It's an easy read and I'm already enjoying it. I will share information with you along the way. What you see in quotes comes directly from the book.
"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." Francis Bacon
". . . your own culture and language is so different from the biblical culture and language that it is inevitable that you will unconsciously but mistakenly read your own culture, ideas, concepts and preferences into the text, rather than reading the original meaning."
". . . The truth is we all need help in reading and understanding the Bible."
We talk about this in our Bible study group a lot and we try to wrap our head around the culture of the times, but we can only do it as much as we can imagine from things we've seen which are mostly Hollywood depictions.
"Think for a minute about the famous story in Acts 8 of the Ethiopian eunuch . . . reading an Isaiah scroll . . . when Philip the Evangelist . . . asks him "do you understand what you are reading?" . . . "How can I, unless someone explains it to me?"
". . . if one is going to try to apply or practice what a book instructs a person to do, this requires something beyond understanding . . . there is a very significant journey from knowing what is said to understanding what is said, to knowing how to apply the text. The Bible . . . calls a person to embrace them, apply them, live them."
We also discuss this a lot - we are not studying the Bible or attending Bible studies for the sheer benefit of head knowledge, but to learn how to apply the Truths in our everyday walk while we are here on earth. We cannot get fixated on one particular story within the Bible but must understand it as a whole.
"The book of Leviticus is likely to appear as a gigantic rule manual if you don't first understand the sacrificial system used in ancient Israel and the covenantal nature of God's relationship with his people . . . taken out of context [it] will seem like a handbook for ancient priests.
. . . is understandable, until one reads Leviticus in light of the stories in Genesis and Exodus about covenant and sacrifice, the beginnings of the priesthood, and why sacrifices to God and rules for the priesthood were needed.
"Even if you glide through Leviticus . . . to Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and Esther, you may have problems with the fact that books like 1-2 Chronicles seem to be edited down reruns of 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings. Then you can't figure out why there is a hymnbook in the middle of the story in the OT (the Psalms). Then you get bogged down in prophecy after prophecy . . . "
"Then you come to the NT . . . and wade through a genealogy in Matthew . . . of men into which is squeezed four strange women and then the wife of the primary person at the end of genealogy (Joseph's wife Mary), and then you learn that in fact Jesus is not the physical descendant of Joseph but only Mary - yet this is Joseph's genealogy . . . you then discover that this gospel and the two that follow it seem like variations on a theme, but the Fourth Gospel is very different than the first three."
"Next . . . Acts . . . a biblical narrative . . . [then] you discover the rest of the Bible is composed of letters or sermons or discourses . . . [and then] the Bible concludes with a bang, a book of apocalyptic or visionary prophecies."
"It is for these and other reasons . . . we will start our journey of trying to understand the Bible by looking first at the grand sweep of the story . . . Before we do, a word about what can go wrong if we don't study the Bible in its original contexts is in order."
"There was a young man who liked to have a 'verse for the day to live by.' . . . he would close his eyes, thumb through pages, put his finger down, open his eyes and read the verse where his finger landed. One day what he landed on was 'and Judas went out and hanged himself.' He thought 'surely this is not what you want me to do today, Lord.' . . . the second time he landed on 'Go and do likewise.' Well, perhaps the third time . . . he read, 'What you are about to do, do quickly.'
Obviously, this is not how to apply the Bible to your own life. Indeed, any kind of approach that takes words or phrases or verses or paragraphs out of context and tries to apply them is a recipe for disaster. . . . start big, with the grand narrative of the Bible, and work your way to the small."
This is important for all of us to understand because I know we all have our questions / issues / concerns . . . (me included) . . .
"the Bible does not provide a historical account about all humanity. Did you ever wonder where the spouses of Cain and Abel came from? . . . Other peoples come into the story only tangentially when they interact with God's people . . . for example, the Bible does not tell us the story of the rise and development of the Babylonian people, the Assyrian people, the Hittites, the Egyptians, the Greeks, or the Romans. These other people come into the story only when they interact with God's people. . . and God's people are the Hebrews, or as they are later known, the Jews . . . almost every single book of the Bible was written for the Jews . . . except Luke - Acts and possibly 2 Peter. Jesus, Paul, the Twelve, and all the very earliest followers of Jesus were Jews. The Bible is a thoroughly Jewish book, from cover to cover. The people of God only expand to include many Gentiles once Jesus comes to redeem not only Israel but the nations."
"While the author uses the seven-day framework to discuss Creation, the alert reader notices immediately that the sun of our solar system is neither mentioned nor created until the fourth day of Creation (Genesis 1:14-19). It is thus impossible to take the "evening and morning" structure of the account of the acts of creation as a guide to exactly how long it took God to create the universe. . . . The real focus . . . is not on inanimate matter . . . but on the creation of humankind . . . created in God's image."
"Adam . . . needs a mate in order to fulfill the mandate to 'be fruitful and multiply' . . . Nothing implies Eve's subordination to Adam. Eve is created as a 'helper' . . . and proves to be the crown of creation, after which God 'ceases' to create (see Genesis 1-2). [They are] given tasks . . . to tend the garden, to fill the earth and subdue it, and to avoid the fruit of one particular tree in the garden, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The Hebrew word for "knowledge" is yada. The careful reader of Genesis 1-3 notices that it is only Adam who receives the commandment to avoid the tree in question. Eve learns it second-hand from Adam . . . appears poorly taught because she assumes that God had even said not to touch the fruit. . . . Since it is Adam who was first given the prohibition, it is also Adam who is mainly blamed for the sin and its horrific consequences not only here in Genesis but in the NT as well (see Romans 5:12-21)."
[An aside from Judi . . . is this why we say "yada, yada, yada" ???]
"Whenever God is disobeyed in the Bible, there are negative consequences. In this case the consequences involve labor pains. As women we usually only associate them with birthing, but here we see God has multiple meanings
1) Adam will have to work the land 'by the sweat of his brow' (work will be had, back-breaking, and even dangerous)
2) Eve will also experience dangerous pains in labor as she bears children and becomes the 'mother of all living.' But the worst consequence of the original sin was that 'your desire will be for your husband, and he will lord it over you.' . . . an equitable relationship that involved 'to love and to cherish' would degenerate into 'to desire and to dominate' . . . because of the original sin . . . gender hierarchy and patriarchy in which men subordinate and dominate women in various ways (see Genesis 3)."
[I will continue to post information from this book. You will find it with the same title and "continued" in future blog posts. For now . . . this is enough to absorb ;-) Blessings . . . Judi]