Reading the Bible

I'm not sure if, for blog consistency sake, I should name this post Book review: Genesis.  But I'm going with the more clickbaity/shocking one for the family.

Yep, I'm reading the Bible.

I should qualify that.  I've just finished Genesis, the first of 66 (give or take, depending on your version) books of the Bible, so there's still a way to go.

I think I last read Genesis in full over 30 years ago, so there's a lot I didn't remember.  I'm now continuing on with Exodus.

I should qualify that some more.  I'm actually listening to someone else read aloud the Bible, while I follow along to the text.

And some more qualification: This person reads the text then provides a commentary on it, all in a handy YouTube series, one Bible chapter per video.

So, averaging something like 11 minutes per video-chapter, you can do the maths for how many hours I've already spent listening to 50-chapter Genesis.

Occasionally Mulan or Miya sit with me too, and Mulan especially enjoys it.

On to my thoughts:

The commentator is Hemant Mehta, whose YouTube channel is called Friendly Atheist.  This Bible series is called Everything Wrong with Genesis in the Bible.  So, yeah, with names like that we're not likely to be glossing over the Biblical oddities.

But Hemant's friendly and entertaining, and somehow even the long Bible family tree name lists are not too boring with him.

Hemant approaches the Bible as a person of today, raising questions that most of us would likely have when reading the Bible.  As Mulan said, he points out the obvious things.  Eg:

• Internal self-contradictions.  Sometimes the Bible contradicts itself, and it's impossible for both passages to be true at the same time.  Often this is to do with (a) how certain events are said to have happened, (b) family relationships, (c) ages of people, (d) numbers of things.  Hemant usefully points out where the section we're reading contradicts another section of the Bible.

• Contradictions with current best-evidence science.  Sometimes events that the Bible describes cannot possibly have really happened according to current best scientific evidence.

• Morality.  Characters in the Bible frequently do some pretty bad stuff.  God is one of the worst offenders.  There's plenty of genocide, rape, murder, slavery and incest.  And then there's the soap-opera-worthy nasty family dynamics.  The sexist male domination is stand-out bad, too.

• Storytelling.  As Hemant says, the Bible could have used an editor.  There are issues of event ordering, repetition, missed information, unnecessary information, etc.

• And then simply weird stuff.  Hemant's tone is perfect for reacting to the absurdities.

The main weakness with Hemant's commentary, as I see it, is that he doesn't spend much time detailing how and why the cultures of the day(s) saw things differently, and how that influenced their behaviours.  Sometimes he's a little too quick to point out the oddities, without explaining why the people of the day thought those oddities made sense within their culture.  From an intercultural awareness perspective there could be a little more cultural context and sympathy, before jumping to the humour/criticism.  (Though to be fair to Hemant, his point, as he says at the beginning of the series, is to show how it makes no sense to take the Bible literally, as the inerrant word of God.  He is not doing cultural studies.)

But overall, reading along with Hemant is a great way to read the Bible.  For non-Christians it's an enjoyable intro into something that everyone should be familiar with.  For Christians it's worth stepping back to get a fresh perspective.  And for ex-Christians like myself, it's a comfortable back-to; rehearing the familiar childhood stories while also recalling why it was all best left in childhood.  Highly recommended.  Here's the start of the series: