Welcome to Barstool Bits, a weekly short column meant to supplement the long-form essays that appear only two or three times a month from analogy magazine proper. You can opt out of Barstool Bits by clicking on Unsubscribe at the bottom of your email and toggling off this series. If, on the other hand, you’d like to read past Bits, click here.
So I’m down at the pub, and I’m stunned that no one has read the Bible. Nobody wants to go near the thing. You’d think it was some manky old object, so gross, it might give you leprosy. One buddy of mine claims to have read the good book twice. But when I ask him if he remembers the story of Dinah, or any other specific, he has no idea what I’m talking about. All he does is quote me some chapter and verse from Exodus and ask whether I’m familiar with the ignominious passage he has committed to memory. The bartender tells me it’s a bad book because of what it says about the gays. No one seems to know that it’s primarily a book of stories.
Since reading Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), I’m fascinated by the idea of textbook pedagogy—the way sciences are taught. It breeds a sort of illiteracy because it doesn’t teach the reading of context. No history comes into play. And so no socio-cultural observations enter the picture. This way of teaching gives readers the false sense that science is all about “the facts”—and of course facts are tidy little things that have no history and nothing at all to do with politics and storytelling. There’s certainly no literary dimension, no story arcs, no choice of phrase or vocabulary worth paying attention to. The way facts are relayed has nothing to do with all that. It’s like reading the back of a paint can. Just the facts.
But it’s not just science that is taught by textbook. The Bible too is taught by religious folk as though it were a textbook. And the job of a text—in the textbook context—is to convey a lesson—a doctrine of some kind. The first problem is that these (often moral) lessons are imposed on the text. If scripture is viewed as disjointed statements destined to prop up arguments, it’s being treated as a textbook: something you can point to. Meanwhile, our morality has changed since those teachings were designed. So now the old moralistic readings appear to be all about excusing scoundrels for their immoral behaviour. Not to mention their complicity with an amoral, rule heavy God who seems to do too much smiting and punishing to balance the God = Good equation.
Orthodox Jews call the Torah (the first five books), The Law. And as law, the book is taken to be instructional. But who decides the nature of the instruction when the text is a collection of tales? Traditional teaching of Bible stories is misguided because it fails to take the text on its own terms. Instead, the text is used to load, carry and push ideas that the text itself doesn’t really support. It’s a rickety wagon of rhetoric.
One atheist I know tells me that the book is bad because there’s no excusing Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac. And what kind of God demands such a thing in the first place? I think she’s onto to something. But the text doesn’t quite support the reading she and most religious folk attribute to it. We need enough context to unpack the story of the sacrifice of Isaac to understand that the questions she’s asking indeed lie at the heart of the tale. These are precisely the questions bothering Abraham as he wanders around in the desert with his son, trying to understand the will of God.
As it turns out—from a literary perspective, that is, from the perspective of just reading the text on its own terms—the story of the sacrifice of Isaac is about overturning past notions of a deity that demanded child sacrifice. Abraham discovers a solution to the problem, sacrifices a ram in place of his son, and brings to an end the barbaric practice of child sacrifice. But I’ll leave the careful analysis of this story for another time.
In this week’s column, I’d like to simply lay the grounds for future readings from the Bible by starting at the beginning and dispelling the myth that the Bible tells us that Adam and Eve were the first human beings and are the parents of all humanity. Though the misreading is understandable, it’s also clearly false because when Cain murders his brother, he is concerned that he will be reviled and murdered by other humans. Cain and Abel are the only two offspring of Adam and Eve at that time, and afterwards, they only have one more son, Seth. So where did all the other people come from? Clearly not Adam and Eve. Understanding this is key to unlocking the tale of creation.
Another key point is that the actual creation of the world is told three times back to back in Genesis, and each telling uses a different voice so that it’s obvious that we’re dealing with three different tellings, three different scrolls. (I have the benefit of being able to read the Hebrew where the changes in style and tone really jump out at you.) Recognising this textual evidence of compilation is essential because it sets the ground for what the Bible actually is: a collection and deliberate compilation of cultural tales pertaining to one group or tribe of people (or to several groups that joined together).
In that context Adam and Eve are the ancestors of this people, not the first persons on the planet. This reading is reinforced in Chapter 6 when we hear of several types of human: the Nephilim, the sons of Elohim and the daughters of Adam. Who are all these peoples? How do Adam and Eve fit into all this? And if Yaweh and Elohim—the principal Gods of the Bible—aren’t credited with the creation of all humanity, then what the heck is going on? These are the sorts of questions that most immediately present themselves as we begin to clear the cobwebs of doctrine from the text of Genesis.
If we leave aside the imposed readings of the priests and rabbis, the Bible is a remarkable book, a collection of tales and chronicles as fascinating and at least as relevant as The Histories of Herodotus (credited as the first attempt at writing a secular history), and The Thousand and One Nights, which collected the tales of the Middle East and India, most famous today for Aladdin, Sinbad and Ali Baba.
Significantly, too, the Bible is a shared cultural artefact, indispensable to anyone who wants to read any literature and understand any of the poetry, fiction, theatre and even the politics of the western world. In fact, without the Bible, one also misses a whole lot about science and the stories it tells about itself as a heroic enterprise… influenced by biblical notions of heroism and indeed an outgrowth of the same project of discovering and revealing God. In other words, if you don’t read the Bible, you’re not just being an atheist, you’re actually disconnecting yourself from your history and your culture. And the worst part of it is you get the sense that we were all reborn with science into a world of facts just yesterday, which is a false understanding of our present historical context.
To the bartender who says the good book is bad because of what it says about the gays, I reply, Well then I guess we best ditch the five books of Darwin too because that text says some offensive things about inferior races and makes eugenicist claims. Maybe we should get those sensitivity readers who recently cleaned up Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming to get to work on the Bible and Darwin.
To my barstool buddy who likes to quote that one passage that damns the good book to the trash, I explain that I don’t memorise chapter and verse like a preacher. And I don’t use scripture as a cudgel. As a reader of history and literature, I’m interested in the Bible as a collection of fantastic, well told stories and remarkable poetry. He’s had a few pints and gets off his stool a little hunched and he says, “That’s just it! They’re just stories. Just stowrees.”
Let’s hear your comments.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.