First Impressions: On (Re)Reading the Bible All the Way Through

First Impressions: On (Re)Reading the Bible All the Way Through

April 2022

By AFBR

I have been reading through the Bible for over a year now. This venture began for several reasons. First, my son, a recent college graduate and staying home due to covid, and I began reading Genesis together and discussing the text and its implications. Secondly, growing up Christian with mostly evangelical influences, going to Christian institutions since kindergarten - including college and seminary - and having read the Bible for my entire life, I realized I’d never read the work all the way through. While I’d studied many passages and books dozens of times, there were still portions I’d not read or else had only skimmed over long ago.

When my two children were born, about 25 years ago, my wife simply was no longer Christian in any real sense, and I was moving on from a traditional notion of faith and was quite liberal (I am now clearly agnostic). We decided not to baptize our children in any church and they grew up culturally Christian, but (unlike myself) with no real sense of the theology or textual connections to the faith. My son, though, had expressed an interest in knowing what the seminal text of the Judeo-Christian faith was all about.

My son, so I found, brought many questions and comments to the first book of the Pentatuch that - unlike myself - were refreshingly not infused with the theological assumptions I’d grown up with. He saw the text as someone not doctrinated would and I appreciated his keen insights and questions very much, as they helped frame my own interpretations. After Genesis, my son moved out and into his own place and after a few months, picked back up and decided I’d complete the whole work in the next few years or so. 

I am now through the middle of Psalms and have many insights I want to share - but here are only a few. These short reflections I hope will spawn longer essays later as I go back to review my notes, but here are some I have at the moment.

• There is very little, or no, evidence from Genesis to Psalms that God’s love is unconditional in any way. The Lord (or, most accurately, the human authors of the books portrayal of His character) makes very, very clear, in passages too numerous to count, that this self-proclaimed “jealous God” will love and protect His people conditionally. He, or his textual representatives, proclaim from Abraham on through Ezra, that, if you love me, I will love you back and protect you, but if you don’t, I will destroy you. Sometimes He goes back or softens this decree - but it always hangs over the people of Israel like a curse and blessing. Two chapters in particular stand out and are representative of the whole ethos of the texts - but there are myriad other examples. These verses from Deuteronomy 28 and 29 (RSV): 

  • “If you obey the voice of the Lord your God, being careful to do all his commandments which I command you this day, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the Lord… If you are not careful to do all the words of this law which are written in this book… the Lord will take delight in bringing ruin upon you and destroying you; and you shall be plucked off the land which you are entering to take possession of it.”

  • Again, the Old Testament is chock full of these verses and the curses and plagues befall the children of Israel dozens of times. More on this later, I hope.

• The God of the Old Testament is quite narcissistic (“jealous”) and not the kind of parent even a bad earthy parent should take lessons from. Let’s put aside the Binding of Isaac in Genesis, as that’s often cited for a statement like this. Here I want to draw attention to Judges 12 (Revised Standard Version). Here, a man of God, Jephthah, who has the “spirit of the Lord” within him, prays to God, asking for victory in battle, and makes his own condition: “If thou wilt give the Ammonites into my hand, then whoever comes forth from the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious… shall be the Lord’s, and I will offer [them] up for a burnt offering.” God gives him victory (or course) but the Pyrrhic dilemma he faces when he gets home is that his daughter is the first one he sees. God does not, as in the Binding of Isaac episode, send a redeemer at the last minute to save Jephthah’s virgin daughter, but allows him to slaughter her for the Lord’s offering. This is no parent to emulate or a God worth worshiping, really.

• The text of the Bible is even more problematic and inconsistent than I’d thought and remember from studying in seminary. I was educated at the undergraduate and master’s level by conservative, moderate, and (a few) progressive professors. Of special note, the progressive professors were the most willing to admit when they might not know something and were very sensitive and accepting of moderate to conservative views. Most of them had grown up either conservative or moderate themselves. I’d studied some of the contradictions and inconsistencies in scripture over the years, but going straight through is opening my eyes to many contradictions - some that are “no big deal,” while some cleary mark this text as a human production of culture, history, and religious subculture, and not that of a perfect divine origin. One very quick example (there are many, really): Who killed Goliath the giant warrior of the Philistines? According to I Samuel 17, it is David, the young boy most Bible readers and Christians who went to Bible Sunday School know about. According to II Samuel 21, however, it is Elhanan, an Israelite soldier. Dozens and dozens of examples are there for the reading - right in front of us. It helps, though, to have an annotated text like the Revised Standard Version, or something like it, to read with a scholar’s lens.

I hope, in the coming months, to dig deeper into some of these topics and more on this website. 

Keep reading. Thanks.