily in the sense that he was always judging but that he was always dispensing justice to nations, especially to the nation with which he signed a covenant (more or less a “contract”), Israel. On the surface it’s expected that judgment on other nations would be instinctual as they by definition do not meet the Jewish God’s standards, but the constant haranguing of “one’s own” seems counterintuitive. But it does make good sense after quick consideration. Since God and Israel contracted with each other, the persistent failure of Israel to live up to her contractual obligations only makes divine retribution more an inevitability than an ill portent.
This constant dispensation of God’s justice combined with the rather verbose writing of the Old Testament authors, gives the bulk of the Old Testament a patina of despair. Even the Psalms — that go-to repository of emotional comfort in verse — flirts with manic depression every other stanza. There is very little in the Old Testament that isn’t tragedy or mere descriptive history.
Just as noticeable was the lack of actual, visible presence of God’s actions in a tangible way. Most of God’s interactions with humanity come through one-on-one transactions with prophets and kings: “God said x to person y.” And so it was. Yes, he parted the Red Sea, called down fire, and became a pillar of smoke and a pillar of fire, but most spectacles were private, localized affairs. There was not a terrible amount of worldwide fireworks and bravado that one would come to expect from a series of books dealing with an all-powerful deity. God, it seems, is rather gentlemanly: no heavy-handedness or overwhelming displays of physics but a tasteful restraint of power.
I’ll talk about the New Testament and other topics in Part Two.