![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
And hasteth to his place where he arose
Apr. 11th, 2019 03:58 pm
Yesterday I finished reading through the bible a second time--this time in ninety days, after finishing my read-the-bible-in-a-year program on schedule in January. And today I've started over again, this time just starting out provisionally planning to read three chapters a day, except in Lent, when I'll read six chapters a day. That adds up to 1215 chapters in a 365-day year, and there are 1189 chapters in the protestant canonical bible, which brings me to what is now blazingly obviously to me the question a particularly informed person ought to ask when you tell them you're "reading the bible", which is, "What do you mean by 'the bible'?" I'm still not entirely sure what to do about all the various Apocrypha and whatnot, but I had definitely better get to them all sooner or later.
Particular information aside, you might think the question anyone ought to ask when you tell them you're reading the bible would be "why?", but the funny thing about reading the bible, it has struck me lately--I mean, struck me explicitly; I think I've been coasting along on an implicit understanding of this all the way through--is that nobody asks you why you're reading the bible; it stands out as a non-productive activity that nobody asks you to justify undertaking, for a few very different reasons: (1) some people will assume you're insane, or at least religious and therefore irrational, and so asking you to justify yourself would be pointless; (2) some will assume you're a good Christian like them and so will just want to congratulate you rather than interrogate you (and, rather than asking why you're doing it, they might ask whether you're thinking of going into the clergy); (3) some, not being particularly Christian themselves but having grown up in the fading but still potent vestiges of Christian culture, which has left them with the unshakeable feeling that Ned Flanders is the very type of a Good Person (and also the nagging worry that they're going to hell), will just sort of (and maybe not without a little bit of resentment) suppose that reading the bible makes you better than them in some way they don't really understand but goes without saying. There are also (4) those few who appreciate that one might read the bible for, broadly speaking, scholarly reasons; while these might no more question your reading the bible than your reading the complete works of Shakespeare, they might raise an eyebrow at your immediately starting over, not to mention immediately starting over a third time, but at that point they will fall into one of the first three groups.
So, nobody, that I recall, has yet asked me why I am reading, and re-reading, the bible. It's a question that, obviously, is in increasing need of an answer as I'm starting in on it for a third time.
That aside for now, a couple of things about the end and the beginning, which have just gone by again: the first time I finished the bible, I thought that including the totally insane book of Revelation was a horrible mistake; this time, with so much more forest working its way out of the trees for me, I was struck repeatedly by how much more like the Hebrew bible, specifically the prophets, Revelation is than anything else in the New Testament, and then when it gets to talking about Babylon I realized: the point of this book is to reconcile the Hebrew messianic prophecies, about the reconstitution of Israel as God's people after the end of the Babylonian captivity and the defeat of the Babylonian empire, with the idea of Jesus. And then I went and looked at the Wikipedia article on Revelation and saw that Revelation is actually largely a pastiche, sometimes a virtual cut-and-paste, of old Hebrew sources with Jesus sprinkled in. So Revelation now becomes vastly more interesting, as part of a project running through the New Testament of reinterpreting the relationship between God and Israel, you might say, "metaphorically"--the big instance of this that jumped out at me this time in the gospels is Jesus saying that God could raise up descendants to Abraham from stones if he wanted to; this a theme hammered on in various places in the rest of the NT: the descendants of Abraham who are God's chosen people are the "spiritual", not biological, descendants of Abraham. (I have to say that I now have a much better appreciation for why some believing Christians in my experience have not been impressed by the Abraham and Isaac story in anywhere near the same way Kierkegaard is.) Likewise in Revelation the "Babylon" to be defeated by the messiah is reconceived as, you could say, a Babylon of the heart (although I have a feeling that some (most? all?) Jewish commentators would argue that Babylon was really always a Babylon of the heart ... though the thing is that for the Hebrew prophets, there was an actual Babylonian empire that was a real practical problem for the Jewish people, whereas by the time of the NT several empires have come and gone since the Babylonians, so you can see how the fall of the actual Babylon having occurred but apparently not the promised reconstitution of Israel, reconciled with God, would be a problem someone like the writer of Revelation might be trying to deal with.)
And about the beginning: I'm not sure I ever noticed before today (though I suspect I have, and forgot) that the serpent is right about what he says to Eve: the serpent says they won't die when they eat the fruit, and he says that God just doesn't want Adam and Eve to be like him, knowing good and evil. In fact they don't die when they eat the fruit (and obviously I am aware of how you can spin this, as I have spun it, in whatever figurative sense, but the fact is that eating the fruit doesn't kill them--God, if he was telling the truth at all, was not telling the truth straightforwardly), and God decides to banish them from the garden because, he says to himself, they have become like "us", knowing good and evil, and he can't let something else that knows good and evil find the tree of life and live forever (which means that God has to take an extra step to ensure that they die; they don't die as a direct result of eating the fruit).
--
Currently under my porch: 5.6. Currently at Havelock: 5. (Weather Underground has eliminated tenths of degrees, to my great irritation.) High today: 7. The first yellow-bellied sapsuckers I've seen this year were tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tapping away today. A pair of purple finches finally showed up the other day, but I haven't seen any since. Every day I wonder if today will be the day the redpolls are gone, but it hasn't come yet. I was kind of back and forth on bothering with maple syrup this year but I did a batch last Thursday: got 1.5 litres, and didn't have to go to the hospital.
Particular information aside, you might think the question anyone ought to ask when you tell them you're reading the bible would be "why?", but the funny thing about reading the bible, it has struck me lately--I mean, struck me explicitly; I think I've been coasting along on an implicit understanding of this all the way through--is that nobody asks you why you're reading the bible; it stands out as a non-productive activity that nobody asks you to justify undertaking, for a few very different reasons: (1) some people will assume you're insane, or at least religious and therefore irrational, and so asking you to justify yourself would be pointless; (2) some will assume you're a good Christian like them and so will just want to congratulate you rather than interrogate you (and, rather than asking why you're doing it, they might ask whether you're thinking of going into the clergy); (3) some, not being particularly Christian themselves but having grown up in the fading but still potent vestiges of Christian culture, which has left them with the unshakeable feeling that Ned Flanders is the very type of a Good Person (and also the nagging worry that they're going to hell), will just sort of (and maybe not without a little bit of resentment) suppose that reading the bible makes you better than them in some way they don't really understand but goes without saying. There are also (4) those few who appreciate that one might read the bible for, broadly speaking, scholarly reasons; while these might no more question your reading the bible than your reading the complete works of Shakespeare, they might raise an eyebrow at your immediately starting over, not to mention immediately starting over a third time, but at that point they will fall into one of the first three groups.
So, nobody, that I recall, has yet asked me why I am reading, and re-reading, the bible. It's a question that, obviously, is in increasing need of an answer as I'm starting in on it for a third time.
That aside for now, a couple of things about the end and the beginning, which have just gone by again: the first time I finished the bible, I thought that including the totally insane book of Revelation was a horrible mistake; this time, with so much more forest working its way out of the trees for me, I was struck repeatedly by how much more like the Hebrew bible, specifically the prophets, Revelation is than anything else in the New Testament, and then when it gets to talking about Babylon I realized: the point of this book is to reconcile the Hebrew messianic prophecies, about the reconstitution of Israel as God's people after the end of the Babylonian captivity and the defeat of the Babylonian empire, with the idea of Jesus. And then I went and looked at the Wikipedia article on Revelation and saw that Revelation is actually largely a pastiche, sometimes a virtual cut-and-paste, of old Hebrew sources with Jesus sprinkled in. So Revelation now becomes vastly more interesting, as part of a project running through the New Testament of reinterpreting the relationship between God and Israel, you might say, "metaphorically"--the big instance of this that jumped out at me this time in the gospels is Jesus saying that God could raise up descendants to Abraham from stones if he wanted to; this a theme hammered on in various places in the rest of the NT: the descendants of Abraham who are God's chosen people are the "spiritual", not biological, descendants of Abraham. (I have to say that I now have a much better appreciation for why some believing Christians in my experience have not been impressed by the Abraham and Isaac story in anywhere near the same way Kierkegaard is.) Likewise in Revelation the "Babylon" to be defeated by the messiah is reconceived as, you could say, a Babylon of the heart (although I have a feeling that some (most? all?) Jewish commentators would argue that Babylon was really always a Babylon of the heart ... though the thing is that for the Hebrew prophets, there was an actual Babylonian empire that was a real practical problem for the Jewish people, whereas by the time of the NT several empires have come and gone since the Babylonians, so you can see how the fall of the actual Babylon having occurred but apparently not the promised reconstitution of Israel, reconciled with God, would be a problem someone like the writer of Revelation might be trying to deal with.)
And about the beginning: I'm not sure I ever noticed before today (though I suspect I have, and forgot) that the serpent is right about what he says to Eve: the serpent says they won't die when they eat the fruit, and he says that God just doesn't want Adam and Eve to be like him, knowing good and evil. In fact they don't die when they eat the fruit (and obviously I am aware of how you can spin this, as I have spun it, in whatever figurative sense, but the fact is that eating the fruit doesn't kill them--God, if he was telling the truth at all, was not telling the truth straightforwardly), and God decides to banish them from the garden because, he says to himself, they have become like "us", knowing good and evil, and he can't let something else that knows good and evil find the tree of life and live forever (which means that God has to take an extra step to ensure that they die; they don't die as a direct result of eating the fruit).
--
Currently under my porch: 5.6. Currently at Havelock: 5. (Weather Underground has eliminated tenths of degrees, to my great irritation.) High today: 7. The first yellow-bellied sapsuckers I've seen this year were tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tapping away today. A pair of purple finches finally showed up the other day, but I haven't seen any since. Every day I wonder if today will be the day the redpolls are gone, but it hasn't come yet. I was kind of back and forth on bothering with maple syrup this year but I did a batch last Thursday: got 1.5 litres, and didn't have to go to the hospital.
