A Few More Thoughts About Bible

Mid-Week Lenten Thoughts from Jamie
A few more thoughts about Bible
(a few more thoughts about the March 23, 2025, sermon)
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The Bible is a library, a written collection of how people understood God’s interaction with them in the world. Much of it is history: even the prophets’ writings reflect what was happening in their world.
It’s not all history, though. Stories from the earliest days were handed down from the old to the young, from religious leaders to those who followed the religion. Word of mouth was the conductor of these tales of the earliest parents of our faith, until they began to be collected in writings. Even the books attributed to Moses show signs of being tampered with somewhere along the way, with different linguistic styles and even different names for God (for example, the names for God, Yahweh and Elohim, demonstrate two different strands of origin, one being a bit more “priestly,” and the other being more “folksy,” respectively).

When it comes to the Law, or what we call the 613 commandments, we find the basis for many of our laws even today. Called the “Judeo-Christian” tradition, ideas like equity for all people under the law and punishment that fits the crime are both found in these commandments.

I don’t believe that there is any such thing as a “biblical literalist.” First, to believe the Bible literally would mean that one would have to have access to the original document(s); then, one would have to read Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic fluently enough to understand them 100% of the time; and one would also have to have a strong working knowledge of the cultures from which the biblical writings emerged. I know there are even more conditions than these, but those are nit-picky compared to these three big ones.

Our Jewish parents in faith had a much more flexible understanding of the scriptures. Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish professor of New Testament at Vanderbilt Divinity School, argues that rabbis were used to approaching the scriptures from a less literal standpoint, finding explanations for questions in a creative fashion. For instance, how did Adam and Eve’s sons find wives? The rabbis said, “Well, God created this other woman, Lilith, and she gave birth to the daughters.” Of course, the rabbis argued about this, and there were other explanations as well. The thing is, biblical discussions did not hinge on absolute answers. Levine also says, “The Bible teaches us which questions to ask.”

You have heard me say many times that I believe the Bible to be a conversation between God and us. Sometimes, the conversation seems irrelevant to our lives; at others, the conversation never takes place at all, because we don’t bother with it, deciding that “the Bible said it, I believe it, that settles it:” and at still others, we wonder if the Bible should be interpreted a little more loosely (or not at all).

Two examples of this: Jesus taught that we should “turn the other cheek.” I had a Sunday School teacher who actually said, “Jesus doesn’t expect us to do this.” Yikes! Jesus also taught that divorce was a sin: I still recall how upset my family was over the impending divorce of good friends of theirs, even stating that they would not be able to come back to church (and, as I recall, they didn’t). Yet over the years, because of society’s acceptance of divorce, we have, in our hearts, re-written, if not Jesus’ commandments, at least our understanding of these two sayings.

I love the Bible. Being a historian at heart, the stories themselves keep me enthralled. I’ve never been a legalist, so the Law doesn’t interest me. St. Paul says that the Law came to fulfillment in Jesus, and I was taught that he supersedes all laws (I am thankful for this, as I eat shellfish as often as possible – against the Law of Moses – and have been known  to eat swordfish as well as escargot). The example of swordfish, by the way, shows how the rabbis changed the Law when it was discovered that swordfish only had scales (scales were what defined “fish,” which were Kosher to eat) when they are young; mature swordfish don’t, which meant changing the Kosher – read “part of the 613 commandments” – to exclude the eating of swordfish.

Reading the Bible is never enough. After reading it, we consciously or unconsciously decide how then we are going to live. I believe that God allows us to expand our understanding of how we are to live rather than condemning us Sfor trying to live faithfully within whatever culture we live and work and play.

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