About "The" Book, Part One

It is simultaneously the most revered and most reviled book of all time.

Every person has an opinion about it, yet most people have never read it.

And it's actually not a book. Rather, it's a collection of scores of different books and letters and poems, from several different genres, that were composed across a span of many centuries by dozens of different authors.

The oldest of these writings were composed about 3,200 years ago, and were likely memorializing things that had been handed down orally from earlier times. The newest were written about 1,900 years ago, and it was not until a few centuries after that -- and after a great deal of study and debate -- that a consensus was reached to include these diverse writings in a single collection while excluding many others.

This collection is what we now call the Bible. One of its recurring and most obvious lessons is that every human is very sinful, very flawed, and very limited, and that every human must remember this and therefore act with humility. Among the Bible's devotees are many people who take this lesson to heart and behave accordingly... and, unfortunately, many others who conduct themselves with such pride and arrogance that they miss the mark spectacularly.

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Here in the English-speaking world, it goes without saying that the great majority of us who read and quote the Bible do so in English.

But of course the Bible was not written in English. It was written before the English language even existed, and many people, including an alarming number of authorities who should know better, gloss right over this fact.

Most of the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, though some sections, particularly in the books of Daniel and Ezra, were originally in Aramaic.

Of note, Aramaic was Jesus's native language. Long before he was born it became the lingua franca of that part of the world and came to be spoken by most "ordinary" Jews, whereas Hebrew itself retracted to being spoken mostly by the educated elite. Out of necessity, biblical scrolls in many communities were therefore translated to Aramaic in order to facilitate public worship. 

Also long before Jesus was born, Greek supplanted Aramaic as the lingua franca. That was about 250 years before his birth, which, if you're doing the math, is about as long as the United States has existed. Therefore scrolls were translated into Greek, specifically into the then-dominant dialect known as Koine Greek.

When Jesus's disciples/apostles read scriptures, they were reading the Greek translations, which are collectively known as the Septuagint. When they wrote the books and letters that would later become the New Testament, they wrote them in Greek.

As Christianity spread it became necessary to take the Septuagint and New Testament and translate them into other languages -- especially Latin, seeing as how Latin was the language of Rome and the Roman Empire was at its zenith.

Between 382 and 405 A.D., Jerome of Stridon translated most of the Old and New Testament writings into Latin. Though his translations were made mostly from the Septuagint, he also translated from the small number of Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts he could get his hands on.

Then other Latin translations of the few books Jerome didn't get to were added to the plethora of translations he did complete, and altogether the compilation was called the Vulgate. As time unfolded through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it came to be the most widely used version of the Bible and thus it was Christianity's gold standard for roughly 1,000 years.

Even so, for some 400 of those same 1,000 years, dedicated groups of Jewish scholars back east, in parts of present-day Israel and Iraq, underwent the painstaking task of bypassing the Septuagint as much as possible by transcribing Old Testament scriptures back into Hebrew text. To this end, they combed through whatever Hebrew manuscripts existed in those parts of the world and supplemented them with pertinent oral traditions. Because those scholars were called Masoretes, the compilation they produced came to be known as the Masoretic Text; and over the past 500 years it, as opposed to the Septuagint, has become the primary basis for most modern biblical translations.

Still, the Masoretic Text is not the sole basis for any biblical translation. There's just no getting away from Greek, because: 1) Greek was the original language of the New Testament, and 2) by the time the Masoretes did their work, the number of surviving Greek manuscripts of the Old Testament far exceeded the number of surviving Hebrew ones.

Plus, it's hard to ignore the cold truth that the vast majority of Greek manuscripts from which the Septuagint was translated are older than the Hebrew ones from which the Masoretic Text was garnered -- in some cases up to a thousand years older.

You don't need to have spent much time suffering through studying foreign languages to see how ripe this timeline is for things to get obscured, redefined, or otherwise lost in translation -- and so far I am only talking about elementary, run-of-the-mill translation issues.

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Everybody has heard (and made) the complaint that something is being taken out of context.

Biblically speaking, the first example that leaps to my mind is when people righteously claim "the Bible says not to judge." The passage they have in mind is from the Sermon on the Mount, in the Gospel of Matthew, and what it actually says in full -- i.e., in context -- is:  Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, "Let me take the speck out of your eye," when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye. (ESV)

This is telling us how to judge, with the point being that we need to start by judging our own selves so that we may be in the proper position to judge others. There are several reasons why people cite only the first of this passage's five sentences when they "quote the Bible," and all of them are obvious.

When talking about taking the Bible out of context, however, that example does not even begin to scratch the surface of how deep the problem runs, for it only illustrates people misinterpreting one paragraph that is presented in a single language from a very reliable translation. This misinterpretation stems from plain old selective listening, selective reading, short attention span, deflection, and wishful thinking -- things which are sadly pervasive, but are otherwise correctable and easy to point out.

A deeper, harder-to-penetrate problem is people's failure to consider the Bible in its proper historical context. And I don't mean "historical" in terms of when the Hebrews escaped Egypt or where exactly the Magi came from. I'm talking about "historical" in terms of which people wrote the books we now call the Bible, what culture they lived in, what environment surrounded them, and what they sought to achieve with each book.

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The Bible is often called "the word of God," and for the record I do believe that description is accurate. But I do not believe that description is complete, for it lends itself to misunderstanding, mischaracterization, and sundry other "misses" that can be terribly deceiving.

It lends itself to "misses" because of the simple fact that the Bible was not written by God, but by human beings. Every one of those human beings had a worldview, knowledge base, and belief system that were very different from the ones you and I possess in the year 2021 A.D. -- especially if you, like me, live in the First World of Western Civilization.

When those ancient human beings wrote those ancient books, their audience consisted of their contemporaries: Fellow ancients who had the same worldviews, knowledge bases, and belief systems as the authors. The audience was expected to know what the authors were talking about, to intrinsically grasp the reference points, to not need to have certain things explained to them.

The authors were not thinking of us, because we were unfathomable to them, so it should go without saying that we fail to pick up on the meanings of some of the things they wrote. But it usually doesn't go without saying, and as a result there are lots of intelligent, well-meaning people who end up twisting words and maiming logic in order to cram the Bible's text into whatever boxes they've installed in their own minds. Tragically, much of the information and detail they miss are probably among the most important -- and definitely among the most fascinating -- things the Bible has to say.

The first time I read Genesis, the opening of Chapter 6 hopped off the page like a kangaroo:  When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. Then the Lord said, "My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years." The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.

What pray tell is this talking about? Is the Bible saying that divine beings descended and had sex with human women and produced demigods that roamed the planet? Why hasn't Zack Snyder brought this to the big screen?

Whatever's going on here sounds like a big deal, so surely the Bible is about to linger on this topic and expand on it and serve up some juicy material, right?

Wrong.

Instead it takes a 90 degree turn and abruptly informs us that God will be destroying mankind but sparing Noah. That's it. Not another word about the celestial rape heavenly-human coupling it just brought up.

Huh?

Regardless of whether we're believers or unbelievers, our modern minds are left wanting, wondering why we aren't given more info about something that seems like it should be of monumental importance. How, we think, can this book be thought of so highly when it leaves this kind of material on the cutting room floor?

Well, our modern minds are modern. On the other hand, ancient minds apparently knew what was being referred to in Genesis 6:1-4 so the author didn't need to spend time filling them in.

Kind of like if I were to use the phrase "in the aftermath of 9/11" when writing a blog post about privacy laws, I wouldn't bother explaining what "9/11" is -- but if somebody 1,000 years from now was to stumble upon my post, he might not know about the World Trade Center attacks and therefore he might breeze right past the phrase "in the aftermath of 9/11" without ever realizing what it means or how important it is to my theme.

As the inimitable Michael Heiser likes to say: "The proper context for understanding the Bible is the context that produced it."

Just imagine how much more we could glean from the Bible, and how much less of it would be lost to us, if we approached it with a better understanding of its background and its authors' mindsets! Or, as Heiser also likes to say: "Read the Bible with the ancient Israelite in your head, or the first century Jew when you get to the New Testament, just try to read it through their eyes. Try to read it like they would."

That task is much easier said than done, and batting 1.000 at it is absolutely impossible, but pursuing it is interesting and rewarding.

I have rattled on way too long for now. In the future, including the not-too-distant future, I'll be writing some posts in which I delve into the Bible and try my hardest to peel its layers.

I'm human, which means I won't come close to reaching its core, but it should be fun and I hope you'll do some delving too.

To be continued...