The following is taken from a great book I bought last year, entitled "The Harlot by the Side of the Road," by Jonathan Kirsch. I purchased it to read about how women were treated in the Bible, but learned a lot more than I expected.
The Bible encompasses so many contradictory laws, rituals, and commandments that we are forced to pick and choose the moral instruction that we find most compelling. Of course, there are plenty of people who are willing to make the choice for us, and that is one of the reasons why the Bible is such an unfamiliar book to so many people-many of us rely on teachers and preachers to tell us what matters in the Bible and what can be discarded.Over the centuries, and never more so than today, we have tended to be drawn to the kinder and gentler moral imperatives that can be found in the Bible. "And what does the Lord require of thee?" writes the prophet Micah, whose message is especially compelling because it is so compassionate-and so simple. "Only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God." (Mic.6:8)
But a simple credo does not go far enough; wars have been fought (and are still being fought), men and women have been tortured (and are still being tortured), and lives have been lost (and are still being lost) over the question of what is just and what is merciful. The history of the Bible-based religions is also the history of book-banning and book-burning, inquisition and excommunication, holy war and holy crusade, martyrdom and mass murder, and the rack.
"Religious intolerance," as Freud observed, "was inevitably born with the belief in one God." The real challenge of the Bible, then, is to reach some common understanding of how an article of faith translates into a concrete act of human conduct--and that is why we hunger for words of moral instruction from the Almighty to fill Sartre's god-shaped hole in our soul, words that can be understood and acted on, not in heaven, but here and now!
Much attention has always been paid to the externals of religious practice, but the Bible depicts God as having little interest in such matters. Elaborate ceremonies of worship, no matter how solemn and reverent, are meaningless in the eyes of God if they are not accompanied by nmercy and justice, as we are told by the prphet Isaiah. "Your new moons and your appointed seasons, My soul hateth; they are a burden unto Me; I am weary to bear them, " God warns Isaiah. "Yea, when you make many prayers, I will not hear." (Isa.1:14-15)
In a passage from Isaiah that is read aloud in contemporary congregations on the first day of Yom Kipper, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the prophet tells us what God really wants of us in simple, straightforward, and specific terms:
"It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, clothe him,
And not to ignore your own kin." (Isa. 58:7)
This book has many chapters also about who actually wrote the Bible,
"Today, the Bible is regarded by most scholars and critics as a patchwork of legend, lore, and law that was created over a thousand years or so in distant antiquity by countless unknown chroniclers and lawgivers and storytellers, collected and compiled and corrected by generation after generation of editors (or "redactors"), and canonized by the ancient rabbis only toward the end of the Biblical era. Thus, even if we regard what we find in the Bible as divinely inspired, the words themselves were spoken aloud by human voices and set down in writing by human hands."
Who knows what transpired between storytelling? It's like that old game, where you sit in a circle and one person thinks up a story and whispers it to the person next to them, and it goes on and on until the last person has to tell the story. It inevitably gets screwed up, even after only about twenty minutes!!
" Over the centuries, the storytelling traditons were expanded and elaborated upon by priests and scribes whose goal was to formalize the stories and make them fit into the official faith of ancient Israel. The priests themselves promulgated law codes and prescribed elaborate rituals for high holy days and day-to-day life. At the same time, the archivists and chroniclers in service to the early monarchs began to write down official accounts of royal births and deaths, victories and defeats in wartime, international trade and treaties in peacetime. Then, in times of crisis, along came the seers and sermonizers whom we call the Prophets, and their visions and scoldings and exhortations were added to the sacred literature of ancient Israel.
Over the span of several centuries, starting around 1000 B.C.E. and ending sometime after 200 B.C.E., all of these many strands of storytelling, poetry and song, sacred law, priestly ritual, and court history were written down, gathered up, stitched together and offered to the people of ancient Israel and their posterity in the form of the book that we know as the Bible."
April
I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe; I told it not, my wrath did grow. (William Blake, A Poison Tree)
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