The New Testament (in 48 hours)

This is the final entry in a series of posts on Reading the Whole Bible

I'll meet you at the Alamo mission
And we will say our prayers.
The Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mother
Will heal us, as we kneel there,
In the midnight moonlight,
Midnight moonlight, moonlight,
In the midnight, moonlight,
In the midnight moonlight, midnight.
—"Midnight Moonlight," The Be Good Tanyas

How It All Went Down:

At long last, I've come to the end of this project. As I mentioned in an entry this summer, I'd initially thought it would take me about three months to read my Bible, given that there were only 2000 pages or so, and with a good novel I can do 2000 pages in a couple of weeks. 2000 pages of Bible, I reasoned, shouldn't take much more than that. I ended up making quick progress until I hit the ~600 pages of poetry in the middle, which were so different and hard to plow through that I ended up taking a whole month off just to enjoy reading other things; I read much more slowly once I returned to them.

Perhaps surprisingly, I was expecting the same problem with the New Testament.

The New Testament is not my favorite part of the Bible; that designation is reserved for the beautiful narratives of the Hebrew Bible, especially 1 and 2 Samuel. Biblical narrative is what I crave; thankfully, there are five narrative books stacked right at the beginning of the NT: the four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) which depict the life of Jesus from slightly different angles, and Acts, which describes the beginnings of the Christian church as it spread from Israel into the Roman Empire. While these books sometimes don't quite measure up to the sheer narrative artistry and literary pleasures of the Hebrew Bible's greatest moments, they are all still wonderful to read, and examining them in detail with commentary was something I looked forward to. These books were not my problem.

My problem with the New Testament has always been the second half, which consists almost entirely of epistles (a word which I was not able to distinguish from "apostles" until I was almost an adult) or letters. These letters were often sent from a church leader to a specific church in another city, but sometimes to a specific individual or a more general audience, the early Christians as a whole. These books, in other words, do not tell a story; rather, they lay out instructions and theology for the early church, often using the techniques of ancient Greek rhetoric to do so. To say the least, the prospect of ending the Bible project with a slog through ~200 pages of this epistolary material did not seem all that exciting.

To get around this, and the risk of dragging out the project over another month or two, I borrowed a technique I learned in college: set an arbitrary deadline and cram like heck to meet it!

It so happened that by the end of 2013, I had only finished about one and a half gospels, and so had over 300 pages left to finish in the NT before I was done with the Bible. Since I'd made no plans for New Year's Eve, I decided I would try my best to finish before midnight. After I got home from work, I sat down with some snacks and a couple of Bibles for cross-referencing and went to town. I ended up making it about halfway through the remaining 300 pages before midnight, going to sleep, waking up early, and finishing the rest over the course of the next day, finishing just before midnight on New Year's Day, 2014. So if the Whole Bible Project had really been a college assignment, I would have lost a letter grade for turning it in a day late. Still: the arbitrary deadline worked! 300 pages in 2 days was by far the best speed I'd managed to accomplish over the course of the project. The real question was: at that pace, would I get anything meaningful out of it?

What I Got Out of It:

Dude, of course I did. The Bible is awesome; pretty much no matter how fast you read it, you can learn something. As the New Testament book of Hebrews puts it, "the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword."

Except, of course, that when you read that verse in context, it's clear that it means nothing of the kind:

Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account. (Hebrews 4:12-13, NRSV)

In Hebrews, the verse is clearly referring not to the liveliness and potency of scripture, but to God's ability to speak to and judge the human heart. Yet I have never heard this verse quoted by a Christian except as a way of talking about the Bible, "God's word," as we have come to call it, never mind that the Bible as we know it, for obvious reasons, simply did not exist when the anonymous author of Hebrews was writing.

One of the most interesting parts of reading through the whole NT, then, was putting back into context verses that I'd heard quoted time again in church as prooftexts for some idea or other, discovering in the process that they meant something completely different than I'd been taught. Here's another one, Romans 8:28: "We know that all things work together for good for those who love God" (NRSV). For some reason, this is often quoted as proof that God wills all things, good or bad, and that the bad things he wills are secretly going to work out for the better, which has always struck me as insane. The notion that rapes and murders and catastrophes and wars are God's will is fine, if you don't believe that God is good, but the people who say this stuff do believe that. In context, or heck, even out of context, it seems pretty clear to me that this verse means something radically different; as my commentary so helpfully put it, "[Romans 8:28] does not say that God wills all things, but that God works in all things for the good of those who love God" (New Interpreter's Study Bible, pg. 2022, emphasis mine). It was nice not only to read it as part of a larger whole, but to have the commentary on it confirm my suspicion that it is being misinterpreted.

The slightly disturbing thing about the project was that, even as I was gleefully reading well-known verses and discovering their original meanings, I also watched the Biblical authors do the exact opposite.

The funny thing about the Bible is how self-referential it is. The Biblical authors were constantly quoting, alluding to, or retelling each other's stories and ideas:

Map of all the cross-references in the Bible; color corresponds to textual distance between the points of reference

As the earlier books of the Bible aged, they took on a new character for the Jews (and later Christians) who read them. The most important conclusion that later readers came to was that these books were not just texts written for the specific time and audience of their authors' day, but as universal divine messages to people, and especially messages that were relevant for their own time as later readers. One important result of this was that the books of the Bible that had already been written came to be seen as a kind of vast code, any part of which might be extracted and connected with something else to make a new meaning.

For example: the author of Hebrews, the very book I've already complained about people extracting a single verse from and giving it a whole new meaning, felt extremely free to quote from and allude to the Hebrew Bible throughout his own book; my commentary counts 30 direct citations and 70 allusions. These citations and allusions are not serving the purpose of elucidating what their original authors wanted to say to their own audience; rather, the author of Hebrews is governed by "the conviction that Christ is the ultimate meaning and goal of the [Hebrew Bible] and thus that the [Hebrew Bible] constantly points to him" (NISB, pg. 2152; the original text has "OT," that is "Old Testament," where I've put "Hebrew Bible," but OT is not a term I've been using in writing this series). In keeping with this conviction, the author of Hebrews disregards the original meanings of his texts and read them as if they referred to Christ. 

My feeling of superiority, therefore, was severely undercut by the fact that the same principle I was objecting to seemed to have been applied throughout the very Bible I was trying to protect from it. Wrestling with questions of context and reinterpretation has been a big part of the fun of this project, though, which I've written a bit more about elsewhere. 

What Else: 

The best part of this two-day Bible smorgasbord was finally discovering some actual enjoyment in reading those dreaded epistles. When segments of the epistles are read in church, they often come off as didactic in tone and the kind of un-fun thing you wouldn't really want to dive into at length. When reading in a group at a Bible study, they seem confusing and sometimes even pointless. However, reading them on my own, quickly, with a commentary to guide me, I discovered a couple of delightful things:

The first was that, quite apart from any spiritual meaning I might someday extract from them as pieces of religious instruction, the letters actually double as a sort of sketch of the very early history of the church. These letters, after all, are the first Christian writings we possess, and they make for a sort of historical mystery or puzzle to solve, the prize for solving it being a vision of the structure community and life of the first people to believe in Jesus as we Christians, their spiritual descendants, still do today.

For example, the main thesis of the book of Galatians (so named because early Christian missionary Paul wrote it to a church in the city of Galatia), is that as Christians, we are justified, or known to be righteous, because of our faith in Christ, not because of obedience to religious laws. In articulating this message, though, Paul takes a moment to tell how he confronted the apostle Peter (here called by his Aramaic name, Cephas) when he saw him doing something he thought was wrong:

But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. And the other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, “If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews? (Galatians 2:11-14, NRSV)

The point of the story is that Paul is defending the right of Gentile Christians to not get circumcised (since they were justified by faith in Christ, not obedience to the Jewish religious laws, including the commandment that males must be circumcised). It supports his thesis in the book of Galatians: he has stood up for this idea in his own life, as the story demonstrates. But the result of him telling us the story is that we have this little glimpse of conflict in the early church, between two of its most key founding members: Peter, the most prominent disciple of Christ and a leader of the early church, and Paul, the formulator of much of the early church's theology and the person who most actively spread the faith to non-Jews. These kinds of clues are nearly always left out of church services, because while they are interesting if you're looking for this sideways glimpse of the early church I'm talking about, they tend to leave something to be desired in terms of teaching a religious idea or lesson.

The other delightful thing I discovered in the epistles was the radical, creative, odd beauty of the theology in the letters. When I read these letters, Christianity felt less like something a couple of millennia old, with tradition after tradition and interpretation after reinterpretation stacked against and on top of each other across the ages, and more like something completely fresh and weird, at once full of adventure and joy. Reading the books all in the course of 48 hours helped reinforce this feeling for me, since I was seeing the letters all together and watching the church grow and change and think and even argue with itself over the course of its first few decades. But I think all it really takes to get this feeling is to step away for a moment from the idea that these books are written primarily for you, the reader (an idea which I've found Christians, especially Protestants, seem to assume more often than is healthy) and to instead start by thinking about the original audience. To me, the fact that they are letters, often literally written to a specific, named audience of people, was also helpful in this regard.

At all events, I enjoyed thinking about ideas I'd heard countless times before being articulated for the first time, to the audiences for whom they were originally meant. The newness, the weirdness, the creativity came through powerfully and beautifully for me. As a demonstration, I'd like to return to the book I started this section with, the Letter to the Hebrews. The main point of the book is to articulate the idea that Jesus is the believers' very own High Priest, like the Jewish High Priest who made the atoning sacrifices in the Holy of Holies at the Temple at Jerusalem, only better:

For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made by human hands, a mere copy of the true one, but he entered into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself again and again, as the high priest enters the Holy Place year after year with blood that is not his own; for then he would have had to suffer again and again since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself. (Hebrews 9:24-25, NRSV, emphasis mine)

The notion that Jesus is a High Priest of some kind or another has been rattling around in my brain for a decade or two, mostly because I often sang this one song that mentions it briefly at the beginning. I've also been aware of the notion that Jesus' sacrifice atones for sins, in the abstract, for a long time. What's neat about this passage is how eloquently, and creatively, it articulates a completely new piece of theology: Jesus is the new High Priest, who made a sacrifice, not of an animal's blood, but of his own, and not for one time only, but for all people and for always.

For Christians today, this idea maybe isn't that big of a deal. But for the Jewish Christians who were the audience for this letter, who were concerned about the religion they'd chosen, facing rejection from their society and religion, and considering leaving the faith, this creative bit of theologizing might have made all the difference. It connected their faith with the faith of their forbears, and assured them that they had chosen the correct way, that they were still part of God's people.

The fact that the Biblical authors were able to draw together the different strands of their faith, different ideas from previous generations, into something new that spoke to their own day, gives me hope that I and my fellow Christians can do the same in our time. While I may sometimes worry about people forgetting the context for the verses they quote as proof to each other, in the end I am encouraged by the examples I found in the New Testament, especially in the epistles, and I believe that God can still speak to us through the fresh reading and application of these ancient texts.

---

Photo Sources:
http://www.chrisharrison.net/index.php/Visualizations/BibleViz
https://secure.flickr.com/photos/29811338@N05/3601180188/

Reading the Apocrypha

Part of a series on Reading the Whole Bible

Orthodox priest studying his Bible, which contains the Apocrypha

So take to the streets with your apocalypse strain,
Your devotion has the look of a lunatic's gaze.
—"Apocalypse Song," St. Vincent

 A couple months ago I finished the Hebrew Bible and started work on the Apocrypha, a group of books that form the middle section of my NRSV Bible. The books in this section weigh in at a relatively svelte 350 pages or so in my Bible, compared to the great and honking mass that is the Hebrew Bible at 1300 pages.

The Apocrypha are not a separate section in Catholic or Orthodox Bibles; you will find the books that are gathered under that name in my NRSV scattered throughout a Catholic or Orthodox volume. And a typical Protestant Bible will exclude them altogether: as a Protestant myself, no Bible I ever saw in church growing up had these books, and it wasn't until my parents thoughtfully gave me a New Interpreter's Study Bible* for my college graduation present (yes, I was then and am still a Bible nerd) that I finally came to own a Bible that included them. To understand why this is so, we need to dig into a little history.

A Short History of the Apocrypha:

In the three centuries before Jesus' life on earth, the Jews lived not only in their homeland of Palestine but also in communities scattered around the ancient Near East, especially in Alexandria, Egypt. They were a part of the first Jewish diaspora into the larger ancient world. The language of their daily lives ceased to be Hebrew, in favor of the Greek that their neighbors spoke. (This was especially true of Jews living outside of Palestine. In Palestine, on the other hand, many Jews, including Jesus, came to speak Aramaic as their primary language.**)

The Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek for the benefit of this diaspora community. (The most popular ancient Greek translation was called the Septuagint, though there were others.) Meanwhile, religious books were still being composed by Jews in these last three centuries BCE; they were sometimes composed in Hebrew, sometimes in Greek, but were usually translated and circulated in Greek if they hadn't been written in it, and most copies of the book in existence at any given time would have been in Greek. The most popular of these books took on as much significance as the older books of the Hebrew Bible for many ancient Jews, and the distinction between these newer books and their older counterparts might not have been as clear as one might think. To quote my Bible's notes on the subject, "For a Greek-speaking Jew living in Egypt, it would have been far from clear that (for example) Proverbs, which he or she would know in its Greek version, was Holy Scripture, whereas the (rather similar) Wisdom of Solomon, which was originally composed in Greek, was not" (Access Bible, pg. 32).

This means that, in Jesus' day, there was a sort of unofficial Jewish canon of scripture that included both the older books that we now know as the Hebrew Bible, and some newer books either written Greek in or primarily known in their Greek translations. When Christianity formed, it inherited this larger canon of Jewish scripture. Later, as modern Judaism began to form under the rabbis who led the Jewish community after the destruction of the Temple, Jews began to consider only the books in Hebrew as canonical.

So, somewhat ironically, Christians ended up preserving quite a number of ancient Jewish writings that would likely have been lost otherwise. There was some dissent about these books among Christians in ancient times, who noticed that the Jews had a smaller canon that only included the older Hebrew works,^† but for the most part, other Christians paid little attention to this dissent. But all this doesn't quite explain how I, a Protestant, ended up never getting around to reading the Apocrypha until this year. For that, we need to jump forward to the Reformation.

Depiction of St. Jerome, ancient translator who objected to the Apocrypha

In the sixteenth century, a number of religious thinkers and leaders called for changes in the Roman Catholic Church, were denounced and expelled as heretics, and ended up forming their own church movements as a result. This period is called the Protestant Reformation (which has always struck me as slightly odd, since the people who protested and left the Catholic Church did not really succeed in reforming it, though the Catholics eventually got around to making some of the changes the Protestant Reformers suggested anyway, in a movement amusingly titled the Counter-Reformation). One of the most important ideas of the Reformation was something called sola scriptura, which is a doctrine that the Bible contains everything you need to know in order to be saved from sin and hell, and therefore that only ideas that are directly stated in the Bible (or that can be logically derived from statements in the Bible) should be considered doctrines of the church.

In enunciating the rallying cry of sola scriptura, the Reformers began to examine the contents and extent of said scriptura in more detail than was common at the time. They ended up agreeing with the earlier Christian thinkers who had wanted to remove the books from the canon.^‡ While early Protestant translations of the Bible, including the still-widely-loved King James Version, kept the books as a separate section between the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha quickly fell out of favor (from what I can tell, many Protestants considered them "too Catholic," but I can also see how it might be annoying and weird to have some books in your Bible that aren't, you know, scripture), and most Protestant Bibles that are produced today, KJVs included, do not include the Apocrypha. Protestants working on new translations have generally not even bothered to translate them.

Title page from a Counter-Reformation Bible

Thankfully, the good folks who created the (somewhat redundant-sounding) New Revised Standard Version did bother to translate the Apocryphal books, and they are included in both of the NRSV volumes that I own. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, most NRSVs used by Protestant churches do not include the Apocrypha. There's also a Catholic NRSV edition that includes the books in the order they appear in in Catholic Bibles.) The NRSV Apocrypha section includes not only the books that appear in Catholic Bibles, but also some that appear only in Orthodox Bibles.

Reading the Apocrypha:

As I've remarked before, I have way more love for Biblical narrative than for other Biblical genres; I'm especially bad at enjoying or understanding Biblical poetry, at least at any length. Unfortunately for me, two of the longest books in the Apocrypha, the Wisdom of Solomon and the book of Sirach, are books of poetry. Wisdom was pretty good; it's the shorter of the two, and I enjoyed its message of the importance of pursuing goodness and righteousness, even in the face of opposition. Sirach was a doozy though; not only is it the longest Apocryphal book by far (51 chapters and 87 pages in my Bible, while no other book in the section gets much beyond 50 pages), it's also not very fun or interesting, and it's littered with the most entrenched patriarchy/misogyny I've seen pretty much anywhere in the Bible, which is not the most forward-thinking, when it comes to gender, on a good day. Take this gem, Sirach 42:12: Better is the wickedness of a man than a woman who does good; it is woman who brings shame and disgrace. "The severity of this statement," my Bible commentary notes, "is unparalleled in Biblical literature." Blerg.

Much of the other material in this section is a lot better than this, though, and in fact one book, Judith, is practically a proto-feminist text. The main character of this short novel is Judith, a strong, independent widow who saves her town from an invading army by tricking her way into the general's quarters and beheading him. I love its positive vision of service to God and people, although I suppose its violent resolution is not necessarily my favorite thing in the world. It's quite well written, however, doing a great job of building suspense and creating a sense of danger for the heroine before she completes her grisly mission.

And boy, is it grisly

I once read somewhere that ancient authors thought it was important to avoid creating suspense because it distracted the audience from the point of the story. If this is true, then whoever wrote the book of Tobit must have subscribed to this ancient literary theory. Tobit is a really fun, edifying, and satisfying story, but the funniest moment in it for me is when, about three chapters in, the author steps aside from narrating the story itself to assure the reader that everything is going to turn out okay for the main characters. (Second funniest moment: Tobit 6:3, which says, "Suddenly a large fish leaped up from the water and tried to swallow the young man’s foot, and he cried out." Hee hee.) The book is the story of a man, Tobit, and his son, Tobias. Tobit is a pretty cool guy, but early in the story becomes blind and impoverished, and God sends an angel to help Tobias on a journey to retrieve some money for his dad. Along the way, Tobias saves a woman from a demon that's been keeping her from getting married, and then marries her (the woman, not the demon). The book places a weirdly strong emphasis on the importance of properly burying the dead, and I found it mildly unsettling that the angel in the story feels the need to repeatedly lie to conceal the fact that he's an angel, but these are both things that actually added to the fun for me in discovering this new book. 

Other fun stuff in the Apocrypha included the various books called "Maccabees;" 1 and 2 Maccabees, for example, are actually two different authors' perspectives on the same period in history. I have next to no exposure to said time period, the era when the Jews rebelled against their Greek overlords and set up an independent state of Israel (which lasted for over a century, until it was conquered and incorporated as a Roman province; sigh). "Maccabees" is the nickname for the family that led this rebellion, and of one member, Judas Maccabeus (or "Judah Maccabee"), in particular; the nickname probably has something to do with the Aramaic word for "hammer," though apparently there are other theories.

Judah Maccabee leading his army

Amusingly, neither 3 Maccabees nor 4 Maccabees has anyone from Judah Maccabee's family in it, though they both involve roughly the same period in Jewish history as 1 and 2 Maccabees. 3 Maccabees is delightful mostly for the deliciously weird irony of its premise. At the start of the book, the king of Egypt, Ptolemy, is saved from death by a Jew. To show his gratitude, the king offers a sacrifice at the Temple in Jerusalem; once there, however, he is enraged to discover that he is absolutely forbidden to enter the Holy of Holies, where even the high priest is allowed only once a year, and so the king resolves to kill all the Jews in Egypt out of spite. Much hilarity ensues, including several (failed) attempts to trample the Jews to death with elephants, and the king ends up blaming the idea for the whole episode on his advisers when he finally repents in the face of an angelic intervention. 4 Maccabees is a philosophical treatise that sets out to prove that reason can govern the emotions, but it is taken up in very large part with an unnecessarily detailed account of King Antiochus torturing seven Jewish brothers and their mother to death (an event which 2 Maccabees records with slightly more decorum as part of a general campaign by the King Antiochus to snuff out the Jewish way of life, which eventually led to the Maccabean revolt). Neither 3 nor 4 Maccabees can be found in Catholic Bibles, and 4 Maccabees is scarcely in any Orthodox ones either, but I was certainly happy the NRSV translators included them, especially 3 Maccabees, which is a riot.

Several books of the Hebrew Bible appeared in expanded form when translated into Greek; these Greek additions are listed among the Apocrypha, but are mostly too short to give much attention to on their own, though one addition to Daniel, Bel and the Dragon, is kind of cool because it has a dragon. The Letter of Jeremiah is an addition to the Hebrew Bible book of Jeremiah, and it's pretty much dedicated entirely to the questionable Biblical argument that idols should not be worshiped because they are man-made. This made it a lovely example when I needed to wrap up a post about idolatry a few weeks ago.

My favorite book in the Apocrypha was 2 Esdras, which only appears in the Slavonic Bible (one of the Bibles of the Orthodox churches), and Jerome's Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate (where it appears as an appendix). The Wikipedia entry on 2 Esdras calls it "one of the gems of Jewish apocalyptic literature," which I think sums it up rather nicely. The book is a collection of several authors' viewpoints on the chaotic and troubling goings-on of the early centuries CE, but my favorite is the middle section, which depicts a dialog between the main character, Ezra, and the angel Uriel, who God sends to comfort Ezra in his distress and answer his questions about the end of the world and the life to come. In particular, I identify with Ezra's questions about the nature of the afterlife, especially his outraged inquiry, repeated throughout the book: why is it that most people who live will not go to heaven, but will suffer in the afterlife? Ezra several times rejects the angel Uriel's too-pat answers to this very important question, and while Ezra eventually comes round to Uriel's way of thinking, a number of unanswered questions remain, which is how I like my Biblical books. 2 Esdras reminds me of nothing else in the Bible so much as Abraham's argument with God, in which he attempts to save the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of the few righteous people who live there. This argument between God and Abraham is one of the pivotal moments in the book of Genesis and in Jewish thought on the nature of God, and 2 Esdras expands on it and plays with it and many other Biblical scenes and tropes, to good effect. I'm glad I have a Bible with this book in it, and the others I've talked about; I hope to revisit them again sometime soon.

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*The NISB is a great book, and I've been using it to supplement my reading, especially when I'm reading at home in the evenings. It's not very portable, though; thankfully, as I mention briefly in the first post in this series, my father was kind enough to get me a copy of the more obscure but quite good Access Bible, which has provided enough commentary to keep me engaged and make sure I'm understanding what's going on in some of the more obscure places. It has significantly less commentary than the NISB, though, and it's a paperback to boot, so I can take it with me from place to place without totally hulking out and frightening passersby with my unbridled physical prowess.
**Aramaic is a language related to Hebrew; it was the language of the Babylonians, who destroyed the ancient nation of Judah and carried many Jews into exile in Babylon. This is roughly how it replaced Hebrew for the Jews in Palestine: not only would the Jews in exile have used Aramaic in their daily lives, and would have brought it with them when they returned to their ancestral home a generation later, but also the people who stayed behind in Palestine became part of the Babylonian Empire, an Aramaic-speaking empire, and would have needed Aramaic for administrative and other purposes.
†These included St. Jerome, who learned enough Hebrew from his Jewish friends to translate the Bible into Latin (in what became known as the Vulgate, which is still in use by the Catholic Church). In doing so, he found out that they had a smaller canon and objected to the inclusion of the books that the Jews had not included in their Bibles into his Old Testament, even going so far as to get into a debate with St. Augustine on the subject. He ended up translating them in spite of his objections.
‡The Reformers had varying views of the works in the Apocrypha; Luther thought that, though they were not to be considered scripture, the Apocryphal books were still good and valuable, and he said wanted them to be read and taught by Christians. Calvin had a much more pessimistic view, though even he was not entirely consistent on the matter. From what I can tell, the Anabaptist Reformers generally thought of these books quite positively and may even have thought of them as authoritative scripture, though like other Protestant movements, modern Anabaptist churches have generally excluded them from their Bibles.

Photo sources:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Orthodox_Priest,_Tek_Teklay,_Ethiopia_%288070187014%29.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Workshop_of_Pieter_Coecke_van_Aelst,_the_elder_-_Saint_Jerome_in_His_Study_-_Walters_37256.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Johannes_Eck_1537_Titel.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GENTILESCHI_Judith.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:143.Judas_Maccabeus_Pursues_Timotheus.jpg

1 & 2 Samuel: The Hebrew Bible's Best Novel

David's Grief over Absalom, Illustration from a Bible Card

And I should have known that my son so bold,
He'd bear my sword, he'd take my sword,
He'd take my sword to his grave.
—"Absalom," Families

Yesterday, my fiancée and I were asked to present our favorite scriptures to a Sunday school class we were participating in. After a little thought, she had come up with several lovely bits from the book of Matthew, things like "can any of you by worrying add a single hour to his life?" and "ask and it shall be given to you." I, meanwhile, was having much more trouble thinking of something to present. Not because I don't have favorite scriptures, but because I tend to think of them in terms of whole books, rather than individual verses from those books.

For the purposes of the Sunday school lesson, this was about as helpful as being asked my favorite movie quote and responding by acting out the entirety of Children of Men. I at least knew what my favorite book of the Bible was, though, so I had a decent starting place to start thinking on the question.

1 and 2 Samuel is my favorite book in the Bible. (In Bibles today, it's divided up into two books, 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel, but that's because when it was translated from Hebrew to Greek in ancient times, the Greek text was too long to fit on a single scroll, so it was split up into two scrolls. It's all one book, though!*) Broadly speaking, it's the story of how the ancient people of Israel went from being a hodgepodge of tribes with local rulers, often oppressed and attacked by neighboring tribes and peoples, to a unified nation under a single ruler, strong enough to defend itself adequately and play a role on the world stage of its era. But really, 1 and 2 Samuel is the story of one man: King David.

Samuel is interesting for a lot of reasons, but to me, it's the story of the ruthless rise to power and gradual aging and decline of King David that's the most fascinating. (There are other people's stories in it, including the story of the prophet Samuel, who the book is named for. These stories serve as a sort of lead-in to the main narrative about David.) Not just the story, though: while the plot of 1 and 2 Samuel is quite intriguing, it's the way the author** uses the literary tools at his disposal to portray that story that's truly compelling. Not only does the author present the history of David's life in a compelling way, he also uses the story to grapple with and explore big questions and problems in the human condition, on topics as diverse as aging, death, necessary evils, fame, political machinations, lust, avarice, treachery, murder, and, uh, hemorrhoids.

David and Goliath (Caravaggio) maybe the most famous image of David where he's not naked

Take this for an example: one of the basic tools the authors of the Hebrew Bible used to quickly define their characters was to make the first words a character says a key to understanding him or her. In 1 Samuel, David's first line of dialog takes place during the story of Goliath, a giant Philistine who has challenged the Israelite army to send a champion to fight him, and insulted them and their God when they do not immediately send someone. When David hears Goliath's challenge, he speaks for the first time:

"What shall be done for the man who kills this Philistine, and takes away the reproach from Israel? For who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God?" (1 Samuel 17:26, NRSV)

The first thing David ever says in 1 and 2 Samuel (1) looks very pointedly for (political) gain—the answer to "What shall be done for the man...?" turns out to be "You get to marry the king's daughter!"—and (2) either balances out or, more likely, covers up this grab for personal profit with some pious, patriotic rhetoric. This ends up being key to the author's portrayal of David, a character who uses whatever means necessary to gain and consolidate political power, and then either makes up for it or covers it up (depending on how charitable you want to be as a reader) with expressions of piety and political necessity.

Combat between Soldiers of Ish-Bosheth and David (Gustave Doré)

I'd like to take an aside to defend the use of the word "novel" to describe1 and 2 Samuel. The author of 1 and 2 Samuel has a clear interest in depicting historical events; unlike, say, Job or Jonah, 1 and 2 Samuel does not appear to have been made up out of whole cloth for purposes other than communicating historical events. (Whether David and the other characters of the book are real historical figures has been debated, but 1 and 2 Samuel lacks characteristics one would expect of a portrait of a legendary figure, and it is certainly no fable or morality play.) Even though 1 and 2 Samuel is interested in history, it is not just a book of history; the author feels free to incorporate folk tales and legends into the work, as well as other fictional elements. Literary critic and Bible translator Robert Alter describes it this way:

This narrative...has many signs of what we would call fictional shaping—interior monologues, dialogues between the historical personages in circumstances where there could have been no witnesses to what was said, pointed allusions in the turns of dialogue as well as in the narrative details to Genesis, Joshua, and Judges. What we have in this great story...is not merely a report of history but an imagining of history that is analogous to what Shakespeare did with historical figures and events in his history plays. That is, the known general contours of the historical events and of the principal players are not tampered with, but the writer brings to bear the resources of his literary art in order to imagine deeply, and critically, the concrete moral and emotional predicaments of living in history, in the political realm. To this end, the writer feels free to invent an inner language for the characters, to give their dialogues revelatory shape, to weave together episodes and characters with a fine mesh of recurrent motifs and phrases and analogies of incident, and to define the meaning of the events through metaphor, allusion, and symbol. The writer does all this not to fabricate history but in order to understand it. (The David Story, pgs. xvii-xviii, emphasis added)

Taking historical facts and weaving them together with imagined events, thoughts, and speech in order to wrestle with both the history itself and the themes it represents seems less like history to me than a historical novel. There are other other novels in the Hebrew Bible, stories that follow the arc of a few characters through a plot, not straying far into straight history or poetry or other genres; Jonah is one, and Esther and Ruth. For my money, though, 1 and 2 Samuel is the Hebrew Bible's finest novel, for no other Biblical book can match it for artistry, depth, and sheer enjoyability.

Study of King David (Julia Margaret Cameron)

When it came time on Sunday for me to share my favorite scriptures with the Sunday school class, I chose my favorite moment in 1 and 2 Samuel. It's a little dark, but bear with me:

The Lord struck the child that Uriah's wife bore to David, and it became very ill. David therefore pleaded with God for the child; David fasted, and went in and lay all night on the ground. The elders of his house stood beside him, urging him to rise from the ground; but he would not, nor did he eat food with them. On the seventh day the child died. And the servants of David were afraid to tell him that the child was dead; for they said, "While the child was still alive, we spoke to him, and he did not listen to us; how then can we tell him the child is dead? He may do himself some harm." But when David saw that his servants were whispering together, he perceived that the child was dead; and David said to his servants, "Is the child dead?" They said, "He is dead."

Then David rose from the ground, washed, anointed himself, and changed his clothes. He went into the house of the Lord, and worshiped; he then went to his own house; and when he asked, they set food before him and he ate. Then his servants said to him, "What is this thing that you have done? You fasted and wept for the child while it was alive; but when the child died, you rose and ate food." He said, "While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept; for I said, 'Who knows? The Lord may be gracious to me, and the child may live.' But now he is dead; why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me." (2 Samuel 12:15b-24, NRSV)

This story, particularly David's line at the end, is a turning point for his character. Before this incident, David is almost constantly gaining and consolidating political power, and nearly everything he says can be construed as having a secondary, political motive behind it. The heartfelt, wrenching line "Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me" is the first time David feels completely real to the reader; his heart is laid bare.

After this point, David begins to turn into the old man he will be at the end of the book, shivering in bed and scarcely aware of what is going on in his kingdom. Along the way, he starts losing track of what is going on in his own household; his children end up violating and murdering each other, and one of them, Absalom, starts a rebellion against David, only to eventually be killed when David takes back the throne, much to David's sorrow.

1 and 2 Samuel is many things, but it is not least a moving portrait of an individual human life, conveyed with profound artistry and richness. I recommend it to any reader looking for such a portrait. For the general reader, it's hard to go wrong with Robert Alter's translation, The David Story, which I quoted earlier. It includes enough helpful commentary to both understand the ancient context and appreciate the artistry of the book without overwhelming the reader, and I highly recommend it.

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*It's actually slightly more complicated than this: the end of the book, in which David is on his deathbed and giving his last instructions to Solomon, was later cut off and added to the book of 1 Kings, in order to serve as an introduction to 1 Kings' stories about Solomon. Thus, in modern Bibles, the story of 1 and 2 Samuel really goes all the way through 1 Kings chapter 2.
**The author is anonymous, like most of the authors of the Bible, especially outside the prophetic books, which tend to have been written by the people they're named for, with a number of exceptions. Given the time and place in which 1 and 2 Samuel was written, the author was almost certainly male.

Photo sources:
Photo 1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:David_and_Goliath_by_Caravaggio.jpg
Photo 2: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:David%27s_Grief_Over_Absolom_%28Bible_Card%29.jpg
Photo 3: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:078.Combat_between_Soldiers_of_Ish-bosheth_and_David.jpg
Photo 4: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Study_of_King_David,_by_Julia_Margaret_Cameron.jpg

I Just Finished Reading the Hebrew Bible

Part of a series on Reading the Whole Bible.

John Martin, "The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah." It's going to be that kind of post.

And blood
bitterness
exploding fire
wailing blood
and bleeding
—"Dread Beat and Blood," Linton Kwesi Johnson

This week, I finished reading the Hebrew Bible (AKA The Old Testament—I will stick with the "Hebrew Bible" here and abbreviate it "HB" when I feel like it). And I'm here to tell you why it was scary, weird, surprising, and delightful. In that order.


SCARY:

You've probably heard this before; (heck, I've already mentioned it in the course of this project), but the God of the Hebrew Bible is often portrayed as a violent, seemingly capricious entity. I discovered, though, that there's another layer of scary unpleasantness in the HB, and that comes out of the incredible bitterness and anger that the Biblical authors felt in reaction to the destruction of their country.

There's a fair amount of material generated because of these feelings. Some of it is (in)famous, like the notorious baby-smashing impulse expressed by the Psalmist in Psalm 137, a lament over the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.

But sometimes this material is the stuff of entire books, and obscure books at that. Obadiah, for example, is one long tirade against the nation of Edom for how they responded when Jerusalen was sacked (basically, they were total dicks about it). It's only a couple pages long, but they're a couple pages of condemnation and divine threats to a whole country of people. Nahum is a book entirely about gloating over the destruction of Nineveh, the capital Israel and Judah's longtime frenemy Assyria. To be fair, the Assyrians were also kind of a bunch of dicks—among other things, they destroyed Israel and took her people away into exile—but Nahum is just page after page of creepy happiness over the death and destruction of an enemy. Which was scary to find in my Bible.

The way I've been processing this strain of scary in the HB* has been to chalk it up to basic, human emotion. I'm sure if someone destroyed the place where I lived and took a bunch of people away, I'd be pretty irate too. I don't know if I'd be baby-smashing irate, but still. It's been easier to figure this stuff out than the whole violent, capricious God thing. On that score, I'm still befuddled and still sympathize more than I probably should with Marcion.


WEIRD:

The Hebrew Bible is a product of an ancient and incredibly foreign culture. This isn't always obvious, because we can read it in our own language and because it's a familiar and even foundational document in our culture. But there are moments when the reader gets jarred out of a sense of familiarity by the appearance of totally alien cultural norms and activities in the Bible. My favorite of these is the symbolic prophetic act.

Raphael, "The Prophets Hosea and Jonah"

Many of the prophets felt called by God to deliver unpopular messages to God's people. And sometimes, they used symbolic, public actions to help them. In our culture, such symbolic acts might take the form of, say, chaining yourself to the White House's front gate, or speaking for 21 hours straight on the Senate floor. In a Biblical setting, things can get a lot weirder than that:

When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, “Go, take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.”  So he went and took Gomer daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son. (Hosea 1:2-3, NRSV)

That's right, ladies and gentlemen: Hosea's symbolic act was literally marrying a prostitute. Which is insane.

More awesomely weird is my personal favorite symbolic prophetic act, from Jeremiah:

Thus said the Lord to me, “Go and buy yourself a linen loincloth, and put it on your loins, but do not dip it in water.” So I bought a loincloth according to the word of the Lord, and put it on my loins. And the word of the Lord came to me a second time, saying, “Take the loincloth that you bought and are wearing, and go now to the Euphrates, and hide it there in a cleft of the rock.” So I went, and hid it by the Euphrates, as the Lord commanded me. And after many days the Lord said to me, “Go now to the Euphrates, and take from there the loincloth that I commanded you to hide there.” Then I went to the Euphrates, and dug, and I took the loincloth from the place where I had hidden it. But now the loincloth was ruined; it was good for nothing.

Then the word of the Lord came to me:  Thus says the Lord: Just so I will ruin the pride of Judah and the great pride of Jerusalem. (Jeremiah 13:1-8, NRSV)

Jeremiah's symbolic act involves—yes, it's true!—his dirty, filthy underwear. It's a metaphor, sure, but it's a weird metaphor.

There's plenty of even weirder and crazier stuff in the HB; I won't tell you all about it here for the sake of space, but I just want to point out that the beginning of Ezekiel sounds suspiciously like a UFO sighting and that—and I cannot emphasize this enough—there are talking horses in Zechariah, in addition to a huge flying scroll and a woman sitting in a giant basket for no obvious reason. The Hebrew Bible is weird.


SURPRISING:

There are some real surprises and even delights in reading the Hebrew Bible, though. My biggest surprise came when reading the book of Amos; God shows Amos a vision of some fruit, which seems innocent enough, and then things take a sudden bewildering turn:

This is what the Lord God showed me—a basket of summer fruit. He said, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A basket of summer fruit.”

Then the Lord said to me, “The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass them by. The songs of the temple shall become wailings in that day,” says the Lord God; “the dead bodies shall be many, cast out in every place. Be silent!” (Amos 8:1-3, NRSV)

I found this so jarring that I laughed aloud when I read it. "Hey, God," I thought, "it's just fruit. No need to get so worked up."

The Prophet Amos in a Russian Orthodox Icon

Turns out, there's a pun here: the words for "summer fruit" and "end" sound very similar, and God uses the odd vision of the summer fruit to introduce the idea that follows. Most folks are unaware that puns are a feature of the Hebrew Bible, but they are. It's rarely more obvious than this jarring passage, which simply does not work as a piece of coherent writing unless you know there's a pun. Most of the time, wordplay passes completely unremarked upon in English translations, because it's not central to a clear understanding of the text.

Nevertheless, puns and other wordplay are common tools for the Biblical authors, used for making meaningful connections between passages, carrying ideas forward, and even creating humor. It's too bad modern readers, myself included, are typically not in on the joke.


DELIGHTFUL:

The truly great joy for me, of course, has been in discovering the connections between obscure parts of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament passages that I know well. It's a pleasure to watch the Biblical authors borrow from and build on each other.

Rafael, "The Prophet Isaiah"

I discovered, for example, that a line I'm used to seeing in hymns is actually not only Biblical but has a more involved history than I might have imagined. Paul uses an image in talking about spreading the gospel, "how beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news," which he appears to have borrowed from Isaiah, who was talking about the hope of Israel being delivered from her enemies. Isaiah, in turn, borrowed it from Nahum, who was talking about how totally rad it was that Judah wasn't going to have to deal with Assyria anymore. Isn't intertextuality fun?

The Hebrew Bible, for all its flaws, was the Bible of Jesus, so it's been worth examining as a Christian to gain insight into his thoughts and what he said and did. In the course of my study of the HB, for example, I read a great essay on Ezekiel and how it relates to the New Testament. I'd never heard of most of the connections between Ezekiel and the NT before, and it was fascinating to me.


SUMMING UP:

Knowing and understanding the Hebrew Bible is essential for Christians, I think. Without its foundational stories, the New Testament can't happen. Without its prophetic messages, the dramatic foreshadowing of the New Testament isn't there. And without its poetic images, the vividness and deep meaning in the New Testament is sucked dry.

While many Christians, myself included, would be more comfortable ignoring the ugliness here in the Hebrew Bible, it is vital to the truth and wholeness of our faith that we find ways to acknowledge and set aside this ugliness and instead learn to seek out the beauty and the truth in it.

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*This kind of scary stuff is mostly in the poetic books. The historical books of the Bible, which are clustered in the first third of the Christian Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible has a different order), generally deal with the pain of the destruction of Jerusalem and the subsequent exile by looking for reasons that they might have happened. The typical answer is simply "idolatry."

Photo Sources: 
Photo 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_Martin_-_Sodom_and_Gomorrah.jpg
Photo 2: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Raphael_-_The_Prophets_Hosea_and_Jonah_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg 
Photo 3: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Amos-prophet.jpg
Photo 4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Raffaello,_profeta_isaia.jpg 

On the Whole Bible Project & Biblical Poetry

Part of a series on Reading the Whole Bible.

Oh God! well look at you now!  
Oh! you lost it, but you don’t know how!  
In the light of a golden calf,  
Oh God! I had to laugh!
—"Neon Bible," The Arcade Fire

Five months ago I wrote that I would be starting a project to read the whole Bible. I pursued this project with a great deal of excitement at first, which slowly diminished to diligence, and then to lethargy, over the first half of 2013. I set out intending to finish the project after a few months (I gave it three, tops) and move on to other pursuits. This was misguided, though not for the reasons you might think. It wasn't the fact that the material was boring or alienating because of its ancient character (I was raised with this stuff, after all, and have spent much of my adult life investigating it), nor that it was simply too long to read all in one go (at ~700,000 words, it's pretty long, but I've engaged in similarly long projects without tiring out—I'm looking at you, A Song of Ice and Fire). The problem, my friends, was poetry.

Don't laugh.

Reading Biblical prose is easy for me. In just about any prose text in the Bible, one idea follows the next in a logical sequence, usually keeping to chronological and/or cause-and-effect order. If you encounter something weird, you plow through it until you come across something more understandable and interesting. There is a plot or a narrative of some kind, so it's easy to stay engaged because you want to find out what's next. Plus, there's a feeling of excitement and discovery when things are new, and a feeling of returning to something beloved when they are not.

Biblical poetry, alas, is a different beast altogeter. Unlike much of the poetry of the ancient Near East, Biblical poems are virtually never used to tell an extended story, with the rare exceptions being retellings or references to a story that the poet assumes is known by the audience (see for example "historical" Psalms like Psalms 78, 105, and 106). Even when a poem tells a story in such a case, there is never any exposition to help the reader along. And in all events, most Biblical poems serve other purposes.

So it was with some dismay that I hit the middle portion of the Christian Bible, which is almost exclusively poetic in content, and realized that the pace I'd achieved during the previous sections was not going to be sustainable. (In my Bible, the distance between the beginning and end of the predominantly poetic books [i.e., Job to Malachi] is a little under 700 pages, roughly one third of the total.) Reading Biblical poetry is taxing; it forces you to either slow down and take it in (to try to analyze it for deeper meaning), or to rush through it and exhaust yourself with a task that starts to seem meaningless after a while (this is what I did).

Because I got exhausted reading poetry, and because the project was keeping me from doing more fun reading, I stopped for the month of May. To get prepped to start again, I'm rereading a favorite book, The Art of Biblical Poetry, by Robert Alter. In it, Alter lays out the features that make Biblical poetry unique and beautiful (specifically, a kind of dynamic parallelism, where things are stated and then restated in a way that makes them more interesting and moves the action of the poem forward). Alter makes a very compelling case for the poetry of the Bible as a interesting and important kind of art, in addition to its religious meaning for many, myself included. Thanks to his work, I'm looking forward to restarting this project in the days to come.

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Photo sources:
Photo 1: www.flickr.com/photos/skeggzatori/4278335002/
Photo 2: www.flickr.com/photos/vblibrary/4596177185
Photo 3: www.flickr.com/photos/joshme17/2143980427

Announcements

All right, time for two mildly important personal public announcements:

1. I am suspending my Bible-reading project for the month of May for the following reasons:

• I am a little worn out and it's kept me from reading any other book books (i.e., not comic books) for four months now. 
• I just hit the halfway point (Jeremiah) at about 1050 pages out of 2100. 
• It stinks to have the project feel more like a burden than an adventure, and I think I can turn that around with a little break.

2. I'm changing the day of the week I post on my blog from Friday to Monday because:

• That will let me use the weekend to polish things up (or push back the panic and last-minute decisions to Sunday night rather than lunchbreak on Friday). 
• I'm betting it'll be less likely to get buried in the afternoon social media content rush on a Monday than a Friday.

Thanks to everybody in my life who is encouraging me on both these fronts. I appreciate you.

Reading the Whole Bible—Update

Part of a series on Reading the Whole Bible.

We should shine a light on
A light on...
And the book of right-on's right on—
It was right on.
—"The Book of Right-On," Joanna Newsom

So, I'm reading the Bible cover to cover (currently on page 317 out of 2089—starting the book of Joshua). It's going a little slower than I thought it would, but I'm content to blame that on having much less free time at work than usual these last few weeks.

The fact that I'm in Joshua means that I'm finished with the first five books, an important segment of the Bible that Christians and many scholars often call the Pentateuch (from the Greek penta "five" + teuch "books at the beginning of the Bible"*) and that Jews and other cool people call the Torah (Hebrew for "teaching" or "instruction"). For Jews, the first five books are the most important part of the Bible, as they contain the story of their ancestors and origins as a people (in the first book, Genesis), the story of the beginning of their relationship to God (in the second book, Exodus), and all the commandments that they are to follow (in Exodus and the other three books, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy)—though different groups disagree on whether to obey all of the commandments in the Torah, including things like not mixing different kinds of fibers in your clothes, or just the ones about morality, like honoring one's parents. For Christians, they are important because they describe things like God's creation of the world (Genesis 1), humanity's fall from a state of innocence (Genesis 2), the beginning of God's relationship with human beings (Genesis), and the moral code that forms the foundation of proper living (the Ten Commandments, Exodus 20).

A friend asked recently if I had achieved any big insights so far in my reading. My honest first reaction was, "Well, no. Not really." And I didn't decide to do this in order to discover things or change my worldview; I'm doing it because it's interesting, and because I think it's important for a Christian to do it if he or she can.

But my honest first reaction was also an unconsidered one. I have had a couple insights.

First, on the down side: since I've never read these books whole, nor in a sustained fashion, this is the first time I've ever been directly exposed to the way they depict God for an extended period. And while I've always known that the God of the Hebrew Bible, and these books in particular, is often brutal and capricious, knowing that is different than seeing it, over and over in some places.  This hasn't led to any big epiphanies, but it does confirm my belief that the Bible cannot be an infallible record or be wholly relied upon. I feel strongly that God's capriciousness and brutality in these books cannot be reconciled with God's being a loving parent, concerned with the well-being of God's creation. I believe that the authors of these books confused the history of their ancestors' often violent activity with the will of the God that they worshiped. It has also led me to sympathize, though not agree, with various heretical groups who have tried to reconcile the problem in even more drastic ways, like claiming that the God of the Hebrew Bible is a separate, lower deity than the God of the Christian New Testament (AKA Marcionism).

On the up side, though, my reading so far has yielded lots of little insights, small details to ponder over and wonder at. And I have enjoyed these immensely. I particularly enjoy trying to connect what I'm reading with what I already know about later parts of the Bible. For example: when I read in Leviticus about things that caused ritual impurity or "unclean"-ness, I came across a passage (Leviticus 15:25-27) describing what happens if someone has a constant hemorrhage that never goes away (they are "unclean," as is anyone who touches them and everything they sit or lie on, which is pretty intense) and I realized that the life of the woman with this problem in the gospels (Mark 5:25-34, Matthew 9:20-23, Luke 8:43-48) was way tougher and lonelier than I had previously understood. You basically couldn't be with her and be an acceptable part of society. I also wondered if there's a connection between the ceremony for refusing to perform levirate marriage (the woman takes the man out in public, takes off his sandal, and spits on him [Deuteronomy 25:5-10]) to the ceremony performed by Boaz when he wants to marry his relative's widow, Ruth (Boaz asks Ruth's less-distant relative if he will marry her, and then takes his sandal as confirmation that he doesn't want to [Ruth 4]). There's tons of this stuff, and I love thinking about it and trying to make connections. 

The other big up side is that, like I talked about a little last week, much of this book is undeniably beautiful. And even the parts that are not have started to seem lovely, or at least familiar and interesting. By the time I hit Deuteronomy, I had gotten so into the rhythm of reading Biblical laws that I was actually enjoying reading the law parts of Deuteronomy, which are not only interesting in themselves, but are in fact often a revision or updating of laws earlier in the Bible. Deuteronomy changes the laws in a couple of ways, but the coolest way is that it makes an explicit place in the law for widows, orphans, the poor, and foreigners, with a thoroughness that is totally unlike law codes in other Biblical books. 

So the project proceeds apace, for good or for ill. Mostly, it's been good.

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*Okay, not really; it's from Πεντατευχος (penta + teuchos), the Greek word for five plus the word for tool, vessel, or book.

Photo 1 source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lawriecate/3370859327/
Photo 2 source: www.flickr.com/photos/leventlecri/2296855678/

Reading the Bible—All of It

Part of a series on Reading the Whole Bible.

 
Books of Moses, bringing stone news,
Wet in the water, weeping in the sun,
Books of Moses, got some splinters, didn't you?
Books of Moses, brought me right here back to you.
—"Books of Moses," Tom Waits

On January 1st, 2013, I was dispiritingly unable to announce any New Year's resolutions to rival last year's set. While some might argue that my life just doesn't need any major improvements, I think the reality is that the kind of improving it needs is in places that New Year's resolutions cannot readily or easily address: be more productive, worry about the future less, get out and have adventures more often. Having a structure ("write an entry every Friday") was what made the resolution to start this blog successful, and having a well-defined goal ("don't eat meat, ever") was what made vegetarianism possible. With no structure or goal, resolutions fail fast: e.g., my resolution a couple years ago to get in shape, which ended after I discovered that jogging in public is painful (my knees/feet aren't built for it) and embarrassing (my running shorts are too large and have to be periodically pulled up, or just held in place with one hand), and a lack of a defined end goal or rigid schedule made it all the easier to quit, quickly.

It was not till several days after New Year's 2013 that I came up with my resolution. Instead of trying to improve the way I live my life, I've decided to set a single, straightforward goal: read the Bible. All of it.

I fielded the question "Have you read the whole Bible?" a number of times in 2012, and it was frustrating to be a person who takes his faith seriously and still has to answer "no." Especially as a Protestant, a member of the portion of the Church that views the Bible as the only resource necessary for salvation and holiness, I feel like something of a sham for never having even glanced at whole books (I'm looking at you, Obadiah) and never having read significant portions of certain key works (like Isaiah). It's also a been little embarrassing to have a running argument with a fundamentalist friend about our divergent views of Scripture without, you know, having actually looked at all of it.

More than this frustration and embarrassment, though, I'm motivated by the kind of curiosity that David Plotz describes at the beginning of his "Blogging the Bible" series; speaking of the (surprising, unsettling) story of Dinah and Shechem, Plotz writes: "If this story was strutting cheerfully through the back half of Genesis, what else had I forgotten or never learned?" (I'll admit I'm also compelled by his conclusion: absolutely everybody, religious or not, should read the Bible, for cultural and intellectual reasons.) I wish I could say I was reading for pure spiritual edification, but while I do care about that, it is not chief among my reasons (to be honest: I don't expect to be spiritually edified by large swathes of it).

The next step after choosing to read the whole Bible was choosing which one to read. There are lots of translations out there; the King James Version, while beautiful and influential, is also strange enough (and, academically/critically speaking, out-of-date enough) that I set it aside. There are any number of more modern translations, but I chose the NRSV as a reputable translation with a focus on word-for-word accuracy, rather than general sense translation.

Also, I knew I would need something extra to help me along in reading the Bible cover to cover. I find the Bible fascinating in short chunks, but without some more modern prose alongside to engage my interest and direct my understanding, I tend to get tired fast. (This is why I've had great success at reading, say, Robert Alter's Genesis translation and commentary, but I've never made it all the way through Hebrews.) So I wanted a study Bible, something like the Oxford Annotated Bible that was a required text for many students in college. But I'm also planning on carrying it around with me all over, so I wanted something more portable.

A truly portable study Bible turned out to be a mythical beast, but I found a close enough approximation in the Access Bible, which my father dug up (and, very helpfully, purchased for me—thanks, Dad!) after I asked him for help. It's a bit on the heavy side, but it's more compact than any other study Bible I've come across (about the size of a hymnal, but thicker), and a paperback to boot. The only flaw I've spotted so far is a exceedingly poor font choice for certain sub-headings, but at least it's not Papyrus.

A couple of things will make this particular resolution to read the Bible unusual. First, I'm planning on reading the Apocrypha, the books that Protestants do not think of as part of the Bible, but that other branches of the Church do. I'm expecting this to be the most fun part, actually, since I have next to no experience with these books. The other thing: I'm not following a schedule. There are lots of scheduled whole-Bible reading experiences out there; the most popular ones last a year. I have no intention of spending a whole year reading a book, not (mainly) because I think I'm too awesome a reader to take that long, but because I know at that rate that I will certainly get off schedule sometime and give up in despair. In fact, any schedule is going to make me more likely to give up, because I hate having to catch up on reading and tend to not do it (see: my core classes in college). So far, with no schedule, I'm 31 pages in—and still reading the introduction.

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Photo sources:
Photo 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wonderlane/27701688/
Photo 2: http://www.flickr.com/photos/renaud-camus/6242447085/