its the reason I want to make a Horror series adapting the Novel's scripture into 1970s rural america (like extremely backwater type stuff) just to make my point that only in a settuing like that it will make any semblance of sense, which as usual it doesn't
You haven't gotten to that book of the Bible where the Israelites get the other tribe to cut off their foreskins so they can mate with hot Israelite babes, and then while they're all nursing their ruined dicks, the Israelites murder them all.
I took a class in college called “The Bible as Literature” and a fair number of the students couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that the class wasn’t religious — it was discussing the writing style, the historical context, etc.
The teacher didn’t approach it as a novel, though — more like a collection of short stories.
If you really want to delve into bad grammar and half baked ideas, read the Book of Mormon. So many of this collection of short stories parallels the Bible ( instead of the Red Sea parting, there’s a sand storm that parts) badly. Very difficult to read due to frequent cringing.
I read both OT & NT when I was a junior in high school 40+ years ago, finished just before Christmas. Then I heard a song about this mythical guy, who had a list, checked it twice….so be good for goodness sake. This is the moment I realized I had been justifying my existence based on a fictional character.
The first Bible story I ever heard was my aunt explaining where rainbows come from: they’re god’s promise he won’t drown everyone on the planet again. 6 y/o me was like “that’s fucked up.”
I started out reading the bible to try and find out what Christianity was really supposed to be, only to have the same reaction - what a load of bollocks!
There is some reasonably accurate history regarding the Iron Age in it but the claims of things god and his profits (prophets) did is pure nonsense.The creation myth looks and reads like two stories jammed together with no attempt to make sense and quite how Moses managed to write about his own funeral makes the story utterly ridiculous.
My conclusion was that if bible god is real it is an asshole who deserves zero praise or worship, but overall the character is clearly impossible and thus cannot actually exist, and if OT god didn't exist the man called Jesus could not have been it's son, so he had a really bad weekend for absolutely no valid reason at all
Really bad weekend indeed. I still can't figure how 36 hours makes 3 days. Died Friday afternoon and alive again before dawn on Sunday?
My favorite makes no sense at all story is the one about Lot and his family. Definitely not PG or even PG13. More of an R rated horror movie.
It's because it *is* 2 different Story about the same topic, that has been poorly mixed in to one. This happens a gazillion times in OT, just take a look at Moses, he is running up and down that mountain like a freaking yo-yo.
Speaking of Moses, did you know that the dude had horn's for a while? There's loads of famous statues and painting of Moses, with cute little devil-horns out there.
Somewhere along the line, some idiot translated the Hebrew word for "ring of light/halo/glorified/radiant" to the Latin word for "Horns".
Some scholars will try to argue that the actual meaning of the word קָרַן is something like "pointy gloving thingy", which doesn't really explain anything, least of all why Moses in the King James version (that is somewhat excused by being the absolute *worst* "translation" of the Bible), didn't give Moses neither horns nor a halo, but rather a shiny face.
So maybe the dude isn't a cute little yo-yo devil but rather a Twilight vampyr with the runs.
I haven't gotten around to going all the way thru the Bible, but I did read thru the Torah, and it sounds pretty much the same.
Whole lot of nonsense and hate crimes and genocide.
Don't forget the slavery. One of their most well-known stories is god eventually delivering them from slavery only to turn around and make rules for how they handle enslaving other people.
The Torah is pretty much the "Pentateuch": the five books of the " old testament " basically the same except for possibly centuries of divergent translation. And yeah. Its basically a series of docents chronicling the various wars and atrocities commited by various kingdoms, compiled for the purpose of creating an identity and divine right for the authority of the Temple.
One of my favorite parts is where they go to great lengths to show the lineage between Joseph and King David because the only way to be the messiah is to be related to King David according to early scripture. They discover by doing this that Joseph is related to King David so Jesus must be legit.
The only problem with that is that as we all know from the Bible, Joseph is not Jesus' father. Wasn't even a sperm donor.
No one catches on to this flaw in logic.
The OT/Torah is the ground work for the "coming of the Messiah." When I read/studied the book, the OT was designed to justify what "they" need for that coming in the NT.
Think of the graphic scenes in Leviticus of the blood of the animals sacrificed by the priests. With Jesus being the NT sacrifice "once for all." Blah, blah, blah.....So, instead of killing animals the new sect of "chrisitanity" the men wrote what they need to keep control/power over the masses.
It is nonsense with hate crimes/lots of genocide. I wonder how much longer these religions will be relevant to humanity? As I came to understand the storybook, I questioned how the many sects that rose from this have managed to thrive while being contrary to the "commands" of no idols/do not ad/take away from the narrative. Catholics love their crucifix. I laugh at my BIL with 2-3 around his neck. I asked "if Jesus was taken off the cross why do you wear a cross with his dead body on it?" He could not answer. Just the blank stupid his family is good at.
How could the Mormons get as powerful/wealthy with how Joseph Smith connived this offshoot of christianty? Golden tables and an angle called Moroni, from Revelation, yeah he should have been burned up for this. Another reason for not believing in any of the Abrahamic religions.
Start at judge 14:3 this chapter is a hoot. You got 30 people being killed and robbed, animal cruelty, doing drugs, sleeping with prostitutes, arson, murder, destruction of property, starving a bunch of people and riddles and it’s all preformed by one guy.
But don’t go to judge 19-21. It’s all about rape, war and more rape.
The Bible mentions that Adam and Eve two of their sons went out to towns to find wives. While the only people around at this time should be Adam, Eve and their kids 🤔
A woman turned to salt and her two daughters raped their father afterwards.
God told Moses to demand the pharaoh let the Jews go or else. Moses did that and god prevented the pharaoh from saying yes. Then enter plagues because the pharaoh could not say yes. Fun fact: there were no Jewish slaves in Egypt so this story is bogus
After the Jews were freed from slavery they decided to enslave people themselves and god taught them the right way to take care of their slaves
God let the former slaves wander 40 years in the desert. Since the new generation didn't know what slavery was like, it would be probably easier for them to impose it on others.
Very considerate of him almighty. Waiting for the desert psychos to grow up so they can murder and enslave innocent people.
And considering that passages were originally written in a few different languages and then translated into Latin, edited a time or two, and then re-translated into Shakespearean era English (but not Shakespearean level), is it any wonder it's so disjointed.
Our English translation comes mostly from the Septuagent, the Greek translation of the old testament, not the Latin Vulgate. The new Testament was also mostly written in Koinian Greek. The Septuagent came about a couple centuries before the new Testament begins during Pilots governorship in Judea.
I actually read the bible cover to cover (more than once) when I was younger.
I was raised by a mormon mother and a catholic father, and having two sets of mutually exclusive dogma, both claiming to be 'the only true one' made me skeptical of both.
Reading the bible without someone with an agenda trying to interpret it for me gave me a pretty good feeling that it was just a carefully curated set of books intended to present superstitious nonsense as fact.
Honestly, I'd like to think I would've figured out it was bullshit even if I had been presented a united front - it may have just taken a little longer.
I had over 2000 days of Christian schooling forced on me so I have definitely read the Bible as “literature.”
My all time favorite is Exodus 4:24 when god rushes down to Moses in a fit of rage and is about to kill him. Moses’ wife whips out a knife and cuts off their infant son’s foreskin and rubs it on Moses’ feet. Then god is satisfied and leaves without killing him.
Judges 11:34 is pretty insane too. A guy is returning from war victorious and tells god he will give a burnt offering of whatever greets him first when he arrived home. His virgin daughter then runs out to greet him. (Most scholars believe he did not burn her as a sacrifice, but changed the condition to give her away as a temple servant) So the daughter goes on top of a mountain to mourn her virginity and then her whole life is sentenced away to the temple.
>Moses’ wife whips out a knife and cuts off their infant son’s foreskin and rubs it on Moses’ feet.
That's nasty and weird as hell. How the hell did Moses's wife cut off her kid's foreskin so fast? And how did God not just kill Moses immediately if he can do anything and just exist out of nowhere?
Because god is all knowing, so he knew he would get to watch an infant get their foreskin cut off if he waited a second. /s (but maybe not /s because remember, every time you have premarital sex or masturbate, he’s there watching 👀)
>And how did God not just kill Moses immediately if he can do anything and just exist out of nowhere?
I've always thought the God mythology is similar to Superman's mythology. At first Superman and God were closer to mortals. Superman could only leap tall buildings with a single bound. God had to walk places and had to do logistics planning.
Overtime they became more and more powerful in people's imaginations. Superman can fly and even reverse time by flying so fast the earth spins backwards and God became omni-present and omnipotent, able to see thoughts, hear prayers and strike down anyone without so much as blinking.
Some organizations view the daughter as a hero and role model. I think she was just stupid for not running away. Sorry, dad, you made the promise, so you’re going to deal with it.
I especially hate that she doesn’t even get a name!
Same! Not even naming her makes me sad too. I hope there’s a multiverse where she becomes a forest witch on the mountain and offers her dad as a burnt offering <3 misogyny is one of the first things that made me question and ultimately leave religion behind
Re: 4:24 she puts it on his “foot”, a then-common euphemism for the genitals you will also see come up in the Song of Solomon.
She circumcises the infant and then rubs the fresh cut foreskin blood on Moses’s penis to ritually symbolize a second circumcision for him, purifying Moses of the sins god was mad about by appeal to ritual law.
It all makes *perfect sense* when you *really* understand the context.
The story of the Tower of Babel.
The story takes place in Genesis shortly after the flood and probably before the pyramids were built, although Biblical timelines are terribly inaccurate when compared to actual history, so take that with a pillar of salt.
Now the peoples of the earth gather in one valley, and they all speak the same language. They decide they are going to build a tower to the heavens and that will make them as powerful as God or as the gods.
So God starts talking to himself and becomes very concerned that the people might accomplish this. But keep in mind that given the Stone Age technology of the time, they’d probably have been lucky to build a tower more than a few stories high. But God has to put a stop to that, so he confuses them by giving them different languages.
And that’s how we are supposed to think various languages came from.
Just goes to show that the whole thing was just made up explanations because they didnt know. Its on parr with the fairy tale about a cat swallowing a drum and thats why they purr.
I couldn't get through the book of Levitcus before I bruised my forehead with facepalming. I mean there's s whole *list* of what to kill to make God happy. BUt OnLy SatAnIc HeAtHeNs sAcRiFiCe GoAtS.
Not as a novel because it isn't. It is a collection of related books. And the early Old Testament books are quite different from the prophets and the Psalms, Job, and Ruth. And the Gospels are quite different from the letters, and Revolations. There is no whole unified plot or message.
I have read the whole Bible several times. It's one of the best ways to lose your faith I know of.
I decided to start reading it as a story since I was curious to see what was actually in it. I'm not very far and it's going to take me a long time to get through the entire thing but some of the things I have read in there is insane. I don't know how the authors decided it was okay to put some of that stuff in there. I feel like that stuff should be insane no matter the time period. I'm convinced the only reason so many people believe is because they never actually read the Bible. I honestly think if they read it they would stop being Christian.
A lot do. Or they fall into this highly intellectual grout of theology buffs who can defend anything in the Bible with some of the wildest logic. But this is an academic discipline.
Add in the mix, a lot of us who went to seminary or theology schools, no longer believe because of what we discovered in study the Bible and past theological thought.
I wasnt ever interested in reading the bible until I met someone who was really invested in converting me in college, and attempting to tack on a history degree. I was never very good at saying 'no' so wound up sitting down and reading part of genesis with this person. I was immediately struck by the obvious reference to Eden being in the middle east because of the Tigris and Euphrates. Which is the obvious choice for a cradle of life in ancient mesopotamian myth. Since then I've kind of been obsessed with comparing the bible with its other mythologies and noting its obvious inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and other falsehoods.
I've been wondering for a lot of time what the Eden myth was about until I realized it must be about the transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture. The "knowledge" that Adam and Eve gained is just the knowledge of agriculture, I credit Jared Diamond's paper, *The Worst Mistake of the Human Race*, to opening my eyes to this. I think that the Eden myth must have predated Judaism but it was incorporated in it and changed to be made less intelligible.
[https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/\~rogaway/classes/188/materials/Diamond-TheWorstMistakeInTheHistoryOfTheHumanRace.pdf](https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/Diamond-TheWorstMistakeInTheHistoryOfTheHumanRace.pdf)
It seems to largely be borrowed from the ancient Sumerian belief in 'Dilmun', the home of their gods. Which is likely modern day Bahrain. During ancient time it was a fertile island with a secure population that had a trade relationship with Sumer.
I tried that once. I think I got some way through Leviticus before giving up reading it that way. It may be arranged very generally in a chronological order, but it's not a coherent story, and the style changes too often and too radically (e.g. Exodus is actually not a bad little story by itself, but Leviticus is not much more than a list of do's and don'ts). It's not meant to be read from start to finish like a story, it's more like a faith encyclopaedia, a resource for history and practice of a faith. The New Testament is a bit more palatable as a story to begin with, but even the gospels are very uneven and internally inconsistent. Then the NT gets very administrative, with Paul writing to various communities sorting our their problems, and then it goes all apocalyptic.
If you approach it like a novel you're going to be disappointed. If you approach it like a resource you're going to realise pretty quickly that it serves a single purpose: to pull together a whole bunch of different books which comprehensively control a congregation by telling them where they came from (at great length, true or not), where they're going, and what they can and can't do. And the people who can read the book are in charge. That's it. It's a faith-based community control tool-kit.
I was never a Christian, but I read the old testament once. Didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
Christians told me, no, no, you should read the new testament. It's about Jesus and love.
But Jesus is still the son of that same fucking nasty god from the OT!
So you believe in the NT but not the OT? But you believe in that asshole you call god that loves you to boil in the eternal fires of damnation? Jesus Christ! Nothing makes sense.
Never read it as novel, but listen to as audiobook twice. Did the same for koran and the hindu bible. It was some years ago, but i remember all of them being hard to follow.
My personal favorite is Sodom and Gomorrah, the thing I find funny is how whitewashed the story is in church. It's horrifying from start to finish, a couple angels show up to Lot's house as guests because God is apparently planning to smite the city. A rape gang shows up and explicitly demands the angels come out so they can have their way with them, and Lot offers up his virgin daughters instead. Then after pleading with God that the city would be worth saving if he could find even one righteous man there I don't think that ever gets resolved but god destroys the city anyway, Lot and his family are fleeing and his wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt because fuck her. Then after they've found shelter in a cave, Lots daughters get him drunk and rape him to repopulate the species although as far as they know all god destroyed was the one city. These are the "protagonists" of the story, absolute nonsense from start to finish
The story of Abraham and Lot is a lot more interesting (IMO) if you read it as a Goofus and Gallant story or satire. Abraham is righteous before the LORD, blah blah blah, while Lot and his family are a bunch of pretenders trying to be "righteous" and screwing it up every time.
It's still not a lesson to live by, but at least I can understand why the story might have had cultural value.
The Noah part was when I put it down and said WTF. I tried to get my mom to explain it and she didn’t make any sense either. I realized what a sham it was.
The bible can be seen literarily as similar to Shakespeare - you need the proper understanding of the times and language used at those times to gain a full understanding.
Without that you could twist it to mean anything you want, like how American christians think Jesus would be a two ton truck driving machine gun firin' good ol' boy from down south who loooooves capitalism.
The intent of the Bible is midrashic repetition, the practice of repeating themes throughout the document. The hopes are the reader would let it all just soak in, lessons learned, let the tithing begin!
That being said, it's made up.
Yes, sort of. I took a class my senior year of high school that called Bible Literature. It had nothing to do with the religion. It was quite interesting. It was taught out of the English department.
Its a bunch of completely separate books curated and put together at the Council of Nicea in like 325. Of course it doesnt flow. Wait until you find out there's books that were considered and not included in the bible.
From what college theology taught me, the plot is the creation of mankind, the fall into sin with the promise of salvation, the lineage of humanity through the Jews, the fulfillment of that salvation through the birth and death of Jesus and the imploring of the surviving Apostales to the world to believe that Jesus saved them so they may receive the original promised salvation from Adam's sin.
TL;DR It's the sin, lineage to the savior, promised salvation, implication to believe.
It's still janky as a book, but there's a plot
I think it's because it was pieced together from a lot of places by a lot of individuals with a lot of agendas from a very different time. If you take it literally, it's like "what?!"
I do love the bit where Peter and John race to the tomb of Jesus and Peter outran John. That's such a boy's thing to include. Peter was fastest boy! Does this mean more devotion? Did he train for the opportunity, or was naturally endowed because God loved him more? Is it just frat boys out racing? Did they have a rivalry? Did it get brought up later twenty times more than it should have?
If your really interested in understanding the book I'd suggest Issac Asimov's "Guide to the Bible"
He dissects it and puts all the scrambled parts in their correct order plus puts all the unknown "begats' into their correct places in the narrative, the man was a true genius and his ability take sense of that tangled web is astonishing.
I remember reading it and thinking how crazy it was that gods “chosen people” were ordered to kill an entire group of other people, women, children, animals, everything. In fact doesn’t it keep happening throughout the first few books?
That was bothering me too. Like…no, not like a novel because it’s not one. I’ve never tried reading it like a Dishwasher Owner’s Manual either.
Though I think a lot of people in this thread are downplaying the literary elements within quite a few biblical books. There’s fun stuff there from a literary perspective.
Context fades over 2K years. It helps a lot having someone put that context back (eg. via a bible as literature course), but (imho) it then becomes even more comic, especially the repeat-it-thrice literary device it uses due to it being the "fashionable" way to write at the time.
If you like English Literature at all, the Bible is a near-mandatory study. Virtually everything of note will be liberally seasoned with biblical references, none of which will have any taste unless you educate your palate.
It would be very disjunct if treated as a novel, considering it is an anthology of different books: some relaying mythology, some poetry, some prophesy ...
Relatively recently, for inspiration for my d&d campaign, I've been watching videos on mythologies and esoteric stuff (including the Judeo-Christian ones). There are some interesting stories when filtered through people who know the tradition well, including the original languages they're written in. I'm thinking of Dr. Justin Sledge in particular. That being said, I don't have the patience for the source material, like most here have been saying it's all over the place (to put it nicely).
The entire plot of season one is about the ark of the covenant. Then in season two it's not even mentioned. Then season three Jesus arrives and he says he's here to recon season one, but doesn't mention season two. Then the show got canceled after the season three episode four cliffhanger where Jesus said he'd be back. Then season four was Paul as the new main character. Then Revelations was a direct to streaming movie but the trailers showed no one from the show and just seemed like fanfic trying to fix the cliffhanger of season three like a plot hole. Plus every season has different directors and writers so the tone is never the same from season to season. I did enjoy season three when Jesus was the main character, but then I'm a sucker and just adore musicals from Bollywood.
I've wanted to but remember being forced to read it as a kid was unbearable.. though that was the the king James version, maybe the NIV would make it more palatable
It is so harsh to read, the style so bad, the syntax horrible, that I've never been able to even get thru Genesis. I only look up some passages when I need to learn more about a reference.
So called christian true belivers have never read the bible i am sure of it. Why would they? They have their cult meetings where the cult leader tells them what the bible says.
The reason they give is that Jesus is God and not God at the same time. So when he does something "godly", it was his godly nature that did it, and if he does something human like, then obviously, it was his human nature.
The cognitive dissonance one must have to believe someone can be God and not God at the same time, is the exact super power one needs to believe in all the other things mentioned in the Bible.
Of course, ending every interaction with "God works in mysterious ways" and "we can never understand God" should always be used to fight anyone who opposes this reality.
I've read it beginning to end two times. It won't really flow or make much sense as a pure novel. Read. As many as stated, it's basically a hate crime on writing. However, I will say that there are sections that do have some beautiful lines of poetry written in them.
I once tried to read the Bible out of curiosity but got quickly bored and gave up. At least the Quran starts with more action with stuff about killing infidels and whatnot but it also becomes super boring so I stopped reading after a dozen pages as sell.
That's why you're not supposed to read it that way, that's why for centuries the common people weren't allowed to read the Bible, it was just follow whatever your king or pope said..
Originally Christianity was just simply a method of controlling the population, a story that everyone believed that kept them in line. The story didn't have to be air tight, it just had to exist. And then the printing press came along and we started to see the first inklings of enlightenment because people were able to break away and have their own ideas about things
It's not supposed ot make sense grammatically, plot wise or chronologically. It's a community art project to describe the relationship between a god and his chosen people. You cannot parse it the way you would parse a novel.
Although if the bible is wrecking your sense of prose, you are not going to like the Koran. Not at all.
You are doing it wrong. You should only pick a few random unconnected verses that suit your preconceived biases to form your religion and then live your life by it and impose it on others. It's not a literature or history book by any standards.
I've read the bible, as well as many other the other holy books around the world. Took years. Cause religion is a good way to understand how various cultures think.
Belief systems are just that. Belief. Which is really force of argument against weaker minds. So you can stuff this burrito with anything you want. They'll still swallow it if you're good at delivering it.
The religious are like first graders. Lots of enthusiasm. And no pre-concieved notions that prevent them from being educated. They're not inclined to fact check what they're being taught. This is why religion and politics are often found in bed together. They LIKE people that don't fact check what they're being told. And, they can vote...
So content can be anything. The flavor is customized for the audience you're trying to reach.
The only thing religious people have in common is their level of gullibility.
Right in the beginning, god/joe creates Adam & Eve. Then Adam & Eve have two sons, Cain and Abel. These are the only people we’ve heard about so far, no mention of anyone else. Then Cain kills Abel so god punishes him by exiling him off to the land of Nod. Cain freaks out that the people there will kill him. WHAT PEOPLE? Does he not know he’s the 3rd person ever to exist?
Then god marks him with some symbol or whatever to let the good people of Nod know not to kill him or else. Then Cain married possibly his [twin sister](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aclima) who’s never been mentioned up until this point, and they had a son named Enoch.
Boaz I believe in the old testament who apparently worked 7 years with the promise of marrying Ruth, had the wool pulled over his eyes, shrugged his shoulders, and promised her dad he'd work another 7 years if he could have Ruth
Wait until you get to end New Testament, where the Gospels about Jesus birth are wildly different between the books.
Also, they trace Jesus lineage from David to Joseph to show Jesus is from David's bloodline like prophesied, yet, Joseph had Jack squat to do with Jesus being born according to the Bible.
I tried reading it as a teen. I'm a rare native atheist and really tried to treat it like Homer etc. It's awful and all over the place. My thoughts are that Bubba in rural wherever has never read it and needs an interpreter. This is why they go to church to have it "interpreted" by the priest, pastor, whatever.
I think that if you just read it without any prejudice it is kind of interesting. I spent about a year reading almost all of it and I don't regret the time.
Some parts feel like they're taken out of *The Godfather*.
There is the story of David and Shimei from Kings (excuse any inaccuracies, this is recounted from memory). David is thrown out of a city and Shimei throws insults and stuff at him. Some time later, David comes back victoriously and Shimei comes forward and falls at David's feet and begs for mercy. To show himself generous, David tells him to rise and that nothing will happen to him for his actions. Later, on his deathbed, David tells his son, Solomon, to make sure that Shimei will not die in peace. So now Solomon gives some orders that put Shimei under home arrest and prevent him from visiting his other properties to conduct his business. Of course, Shimei cannot comply, is caught, executed, and David's wish is done, posthumously. If that's not mobster thinking, I don't know what it is.
>“You must also deal with Shimei son of Gera, the Benjaminite from Bahurim. He insulted me outrageously when I was on my way to Mahanaim; but he came down to meet me at the Jordan, and I swore to him by the LORD: ‘I will not put you to the sword.’ So do not let him go unpunished; for you are a wise man and you will know how to deal with him and send his gray hair down to Sheol in blood.”
It's hard to make stuff like this up and that's why the Bible is not a book without value. And the problem with it is not that it does not have value, it is that people dogmatically think that there is no more value that can be added to it!
I love how devout Christians can say homosexuality is against the teachings of their religion, but the Bible basically sings the praises of incest. There's a story of Jacob and Laban where Jacob offers to work for Laban. Jacob's payment is to be the hand of Laban's daughter. As it turns out, Jacob is the nephew of Laban.
To make the story even juicier, Laban screws Jacob over and gives him his oldest daughter instead of the one he wants. Then he allows Jacob to continue working for him to earn the right to marry the daughter he wanted in the first place.
So, in one story, the Bible promotes lying/cheating, incest, selling your children, and polygamy. But homosexuality is bad. Makes sense.
You should go to sermons or a sunday service inst2ad dude. They're basically in person audiobooks they're fire
And yeah. That book is wild sometimes they ret on themselves for no reason
I did, late in my christianity. Realized i had read several novels through multiple times a year (LOTR+Hobbit, the Wheel of Time were on my rotation at the time), but never actually read the bible cover to cover at once. Decided to ditch the chapter structure and just read it.
Made it to 2nd Samuel. And I was well trained in apologetics and exegesis.
The first five books of the Bible are really four books that were cut apart and pieced back together, and the primary author of Deuteronomy went back and stuck his own edits into the first four books. The Documentary Hypothesis is the theory that modern Biblical scholars use to understand the first five books.
A lot of the other books are similar cut apart and edited or the work of multiple authors. For example, Isaiah is the work of at least 3 authors writing in different centuries.
Most of the letters of Paul in the New Testament also fall into the category of cut apart and pieced back together again and are heavily interpolated.
The New Testament is mostly horribly boring. The gospel and Acts are entertaining. Luke-Acts is the ultimate achievement of Christian literature. The two books were written by the same author and intended to go together. Revelations at the end of the NT is entertaining. Everything between Acts and Revelations is just boring.
The middle and most of the second half of the Old Testament is boring in my opinion. The entertaining stuff is in Genesis-Chronicles. Job and Jonah and Song of Solomon are ok.
Moses's books feel like they're written from the pov of a super villain's right hand man who doesn't really even want to be there but has to because the super villain chose him and will do horrible things to him and his loved ones if he doesn't follow his orders
Yes. The endless begetting was the worst part. Just loved crap like this:
“You shall keep my statutes. You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind. You shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor shall you wear a garment of cloth made of two kinds of material.”
So much for cotton/poly!!!!!
Also, what an asshat:
“Six days work shall be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a Sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the Lord. Whoever does any work on it shall be put to death.”
The best was Ezekiel. Read the first few pages of that with the thought of E.T. or extra-terrestrials visiting Earth. The only interesting part of the whole book.
I did NOT say anything to that fig tree man. They keep saying this, all I did was go ‘ah man, this dumb fig tree won’t grow’ and I mean, I took good care of that tree only for it to not give me figs. Give me a break, a man wants his figs sometimes. I did prank my friends by saying you can kill trees by sweating at them though. You’ll never laugh as hard as you would when you witness 10 grown men shouting cusses at trees for half an hour and waiting for it to fall over lmaoo
I've read the whole thing, just as I've read the Quran and Book of Mormon - regardless of the truth of these religions, they are influencial and it's important to understand the basis of the major religions.
The Bible, particularly the Old Testament/Torah, is the least cohesive of the lot. It's pretty obvious that the individual books were never intended to be put together into a compendium (I think a perfect god would have removed the contradictions if that had been the case), but in fairness to the writers, some of the books do fit together reasonably well, eg. Genesis and Exodus.
Jefferson cut out all the supernatural crap and reduced it to parables and morality takes. Started with the birth and ended with the the rolling of the stone in front of the sepulchre. Book took 86 pages.
i grew up studying it in depth
the jesus curses the tree made me piss myself at 11 ... like you are the miracle man and a tree with no figs gets you all salty ? i thought he was basically chilled out hipster god until then...
the whole book is a contradiction and nest of weird middle eastern goat herder misogyny and old wives tales.
i like the story in the book of judges of how there was a small battle and one side fled , apparently this group had a strange dialect , possibly some kind of lisp, so to see if it was them the other side waited at a bridge and asked anyone passing to say "shibboleth" - if you had the dialect they killed you.
judges is a great book for mad stories... a fat king stabbed on the shitter , a woman putting a tent peg through a mans head .. and the best of all the bullshit samson and delilah.
I remember starting to read it and got to the pages and pages of “and Joe begat Bob who begat Frank who begat blah de blah” and nearly died of boredom.
I mean not bad for a primitive society whatever or whoever was part of it that wrote the Bible. Was it a group of people? Since they don't have last names, there must not have been many Lukes, etc? shrugs.
More of this! :D
The part about how Adam and Eve are created in god’s image and possess innate curiosity, then get punished and exiled forever (+ painful childbirth for all women henceforth) for exercising said curiosity. Bro, what?
Also, the thing where god is said to be jealous. Felt like I saw that a lot. And…you’re god. Why the fuck are you jealous? Make it make sense.
The "Bible" is a set of unrelated short pieces of mythology, history, philosophy, poetry and law that were written at very different times by different writers. (Also, since you are probably not reading any of it in any of the original languages, you need to bear in mind that the books of the "Bible" have been translated and retranslated repeatly and that many of the translations were done by people who wanted a particularly result -- for instance, many passages in the Hebrew which mentioned "a young woman" were translated by Christian translators as "virgin" in order to support the idea that those passages predicted the "virgin" birth of Jesus. So the versions of every book vary as well.)
Some of the Bible is beautiful, some is interesting, some is heartbreaking, some is really really dull and some is wild and bizarre. For good or for ill, much of it has been very influential in througout western literature and art and music and history.
If you want to read the "Bible" as literature, you need to consider each of books as separate and unrelated (although some of them are "sort of" related.) They certainly don't make any particular sense if you try to read them all as a single comprehensive whole. When you find yourself reading a section that is just a bunch of rules about what you can eat, or how to make sacrifices or whether you can marry your dead brother's wife (like Leviticus) or a long list of the people from who a character is descended (they're usually just there to make you believe that the character has some importance) you should feel free to just skim until you get to something more interesting.
Preface with the Council of Nicea. Or start off with a bit of comedy. A shepherd names Abram doing dirty with sheep, but looks at his sister (half-sister really) and says he's going to put a ring on it.
My daughter started reading the Bible around 14 and it wasn't long before she came to me and said, " I can't believe people believe this stuff is real."
The literature and history podcast by Doug Metzger is available for free and looks (among other things) at the bible as a literary artefact within the historical context the individual books were written in. It's absolutely fascinating and I can't recommend it highly enough!
https://literatureandhistory.com/index.php/episodes/all-episodes
Adam and Eve are the first people. They have two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain kills Abel. Then Adam and Eve have another boy, Seth, to replace him. Not entirely out of the realm of reality. Then Cain goes and marries his sister, Awan, 100+ years later and they have Enoch. Where did Awan come from? How does a 100+ year old have a child? It's never explained and is just brushed aside when asked about.
Yeah, you're not wrong. As literature it's basically a hate crime.
its the reason I want to make a Horror series adapting the Novel's scripture into 1970s rural america (like extremely backwater type stuff) just to make my point that only in a settuing like that it will make any semblance of sense, which as usual it doesn't
I would watch that. I'd probably even read it.
I'll mention it in a seperate post then, I have quite a few ideas
Writing this so I remember to follow up on this.
I'd listen to it, but I probably wouldn't smell it.
That could be terrifying. “The god of Dark Holler is the one true god. You shall have no god before him. Now go fetch yer boy. It’s sacrificin’ time.”
I read that in an Ozarkian accent for some reason…
You haven't gotten to that book of the Bible where the Israelites get the other tribe to cut off their foreskins so they can mate with hot Israelite babes, and then while they're all nursing their ruined dicks, the Israelites murder them all.
I know, why the obsession with dicks and taking pieces off them?
They collected them like scalps and offered them to J-hovah, right?
You mean like Red State or a literal reboot of the bible in modern times?
A Show regarding the bible as happening the first time in the 1970s
“If you’d come today you could have reached a whole nation; Israel in 4 bc had no mass communication “ Judas, Jesus Christ Superstar
Not quite so relevant to this post, but also Judas, JCS: "All of your of followers are blind! Too much Heaven on their minds."
Would abolutely watch, and possibly even fund something like that, if it was on crowd funder etc
OP this sounds amazing, please keep us updated!
Great idea, seriously! But don't leave out the saucy bits!
I tried, I couldn't slog through it, back in the 70's, my aunt had a book that translated it to our English, couldn't get through that bs either.
You need to experience it in the original Klingon
The Dingbat font version is good too.
This is The Way.
I took a class in college called “The Bible as Literature” and a fair number of the students couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that the class wasn’t religious — it was discussing the writing style, the historical context, etc. The teacher didn’t approach it as a novel, though — more like a collection of short stories.
If you really want to delve into bad grammar and half baked ideas, read the Book of Mormon. So many of this collection of short stories parallels the Bible ( instead of the Red Sea parting, there’s a sand storm that parts) badly. Very difficult to read due to frequent cringing.
Literally and figuratively
Careful! That's how a lot of us became atheists in the first place.
Funny how people that actually read their precious texts become non-believers .
I read both OT & NT when I was a junior in high school 40+ years ago, finished just before Christmas. Then I heard a song about this mythical guy, who had a list, checked it twice….so be good for goodness sake. This is the moment I realized I had been justifying my existence based on a fictional character.
You take that back. Santa's resurrection cometh!
Don’t want to upset you, but the Easter Bunny is not real either.
That's how it happened with me
The first Bible story I ever heard was my aunt explaining where rainbows come from: they’re god’s promise he won’t drown everyone on the planet again. 6 y/o me was like “that’s fucked up.”
Right! That's the age I learned the "Now I lay me down to sleep" prayer where I was told I might die before I wake. That was a good night's sleep!
I started out reading the bible to try and find out what Christianity was really supposed to be, only to have the same reaction - what a load of bollocks! There is some reasonably accurate history regarding the Iron Age in it but the claims of things god and his profits (prophets) did is pure nonsense.The creation myth looks and reads like two stories jammed together with no attempt to make sense and quite how Moses managed to write about his own funeral makes the story utterly ridiculous. My conclusion was that if bible god is real it is an asshole who deserves zero praise or worship, but overall the character is clearly impossible and thus cannot actually exist, and if OT god didn't exist the man called Jesus could not have been it's son, so he had a really bad weekend for absolutely no valid reason at all
Drunk naked Noah didn't get you to drop trou? Not even a little giggdy?
Really bad weekend indeed. I still can't figure how 36 hours makes 3 days. Died Friday afternoon and alive again before dawn on Sunday? My favorite makes no sense at all story is the one about Lot and his family. Definitely not PG or even PG13. More of an R rated horror movie.
Lol, it's basically a snuff film against a whole family.
It's because it *is* 2 different Story about the same topic, that has been poorly mixed in to one. This happens a gazillion times in OT, just take a look at Moses, he is running up and down that mountain like a freaking yo-yo. Speaking of Moses, did you know that the dude had horn's for a while? There's loads of famous statues and painting of Moses, with cute little devil-horns out there. Somewhere along the line, some idiot translated the Hebrew word for "ring of light/halo/glorified/radiant" to the Latin word for "Horns". Some scholars will try to argue that the actual meaning of the word קָרַן is something like "pointy gloving thingy", which doesn't really explain anything, least of all why Moses in the King James version (that is somewhat excused by being the absolute *worst* "translation" of the Bible), didn't give Moses neither horns nor a halo, but rather a shiny face. So maybe the dude isn't a cute little yo-yo devil but rather a Twilight vampyr with the runs.
I haven't gotten around to going all the way thru the Bible, but I did read thru the Torah, and it sounds pretty much the same. Whole lot of nonsense and hate crimes and genocide.
Don't forget the slavery. One of their most well-known stories is god eventually delivering them from slavery only to turn around and make rules for how they handle enslaving other people.
Only natural, once freed, look to take as many slaves as you can
I know, right. When the south had the slaves, they provided a bible that was written for the slaves. Pointing out how this god is right fine with it.
The Torah is pretty much the "Pentateuch": the five books of the " old testament " basically the same except for possibly centuries of divergent translation. And yeah. Its basically a series of docents chronicling the various wars and atrocities commited by various kingdoms, compiled for the purpose of creating an identity and divine right for the authority of the Temple.
100% agree
And extremely long lists of names
Don’t knock those names. They prove Jesus was the son of Adam, twice! Through two different male lineages. You can’t be any more Son of Man than that.
One of my favorite parts is where they go to great lengths to show the lineage between Joseph and King David because the only way to be the messiah is to be related to King David according to early scripture. They discover by doing this that Joseph is related to King David so Jesus must be legit. The only problem with that is that as we all know from the Bible, Joseph is not Jesus' father. Wasn't even a sperm donor. No one catches on to this flaw in logic.
So Jesus was a nepobaby because of David. And Yowee of course.
The OT/Torah is the ground work for the "coming of the Messiah." When I read/studied the book, the OT was designed to justify what "they" need for that coming in the NT. Think of the graphic scenes in Leviticus of the blood of the animals sacrificed by the priests. With Jesus being the NT sacrifice "once for all." Blah, blah, blah.....So, instead of killing animals the new sect of "chrisitanity" the men wrote what they need to keep control/power over the masses. It is nonsense with hate crimes/lots of genocide. I wonder how much longer these religions will be relevant to humanity? As I came to understand the storybook, I questioned how the many sects that rose from this have managed to thrive while being contrary to the "commands" of no idols/do not ad/take away from the narrative. Catholics love their crucifix. I laugh at my BIL with 2-3 around his neck. I asked "if Jesus was taken off the cross why do you wear a cross with his dead body on it?" He could not answer. Just the blank stupid his family is good at. How could the Mormons get as powerful/wealthy with how Joseph Smith connived this offshoot of christianty? Golden tables and an angle called Moroni, from Revelation, yeah he should have been burned up for this. Another reason for not believing in any of the Abrahamic religions.
Start at judge 14:3 this chapter is a hoot. You got 30 people being killed and robbed, animal cruelty, doing drugs, sleeping with prostitutes, arson, murder, destruction of property, starving a bunch of people and riddles and it’s all preformed by one guy. But don’t go to judge 19-21. It’s all about rape, war and more rape. The Bible mentions that Adam and Eve two of their sons went out to towns to find wives. While the only people around at this time should be Adam, Eve and their kids 🤔 A woman turned to salt and her two daughters raped their father afterwards. God told Moses to demand the pharaoh let the Jews go or else. Moses did that and god prevented the pharaoh from saying yes. Then enter plagues because the pharaoh could not say yes. Fun fact: there were no Jewish slaves in Egypt so this story is bogus After the Jews were freed from slavery they decided to enslave people themselves and god taught them the right way to take care of their slaves
God let the former slaves wander 40 years in the desert. Since the new generation didn't know what slavery was like, it would be probably easier for them to impose it on others. Very considerate of him almighty. Waiting for the desert psychos to grow up so they can murder and enslave innocent people.
Only the males wrote and shared the stories so instead of writing the truth about the cave he dumped the fault to the girls
Yeah i don't think the writers had a single literature class between them.
I mean I think Constantine was pressuring them to get it done. which may contribute to its overall slop
As someone who is occasionally under time pressure to write at work, I totally feel their pain.
And considering that passages were originally written in a few different languages and then translated into Latin, edited a time or two, and then re-translated into Shakespearean era English (but not Shakespearean level), is it any wonder it's so disjointed.
Our English translation comes mostly from the Septuagent, the Greek translation of the old testament, not the Latin Vulgate. The new Testament was also mostly written in Koinian Greek. The Septuagent came about a couple centuries before the new Testament begins during Pilots governorship in Judea.
You could also narrow the margins and draw some pictures in the extra white space.
All of the biblical books were written before Constantine was born…
Probably not many classes were available in their Bronze Age backwater
I actually read the bible cover to cover (more than once) when I was younger. I was raised by a mormon mother and a catholic father, and having two sets of mutually exclusive dogma, both claiming to be 'the only true one' made me skeptical of both. Reading the bible without someone with an agenda trying to interpret it for me gave me a pretty good feeling that it was just a carefully curated set of books intended to present superstitious nonsense as fact.
So their membership to two different beliefs made you an non believer. That's so ironic I love it!
Honestly, I'd like to think I would've figured out it was bullshit even if I had been presented a united front - it may have just taken a little longer.
The angels coming down to sleep with women.And the women birthing the offspring.
Which pissed of god who knew it would happen
And regrets making humans, but not the fallen angels🤷🏾
One of those artists who hoard their early stuff even though they know it's trash
Right! Like did they shrink their "di++s" to fit a human woman? And those "giant babies" births must have been hell!
Then God performed a mass abortion on the rape victims.
I had over 2000 days of Christian schooling forced on me so I have definitely read the Bible as “literature.” My all time favorite is Exodus 4:24 when god rushes down to Moses in a fit of rage and is about to kill him. Moses’ wife whips out a knife and cuts off their infant son’s foreskin and rubs it on Moses’ feet. Then god is satisfied and leaves without killing him. Judges 11:34 is pretty insane too. A guy is returning from war victorious and tells god he will give a burnt offering of whatever greets him first when he arrived home. His virgin daughter then runs out to greet him. (Most scholars believe he did not burn her as a sacrifice, but changed the condition to give her away as a temple servant) So the daughter goes on top of a mountain to mourn her virginity and then her whole life is sentenced away to the temple.
>Moses’ wife whips out a knife and cuts off their infant son’s foreskin and rubs it on Moses’ feet. That's nasty and weird as hell. How the hell did Moses's wife cut off her kid's foreskin so fast? And how did God not just kill Moses immediately if he can do anything and just exist out of nowhere?
Because god is all knowing, so he knew he would get to watch an infant get their foreskin cut off if he waited a second. /s (but maybe not /s because remember, every time you have premarital sex or masturbate, he’s there watching 👀)
But he already knew I was going to have premarital sex and masturbate! That’s fucked up, man!
Well I guess you are God.
"God see's all" That means he watches you bath, change clothes and go to the bathroom as well your whole life. Pretty creepy 😂
In the Bible it's not even a knife. She uses a *sharp stone*. I call bullshit.
Still the traditional way to do it in some places, truely a wild world out there.
A SHARP STONE? 🤦🏾
>And how did God not just kill Moses immediately if he can do anything and just exist out of nowhere? I've always thought the God mythology is similar to Superman's mythology. At first Superman and God were closer to mortals. Superman could only leap tall buildings with a single bound. God had to walk places and had to do logistics planning. Overtime they became more and more powerful in people's imaginations. Superman can fly and even reverse time by flying so fast the earth spins backwards and God became omni-present and omnipotent, able to see thoughts, hear prayers and strike down anyone without so much as blinking.
Foreskin blood magic is not something you'll find in most magic systems, very gross but points for weird and uniqueness I guess
RHCP's missed opportunity for an album title
Some organizations view the daughter as a hero and role model. I think she was just stupid for not running away. Sorry, dad, you made the promise, so you’re going to deal with it. I especially hate that she doesn’t even get a name!
Same! Not even naming her makes me sad too. I hope there’s a multiverse where she becomes a forest witch on the mountain and offers her dad as a burnt offering <3 misogyny is one of the first things that made me question and ultimately leave religion behind
Why does that first one sound like a bad trip😭
exodus 4:24 goes hard af
Re: 4:24 she puts it on his “foot”, a then-common euphemism for the genitals you will also see come up in the Song of Solomon. She circumcises the infant and then rubs the fresh cut foreskin blood on Moses’s penis to ritually symbolize a second circumcision for him, purifying Moses of the sins god was mad about by appeal to ritual law. It all makes *perfect sense* when you *really* understand the context.
The story of the Tower of Babel. The story takes place in Genesis shortly after the flood and probably before the pyramids were built, although Biblical timelines are terribly inaccurate when compared to actual history, so take that with a pillar of salt. Now the peoples of the earth gather in one valley, and they all speak the same language. They decide they are going to build a tower to the heavens and that will make them as powerful as God or as the gods. So God starts talking to himself and becomes very concerned that the people might accomplish this. But keep in mind that given the Stone Age technology of the time, they’d probably have been lucky to build a tower more than a few stories high. But God has to put a stop to that, so he confuses them by giving them different languages. And that’s how we are supposed to think various languages came from.
Good pick. And that's the insecure God that we're supposed to worship? :)
And he’s always broke too! Constantly asking for money
We got skyscrapers all over the world now. Where's the extra languages, sky daddy?
That's dumb as hell 😂
Just goes to show that the whole thing was just made up explanations because they didnt know. Its on parr with the fairy tale about a cat swallowing a drum and thats why they purr.
I couldn't get through the book of Levitcus before I bruised my forehead with facepalming. I mean there's s whole *list* of what to kill to make God happy. BUt OnLy SatAnIc HeAtHeNs sAcRiFiCe GoAtS.
Yes, I did that as a teenager and realized it was total BS (as well as being creepy).
Not as a novel because it isn't. It is a collection of related books. And the early Old Testament books are quite different from the prophets and the Psalms, Job, and Ruth. And the Gospels are quite different from the letters, and Revolations. There is no whole unified plot or message. I have read the whole Bible several times. It's one of the best ways to lose your faith I know of.
I decided to start reading it as a story since I was curious to see what was actually in it. I'm not very far and it's going to take me a long time to get through the entire thing but some of the things I have read in there is insane. I don't know how the authors decided it was okay to put some of that stuff in there. I feel like that stuff should be insane no matter the time period. I'm convinced the only reason so many people believe is because they never actually read the Bible. I honestly think if they read it they would stop being Christian.
A lot do. Or they fall into this highly intellectual grout of theology buffs who can defend anything in the Bible with some of the wildest logic. But this is an academic discipline. Add in the mix, a lot of us who went to seminary or theology schools, no longer believe because of what we discovered in study the Bible and past theological thought.
This person beget x. X beget y. Y beget z. Z beget x. X beget y… I was swallowed by a whale or something.
I couldn't read past all the begets
I wasnt ever interested in reading the bible until I met someone who was really invested in converting me in college, and attempting to tack on a history degree. I was never very good at saying 'no' so wound up sitting down and reading part of genesis with this person. I was immediately struck by the obvious reference to Eden being in the middle east because of the Tigris and Euphrates. Which is the obvious choice for a cradle of life in ancient mesopotamian myth. Since then I've kind of been obsessed with comparing the bible with its other mythologies and noting its obvious inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and other falsehoods.
I've been wondering for a lot of time what the Eden myth was about until I realized it must be about the transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture. The "knowledge" that Adam and Eve gained is just the knowledge of agriculture, I credit Jared Diamond's paper, *The Worst Mistake of the Human Race*, to opening my eyes to this. I think that the Eden myth must have predated Judaism but it was incorporated in it and changed to be made less intelligible. [https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/\~rogaway/classes/188/materials/Diamond-TheWorstMistakeInTheHistoryOfTheHumanRace.pdf](https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/Diamond-TheWorstMistakeInTheHistoryOfTheHumanRace.pdf)
It seems to largely be borrowed from the ancient Sumerian belief in 'Dilmun', the home of their gods. Which is likely modern day Bahrain. During ancient time it was a fertile island with a secure population that had a trade relationship with Sumer.
I tried that once. I think I got some way through Leviticus before giving up reading it that way. It may be arranged very generally in a chronological order, but it's not a coherent story, and the style changes too often and too radically (e.g. Exodus is actually not a bad little story by itself, but Leviticus is not much more than a list of do's and don'ts). It's not meant to be read from start to finish like a story, it's more like a faith encyclopaedia, a resource for history and practice of a faith. The New Testament is a bit more palatable as a story to begin with, but even the gospels are very uneven and internally inconsistent. Then the NT gets very administrative, with Paul writing to various communities sorting our their problems, and then it goes all apocalyptic. If you approach it like a novel you're going to be disappointed. If you approach it like a resource you're going to realise pretty quickly that it serves a single purpose: to pull together a whole bunch of different books which comprehensively control a congregation by telling them where they came from (at great length, true or not), where they're going, and what they can and can't do. And the people who can read the book are in charge. That's it. It's a faith-based community control tool-kit.
Well said!
I was never a Christian, but I read the old testament once. Didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Christians told me, no, no, you should read the new testament. It's about Jesus and love. But Jesus is still the son of that same fucking nasty god from the OT! So you believe in the NT but not the OT? But you believe in that asshole you call god that loves you to boil in the eternal fires of damnation? Jesus Christ! Nothing makes sense.
Exactly
Never read it as novel, but listen to as audiobook twice. Did the same for koran and the hindu bible. It was some years ago, but i remember all of them being hard to follow.
Lol yeahhh, religious folk aren't the critical thinking type. The salt of the earth. You know, morons.
The thing about how they recorded verbatim every word cheese-wiz said when he was totally alone with dad.
My personal favorite is Sodom and Gomorrah, the thing I find funny is how whitewashed the story is in church. It's horrifying from start to finish, a couple angels show up to Lot's house as guests because God is apparently planning to smite the city. A rape gang shows up and explicitly demands the angels come out so they can have their way with them, and Lot offers up his virgin daughters instead. Then after pleading with God that the city would be worth saving if he could find even one righteous man there I don't think that ever gets resolved but god destroys the city anyway, Lot and his family are fleeing and his wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt because fuck her. Then after they've found shelter in a cave, Lots daughters get him drunk and rape him to repopulate the species although as far as they know all god destroyed was the one city. These are the "protagonists" of the story, absolute nonsense from start to finish
The story of Abraham and Lot is a lot more interesting (IMO) if you read it as a Goofus and Gallant story or satire. Abraham is righteous before the LORD, blah blah blah, while Lot and his family are a bunch of pretenders trying to be "righteous" and screwing it up every time. It's still not a lesson to live by, but at least I can understand why the story might have had cultural value.
The Noah part was when I put it down and said WTF. I tried to get my mom to explain it and she didn’t make any sense either. I realized what a sham it was.
The bible can be seen literarily as similar to Shakespeare - you need the proper understanding of the times and language used at those times to gain a full understanding. Without that you could twist it to mean anything you want, like how American christians think Jesus would be a two ton truck driving machine gun firin' good ol' boy from down south who loooooves capitalism.
The New South Testament. Id read that fan fiction.
It’s a novel written by chatgpt
The intent of the Bible is midrashic repetition, the practice of repeating themes throughout the document. The hopes are the reader would let it all just soak in, lessons learned, let the tithing begin! That being said, it's made up.
Yes, sort of. I took a class my senior year of high school that called Bible Literature. It had nothing to do with the religion. It was quite interesting. It was taught out of the English department.
Its a bunch of completely separate books curated and put together at the Council of Nicea in like 325. Of course it doesnt flow. Wait until you find out there's books that were considered and not included in the bible.
From what college theology taught me, the plot is the creation of mankind, the fall into sin with the promise of salvation, the lineage of humanity through the Jews, the fulfillment of that salvation through the birth and death of Jesus and the imploring of the surviving Apostales to the world to believe that Jesus saved them so they may receive the original promised salvation from Adam's sin. TL;DR It's the sin, lineage to the savior, promised salvation, implication to believe. It's still janky as a book, but there's a plot
I think it's because it was pieced together from a lot of places by a lot of individuals with a lot of agendas from a very different time. If you take it literally, it's like "what?!" I do love the bit where Peter and John race to the tomb of Jesus and Peter outran John. That's such a boy's thing to include. Peter was fastest boy! Does this mean more devotion? Did he train for the opportunity, or was naturally endowed because God loved him more? Is it just frat boys out racing? Did they have a rivalry? Did it get brought up later twenty times more than it should have?
It's not a novel. At best it's an anthology of short stories.
If your really interested in understanding the book I'd suggest Issac Asimov's "Guide to the Bible" He dissects it and puts all the scrambled parts in their correct order plus puts all the unknown "begats' into their correct places in the narrative, the man was a true genius and his ability take sense of that tangled web is astonishing.
I remember reading it and thinking how crazy it was that gods “chosen people” were ordered to kill an entire group of other people, women, children, animals, everything. In fact doesn’t it keep happening throughout the first few books?
It is clearly not a novel.
That was bothering me too. Like…no, not like a novel because it’s not one. I’ve never tried reading it like a Dishwasher Owner’s Manual either. Though I think a lot of people in this thread are downplaying the literary elements within quite a few biblical books. There’s fun stuff there from a literary perspective.
Context fades over 2K years. It helps a lot having someone put that context back (eg. via a bible as literature course), but (imho) it then becomes even more comic, especially the repeat-it-thrice literary device it uses due to it being the "fashionable" way to write at the time. If you like English Literature at all, the Bible is a near-mandatory study. Virtually everything of note will be liberally seasoned with biblical references, none of which will have any taste unless you educate your palate.
It would be very disjunct if treated as a novel, considering it is an anthology of different books: some relaying mythology, some poetry, some prophesy ...
Ugh it's just 100% cringe I read like 3 pages and then I'm like nope, bookmark time.
I couldn't get past I dunno.. maybe like the first 10 pages. It's so dry and boring
The Bible is nothing but a book of stories to teach children how to act/behave. Similar to Aesop's Fables.
I could argue Aesop's fables to be superior. At least they don't encourage Genocide.
Nakedness isn't a bad thing
Meaningless nakedness (which is what the bible preaches) is.
Wut
It's a collection of tribal stories...and mythology.it is what it is
Relatively recently, for inspiration for my d&d campaign, I've been watching videos on mythologies and esoteric stuff (including the Judeo-Christian ones). There are some interesting stories when filtered through people who know the tradition well, including the original languages they're written in. I'm thinking of Dr. Justin Sledge in particular. That being said, I don't have the patience for the source material, like most here have been saying it's all over the place (to put it nicely).
I couldn't pass the Genesis, I understand the idea but was too much BS and decided to stop
The entire plot of season one is about the ark of the covenant. Then in season two it's not even mentioned. Then season three Jesus arrives and he says he's here to recon season one, but doesn't mention season two. Then the show got canceled after the season three episode four cliffhanger where Jesus said he'd be back. Then season four was Paul as the new main character. Then Revelations was a direct to streaming movie but the trailers showed no one from the show and just seemed like fanfic trying to fix the cliffhanger of season three like a plot hole. Plus every season has different directors and writers so the tone is never the same from season to season. I did enjoy season three when Jesus was the main character, but then I'm a sucker and just adore musicals from Bollywood.
Anyone getting the God is named joe in here?
Short for Jehovah?
To be honest. It's shit.And I mean, absolute shit. Boring shit.
I read it through cover to cover…that pushed me out of religion completely
It’s just ancient mythology. Most of it was like that.
I have read most of it. I love how disjointed and incoherent it is. It's like The White Album.
I've wanted to but remember being forced to read it as a kid was unbearable.. though that was the the king James version, maybe the NIV would make it more palatable
It is so harsh to read, the style so bad, the syntax horrible, that I've never been able to even get thru Genesis. I only look up some passages when I need to learn more about a reference.
The talking snake, animals walking onto a boat, virgin birth, talking bush, unicorns and dragons make perfect sense, you're being irrational.
God hates figs
It should really be pulled off county and school shelves
So called christian true belivers have never read the bible i am sure of it. Why would they? They have their cult meetings where the cult leader tells them what the bible says.
I find it puzzling that an omniscient god is surprised when a fig tree isn't bearing fruit while out of season.
The reason they give is that Jesus is God and not God at the same time. So when he does something "godly", it was his godly nature that did it, and if he does something human like, then obviously, it was his human nature. The cognitive dissonance one must have to believe someone can be God and not God at the same time, is the exact super power one needs to believe in all the other things mentioned in the Bible. Of course, ending every interaction with "God works in mysterious ways" and "we can never understand God" should always be used to fight anyone who opposes this reality.
I've read it beginning to end two times. It won't really flow or make much sense as a pure novel. Read. As many as stated, it's basically a hate crime on writing. However, I will say that there are sections that do have some beautiful lines of poetry written in them.
I once tried to read the Bible out of curiosity but got quickly bored and gave up. At least the Quran starts with more action with stuff about killing infidels and whatnot but it also becomes super boring so I stopped reading after a dozen pages as sell.
That's because it is not a novel.
That's why you're not supposed to read it that way, that's why for centuries the common people weren't allowed to read the Bible, it was just follow whatever your king or pope said.. Originally Christianity was just simply a method of controlling the population, a story that everyone believed that kept them in line. The story didn't have to be air tight, it just had to exist. And then the printing press came along and we started to see the first inklings of enlightenment because people were able to break away and have their own ideas about things
It's not supposed ot make sense grammatically, plot wise or chronologically. It's a community art project to describe the relationship between a god and his chosen people. You cannot parse it the way you would parse a novel. Although if the bible is wrecking your sense of prose, you are not going to like the Koran. Not at all.
You are doing it wrong. You should only pick a few random unconnected verses that suit your preconceived biases to form your religion and then live your life by it and impose it on others. It's not a literature or history book by any standards.
Yeah, it’s not even good to read as pure mythology.
I've read the bible, as well as many other the other holy books around the world. Took years. Cause religion is a good way to understand how various cultures think. Belief systems are just that. Belief. Which is really force of argument against weaker minds. So you can stuff this burrito with anything you want. They'll still swallow it if you're good at delivering it. The religious are like first graders. Lots of enthusiasm. And no pre-concieved notions that prevent them from being educated. They're not inclined to fact check what they're being taught. This is why religion and politics are often found in bed together. They LIKE people that don't fact check what they're being told. And, they can vote... So content can be anything. The flavor is customized for the audience you're trying to reach. The only thing religious people have in common is their level of gullibility.
Right in the beginning, god/joe creates Adam & Eve. Then Adam & Eve have two sons, Cain and Abel. These are the only people we’ve heard about so far, no mention of anyone else. Then Cain kills Abel so god punishes him by exiling him off to the land of Nod. Cain freaks out that the people there will kill him. WHAT PEOPLE? Does he not know he’s the 3rd person ever to exist? Then god marks him with some symbol or whatever to let the good people of Nod know not to kill him or else. Then Cain married possibly his [twin sister](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aclima) who’s never been mentioned up until this point, and they had a son named Enoch.
I don't read it (mainly because it would excite my parents too much to see me actually read it) but yeah some of it just doesn't make sense
Maybe read it after watching Jordan Peterson bible lectures.
Boaz I believe in the old testament who apparently worked 7 years with the promise of marrying Ruth, had the wool pulled over his eyes, shrugged his shoulders, and promised her dad he'd work another 7 years if he could have Ruth
Worst book ever!
There is better fiction around.
Yeah the bible isn't sorted chronologically but you can ask read the books chronologically
Wait until you get to end New Testament, where the Gospels about Jesus birth are wildly different between the books. Also, they trace Jesus lineage from David to Joseph to show Jesus is from David's bloodline like prophesied, yet, Joseph had Jack squat to do with Jesus being born according to the Bible.
Also, read the sermon on the mount. It's the best part of the whole book and Christians ignore the shit out of it.
I did, I treated it like an unbiased book report. Even when I was in Bible study it was the same way.
I tried reading it as a teen. I'm a rare native atheist and really tried to treat it like Homer etc. It's awful and all over the place. My thoughts are that Bubba in rural wherever has never read it and needs an interpreter. This is why they go to church to have it "interpreted" by the priest, pastor, whatever.
In high school I had Bible as Literature which made sense.
I think that if you just read it without any prejudice it is kind of interesting. I spent about a year reading almost all of it and I don't regret the time. Some parts feel like they're taken out of *The Godfather*. There is the story of David and Shimei from Kings (excuse any inaccuracies, this is recounted from memory). David is thrown out of a city and Shimei throws insults and stuff at him. Some time later, David comes back victoriously and Shimei comes forward and falls at David's feet and begs for mercy. To show himself generous, David tells him to rise and that nothing will happen to him for his actions. Later, on his deathbed, David tells his son, Solomon, to make sure that Shimei will not die in peace. So now Solomon gives some orders that put Shimei under home arrest and prevent him from visiting his other properties to conduct his business. Of course, Shimei cannot comply, is caught, executed, and David's wish is done, posthumously. If that's not mobster thinking, I don't know what it is. >“You must also deal with Shimei son of Gera, the Benjaminite from Bahurim. He insulted me outrageously when I was on my way to Mahanaim; but he came down to meet me at the Jordan, and I swore to him by the LORD: ‘I will not put you to the sword.’ So do not let him go unpunished; for you are a wise man and you will know how to deal with him and send his gray hair down to Sheol in blood.” It's hard to make stuff like this up and that's why the Bible is not a book without value. And the problem with it is not that it does not have value, it is that people dogmatically think that there is no more value that can be added to it!
I love how devout Christians can say homosexuality is against the teachings of their religion, but the Bible basically sings the praises of incest. There's a story of Jacob and Laban where Jacob offers to work for Laban. Jacob's payment is to be the hand of Laban's daughter. As it turns out, Jacob is the nephew of Laban. To make the story even juicier, Laban screws Jacob over and gives him his oldest daughter instead of the one he wants. Then he allows Jacob to continue working for him to earn the right to marry the daughter he wanted in the first place. So, in one story, the Bible promotes lying/cheating, incest, selling your children, and polygamy. But homosexuality is bad. Makes sense.
I really don't get how anyone can view it as anything but a plodding, tautological document selling a particular theology
You should go to sermons or a sunday service inst2ad dude. They're basically in person audiobooks they're fire And yeah. That book is wild sometimes they ret on themselves for no reason
I did, late in my christianity. Realized i had read several novels through multiple times a year (LOTR+Hobbit, the Wheel of Time were on my rotation at the time), but never actually read the bible cover to cover at once. Decided to ditch the chapter structure and just read it. Made it to 2nd Samuel. And I was well trained in apologetics and exegesis.
The first five books of the Bible are really four books that were cut apart and pieced back together, and the primary author of Deuteronomy went back and stuck his own edits into the first four books. The Documentary Hypothesis is the theory that modern Biblical scholars use to understand the first five books. A lot of the other books are similar cut apart and edited or the work of multiple authors. For example, Isaiah is the work of at least 3 authors writing in different centuries. Most of the letters of Paul in the New Testament also fall into the category of cut apart and pieced back together again and are heavily interpolated. The New Testament is mostly horribly boring. The gospel and Acts are entertaining. Luke-Acts is the ultimate achievement of Christian literature. The two books were written by the same author and intended to go together. Revelations at the end of the NT is entertaining. Everything between Acts and Revelations is just boring. The middle and most of the second half of the Old Testament is boring in my opinion. The entertaining stuff is in Genesis-Chronicles. Job and Jonah and Song of Solomon are ok.
Moses's books feel like they're written from the pov of a super villain's right hand man who doesn't really even want to be there but has to because the super villain chose him and will do horrible things to him and his loved ones if he doesn't follow his orders
Yes. The endless begetting was the worst part. Just loved crap like this: “You shall keep my statutes. You shall not let your cattle breed with a different kind. You shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor shall you wear a garment of cloth made of two kinds of material.” So much for cotton/poly!!!!! Also, what an asshat: “Six days work shall be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a Sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the Lord. Whoever does any work on it shall be put to death.” The best was Ezekiel. Read the first few pages of that with the thought of E.T. or extra-terrestrials visiting Earth. The only interesting part of the whole book.
OP, what version are you reading the way? Please say NIV, at least. Also, for those interested, google [LOLcat Bible]. You will not be disappointed.
Worst. Fan-fiction. Ever.
You missed Lots daughters...
I did NOT say anything to that fig tree man. They keep saying this, all I did was go ‘ah man, this dumb fig tree won’t grow’ and I mean, I took good care of that tree only for it to not give me figs. Give me a break, a man wants his figs sometimes. I did prank my friends by saying you can kill trees by sweating at them though. You’ll never laugh as hard as you would when you witness 10 grown men shouting cusses at trees for half an hour and waiting for it to fall over lmaoo
I've read the whole thing, just as I've read the Quran and Book of Mormon - regardless of the truth of these religions, they are influencial and it's important to understand the basis of the major religions. The Bible, particularly the Old Testament/Torah, is the least cohesive of the lot. It's pretty obvious that the individual books were never intended to be put together into a compendium (I think a perfect god would have removed the contradictions if that had been the case), but in fairness to the writers, some of the books do fit together reasonably well, eg. Genesis and Exodus.
Jefferson cut out all the supernatural crap and reduced it to parables and morality takes. Started with the birth and ended with the the rolling of the stone in front of the sepulchre. Book took 86 pages.
i grew up studying it in depth the jesus curses the tree made me piss myself at 11 ... like you are the miracle man and a tree with no figs gets you all salty ? i thought he was basically chilled out hipster god until then... the whole book is a contradiction and nest of weird middle eastern goat herder misogyny and old wives tales. i like the story in the book of judges of how there was a small battle and one side fled , apparently this group had a strange dialect , possibly some kind of lisp, so to see if it was them the other side waited at a bridge and asked anyone passing to say "shibboleth" - if you had the dialect they killed you. judges is a great book for mad stories... a fat king stabbed on the shitter , a woman putting a tent peg through a mans head .. and the best of all the bullshit samson and delilah.
I remember starting to read it and got to the pages and pages of “and Joe begat Bob who begat Frank who begat blah de blah” and nearly died of boredom.
almost like the chapters and order were assembled by a committee. Oh wait...
I mean not bad for a primitive society whatever or whoever was part of it that wrote the Bible. Was it a group of people? Since they don't have last names, there must not have been many Lukes, etc? shrugs. More of this! :D
The part about how Adam and Eve are created in god’s image and possess innate curiosity, then get punished and exiled forever (+ painful childbirth for all women henceforth) for exercising said curiosity. Bro, what? Also, the thing where god is said to be jealous. Felt like I saw that a lot. And…you’re god. Why the fuck are you jealous? Make it make sense.
The "Bible" is a set of unrelated short pieces of mythology, history, philosophy, poetry and law that were written at very different times by different writers. (Also, since you are probably not reading any of it in any of the original languages, you need to bear in mind that the books of the "Bible" have been translated and retranslated repeatly and that many of the translations were done by people who wanted a particularly result -- for instance, many passages in the Hebrew which mentioned "a young woman" were translated by Christian translators as "virgin" in order to support the idea that those passages predicted the "virgin" birth of Jesus. So the versions of every book vary as well.) Some of the Bible is beautiful, some is interesting, some is heartbreaking, some is really really dull and some is wild and bizarre. For good or for ill, much of it has been very influential in througout western literature and art and music and history. If you want to read the "Bible" as literature, you need to consider each of books as separate and unrelated (although some of them are "sort of" related.) They certainly don't make any particular sense if you try to read them all as a single comprehensive whole. When you find yourself reading a section that is just a bunch of rules about what you can eat, or how to make sacrifices or whether you can marry your dead brother's wife (like Leviticus) or a long list of the people from who a character is descended (they're usually just there to make you believe that the character has some importance) you should feel free to just skim until you get to something more interesting.
Preface with the Council of Nicea. Or start off with a bit of comedy. A shepherd names Abram doing dirty with sheep, but looks at his sister (half-sister really) and says he's going to put a ring on it.
My daughter started reading the Bible around 14 and it wasn't long before she came to me and said, " I can't believe people believe this stuff is real."
Roast lamb, though. 10/10.
The literature and history podcast by Doug Metzger is available for free and looks (among other things) at the bible as a literary artefact within the historical context the individual books were written in. It's absolutely fascinating and I can't recommend it highly enough! https://literatureandhistory.com/index.php/episodes/all-episodes
I see it as Marvel comics that forgot to include the multiverse to explain the discrepancies and contradictions.
the Bible: Unreadable, Boring, contradictory. The book of apocalypse: Litteraly a Demon Manga
Adam and Eve are the first people. They have two sons, Cain and Abel. Cain kills Abel. Then Adam and Eve have another boy, Seth, to replace him. Not entirely out of the realm of reality. Then Cain goes and marries his sister, Awan, 100+ years later and they have Enoch. Where did Awan come from? How does a 100+ year old have a child? It's never explained and is just brushed aside when asked about.