simont | Recently I have been reading

Recently I have been reading

Over the last couple of weeks, I did something I've been meaning to get round to for a while now: I sat down and read the Bible from end to end.

Not for religious reasons, I hasten to assure you; anyone who was expecting to be able to count on me as a staunch atheist can still safely do so. A minor objective was to find out a bit more about what the Christians I know believe, but primarily my motivation was literary: lots of modern writing refers or alludes to the Bible, and I've often not been entirely sure what the explicit references are talking about, and have probably missed quite a few of the subtle allusions.

So after an unusually large number of Bible references happened to go over my head during a period of three or four days the other week, I decided enough was enough and set out to actually read the thing. I allowed myself to skim-read if it got boring (the censuses, the genealogies, the endless indistinguishable psalms and proverbs and prophecies, the extensive theology and moralising in the New Testament etc), but I wanted to at least get from one end of the book to the other and be left with an understanding of its overall structure and plot.

My favourite bit of the whole book, I think, was the second half of 1 Samuel, describing the conflict between Saul and David. This is because it had actual dramatic tension and plot: Saul enthroned with access to all the resources of a king, David on the run and in hiding but with God on his side. Of course I knew how it was going to end already, and of course the writing style was standard Bible-issue stilted awkwardness, but nonetheless I found it a more gripping read than any of the rest of the book.

The most boring bit, on the other hand, would have to have been 2 Kings. That might seem like an odd choice given the wide range of completely unreadably boring bits I listed a few paragraphs ago, but the thing about all those bits is that they're clearly boring, so you can identify them in advance and skip lightly over them. 2 Kings, however, presented itself as a narrative, and so I didn't dare skip any of it because there was always the chance that something interesting and important might happen and I'd miss it; but in fact it was completely full of endless copies of the same cardboard-cutout king doing the same bad things, and because I couldn't skim it I had to suffer through them all in full.

(Some friends of mine had a phrase for that at school, I recall: ‘killer boring’, describing things that are not only boring but that you have to keep concentrating on and can't just ignore. Boredom you can't run away from, that you have to keep staring into until it strips your soul and destroys your will to live. Boredom by comparison to which merely being sent to sleep would be outright pleasant.)

The other thing that struck me as odd about the Bible was, again oddly for such a large and verbose book, its occasionally surprising brevity.

There are of course quite a few really famous Bible stories which I already knew in outline, and could have summed up the story in a few sentences. In several of these cases, the actual version of the story in the Bible turned out to be barely any longer than my summary would have been: the things that ‘everybody knows’ about the story were in fact the whole story.

Take the Tower of Babel, for example: some people tried to build a tower reaching to the heavens, and God thwarted them by confusing their language so they could no longer understand each other. I imagine everybody who knows anything about the Tower of Babel (I mean, beyond just having heard the name) knows that much. So when I got to Genesis 11 and found the actual story, I was naïvely expecting that basic outline to be fleshed out into lots more text: character development, dramatic tension, backplot and motivation, perhaps how they tried very hard to carry on using only sign language but couldn't get the details right so the rest of the tower kept falling down … But in fact, the entire incident takes place in about eight verses, in very little detail more than I gave in my initial summary above.

I mean. Suppose you hadn't read Lord of the Rings, and someone told you that Gandalf confronted a Balrog on a bridge and both of them fell into the abyss. You would naturally expect that that sentence was probably a very potted summary, and that in the real text there would be paragraphs if not pages describing what a Balrog was, why they were fighting, how the confrontation occurred, how both of them managed to fall in instead of just the loser as you might expect, what everybody else watching thought of this, etc. And, of course, you'd be right. But if that same incident came up in the Bible, it would probably actually read something along the lines of ‘19 Then Gandalf confronted the Balrog on the bridge. 20 And both of them fell into the abyss.’ (2 Fellowship 5:19-20) And I think that if your imagination had been tickled by the potted summary and you'd decided to read the real thing, you might reasonably be quite disappointed to find that that was all there was to it.

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I read the bible a few years ago too - as a Christian I felt that actually I really ought to have a better idea of what I believed than just what I heard at church.

What I realised mainly was that a lot of the OT stuff was based on oral tradition. That's why there are two versions of the creation story in the first couple of pages. One is a quick and basic, one is more detailed. I think that originally there was probably a longer story about Babel but it didn't make it to the final narration for some reason - the same way some of the Iliad's bits seem to have something missing.

I'm not sure I'd do it again, mind. The killer boring bits really are killer boring. (And that's a fantastic phrase. I have to minute meetings full of KB.)

Presumably if you were reading as a Christian then that meant you might have had reason to actually pay attention to all Paul's waffling in the epistles? I don't think I envy you that; that was definitely one of the bits I was relieved to be able to skip over.

Yes, I can't see myself sitting down for a leisurely reread either. To help avoid the need, I took notes as I went through, in the hope that they'd contain most of the things I might reasonably want to remember later. (Though even if those notes fail me I don't imagine I should have to reread the whole thing; it ought to be just a case of finding a particular passage and rereading that.)

Ah, now, a lot of his waffle I got to hear in church, so I felt okay about skimming. Also, a lot of what he wrote annoyed me beyond belief, so again, skimming.

> oral tradition

Yes. Also, I think, oral tradition which considered itself to be recounting true history. If all you know is that there was a Balrog and it fell off a bridge then that's all you put in a history. Dramatic narrative is a different genre altogether (and one which was way less developed three or four thousand years ago than it is now).

Perhaps

"There was a Balrog. It was ungodly. Therefore God smote it and it fell off a bridge, and Gandalf laughed. So perish all the rest of you unbelieving scum."

I am also a Christian.

And I happen to believe that the descriptions by the Hebrews of the God of the Old Testament, especially in Exodus, Chronicles and Kings, describe a *complete gibbering psychopath*.

"The Israelites are best, let's kill everyone else 'cos God said so." "Unclean? Stoning for you." *thud*.

I am not saying anything about God here - just about the OT descriptions of Him/Her/It.

Oh, my, yes. Not a god to get on the wrong side of, that one.

LORD SMASH!

One thing I particularly noticed when moving from OT to NT was that the concepts of heaven and hell were new in the NT. That is, they'd been mentioned once or twice in the OT, but only in passing; I suspect they were mostly seen as philosophical abstractions. They certainly didn't seem to be used as carrots or sticks very much.

So I suspect this explains why the OT God kept cursing people's descendants unto the fourth generation, or elevating three generations of someone's sons to the kingship despite them being manifestly unsuited for the job: if the guy at the head of the family tree does something sufficiently good or bad that his own life isn't long enough to reward or punish him in, the only thing you can do to increase the reward/punishment is to apply it to his children and his children's children, which it's assumed he will care about because people generally do. But then it kept falling down when the punished children were good and didn't deserve that sort of treatment, or the rewarded children turned into nasty spoiled brats; hence the NT cleverly invented the afterlife, so that it could redirect the entire punishment/reward to the person who actually did the thing, and treat their children as separate individuals with their own score sheets.

In conversation with a Jewish friend about the idea of Jewish tradition and especially the Talmud, we came up with this analogy: people think of it as a tarball, but it's not, it's source control.

I had never thought of this idea, neither has it come up in my theology class as a possbility. However, I think next time the disucssion on cursing one or more generations comes into play I'll see what others think. I think this is a fab concept though :-)

"What I realised mainly was that a lot of the OT stuff was based on oral tradition. That's why there are two versions of the creation story in the first couple of pages. One is a quick and basic, one is more detailed."

Are you kidding me? They are two completely different stories with different orders of how events progressed. The two origin stories being so radically different from each other should be the first clue to anyone that the bible is bullshit.

> ‘killer boring’

Ah yes, waiting for an hourly bus at a request stop on a blind corner. You can't let your guard down for a moment - and a moment sometimes turns into 90 minutes.

> surprising brevity

[I've not read the Bible but] I've seen this in The Odyssey, too. You know the island of the Lotus Eaters, where the inhabitants sit around, eating lotus and descending into pharmacoepeial reveries? Homer covers the whole of that stop of the voyage in about as many lines as this. Some of these tiny stories have the power to unpack in a similar way in lots of people's heads, into a much richer scene.

I think this is true of a lot of stories written at that time. Big Greek Epics are Dull As Ditchwater to me, though maybe chapters after the first two are completely gripping and I just never read far enough.

I've never tried reading the real Big Greek Epics. I was always satisfied with Tony Robinson's rendition of them as "Odysseus: The Greatest Hero Of Them All", which was one of my favourite books when I was a kid :-)

(Come to think of it, it's one of the few of my childhood favourites which I didn't subsequently manage to liberate from my parents' bookshelves. I wonder if my sister got it instead.)

I managed to end up with The Good Housekeeping Cook Book a.k.a. Want to cook something? It's in here somewhere*. Gutted, as it were, not that my brother was going to use it. My mother doesn't appear to have noticed it's gone. Maybe she had a backup copy...

*with the possible exceptions of sheep's eyes, and brains on toast

Robert Graves' book of Greek myths is quite entertaining and composed of largely digestible chunks, and includes explanations of such mysteries as why Athenians have “absurdly small bottoms”. To what extent it corresponds to the stories the ancient Greeks themselves old, I wouldn't like to say, however, but it's not like it'd be the first time myths got changed in the retelling.

I read quite a lot of the Bible when I was a kid, largely as a result of mandatory Christian-centric religious education.

Having read this superb and fascinating book, I keep meaning to re-read it more thoroughly with new eyes.

One thing I found especially fascinating was the slow development of the concept of monotheism: the Jews first combined the Creator, their tribal god and animistic beliefs into a single god and believed him to have stated "thou shalt have no other gods before me". Only later did they refine this henotheistic position into a strictly monotheistic view that there were no other gods.

And note the different names for God - Adonai, ha-Shem, "!Baal", El - which all come from different bits of other gods. Canaanite, Phoenician and Egyptian religion all had influences.

At one point Yahweh was seen as a god of the hills who had little influence on the plains...

Many Christians haven't actually read it through like that, or ever read most of it. It brings a different perspective. And what many people think a story is sometimes actually has more information than the actual story.

Reading the Bible cover-to-cover is a brave and noble thing to do but does, I think, miss the point slightly; that the Bible is a collection of many different books and stories, made for different reasons, and addressed to different audiences. I wouldn't expect to grasp "the plot" of the whole thing like that.

Aldabra's point about oral history is well made. In skipping the endless indistinguishable psalms you probably missed some of the "best" output of the time (modulo translation).

I do like "(2 Fellowship 5:19-20)" though. :-)

Are you going to read the apocrypha next?

You say that, but there is an overall plot, at least in the OT. Almost everything from Genesis to 2 Kings inclusive at least purports to be a single continuous history; each book picks up pretty much where the previous one left off and refers back to some of the same characters, and there's plot continuity. The later bits of the OT are more scattered, and some of them aren't really localised in the chronology at all, but it all basically fits together.

I didn't quite skip the psalms; I just skimmed over them very fast and only stopped when I saw a turn of phrase I thought I recognised, in order to say "aha, that's where that came from". Nice though it would have been if I could have read them closely enough that I'd recognise a reference to a previously unfamiliar psalm if I saw it in future, I just don't think I'd have had that kind of staying power.

The apocrypha are of limited interest to me, I think, since my primary aim was to have some knowledge of the Bible as context for other literature, and I imagine other literature would refer to the apocrypha rather less often than to the canon. I might have a go at some point, but right now I'm having a rest and reading more legible stuff :-)

Apocrypha is generally more fun. Lots more interesting narrative, for starters.

Anyway, most Christians don't believe in 'the Bible'. They believe in 'the Bible as moderated through years of tradition and wossname'. And as you know, because of that key word 'tradition' you can use the Bible as a starting point for a fairly sensible philosophy of life and living, or you can use it to justify your totally barking daftness of evil.

And yes, The Epistles are terribly important to christians. Just also mostly barking and bloody annoying.

I do like "(2 Fellowship 5:19-20)" though. :-)

Thanks; I was quite pleased with that bit too. Although it's only just occurred to me that actually if I'd picked a different example from LotR I could have had the fictitious Bible book be "2 Towers", so now I'm kicking myself...

Actually, (1) "Fellowship" sounds much more Biblical than "Towers" and (2) it would have to be "2 Two Towers" rather than just "2 Towers", which would sound awful. So I think you did just fine :-).

I've got the OUP King James with commentary and Apocrypha; the former is quite helpful. I don't know about the latter because I'm currently rape-and-murdered [1] out somewhere in the OT. (I have read the thing cover to cover before.)

Beyond the obvious observation that God's a monster, it does leave me with the question of how any intelligent person can possibly believe in this rubbish. I mean, that's always a bit of a mystery, but reading the Bible does emphasise how utterly ridiculous the whole business is...

[1] And lists-of-stuff-ed. When I am a god there will be things like "Appendix A: Tabernacle specification".

(2 Fellowship 5:19-20)

*rolling about laughing*

I think I now have (6 Bakery 1:7-12) type references for my cooking...

Thanks :-) But as I just said above, though, I'm kicking myself for neglecting to arrange that to be a reference to "2 Towers"...

I think the best structural-parody-of-the-Bible I've ever seen would have to be the Book of Nome in the Truckers trilogy (or "Bromeliad", as I think it ended up being called); its book titles are just inspired.

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Recently I have been reading

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Genesis

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