Introduction to the old testament part 5

We can read the Bible with fresh and appreciative eyes only if we first acknowledge and set aside some of our presuppositions about the Bible. It's really impossible, in fact, that you not have some opinions about this work, because it's an intimate part of our culture. So even if you've never opened it or read it yourself, I bet you can cite me a line or two--"an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," and I bet you don't really know what it means. "The poor will always be with you": I'm sure you don't really know what that means. These are things and phrases that we hear and they create within us a certain impression of the biblical text and how it functions. Verses are quoted, they're alluded to, whether to be championed and valorized or whether to be lampooned and pilloried.

But we can feel that we have a rough idea of the Bible and a rough idea of its outlook when in fact what we really have are popular misconceptions that come from the way in which the Bible has been used or misused.

Most of our cherished presuppositions about the Bible are based on astonishing claims that others have made on behalf of the Bible, claims that the Bible has not made on behalf of itself. So before we proceed, I need to ask you to set aside for the purposes of this course, some of the more common myths about the Bible. I have a little list here for you. The first is the idea that the Bible's a book. It's not a book.

We'll get rid of that one. The Bible is not a book with all that that implies, that it has a uniform style and a message and a single author, the sorts of things we think of when we think in a conventional sense of the word "book." It's a library. It's an anthology of writings or books written and edited over an extensive period of time by people in very different situations responding to very different issues and stimuli, some political, some historical, some philosophical, some religious, some moral. There are many types or genres of material in the Bible.

There's narrative, wonderful narrative stories. There's all kinds of law. There are cultic and ritual texts that prescribe how some ceremony is supposed to be performed. There are records of the messages of prophets. There's lyric poetry, there's love poetry, there are proverbs, there are psalms of thanksgiving and lament.  So, there's a tremendous variety of material in this library, and it follows from the fact that it's not a book but an anthology of diverse works, that it's not an ideological monolith. And this is something a lot of students struggle with. Each book, or strand of tradition within a book, within the biblical collection sounds its own distinctive note in the symphony of reflection that is the Bible. Genesis is concerned to account for the origin of things and wrestles with the existence of evil, the existence of idolatry and suffering in a world that's created by a good god.

To be continued in part 6.