I’ve recently undertaken the project of reading the Bible from start to finish. This is not out of religious devotion as I am an atheist. Rather, I want to read the Bible from cover to cover because of its indisputably great historical, cultural, and literary value.
When I mentioned my plan to my youngest brother, who is a devout Christian and teaches a Sunday School class, he warned me against trying to read the Bible straight through! “Some parts of the Old Testament are boring,†he explained. He advised me to read specific parts of the Bible rather than attempting to go from the start of Genesis to the end of Revelation “because some parts of the Old Testament are tough going.â€Â
He’s right, at least at first glance. For example, there are the passages given over to long series of “begats.†There are many chapters devoted to detailed rules about diet and equally detailed descriptions of how worship is to be conducted.
However, these “boring†parts may come alive when the reader thinks of these Old Testament sections as a record of a society and culture in the very process of formation. The “begats†establish that the young society is continuing. That “begat†is a synonym for “sired†rather than “had†underlines the truth that members of this society attempted to tie children to fathers.
Of course, it is also true that, thousands of years before DNA tests, fatherhood was to a great extent a cultural construct since it could not be definitively established as a biological reality. For that reason, the traditional definition of a Jew was someone who had a Jewish mother since the mother is biologically obvious.
In much of Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, early Hebrew society attempts to deal with perceived threats. In Leviticus, the lengthy chapters 13-15 are about leprosy, at the time a disease that was, with reason, deeply feared. We are told that if “the plague in sight be deeper than the skin of his flesh, it is a plague of leprosy: and the priest shall look on him and pronounce him unclean.†Much time in the text is spent on how to decide if someone is afflicted with this disease, ways to prevent the afflicted from transmitting it, and how to determine if a person who formerly had leprosy might be free from it and thus allowed to return to the society.
Leprosy has long ceased to be a major threat but these passages may hold interest for the way they show a society trying to protect its members from infection with a dangerous disease and attempting to be fair to those afflicted or formerly afflicted by establishing guidelines for a “cleansed†state.
Leviticus also prescribes the death penalty for blasphemy (Ch. 29:16) as well as for murder (Ch. 29:17). It also makes male homosexuality a capitol offense (Ch. 20:13) but that is a subject for another essay.
Many Biblical passages go into great detail about what places of worship must be like. Exodus 26:1-4: “Moreover thou shalt make the tabernacle with ten curtains of fine twined linen, and blue, and purple, and scarlet: with cherubims of cunning work shalt thou make them. The length of one curtain shall be eight and twenty cubits, and the breadth of one curtain four cubits: and every one of the curtains shall have one measure. The five curtains shall be coupled together one to another and other five curtains shall be coupled one to another. And thou shalt make loops of blue upon the edge of the one curtain from the selvedge in the coupling and likewise shalt thou make in the uttermost edge of another curtain, in the coupling of the second.â€Â
Why is such exactitude necessary? In my opinion, this is because this is an ancient people who, unlike other groups, were prohibited from making any “graven image†of their deity. As a result, they had to be able to get the idea, feeling, and ambience of “the sacred†through the atmosphere of their worship and the creation of that atmosphere was especially important.
The detailed dietary regulations can be viewed as a young culture attempting to protect the health of its members and at the same time trying to find ways to distinguish itself as a society from those cultures around it.
Even for the most devout Jew or Christian, parts of the Bible can initially be tedious and eye glazing. However, all of its pages may fascinate even the most hard-core non-believer when the reader tries to imagine just what it meant to the people living in its early, pivotal time period.
