Blessed is he that readeth (post-John intermission)

So it took me eleven weeks to get through John, and I'm not sure where to go next. While Acts seems pretty obvious, there is also the fact that I never finished 2Samuel way back when I was in the Old Testament. (I also never got past Exodus 21 or so in the books of Moses, which I should some day bite the bullet and just go through it all.)

I don't know if anyone is reading this in real time as I post, but if you are, suggestions of where to go next would be welcomed. Actually, even if you're reading this somehow long after I posted it, I'd still welcome suggestions as to what scripture would be most interesting to cover. I'm probably going to continue to skip around.

A declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us (Intro to Luke)

I was thinking that I wasn't really satisfied with the way my coverage of the book of Mark ended up. The thing is, it's been my policy in general that when I've covered a topic, rather than going over it again, I prefer to link back to the old post where I covered it in the first place. In general, that's not a bad way of doing things. Except...

When you get to the gospels, you're dealing with essentially the same story told four times over. Yeah, each of the four gospels has its own unique features, but there's a lot of overlap. As a result of that overlap, when I worked my way through the book of Mark (which doesn't have a lot that Matthew doesn't) I ended up having post after post of "I already covered this, let me give a link..." To some extent, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but in another way, it made for rather poor reading.

I've decided that I don't want to do that again, so when I go through the book of Luke (and John as well), I'm going to treat everything as though I'm explaining it for the first time. I just think it will make the posts better, as well as the fact that I assume the majority of my readers are coming here from the SAB, and if they're looking for anything, they want simple answers, not links shunting them off to a variety of other places.

That being said, I'm not going to redo the sections I've already done, so let me just give links to:

John the son of Zacharias (Luke 1:1-25)

But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. (Luke 1:26-80)

Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son (Luke 2:1-20)

All things must be fulfilled which were written in the law (Luke 2:21-52)

Do ye think that the scripture saith in vain?

This post is going to be a bit of a departure from what I'm usually writing in here, but since I haven't written anything for quite some time, posting at all seems to go against the current trend, I suppose.

Earlier today, I received a comment on an old post, and I responded to it as I just about always try to do. While I was responding, though, as I also often do, I looked through previous comments on the same post. I came across a comment from good ol' Anonymous (back in those days, Anonymous had time to read religious blogs, because he wasn't so busy trying to defend Julian Assange and take down the capitalist system), a comment I had responded to with a question that never got answered. Anonymous said:

The problem with the bible is that different people have different beliefs about what it says.

To this I made the following reply:

Is that a problem with the Bible, or a problem with us? I don't ask that question rhetorically, either; I'm curious what you think about it. Isn't it a fact of life in the way language, intelligence, and communication work that the transfer of information between two beings is always limited? Sure, some people have insisted that a book written by God should transcend this tendancy (and maybe you yourself are trying to assert that position), but how do we know this is so?

No reply was forthcoming, but as I said, I was really quite curious as to people's opinions on the matter. As a Christian, I of course believe that God is perfect, and as a perfect being, He would have made the Bible exactly as it needed to be. That being said, can we say that the Bible is exactly as it needed to be?

Now it may depend on what you believe the Bible needs to be, of course. If you think the Bible should be completely without factual error in content or technical error in reproduction, you're probably going to have a hard time showing that the Bible fits the bill. If you believe that the Bible was a document that spoke in an important moral and metaphorical fashion to the ancient Israelites, you'll find it easy to show the Bible fits that niche. I'm pretty sure that most people who believe that the Bible has value at all fall somewhere in between these two extremes. But if the Bible doesn't fit your expectation for a divinely-inspired book, do you change your mind about the Bible's worth, or do you reexamine your expectations? (And it's important to note that neither of these is necessarily wrong; in science, when scientists find data that doesn't fit the prevailing theory, they are probably more likely to revise the theory than assume the theory is garbage.)

The second point that I'm going to try to emphasize--and then stop writing before I go too far in answering the question rather than just asking it openly--is that I believe there is something in the nature of communication itself that makes it impossible to communicate abstract concepts perfectly. If this is true, then since most of what the Bible has to teach us is largely abstract in nature, perhaps it can't be perfect.

Here's a story that may not be necessary in order to convey the concept I'm trying to explain; I read this as a logic puzzle many many years ago. So there's this army that wants to go and invade a town that lies on the other side of a valley. They send a scout ahead to observe the town and message back to the army when the town appears to be entirely asleep. Since this whole story is taking place a few hundred years ago, the army is not using radios to send signals, but rather they have a code system by which they send messages through waving a torch in particular ways. Now, both the main mass of the army and the scout have been ordered by their king that since they are using this form of communication, they are not to proceed with the raid until they are sure all messages between the scout and the army are verified received by the other party. Here's the trouble: When the scout realizes the timing is right, he goes out into the open on his side of the valley and sends the signal for, "Attack now." Needing to verify this message, a communications officer on the other side sends the signal "Message received." Can the attack proceed? No, because the scout has just been sent a message, that message being, of course, "Message received." Since this is a message, the scout must signal back, "Message received." Ready to attack? Nope, the army needs to send a confirmation of receipt of the scout's second message. If the army and the scout obey the order of the king to the letter, the attack will never happen and the two parties will spend the whole night standing on either side of the valley waving their torches until they burn out.

My take from this story? Communication of complete and fully-understood ideas is, in some ways, absolutely impossible. My question restated? What does the nature of communication between imperfect people and a (supposedly) perfect God through the Bible say about God, the Bible, and the way we perceive Him and/or it (whether He exists or not)?

Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together (Dead Sea scrolls)

My birthday occurred not too long ago, and while some people in my family claim I'm a difficult person to shop for, I don't think that's necessarily the case. This is based on the fact that everyone that gave me a gift managed to find a really good one, and the one person who picked an item on my Amazon wish list was my sister, who got me Robert Alter's translation of the Torah, and it was she who turned me on to Alter in the first place. She also got me a copy of a book by Douglas Adams (not that Douglas Adams) about how in order to properly appreciate the Bible, you have to see the humor in it. Both excellent books. While I did get great gifts from everyone, I of course prefer to focus on the more Biblically-oriented gifts here, and the gift that I particularly wanted to focus on was the one I finally got to enjoy this weekend: Admission to the San Diego Museum of Natural History's exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

It was exciting to get to see this exhibit, but it was also full of few surprises, many of which highlighted the fact that I have repeatedly admitted: that I'm not an expert on history. I thought the scrolls were discovered in the 1890's and dated from the 3rd century B.C. It turns out they date from the 2nd century B.C. and were discovered in the late 1940's. Other than the dates, I did get the details of the discovery (Bedouin shepherd boy throws rocks into a cave and hears the sound of breaking pottery. He investigates and finds clay pots full of ancient parchment scrolls.) and the creation (A pre-Christian highly devout Jewish community living in an isolated city apparently spent much of their time copying and storing important Biblical, non-Biblical and pseudo-Biblical documents.) of the scrolls.

One of the biggest surprises for me was the size of the scrolls. When I was a child going to synagogue, our Torahs usually were rather large scrolls, say about two feet high or so, printed in nice, large Hebrew block script. I expected to see something similar, but at least among those on display in San Diego, most were tiny little scrolls just a few inches high with tiny writing in an older Hebrew script that I found difficult to read. Other specimens of Hebrew Scripture from the 10th century that were on display with the scrolls were perfectly easy to read, showing that the written form of Hebrew has changed virtually not at all in the last millennium. (Actually, even the script used in the Dead Sea scrolls is only about as different from modern Hebrew writing as modern English writing is different from scripts about 500 years ago.)

One of the things that of course Christians like to stress about the scrolls is that when compared with the Bible of today, the accuracy of transmission through the last 2,000 years is remarkably good. On the other hand however, some Christians might be a bit shocked to find out that it's not 100% accurate. I worry sometimes, no, a lot of the time that when the church is teaching people that the Bible is "perfect", that they don't explain what they mean by that. Clearly if one is to mean anything by saying that the Bible is "perfect", then perfection is a subjective thing. For instance, the last Bible I owned had a printing error in it (that I found, that is; surely it had more than one!) and I expect that if I had the time to go over my current Bible with a fine-toothed comb, I'd find an error or two there as well. Both ancient scribes and modern Bible publishers are very careful, but they at least are not "perfect".

The Dead Sea scrolls contain quite a number of interesting documents of a few categories. I think a lot of people think that the scrolls are a copy of the Bible, but in fact, there are very many copies of various Biblical books represented in the scrolls, portions from the Book of Psalms being most prominent. Most likely, many copies were made of the Psalms to be used as hymnals. In addition to accepted Biblical texts however, there are a number of apocryphal books found among the scrolls. The book of Enoch is actually one of most popular books among the scrolls, which is a book written as though it were penned by Noah's grandfather. The book was however written in Aramaic, which is a much more modern language than Hebrew, and nobody seems to really believe that it's genuine, nor that it should be an official part of the Bible, although it is quoted extensively in the Epistle of Jude. Enoch talks a lot about the Nephilim, and it may be where some of the more extensive theories about Genesis 6 come from.

The scrolls also contain numerous documents not in the least bit Biblical, although most of them have a distinct Biblical flavor to them, including a document about the coming Messiah that Jesus himself quotes in Matthew 11:5. I've never heard that this passage was a quote before, so it may be that this is a newly-found document; I know they're pulling out fragments and reassembling more scrolls all the time. Also on display was a section of the Copper Scroll, a very unusual document that I found quite amusing, as it seems possible if not likely that the contents of the scroll are some sort of elaborate prank. (I don't know why someone would go through so much trouble for a prank, but the idea amuses me.)

Something else that was interesting was the occasional stylistic choice made by a scribe on how to write God's name. As you may or may not know, in Hebrew, God's name is YHVH, written without vowels. Sometimes, even those consonants are considered to be too Holy to write, and in the Dead Sea scrolls, there were a couple interesting documents reflecting this. One document showed a place where the scribe had replaced the letters with "····", just four dots that the reader was left to understand represented "the Name". In another document, God's name was written in Paleo-Hebrew, an even older writing style that had fallen out of use centuries before the people of Qumran made the scrolls.

Anyway, it was a very interesting display, not just because I obviously have an interest in all things Biblical, but also for the fact that these are handwritten documents made by people who have been gone for over 2,000 years. In addition to my spiritual side, it appeals to my interests in archaeology, linguistics, typography and culture. If you get a chance to see it, it's certainly worth the time and money.

They laughed us to scorn (external links)

Once again, here is a post about other people's blogs, and the links that love them. I don't recall whether I ever pointed out that I added a link to Steve Wells' blog, Dwindling In Unbelief. It's pretty good; mostly more of the same stuff he puts on the SAB, but in a looser form. In the comments of his blog, I came across a couple of other blogs that I thought a person who liked my blog might also like. Or you might not, but I liked them.

Actually, the first one that caught my eye was By The Book Comics. Being a person whose two main passions are comic strips and theology, I find that even though you'll guess that I don't share DocMike's views on theology, I immensely enjoyed his format and humor. Sometimes the best way to get a point across to people is to make it funny, and so despite the fact that he doesn't go to the depth of discussing the issues that Wells does...a picture says a thousand words, as they say. Consider each strip a 3,000 word essay on "What Bugged Me About The Bible This Summer". A funny one at that, although not for the easily offended, surely.

The other blog I came across was one called simply Bible Discussions. It's written by a Jason, who identifies hiself as a "Christadelphian". Oddly enough, I've never heard of this denomination before this week, or maybe not so odd, as Wikipedia claims that there are about 50,000 of them worldwide. As a Christadelphian, Jason has some very different ideas as to the nature of some deeper theological issues. However, in reading his comments and a few posts on his blog, I'm struck by similarities in his writing style to mine. It's interesting to see that a person coming from a different point-of-view concerning the Bible could hold some beliefs and views so similar to my own. Anyway, I thought his blog was good, and I for one intend to read it more.

Well, with the addition of these links on my sidebar, I think I am going to take a few others down. Many of the links I have so far are to blogs of a theological nature, but I'm thinking I'd like to link specifically to blogs about the Bible. Those other links will be moved to my other blog. If you know of any other blogs on the Bible that you think are very good, let me know, and I may want to add them.

Notwithstanding I have a few things against thee

I figure I have about four posts to go to get through the end of Exodus 22, and I really hope to finish them before the month is out. My output has slowed down greatly as of late for various reasons, some of which are beyond my control. However, I wanted to take a break to talk once again about my aims for this blog, mostly for my own benefit. (Partially that's because I don't think most readers will care much about this, and partially it's because the greatest portion of my readers come through here from links on the SAB which will probably have no reason to link to this post. Then again, maybe I'll link this in the discussion forum in hopes of feedback; we'll see.)

What I wanted to muse upon is the nature of the categories of notes in the SAB, and the different ways that I feel a need to respond to them in turn. As I touched on in an earlier post, there are some categories like the "Sex" category regarding which there may be differences of opinion that need some meta-discussion. As both Steve Wells and I agree, sex per se is not a bad thing, but it's a charged issue, and the way people approach on both a personal and societal issue are important. I want to address some of the ways that I feel Steve Wells and I may differ on many of these issues.

Anyway, the categories of notes listed for the SAB are: Injustice, Absurdity, Cruelty and Violence, Contradictions, Intolerance, Women, Family Values, Prophecy, Science and History, Sex, Language, Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Good Stuff. Wells feels that these are all important categories, and I agree for the most part. However, I may have a vastly different understanding of the way to approach these issues as a Christian, and I think it's important to articulate this difference.

In starting the blog, my main intent was to offer reflection on the matters of Contradictions, Prophecy and Interpretation. I feel most of the time that those are the most important categories from a logical point of view. If the Bible can be found to be clearly wrong in any area, it would be found in one of these, and logic is the basis for understanding what may or may not be a problem with these categories. Science and History is a close relative, but as I have said time and again, I'm not really an expert in either area, so I may not be able to address many of those particular issues.

The problems I have in trying to deal with the SAB is often in the other categories. The trouble is, all of these things are very subjective to your own world-view. "Injustice?" What makes something just or unjust? "Cruelty and Violence?" What is a clear criterion for something being "cruel"? While violence is generally well-defined, there are many specific cases where people don't see eye to eye, such as the case of capital punishment. Some people think capital punishment of any sort is cruel and violent, while others feel that there is a big difference between, say, a firing squad and lethal injection. And of course capital punishment is a big place where people split sharply on the matter of "injustice", some people feeling that to not have capital punishment would truly be injustice. While I will respond to items marked as "Injustice" or "Cruelty", it's really me pitting my opinion against Wells', and the reader will probably accept whomever has the opinion that fits their own. On the flipside of that, the same goes for "Good Stuff".

"Absurdity" is definitely something in the eye of the beholder. One of the things that I've run across several times in the SAB is the claim that a certain verse is absurd, usually with no explanation. On the one hand, it makes me ask what the point of the label is, but on the other hand, I realize that by nature one usually cannot explain absurdity: either something is absurd to you or not. What can you say?

"Family Values" and "Women" are two categories that seem to me to be titled in a sarcastic manner. Note that "Honour thy father and thy mother..." is not marked with either of these icons, although this is clearly a matter of family values, and is notable in that the mother is specifically mentioned, I think. (The Bible certainly can be sexist at times, and it would not have surprised me if this verse simply had said "father".) The point of these categories is to point out matters pertaining to these two issues where Wells feels the Bible is coming up short. Sometimes I may agree; more often I will disagree, although in such cases, it may simply be a matter of personal opinion once again.

Likewise, "Homosexuality" is an issue that I suspect is mainly used to bring up instances of supposed homophobia in the Bible, although there are certainly more than a few verses quoted that are pertaining to supposed homosexual interaction between characters in the Bible, such as King David and his friend Jonathan, whose relationship many have hypothesized about. In such cases, though, once again little commentary is given, although perhaps it is not so necessary, and only serves to be food for thought? The trouble with dealing with the issue of homosexuality is that there are varying societal norms when you compare ancient Israel, first-century Greco-Roman culture and modern times. A Christian is likely to assume that throughout all times and places, God's standard for sexual morality does not change. Of course, that doesn't mean that even every Christian understands it the same way.

But closely related to the issue of homophobia in our society, (maybe less or at least differently so in Hebrew society) is the issue of "Intolerance", which is a more difficult but vital issue to address. The thing is that yes, the Bible is intolerant. I won't try to argue against that (at least in general), but I will argue that there is a reason for it, and it can be seen to some extent to be a logical approach to building a new monotheistic religion.

In the Old Testament, there is a certain amount of intolerance in the form of God instituting punishments, even up to death, for false worship. While the New Testament is not so bold in that manner, there are frequent reminders that the only way to enter into God's salvation is through Christ. In both cases, the context is that God is trying to create a new understanding among His people of His nature and will. Why does God want pagans cast out of society or put to death in ancient Israel? Because He does not want His people to be led astray into false worship. As it happened, we'll see that even with these safeguards put in place, they often were led astray nonetheless.

God wants people to do the right thing, and as He knows ultimately what is that right thing, He has no need nor desire to do things halfway with the Israelites. The Bible is not about political correctness or tolerance of relative points of view; it's about God. When it comes to God and our dealings with Him, in a spiritual sense there is no room for tolerance, only room for being right.

Remember the former things of old (Revisiting Genesis 1)

It's fascinating to me to find that in thetime that I have been working on this, there has been so much change in the text of the SAB. In going back and cleaning up old entries, I've found that a few things I attempted to refute appear to have been accepted by Steve Wells (although not necessarily solely on my say-so, of course) and edited out.

At the same time, I note that there are new things added that were not there before. Both his project and mine are obviously ever-changing, as repeated readings of the Bible reveal more and more things, both for and against Christian belief.

Anyway, since it was there, I thought I'd go back and take a look at what seem to be new points in Genesis 1.

The SAB has incorporated a page on Gap Theory, which wasn't there when I was covering that chapter, although I mentioned it as a matter of academic interest. It might be fun to read some of those links and learn more about this odd theory; anyone who read my post before and wanted to know more would probably learn a lot from those links, since I really gave all of what little knowlege I had, and I know the theory is far more fleshed out by some others. There is also a reference page for the firmament.

I don't recall the SAB referring to the idea that childbearing is sinful. It's easy enough to address, though; the answer is no. The verse given to suggest otherwise is misrepresented, in my opinion. Yes, the mother had to bring an offering, but that does not necessarily imply that childbearing was a sin; it's just part of a ceremonial cleansing.

I'm sure the question about marijuana wasn't there before, I think I would have remembered. I think that's an interesting interpretation of this verse that falls apart under further scrutiny. Think of all the poisonous plants that exist; surely God did not intend that we eat poison ivy (toxicodendron radicans), right? (Actually, the SAB also discusses that elsewhere.) One possibility here is that at the time of creation, before the fall, every plant was edible, but some became poisonous or otherwise dangerous. Another possibility is the one most people get out of that verse: that humans were originally designed to be vegetarians, and it was not meant that all plants were to be eaten, but that all they were to eat was plants. Now that being said, I will go on the record as saying that all the plants mentioned there (if you didn't click the link, there's more than marijuana in the question) have potential medicinal value, and as such, they are good. I think it's foolish to miss that there is a difference between drug use and drug abuse. I myself have been known to be an abuser of the plant coffea arabica, another plant that naturally produces a drug. The right and wrong of drug use is only partly related to the legality of the matter, I really ought to avoid excessive use, and have done so for quite some time. (Reading up on the matter, it turns out that caffeine is a natural pesticide. Interesting, no?)

Anyway, that was a fun break from discussing Mosaic Law, which hopefully I'll get back to in sooner than a month's time.

But this I confess unto thee (transitional post)

Well, after asking for suggestions as to where I might go with my blog both here and at the SAB discussion board, I only got one real response.

I guess I'm not too surprised, as I didn't expect too many people to be interested enough to chip in even two cents worth. What did surprise me was that numerous people suggested I simply give up the whole thing, as it was a waste of time. Well, I was actually not surprised at that, but surprised at how many people don't see the illogic behind it, at least as I think I do. If indeed the Bible is a document that is so full of problems that a comprehensive reading of it will lead one unmistakeably to see it's nothing but junk, then I'd think someone wanting to convince me out of believing the Bible would want me to keep up the work until I inevitably become Steve Wells' ally in debunking Christianity.

Well, I do think of Steve as my ally, as I said previously, and not just for the reasons I set out before, but because he was the guy who gave me my one and only constructive suggestion. You can go back to the previous post and read it in full if you want, but in summary, he suggested I drop the sort of narrative format I've used up until now and write individual posts on the most difficult issues of the Bible first. I responded that selfishly, I'd like to pace myself, as trying to respond to the hardest stuff all at once would surely be wearying for me, and make me look far more foolish than I'm sure I already do to many reading here.

I am, however, going to take his advice in a partial manner, and switch styles for most of the rest of Exodus through Deuteronomy, focusing smaller posts on individual issues from the law. Hopefully this looser style won't make me get sloppy and skip over more stuff than I did before and have to keep tracking back.

Yet now that I have announced this, I am going to use this post as an occasion to track back, and in the interest of fairness, dig out the issues that I was unable to address fully in the preceding chapters, partially to admit once again that I don't have all the answers, and perhaps to allow somone who might have the answers on those issues to comment. If someone knows of ones I missed, please let me know. Actually, it's getting late, and it's Friday, so I'll add the list on Monday, either editing the post, or putting it in the comments section.

He asked them, saying, Whom say the people that I am?

While it seems that the large majority oif the traffic I receive to this blog is coming through links from the Skeptic's Annotated Bible, and doesn't really care about the "blog-ish" nature of my posts here, there may be some people who are enjoying reading this as a daily offering of opinion on the Bible. I don't know. Either way, I'd like to get back to work on completing a bit more of the Bible, as I've only gone through one and a half books of a much, much larger work.

I haven't posted here in over a month for a number of reasons. I've been busy, and while I've taken some time to post occasionally on my other blogs, I've let this one languish in the midst of my overwhelming time constraints. The other reason has a lot to do with why I've let this one in particular languish: Exodus gets a lot more boring for the most part from here on out, and throughout the rest of the books of Moses, while there is some amount of plot, it's mostly long lists of laws and their related punishments and procedural applications.

Don't get me wrong, if I keep this up, eventually I expect to cover the whole Bible, but as I've said before, I don't feel it's necessary to tackle in a straight linear fashion from beginning to end. After all, most people don't read it that way. Anyway, what I'm thinking is that in order to revitalize this a little, I could switch to another book that was a little more interesting. Judges comes to mind as very jam-packed with action, but it's honestly a very difficult book to address, due to excessive sex and violence throughout the book. Eventually, covering that cook is going to be largely a droning repetition of "The Bible records this, but does not condone it." Ruth is one of my favorite books, but the SAB has virtually nothing to say about it, so it leaves me with little to say if I'm focusing on replying to objections. I considered spicing it up with Song of Solomon, since who doesn't enjoy reading ancient Hebraic erotic poetry? Still, it seems sort of gimmicky.

So, in the end, I'm going to appeal to any readers I may have: PLEASE post comments to give me a good suggestion! What do you think I should do? Jump to the New Testament? (I was considering Matthew, but it seems like I need to maybe hit all four Gospels simultaneously with a harmonization. I don't know.) Do some Psalms or Proverbs? A prophetic book? What might be nice is if Steve Wells would let me know if he has stats on which pages on his site are most popular, and I might start there. I don't know, just give me a suggestion or two so I can feel a bit more enthusiastic about moving forward.

And received in the same year an hundredfold

Partially by coincidence and partially by design, this is the anniversary of the first post of this blog, and the 100th post as well. I suppose I'm happy to hit this milestone, but would have been a bit happier to have had something more like 200 posts right now, but I guess I've been busy this last year.

Thanks to Steve Wells for being good sport about this, and I hope I've been civil enough about it myself, not engaging in unfair attacks on him, and being honest in stating that I don't know the answer to every question that the SAB raises.

Just as the atheist blog I have been occasionally guest-posting on, Goosing the Antithesis, doesn't completely share my values, but has in its mission statement, if you will, something that I can partially agree with ("We attack Christians who claim to monopolize epistemology and values..." I tend to do that as well, believe it or not.) the SAB has something of value in the purpose it serves. To quote from "About the SAB":

Millions of such Bibles are published and distributed each year by believers in their tireless and tiresome effort to propagate their beliefs. Consequently, nearly everyone, whether believer or skeptic, has at least one copy in his or her possession. Among these Bibles will be found many different versions, but all have one thing in common: all are believer- friendly editions that support, promote, and defend the Bible.

The Skeptic's Annotated Bible attempts to remedy this imbalance. It includes the entire text of the King James Version of the Bible, but without the pro-Bible propaganda. Instead, passages are highlighted that are an embarrassment to the Bible-believer, and the parts of the Bible that are never read in any Church, Bible study group, or Sunday School class are emphasized. For it is these passages that test the claims of the Bible-believer. The contradictions and false prophecies show that the Bible is not inerrant; the cruelties, injustices, and insults to women, that it is neither good nor just.

It is my very purpose (other than the already stated one of self-imposed (near-)daily Bible reading) in writing this blog to also remedy such imbalance. While I do not intend to show that the Bible is a bad book that should be disdained, as Wells begins to say in this last paragraph and continues throughout the rest of the page, I think it fosters a healthy, thinking faith to not put one's head in the sand in regards to what is in the Bible. The footnotes in a Bible should focus on both the good and the bad.

In the book of Revelation, John meets with an angel who is holding a book. The Angel offers the book to John, and oddly enough, tells him to eat it.

And I took the little book out of the angel's hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter. (Revelation 10:10)

Now, the "book" spoken of here (probably a scroll, actually) is probably not actually the Bible, but it's always seemed to me to be very appropriate symbolism. To the Christian, the Bible should be sweet in your mouth. Once you really start to dig in, though, and you think you've really digested it, if it doesn't give you a bit of indigestion, maybe you missed something.

Unlike Wells, who thinks there is more bad than good in the Bible, I think there is more good. Yet, I cannot honestly say that there is no bad. Sometimes, it's that bad that we really need to focus on in order to understand the deep things God is trying to tell us. Is it really better to have a gang of perverts rape your virgin daughters than your houseguests? Is it really a good thing that some young men were mauled by bears for taunting a prophet? Should believers respond to questionable religious activity with physical violence, and then respond to capital crimes with complete forgiveness? There are definitely many, many questions that we should be asking ourselves about this volume that forms the structure of our faith. If we truly have faith, then we should expect to find answers.

I am hoping to find ways to make this blog a bit more accessible. I've noticed that some blog websites have tools that allow you to organize and index things within your blog to make it easier to find topics from the archives. While some of those tools that I think I would like to have are not available here as far as I know, I am trying to come up with something of my own. one thing I do have is a complete list of all posts here (site no longer available). That unfortunately is not set to automatically update, so it may not always be up-to date. On the other hand, most of the recent posts should always be available on the sidebar. It may not matter, though, as the great majority of the traffic I receive seems to come through the SAB itself, from links on appropriate pages.

Thanks for reading, all three or so of my devoted fans.

He sent the people away (Look, links!)

I haven't added these links lately, but it occurs to me that it might be courteous to point out the blogs I've linked to on the sidebar. I wasn't originally going to do that, since I'm not really thinking of this as a blog per se, and I wasn't sure I really even wanted links at all, but what the heck, there are others out there writing interesting stuff, and they're worth checking out.

Actually, what got me thinking about this is that "I Read Leviticus So You Don't Have To" has finally gotten underway. For a while, there was only an introductory post, and I thought it was a project being left by the wayside, but now there are many good posts with some great writing. Furthermore, since Bob's been linking people back to me, I figure I ought to return the favor. I will warn you all that it's not good reading for the easily offended. (You can read his disclaimer.)

"A Messy Faith" is one among many blogs of a friend of mine who is a professional writer. Although his posting is probably as sporadic as mine, he's a much better writer, and his blog touches a lot on the moments of the Christian life where we remember that following God not only doesn't make life easier, but sometimes makes it harder, it seems. Actually, he's apparently recently renamed his blog to "The Recovering Christian" so I suppose I should update my link.

"Stumbling to Bethlehem" is the blog of my friend Victoria, who doesn't need my promotion of her blog, since it's a very popular one. She's just much more of an interesting person than I am, no doubt, and also posts regularly, completely unlike me. A very spiritual woman that I have intense respect for, she's a person whose blog you don't want to miss if you're really into blogs about Christianity, cat ownership, or the Atkins diet.

I don't personally know the writer of "Goosing the Antithesis", and in the very few online interactions I've had with him, he's been a real jerk, to be honest. Still, I found some value in linking to a blog that might likely deal with similar subjects to my own from a very different perspective. Of course, it's been a while since I read stuff over there, and they've changed their description to start, "We attack Christians..." so I'd suggest one tread lightly. If you read the whole description, I'm taking that a bit out of context, though, and really, the writers do have some good insights. I'd spend a lot more time reading their stuff if I had the time for it.

Oh, yeah, there's also "Running from Elevators" which is my second blog. I post there perhaps even less frequently than here, but the content is a bit more free-ranging, so it could be more interesting, or maybe mind-numbingly boring, I don't know.

Have a great weekend!

The beginning of wisdom

I've been having a hard time getting back to my blog lately, partly because of my current workload and personal issues, but frankly, there is something else that's been keeping me from blogging lately.

All this reading and rereading of the notes in the SAB is making me start to have some serious doubts and questions. Maybe I need some time to consider more of the content of that site before continuing on this project much farther.

Just because I'm saying this doesn't mean that I have given up the faith. On the contrary, I'm still holding fast to it as best I can, but I have to be honest. Knowing some of the things I know now, I do have to admit logical difficulties. In the meantime, I suppose I'll still continue with my other blog. Never fear, faithful two or three regular readers, in some form, I will carry on. Get yourself some rest this weekend.

And when there was made a great silence...

Sorry, I haven't posted in a while, I was working on Exodus 4, and while the specific issues of that chapter were fairly easy to respond to, there was a more general theological issue that one of the points raised that I thought I ought to address, and it took too long to finish.

Then I was informed that I had an important business trip to take which has been taking up much of my time to get ready for lately. For those unlikely but possible folks who are hanging on my every post, I probably won't be posting again until the beginning of March when things will be settling down.

Three days agone I fell sick (Taking about a week off)

Sorry for few updates this week, I've been sick, overworked, and preparing for a business trip which will also keep me out of this most of next week. (No, I'm not here, but the thought is enticing.) I'd suggest that anyone who on the off chance might actually be missing my ranting might go check out the discussion boards at the SAB; I recently started some discussions here and here.

Nay; but I will verily buy it for the full price (Gen 23)

Deciding to myself that I'd rather not do more than one chapter per post may not have been a good thing when there were bound to be chapters like this one with no notes to reply to. Or maybe it's a good thing that I can have some nice short posts, or at least would if I didn't ramble like this whenever I get a nice short one.

I've got a lot of questions I'd like to ask anyone who's bothering to read this, in hopes that people might actually leave comments. Should I limit myself to a single chapter for ease of organization? Are these posts too long, too short, or just right? Once I finish Genesis, should I just go on to Exodus, or should I skip around a bit? (I am of course not looking forward to Leviticus, as that's a rather tedious book.)

But anyway, there's still a few things I could say about chapter 23, and so I will. As I said somewhere before, Sarah is unusual in the Bible due to what most would consider sexism in being one of only two women whose age is given, and the only woman whose age at death is given. Like all the men whose lifespans are numbered in these pages, she lives a long life, dying at 127. (The original Hebrew does something a bit odd that's not translated by most English translations, actually; a literal translation is something like, "And was the life of Sarah hundred years and twenty years and seven years, the years of the life of Sarah.") I wonder if it might have been extra-tough for Abraham to lose her. It's hard enough for someone to lose a spouse, I'm sure, but as Sarah was his half-sister, and he was ten years older than her, he probably knew her for her entire life.

In the midst of his mourning, Abraham goes to some nearby people and asks them to give him some land where he can bury Sarah. They tell him that he can just ask and anyone would be willing to sell some land to him, so he asks this guy Ephron. Now it gets a little weird, because Ephron at first says he'll just give the land to Abraham, but Abraham insists on paying a full price. So Ephron, shortly after saying he'll give it as a gift, tells Abraham the price is four hundred shekels. This whole exchange is very odd. Abraham tells Ephron that all he wants is "the cave...which is in the end of his field" indicating that he's not looking for land, and that there is no reason for him to even need part of the field to walk through, since the cave is at the end of the field. Ephron then insists that Abraham take the whole field, and asks an incredibly exorbitant price for it. (Jeremiah bought a field for less than twenty shekels.) So Abraham's getting ripped off, but in a strangely roundabout manner.

Something about history that my own Bible notes but the SAB does not is that fact that a "shekel" is commonly a kind of coin used in the Middle East in ancient times, but coinage wasn't invented for hundreds of years later. In this context, though, it seems pretty clear that the term is being used as a measurement of weight. There are a lot of terms in the Bible of which people have questioned the historical authenticity, but often they're just referring to another similar concept.

See you tomorrow for a somewhat more exciting chapter...

And he spake three thousand proverbs (A personal aside)

Just out of curiosity, I'm hoping to get some feedback not so much on the content of the posts (which I hope people are giving anyway if they have thoughts on it) but on my own personal writing style. I know I have a tendency to get a little too relaxed in my writing which leads to run-on sentences and general verbosity. So far, I haven't been editing my work for anything but spelling, but perhaps it might serve the purpose of clarity if I tightened things up a bit?

As I said, feedback would be nice, and I can even take brutal criticism so long as it's both honest and constructive. (Did anyone but me actually notice that the last paragraph of the August 31st post was one huge sentence? Whether you noticed it or not, did it make it difficult to read?)

They shall be called the children of God (Gen 3 and beyond)

I suppose everyone has their favorite way to look at theology, their favorite way to envision God, you know. A lot of us use metaphors of things we know here on earth to explain a glimpse of what we understand to be going on in Heaven. Some metaphors work better than others. Some work really well in some particular areas, while others fall short. As I said a couple days ago, my personal favorite metaphor is the parent-child relationship. The Bible in fact calls God the "Father" often, and we are referred to as His "children". Sometimes it's just Israel; sometimes it's the church; sometimes all people. Being a half-Jewish Christian I get to fall in all three categories, but that's just a personal matter.

There are a few things I like about this metaphor. One of them is its flexibility. I once heard a sermon that explained the second coming of Christ in terms of a basketball game, believe it or not. It was actually a good metaphor at the time, but I hardly think basketball is going to work to explain all or even a good portion of what people need to understand about God. On the other hand, the parent-child relationship is very telling. You have small people of varying levels of maturity who are growing and learning constantly who are created by and under the authority of a larger being who is older and wiser and wants to look out for the best interest of the former. Granted, not everyone's relationship with their parents is this way. My father was somewhat emotionally abusive at times, and my stepfather was a high school dropout who knew a lot about car engines and construction work, but not much else. Every parent is less than perfect, but most of us can imagine an ideal parent. I like to imagine God that way, because it makes sense of a lot of things.

The other thing I like about this metaphor is now that I myself am a parent, I often get examples from my own life that help me understand God's view of me through a lens of my own view of my children. It's fascinating that hardly a day goes by that being a parent fails to teach me something about being a child of God.

Case in point: My wife had gone to church one weekend without me several months ago, so I missed the sermon, but it was about one of the great mysteries of Christianity, to both Christians and non-Christians alike. Christians just shrug their shoulders and accept it for the most part, while non-Christians tend to think the idea is ridiculous, and scoff at this basic idea from Christianity. What is it? That the one and only thing that will determine who gets to go to Heaven is whether or not you were kind to God's children in general, and particularly God's Son, Jesus Christ. The pastor had said something like, "Take my word, what God cares about more than anything is how you react to His Son."

Why is that? My wife left the sermon with the question emblazoned across her thoughts, unsure what it all really meant. Then she brought the kids home to where the cats were waiting. We have two cats, you see, a white one and a black one. (I always joked that we got a white and a black one so we could be assured of having nothing that we owned without visible cat hair on it; she didn't think it was so funny.) We'd had these cats for nearly five years before we had kids. The white one was sweet, friendly, gently playful and cuddly, and slept quietly at the foot of the bed at night. The black one hissed at strangers, tried to beat up the other cat, brought in nasty dead and/or alive animals it would find nearby, constantly knocked things off of shelves and tore up furniture, would climb repeatedly into the laps of people that it could tell didn't like it, and at night would climb up to the head of the bed and hit you in the face with its paw until you gave it the attention it wanted. As you might guess, the white one was our favorite, the black one was...tolerated.

Then we had kids. Twin girls. Two little toddler girls wandering around the house looking for things to play with all the time, and their favorite things to play with were the cats, even though it was a long time before they were able to figure out how to catch them. Now the white cat decided it wasn't going to have it, and when the girls get taken out of their cribs in the morning, it runs outside and disappears largely until bedtime. It hisses and scratches if cornered by the girls, and won't go near them if it can help it. The black cat? For some reason, it puts up with them! When they chase it, it stops and lets them catch up. It allows them to carry it around. Occasionally it will sit on their laps and it always lets them pet her. If they pull its tail (which they do a lot), it meows at them to warn them, and if they don't quit, it gives them a little bite that never breaks the skin. The thing is, the cats haven't changed the way they act towards my wife and me, but since we've had kids, the black one has become our favorite. Why? Because of the way it reacts to our kids. Why should God be so different? No, you may not like Christians, but let me tell you, don't make the mistake of being unkind to God's Son, Jesus Christ.

That example was a bit longer than I meant to have it, because it wasn't my main point at this time. My point was how the metaphor works for chapter three and so much more that follows in the rest of the Bible. Why is rebellion against God's law such an issue to God? Why can't we just do as we please? The answer is that it's because God's older, smarter, more powerful, and has our best interests in mind.

My children do this odd thing when we go to the local park. The park is separated from the street by some thick metal poles, not a fence, but a barrier to keep cars out of the park and protect the children. My girls sometimes do this thing where they will go to the first pole in the line, hug it, and actually say to the pole, "I love you!" and then move on to do the same thing all down the line. They're two years old, so while this is an absurd bit of behavior, I pretty much take it in stride, so long as they stay on the park side, and don't walk into the street. Sometimes when I come home from work, I say, "Hi girls, Daddy's home! Can I get a hug?" to which they reply with a shake of the head and run away laughing. It hurts my feelings a bit, you can imagine, that they'd more gladly lavish affection on a metal pole than Daddy sometimes, but I know it's two-year-old silliness, and not that they really like the poles more than me. But what if they were older, and it was a serious thing? What if they were, say, fourteen, and they said, "Dad, we've decided that this pole is our father now, and we're going to live at the park and let it take care of us from now on." That would be highly disturbing. My options would be to drag them back home and punish them in some way or let them stay at the park until they came to their senses and came home hungry, cold, and tired. Neither is a fun option.

God is looking down on earth at all of us, and He's our Father. He created us, He gave us everything we have, He loves us. Some of us, however, are saying no, I don't need you, Dad, I love this other God, and I'm going to let him take care of me; or even, I don't need anyone, I'll take care of myself. God is saying, "There is nobody who loves you more than I do, nobody who knows how to take care of you more than I do, nobody who is more willing to look out for your interests and help you than Me. Why would you want to settle for second-best?"

In chapter three, this is the beginning of this sort of thing. For the first time ever, the idea is planted in someone's head, "What do I need God for? Why should I trust Him?" Throughout history, starting with this story, people have made the wrong choice far too many times, not really knowing what they were rejecting. But some have made a better choice:

John 6
67 Then said Jesus unto the twelve, Will ye also go away?
68 Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2:15-17)

Frankly, if you've heard any apologetics concerning the first few chapters of the book of Genesis, you've probably heard a lot of what I have to say here. Clicking around the Internet in my spare time and looking at a few sites that are like the SAB, responses to the SAB and sites like it, and others still giving rebuttals to responses, I'm frankly finding it a bit depressing. In that middle category where my blog fits, there seem to be largely two types of folks: absolute geniuses and muddled hacks. I don't think I'm one of the former, but I fear it places me in jeopardy of being grouped with the latter. Hopefully my willingness to admit that I am not a genius in this area will lend me a certain air of credibility for my honesty at least. I'm not a theologian, I don't know all the answers, and admittedly very little of what I write here proves anything. The SAB suggests some problems with the Bible, I suggest some explanations for them, and the Bible is neither proven to be infallible nor utterly wrong, but only ambiguous. Even if I were a highly gifted apologist, the reader would still of course decide for themselves how to take the Bible's claims. It's nice to get that off of my chest.

Okay, it's finally time to get to the topic I'd mentioned twice before: the tree of "the knowledge of good and evil." What is it, and why does God put it in the garden? It seems like putting your children in the backyard to play and saying, "By the way, don't jump in the pit with the spikes lining the bottom that I dug in the back corner by the swing set, okay?" You'll find that my favorite metaphor to illustrate the relationship between mankind and God is the relationship between children and their parents, so expect a lot of this now that we're discussing humanity.

The tree itself is never said to be an apple as is often believed, and in fact, we don't know what kind of fruit it was (but see comments for interesting speculation!). The fact that we often think of it as an apple is interesting, as I think it does the job of my first point, which is that there was nothing particularly special about this tree. Apples are good and healthy; there's nothing deadly about them, nor particularly wisdom-imparting. I believe that this tree was a tree much like any other in the garden, with the singular exception that God points it out as special. In other words, the tree has nothing that intrinsically sets it apart, but God uses it as a symbol.

What is it a symbol of? Well, knowledge of good and evil, of course. God creates man with understanding, obviously, since God is talking with him. If man did not understand, God would have known, and made it clearer. God was giving a simple message to man: "Evil" is the things that you're not supposed to do, "good" is the things that you should do. The only thing you need to know about "evil" is don't eat from that tree. It's a completely arbitrary distinction between that tree and the others, but an important one. It's so important that man's very life is claimed to be dependent on it.

So why make that distinction? Why allow man to die over this arbitrary tree? The answer is "free will". God wants man to be devoted to his Creator; to love Him, follow Him, worship Him, have fellowship with Him, etc. But what does it really mean to say, "I want you to love me and do as I tell you, but I won't give you any choice in the matter, okay?" Is it meaningful for me to say that I know my daughter loves me because she's never tried to run away from home, when she's too small to reach the knob on the front door? Now, that doesn't mean that to be loving I have to leave the front door open and see if she walks out it and goes away, but for God being in this special position, He needs to create something that is an option for rebellion.

Free will to be able to choose or reject God is important to God apparently, and as a symbol of this choice, it is simultaneously more than a symbol, thence its name. While the tree indeed has no magical properties, the act of eating from the tree has a profound spiritual aspect to it. Why would a person need to eat from a "tree of the knowledge of good and evil" excepting that they wanted to know good and evil? Is that so wrong? Maybe, after all, what was there to know? As far as I know, conservative theologians are pretty much agreed that before chapter three, eating the fruit itself was the only evil that there was, and man already had been told by God that it was evil, and essentially that everything else was good. There was nothing else to know!

Eating the fruit of the tree embodied a profound statement; the statement of, "God, I know you say that you know best, and you claim to have told me everything I need to know, but I want to find out for myself." To eat from the tree would be to say that God was not trustworthy, and that's a serious accusation, especially at this point in history. Atheists and agnostics have raised time and again very thought-provoking points about the character of the Biblical God such as why He would allow suffering if He is supposedly good. That argument wouldn't hold water in the garden, as there was no suffering, no death, no Bible to write an SAB about, nothing but a man, a woman and some trees.

So was God lying when He said that man would die "in the day that thou eatest thereof"? I'm going to save that one for chapter three.

Then Israel sang this song (Biblical language)

Okay, one last post about context before I really start with specifics. Or at least I hope I'm done; I'll give myself the weekend to ponder the matter.

There are two things to keep in mind about the Bible as you're reading it.

First of all, you have to take each piece of the Bible as it was intended to be read. The Bible is full of different styles of writing, and each style has different purposes. The majority of the Bible is in four styles: historic, epistle, prophecy, and poem. There are others, I think, but this is what I remember off the top of my head. Type one is most of the Old Testament through the book of Esther, and the New Testament Gospels and Acts. Type two is the rest of the NT excluding most of the book of Revelation, and bit of the OT here and there. Type three is most of the OT after Song of Solomon, and the bulk of the Book of Revelation. The last type is scattered about here and there, but most of the books of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon.

Why are these so important to understand? Well, in particular, the last two types largely use symbolic language, and are far less likely to be intended for taking literally. Poems will use a lot of flowery imagery that one is not intended to take literally at all, while prophecy is often filled with bizarre images and personifications of nations and social concepts. When Daniel is seeing multiple-headed beasts rise out of the sea to spew filth from their mouths and cast nations into the bottomless pit or whatever, you're not meant to assume there is a literal interpretation of this probably 99% of the time. It's pictures of concepts with its own coded language that unfortunately isn't always easy to understand. In a poem, if the LORD holds the world in the palm of His hand, we need to know that God doesn't have a real hand, nor is anyone really holding the world; it's also a symbol, but usually one easier to understand, and not so deep in symbolism. I may get back to this subject in a later post, most likely when I get to passages of these types.

Secondly, despite what a few odd people seem to believe, the Bible is not a science textbook. One of the most well-known examples of this is Leviticus 11:13-19. Aha! the skeptic thinks, a bat is not a bird! Actually, it is, and this is why. I'll make mention of it when I go through Genesis 1, but in the system of classifying animals in the Bible, there are just a handful of catgories. If it swims, it's a "fish", regardless of whether it has gills, scales, flippers, etc. If it walks on land, it's either a "beast" or a "creature that creepeth," whatever that's supposed to mean. And of course, if it flies, it's a "bird".

While many of us are likely to scoff at this system of classification, one only need look at our own culture to see that we do the same thing. The most prominent place we do it is in nutrition. When we talk about foods, we classify them in a completely different way than zoologists and botanists do. Tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, peppers, and a number of other food items are fruit, but we don't call them fruit, because we think of fruit as a nutritional classification. I've actually seen diets that classify Coca-cola as a fruit, believe it or not! More specific to the sort of classification listed above, though, is the fact that we have things like "jellyfish" that are called by the name "-fish", but aren't truly fish in the technical sense. Generally, these and other things of a scientific nature are rather arbitrary and determined by culture, so we have to look at the information through the cultural lens of an ancient Hebrew.

Now, to leave a parting thought to contradict these two items in an odd way, I think it's interesting that the closest the Bible comes to being scientific is in the writings of Solomon, which happen to be among the most poetic of the whole book. Go figure. I'm sure I'll end up talking about that if I get to it eventually.

The Alpha and the Omega (The Bible and God)

There are a few things that need to be said in an overview sort of fashion before I dive in.

The mantra of the student of the Bible is "context, context, context..." It's always important to remember to look at the context before criticising any Bible passage. One of the most important contexts is the somewhat obvious and overlooked fact that what you are reading is part of a book that's about "God", and all that entails.

I've heard it said many times that if you can believe Genesis 1:1, the rest is easy. Indeed, one of the most important things to remember about just about anything you read in the Bible is that this is the story of a being supposedly omnipotent, omniscient, and completely good. The question should rarely be, "How could that have happened?" but occasionally, one might be fair in asking, "Why would something else not have happened?" While I don't know that one can effectively second-guess God, I don't think it's wrong to intellectually question things that God does. That's straying from my main point a bit, but it's important because I don't want to fall into the pattern of "God said it, I believe it, that's all there is to it." There is a level where a Christian has to just accept, but if you aren't a believer in the God of the Bible, this will be wholly unsatisfying; and even as a believer, one runs the risk of committing intellectual suicide, which opens the door for many things, most notably heresy.

Getting back on track to the point I wanted to make at the beginning though, there are more than a few moments in the Bible where something absolutely bizarre happens, and a casual unbelieving reader is likely to shake their head in disbelief. One of the biggest ones in the book of Genesis is actually the story of Noah, which I have had various skeptics point out to me as a story that's physically impossible on numerous levels. Frankly, I think Bible believers largely miss the absurdity of the story, and envision it as a simplistic children's Sunday school tale, with a cute little boat having animals standing two by two on the deck with smiling faces--and invariably giraffes with their heads stuck through a window towering over the rest. Well, that's unkind of me, but I do think many people simplify almost to that level, when truthfully the logistics are a nightmare. The thing for the skeptic to remember is that this story is one of the works of God.

The Bible reads a lot like science fiction in a way, especially to the non-believer. It's my view that in a good science fiction story, the reader is often presented with a specific item about which to suspend their disbelief, and after they've done that, the story should flow naturally. In the movie "The Terminator", the item is that a cyborg has been sent to the present from a nasty dystopian future. If you can buy that, the rest of the story makes sense and flows pretty well. In the case of the Bible, whether you believe it as true in real life or not, you have to accept that this is a story about "God", a being as described above. Once you accept (if only for the sake of following the story) that there is a "God", the rest should make sense. Thus when we come to Noah, the answer to most of the problems comes down to, "God did it." Maybe you don't buy that God exists, but you need to accept it as a major part of the context of the story for it all to make sense.