Stephen's Impressions of the Old Testament

I'm now going to share some of the stuff I got out of the old testament. Genesis is everything that happens before Moses, while the following four books are the story of Moses. Moses' early life and the basic story of the exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt is given in Exodus, along with Moses delivering God's covenant to the Hebrews (this is basically an assortment of laws). More laws, especially those dealing with sacrifice are given in Leviticus. Numbers has even more laws. When they are about to get to the holy land in Deuteronomy, Moses then repeats everything he already said (his is very tedious).

Joshua is about the Hebrews' invasion of their promised land and how they divided the spoils. If you didn't know, the area was inhabited, so many people had to be conquered and/or massacred for the Hebrews to live there.

The Hebrews' history is then recorded in Judges, and the books of Samuel and Kings, The books of Chronicles repeat what was in Samuel and Kings (bor-ring!). The Israelites form a kingdom to help stability and successfully have three kings: Saul then David then Solomon. Its funny that you never hear much said about Saul. Also, David didn't become king after slaying Goliath - that story really wasn't that important. David was chosen to become king before then, and didn't actually become king until much later (Saul was in the way).

After Solomon, Israel split in to two kingdoms: Israel and Judah, who proceeded to have many wars with each other and the million other nations in the region. Eventually the Assyrians took the Israel people as slaves back to Assyria and later the Babylonians did the same thing to Judah.

After Cyrus of Persia took over the region, some Judeans were allowed to come back and rebuild (this is told in Ezra and Nehemiah). As far as I can tell the Israel people were dispersed for good though.

The book of Psalms is little more then a bunch of whiny prayers asking God to help the people of Israel out when they are attacked every other week. This part is really discouraging to faith in Christianity/etc as even the ancient people seem to not see God helping them out when they ask, and seemingly not seeing any sign of him really.

The Book of Job is a really long-winded story of a man who is screwed by the devil over a bet with God. Proverbs is a collection of adages with an emphasis on equating wisdom with doing what God tells you to do.

Isaiah is the longest book in the Bible, apart from the collection of Psalms. It's also very repetitive and doesn't say much, just that while Israel has been the subject of God's scorn, he forgives them and they will be well off in the future and their enemies and those that don't do what God says will suffer greatly. Nothing really enlightening. While I haven't read them yet, my guess is that the rest of the prophets' books will read similarly.

Sorry if I bored you guys with that; I'll talk about something less dense next time. See ya!

Reading the Bible

A couple years back I started reading the Bible. If I remember correctly, I alternated back and forth between the old and new testaments. This was probably a good idea, since much of the old testament is dull and repetitive. I had actually started reading it once before, but got stuck part-way though Joseph's story.

The story of Joseph is actually the last third of the book of Genesis and is quite lengthy, compared to say the story of Eden at the beginning which is very short. People seem to have the most to say about the small bits of the Bible it seems. I'm making a companion video to this blog on that topic actually.

The interesting thing about the Bible is that it often isn't what I expected from what I've seen from church services and from people talking about Christianity and Judaism. Almost every Bible verse you hear people quote or discuss seems to be taken out of context; and large chunks of the Bible tend to not be discussed at all.

Now, I've been reading the Bible to get a better feel for just what Christianity is, or what the their holy book says it is anyways. If you just stick to the gospels or Paul's letters, it tends to be what people say it is (not that Paul and the gospels agree with each other of course). However we must be careful as it's easy to take verses and even entire chapters out of context.

I finished reading the new testament and all of the old testament excepting the prophets some time ago and just recently picked up reading the Bible again. I read Isaiah this week and will probably finish the book in a few weeks if I keep to it.

Next on my "spiritual" reading list is the Qu'ran. The version I have has lots of commentary. This will be helpful, since I don't have the background in Islam that I do in Christianity.

I would also like to read the Book of Mormon or whatever the LDS call their holy books. Unfortunately you can't buy it in stores and the only way to get a copy is to have a Mormon to come to your house and talk at you. Frankly, I'd rather they didn't know where I live.

Well, I'm posting some of my impressions of the old testament as a follow up to this blog (read it or not). See you later!