...no matter what bibliolaters want you to believe.

The Bible is not a history book. The Bible is NOT a history book. The Bible is not a HISTORY book. THE BIBLE IS NOT A HISTORY BOOK!!!

Most of the Bible was laboriously inscribed on tanned animal skins ("parchment") during the Bronze Age. Some of it dates to the Stone Age. About a fourth of the Bible was laboriously inscribed onto mashed river reeds ("papyrus") during the Iron Age.

During most of Bible times, the male literacy rate was about 2 percent. The female literacy rate was probably about 0.02 percent. Most people sincerely believed that the Earth is flat, that what we today see as mental illness was "actually" demonic possession, and that God has a physical body (but it would burn out your retinas to look at "him").

They had no electricity. They had no TV, movies, videos, books, supermarkets, schools (well, maybe two or three schools on the WHOLE PLANET), Internet, postal service, internal combustion — they didn't even have toilet paper. (Know what a Roman soldier in Judea used to wipe his bum? A sponge on a stick. Puts a whole new light on Mark 15:36, doesn't it?!)

Except for the very rich, this was life: Wake up at dawn. Eat a piece of matzo, and maybe some leftover beans. Work hard all day long. About an hour before sunset, eat matzo, beans, cottage cheese, or VERY RARELY, meat. Drinking water straight from the river will probably make you sick (cholera, for example), so choke down raw, sludgy 2% wine to stay healthy. Shortly after sunset, go to bed. Without electric light, with nothing but starlight and a little moonlight most nights, the world was very dark very early. Once in a while, a wedding, funeral, or special religious occasion would break the monotony. Small wonder they made such a big deal about any break in their harsh routine!

If you've spent the entire day at hard physical labor, the last thing you want to do when you're resting is listen to a dry academic lecture full of words like exegesis, hermeneutics, or aseity. You want a little fun, right? The Bible is full of stories that the hapiru nomads of 2,000 BCE considered real knee-slappers. The problem is that, 4,000 years later, most of us don't know the first thing about what life was like in the Fertile Crescent in the Bronze Age. Worse, we read the Bible as if it had been written by Stephen King, so all we need to do is read it once, as fast as we can — so we don't even notice that to its original audience, Judges 3:12-26 was a laugh riot. We just think, "Oh, Ehud stabbed the king" and read on. (Read The Uncensored Bible for an full explanation of why Judges 3 is hilarious. When I realized what I had actually been reading, I laughed so hard I practically wet my pants!)

Lacking movies, TV, videos, books, magazines, newsletters, board games, plays, operas, computers, radios, MP3 players, or other forms of entertainment you and I take for granted, ancient peoples took up storytelling. Because ancient peoples knew virtually nothing about the sorts of things you and I take for granted — for example, the ability to count higher than forty — they used their stories to answer questions about the world. Why are human men almost the only male mammals on Earth that don't have bones in their penises? Why are human women the only females on Earth who have labor pains? Why are there so many languages in the world? Why are there seashells at the top of this-here mountain? Is it possible for humans to build an artificial mountain that could touch the hammered-metal dome that separates the sky from the chaos waters beyond? Why does that salt formation in the desert look so much like a human woman?

The ancients found their entertainment in a special form of storytelling that German theologians call Heilsgeschichte. (There's a perfectly good English equivalent, but virtually everyone alive thinks the word means "fiction," so I won't use it here. We are not talking about fiction!) In English, Heilsgeschichte translates as "holiness stories" or "sacred stories."

Sacred stories teach theology — that is, the interrelationship between God and creation, especially humanity. Who is God? What has God done? What does God want from us? How do we know? Sacred stories teach theology as entertainment. Instead of gathering around the TV to watch The Real Housewives of Disgusting Overconsumption, in ancient times, people would gather around the campfire, and some child would say, "Tell us again how David killed Goliath." Or, "Tell us again how Moses made the king of Egypt look like an idiot."

The sacred stories in the first five books of the Bible evolved over hundreds and hundreds of years of telling and retelling. Because it was so incredibly laborious in the Bronze Age to write anything down, the tanned leather scrolls of the Bible became incredibly intricate, with every single word chosen to carry several layers of meaning. Have you ever heard of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake? Like that there, but more complex.

Maybe you learned in school about George Washington chopping down a cherry tree when he was a boy, and when his dad asked him, he replied, "I cannot tell a lie." This never happened in The Real World. It was made up in 1809 by a man known as Parson Weems. If they taught you in school that this made-up story actually happened, it was because the incident has turned into a "sacred story" of American history. It teaches Americans to value courage, honesty, integrity, and above all the sacred principle "It's easier to get forgiveness than permission."

Up until a few hundred years ago, no one cared about whether the sacred stories in the Bible actually happened in The Real World. Uneducated people, simple-minded people, and children took for granted that the sacred stories were literal history. Educated and intelligent people knew (and know today) that the stories are sacred because of what they teach us about God and God's relationship with God's creations. Whether or not they are factual history is not the point, never was the point, and never will be the point, any more than whether George Washington actually did chop down the cherry tree is the point. Today, fundamentalists insist that if it's not factual, it's neither true nor valuable; therefore the Bible must be factual, a history book. It's not. It was never meant to be.

If the Bible were food, the original authors intended it to be tough and incredibly chewy, like gristle, dried bacon rind, or dried cuttlefish, so you could think about each story for hours and hours while you were watching your herd or training your toddler not to poop indoors and never get bored. Most people gulp the Bible down as if it were popcorn. "I read the entire Bible, from page 1 to page 2,139, in only four months!" they boast. That's like saying that a mail-order Ph.D. you buy over the Internet for $20 is just as good as ten years of study at a top university.

The Bible is a collection of sacred stories that are intended to teach about the human relationship with God in a way that's entertaining and accessible to everyone — children, fools, dolts, fundamentalists, simpletons, and ignoramuses as much as educated people. It is not a history book, and it was never intended to be a history book. The Bible is theology. It is every bit as much theology as "Barack Obama is a Muslim socialist born in Kenya" — a fact-free statement of faith believed today by thousands of flat-Earth flatheads. The difference is that, unlike the message of the Freedumb Caucus, the message of the Bible overall is of God's love, compassion, forgiveness, and inclusivity. "In Christ there is no Jew or Greek, enslaved or free, male or female, Democrat or Republican, MAGAt or libtard, gay or straight, citizen or illegal immigrant, Fox News hysteric or fact-based reasoner. There is only Christ." (Galatians 3:28)

Before you continue your "Bible study," find a course of formal study like Episcopalianism's Education For Ministry (open to all) or Roman Catholicism's RCIA (probably open to all). I have more to say on the subject at How To Study the Bible.

Before you can understand the Christian Testament, you have to understand the Hebrew Scriptures. To understand the Hebrew Scriptures, you need to understand ancient history (real history), ancient cultures, ancient world-views, and even ancient climates. You especially need to understand what the world was like when most people worshiped dozens of goddesses and gods, and thought first Judaism, then the Jesus Movement, were a bunch of wackadoos. Today Christianity is the dominant religion; 1,900 years ago, they called Christians cannibals who practiced incest (because they called each other "brother" and "sister").

God revealed Godself to humanity precisely as often in Bible times as God does today. The claims of most religions to the contrary, God doesn't play favorites.

The difference is, today, if we don't like the story we're hearing over the campfire after long day of hard physical labor, we can change the channel. Back then if people got bored and restless, all the storyteller could do was say something hurriedly like, "And then, he raised the dead! Yes! Elijah / Elisha / Jesus / Peter / Paul raised the dead! And the boy's mother was so happy!"

 

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