I’ve had a perplexing relationship toward religion for my entire life. I’ve never believed in God, never been a Christian, but I’ve never been able to let go of religion. I’m fascinated by mythology, by stories of awesome and terrifying Gods ruling over the cosmos and humanity. I used to devour books about Greek gods (though often with Roman names) and Norse mythology as a kid. With abject fascinated horror, I would read stories of gods that ripped themselves apart to shape the world, of monstrous abyssal creatures driven back into the darkness of Chaos. I loved the stories of mortal heroes who defied deities and became deified themselves, or were cast down into the void, rejected and spurned by celestial powers.
When I got to college, I took classes on The Bible, on Hinduism, on folklore and continued my reading in my own time. In the decades that followed, I continued to read and learn about religions. I’ve read plenty of books about Jesus, about the foundation of the early Church, about the witch trials that burned like wildfires throughout Europe, about the seemingly endless tribulations of the Jewish people in the centuries of Diaspora. However, I somehow sidestepped reading The Bible itself, the actual text that helped shape human history for millennia. I genuinely believe that there is no more important book in human history. It is a foundational work of humanity. Spiritually, politically, economically, culturally: it has impacted huge swaths of humanity, directly and indirectly. But I never read it.
It is because of its importance, because of its weight, that I held off on reading The Bible for so long. Every time I tried to read it before, I never felt like I knew enough or understood enough to take it on. It’s a thousand page work written by many people over many years and edited together by many others. It’s a book that was written in several different languages, over several different centuries, translated, translated again, and pieced together into a final whole work. The Bible is a dense, multi-layered text and while it’s possible to pull a surface understanding of what I’m reading, I knew most of it would go right over my head, that I lacked the education to really take in what I was reading.
This time, I decided to take a different route. I wouldn’t just read The Bible. I would understand what I was reading. I would take the time to actually learn what I was reading. There are too many times, in my experience, that I would read a passage and realize that I hadn’t clocked anything I had been reading because the language didn’t gibe right or because I lacked the proper context or because it just flat-out didn’t make any sense. The number of times God commands the Jews not to boil a young goat in its mother’s milk hit a point where I finally gave in and Googled it to see if I could find an explanation for why the Israelites were not allowed to perform this particularly cruel culinary activity. The best explanation I could find was that this expression was probably a proverb that has lost all meaning in the intervening millennia, and probably refers to not hiding the worst of your harvest beneath the first fruits of your harvest.
So I’ve been reading more books alongside The Bible, to help me better understand. I’ve read books like It Takes Two to Torah by Rabbi Dov Linzer and Abigail Pogrebin, which helped me get a better grasp on the Torah and how modern Jewish readers can and do interpret The Torah (the first five books of The Bible). I’ve been reading The Book of Psalms as translated by Robert Alter. I had already read Psalms in my edition of The Bible, but I felt like I was missing something and I’m going back and re-reading each Psalm with Alter’s commentary.
I’m also reading A Book of Life: Embracing Judaism as a Spiritual Practice by Rabbi Michael Strassfield. He writes about how The Bible can work within a person’s life as an intrinsic part of how they live. I think that’s vital to understanding this book. It’s not meant to just be read, flipped through, digested and left behind. The Bible is meant to be a focal point in a person’s life and to really understand it, I need to understand how Christians, Jews, the faithful, read The Bible. Seeing how Jewish people approach their own holy text is the best way to approach it, in my mind.
When I reach the New Testament, I will, obviously, shift my focus to how Christians embrace The Word, although, by living in predominantly Christian countries, I feel like I have a better grasp of Christianity and its tenets than I do Judaism. I also have spent most of my religious studies already diving into the Christian church and its development.
All of this is taking way more time than I thought it would when I initially decided to sit down and read The Bible cover to cover, but I am enjoying the journey far more than I thought I would. It’s becoming part of my daily ritual to sit and read from my Bible and think on what I read, scribbling notes down on my phone about what I’ve been reading, such as the multiple references to milk boiling baby goats or about how dark Psalm 88 is (seriously, go check it out, most psalms at least end on a high note, this is just sad misery from verse 1 to verse 19). I feel like I’m getting something out of this reading that I didn’t expect to get, but I am enjoying it and glad for it.
I usually feel more centered, more calm after spending some time focusing on my reading. The very act of studying and reflecting puts me in a more present space, which is a rarity for me, given my ADHD. I think I can safely safe that I will actually finish reading The Bible this year. Although the road to Revelation is a longer and more roundabout path than I anticipated, I’m enjoying the journey and I will be sad once I arrive at my destination.
-D-
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