I finished reading The Bible yesterday. I used an app (Bible Study) and a 90-day reading program that served up a selection of the Old Testament, a Psalm, and a bit of the New Testament each day. (I started Jan 1, and it's 4/27, so I missed the 90-day mark, but I'm done). Various thoughts to follow.
First, I just want to note that this was an Investment of Time & Energy. I was reading many mornings/evenings, and mostly put other reading on hold. I'd had Instapaper under 100 articles, and now it's around 285. I've got Black Leopard, Red Wolf, How Long Til Black Future Month, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, and a few other books queued up. I expect to enjoy those more than The Bible, but I'm glad to have finished.
The Old Testament is kind of awful. It's got two creation stories, a handful of patriarchs, Abraham sacrificing his son, Moses and the plagues (God regularly hardens Pharoah's heart, and all I could think was how much additional misery God was putting all the regular Egyptians through each time), and then a story of settler-colonialism. In fact, that story of conquest gets told, then retold, then retold a third time. After the conquest of Israel, there's the story of attempted nation-building, and eventual overthrow. During the kingdom-establishment, bad people get rewarded (waves at King David), good people get punished, and everything's told as being the result of God's power and action in the world. It's got bad ideology (settler-colonialism, nationalism), bad theology/theodicy, and lots of helpings of sexualizing and shaming women. Plus endless measurements of the temple. There's also some interesting rules about how to set up a society of herders and farmers, and get them integrated with urban environments. This gets us through the Pentateuch, Kings, Chronicles (Kings and Chronicles tell the same story, once from the perspective of Israel and once of Judah).
Then Israel falls, the people are carried away to the Babylonian captivity, and there's a whole series of prophets. It's interesting to see that sometimes the prophets are yelling from the rooftop about how society needs to be transformed, and other times they have the ear of the king and are basically technocratic advisors, except instead of using spreadsheets, they're channeling the advice of God. I'm pretty interested in prophetic voices, and the role of prophets in speaking both to the wider world and to communities ostensibly prepared to listen to them, so these were interesting to read, but I still have a lot more thinking I want to do.
Job is basically a slap in the face to all the Theology of the ostensibly historical bits of the old testament. The Psalms are beautiful, and some of them (Psalm 24) spoke to me. Others involved spears and heels of tramping warriors and did not. Proverbs ranges from Deep to Funny. And so on. There are nuggets of excellence and meaning amidst a whole that I found very challenging. (And yes, I'm aware that many smart people have made meaning of the things I found challenging. But it feels to me like a text I would have to do intellectual gymnastics to find valuable as a whole, which I'm not inclined to try to do at the moment. Similarly, I'm pretty sure that The Old Testament is very different from all of Jewish tradition. I may try to tackle Maimonedes again, but mostly I'm thinking about my reaction to the Old Testament, rather than situating it in any of the broader spiritual traditions that have made use of the book. That's another project, or maybe projects.)
The New Testament was also a big challenge. There's some of Jesus' story that I appreciate, but also it's more focused on fulfilling prophecies that really were, at least interpreted on their face, about re-establishing a settler-colonialist state, than I had been conscious of. Plus there's still a fair amount of making women, and men's perception of them, problems. And even more of that with the various letters. Which, again, have nuggets of excellence wrapped in a whole that feels like a grab bag, often disappointingly fascinated by intra-party squabbles. I've lived through left-Twitter, and SFF Book Blogging wars, and various other cases of groups establishing themselves and re-establishing their identities. These are interesting and consuming debates to those involved in them, but rarely produce texts that deserve to be read outside their context, and my impression of the New Testament was similar.
Revelation is interesting to read as part of the prophetic tradition. And I think the thing I found most interesting about reading The Bible was all the different traditions embedded within it. Prophets who speak in visions and allegory. Views of God as powerful actor who has chosen out a select people, an actor who rewards Good and punishes Evil, an actor whose approval can be discerned by Success and Failure, even if the successes and failures don't seem to be good and evil. Plus there's a lot of poetry, and a focus on behavior rather than intention or theology. I was extremely aware while reading The Bible that the Bible that I grew up with has been (re)shaped by centuries of reinterpretation that smoothed a lot of rough edges, discarded many elements, and pulled out chunks.
All of which is understandable. Were I part of a tradition that said "this book has to be a focus", I would probably prioritize selective reading, and make it a coherent tradition that agreed with what I wanted it to. And I could totally make of it a coherent tradition. There's one reaction that people have to the internal inconsistency of The Bible where they point out that people who claim to value The Bible aren't following its commands, which is basically a silly game, and like shooting fish in a barrel. There's another reaction where people decide that they're going to "rediscover" or "reclaim" some "original" or "primitive" Church. Which again is kind of silly. It's pretty easy to find whatever you want in The Bible. It's probably also pretty easy to find the opposite.
So now I've read The Bible. I'm curious about some of the traditions and elements I hadn't really been all that conscious of. I'm much more uncomfortable with some elements than I had been. I'm still going to sing Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho. I'm sure there's a lot I missed, and a lot more to say about it than I saw in my readthrough. But I have a sense of the book as a whole that I didn't 117 days ago.
