The Old Testament – Jesus, This Thing is Huge!

LOL

The Bible has most influenced our Western world by its fundamentalist applications, the reasoning of which is odd given it’s an ancient Middle Eastern text with no knowledge of a round Earth, North or South Americas, established Christian theology, etc., e.g. everything that would come to be Westernized. My purpose of exploring these religious texts is to focus on their origins to discover their true intent and not to beat the dead horse of church atrocities and misfires over the centuries. Good or bad, the Bible has shaped Western culture and thought, and its language still resonates in our writing today. It also causes lots of historical and moral problems. To understand this, you must read the Old Testament as a philosopher, historian, writer, and student of literature—I don’t know why some Christians don’t (well, the book is ten-inches thick), especially since the Gospels’ bedrock of “credibility” crumbles without the OT’s Messianic predictions and overtones. Know your faith. Doesn’t your (after)life depend on it?

            In brief, the OT is the account of the Israelites. As God’s chosen people, they fight other tribes and amongst themselves for political position in the Middle East. The OT details the universe’s creation, the establishment of the Jewish state, historical books which relate stories of exile and return, and many sections of poetry and philosophical prose. In Jewish thought the OT accounts for their special relationship with God. For Christians, the OT paves the way for Christ.

            Some Jewish and Christian authorities teach that the Old Testament was divinely inspired. God wrote it through human hands. Thus its words are undeniable. Of note is Buddha’s reaction to such claims of the Hindu Upanishads. He believed them preposterous as anything written by man is “corrupted” by that man’s motives. Today’s scholarly thought is that the OT was written piecemeal over centuries, rewritten and revised again and again.

They date the formation of the OT’s earliest books between 500-300 BCE. The documentary hypothesis diagrams the composition of the Pentateuch, the first five books, Genesis through Deuteronomy (for a fuller description than I am willing to do here, follow this link: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~mvz/bible/doc-hyp.pdf). By noting ancient manuscripts’ differences in language, vocabulary, and thematic concerns, scholars divide the Pentateuch line-by-line into five authors. These five are J, E, D, P, and R. For example, P concerns himself with establishing religious authority, while E is concerned with documenting Jewish tradition. In E, God is called “El” or Lord, and frequently takes human form. J’s God “Yahweh” is a warrior, violent and impulsive, and often tries to kill the very characters he establishes as Israelite leaders. So, when you hear someone say the God of the OT was a bastard (as Richard Dawkins does…yawn…all the time…), they are partially correct. Overall, however, the OT God has just as much regret, compassion, and love as he does anger. If anything, he is a powerful, telepathic, moody deity plagued by teenage mood swings and whiny worshippers.

            These authorial differences allow us to see the OT in a different light, not as the ultimate word of God, but as an attempt to document a people. In fact, in some circles it is believed this is exactly the OT’s purpose. The glaring tonal inconsistencies and historical inaccuracies do not dampen the text’s power. Instead, it heightens it by allowing readers to see how a people changed in their views of the world and themselves. It’s almost as if someone handed you a book and said, “This book explains our primitive ideas and concepts. This is how we got here today.” The circles of the more literal and priestly bent still maintain that the OT is the divinely inspired, unbreakable work of God, and the establishment of his kingdom on Earth.

            While on this point, it is important to realize the Jewish God is not the only God in the first books of the OT. He is their God, more powerful than others, and thus to be worshipped. Monotheism did not take hold of the Jewish people until some centuries after Abraham and maybe continued in Moses’ time within various tribes. This is called henotheism, in which you acknowledge other deities may exist, but you worship yours because it is the best. There is also monolatrism, which recognizes foreign deities as existing, but does not worship them. There is some argument the Ten Commandments are monolatrisic. I won’t get into that here. Again, it is most important to know the OT books display the evolution of a faith, not merely the faith itself.

            Second, when reading the OT’s historical books, it is important to know modern written “history,” concerned with facts, dates, and events, is different than the ancients’ concepts. Ancient history was stories, with character types, tropes, and repeated themes. Although they used historic figures and events, ancient written history, especially when compiled for worship, was a teaching tool. It was not literal, and its heavy reliance on oral traditions causes its historical validity to become suspect. Remember the telephone game in elementary school? The same principle applies here except we’re talking about a long, long history orally passed down through thousands and thousands of years until priests finally “documented” it..

            So, with these ideas in mind, I sat down to read the OT. I found it to be an intellectually stimulating experience. Just because I don’t believe its dogma, doesn’t mean I had nothing to learn. I learned much, especially with the essays, prologues, and footnotes in the New Oxford Standard Edition Bible (buy it here, you won’t regret it: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195289617/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0195289609&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1GHG7D3WYHCF3ME7Q8BZ) .           I no longer look at the OT as many do—bullshit stories about ancient idiots doing deplorable things—but as a set of stories meant to be dissected, closely read, and discussed. After all, if I was to dismiss all such stories as bullshit, I wouldn’t have any books on my shelf.