Sunday Sermonette: A stink to high heaven

Before we get to today ' s reading,an interesting review in Harper ' s magazine of two books about the Bible. You get one free read per month so even if you don ' t subscribe you should be able to get access. Christopher Beha writes:Judaism has a kind of mythological founding moment that bears some resemblance to Mohammed ’s recitation—the giving of the law to Moses on Mount Sinai—but the actual text believed to be transmitted there makes up a tiny fraction of the Hebrew Bible, which in its canonical form comprises twenty-four books arranged into three major sections—the Torah (teaching), Nevi’im (proph ets), and Ketuvim (writings)—giving the collection its acronymic name, Tanakh. It was probably during the Babylonian exile of the sixth century b.c., some seven hundred years after Moses is supposed to have lived, that various competing strands of historical, mythological, and legal writing, m any already centuries old, were combined into the Torah, which was long the primary Hebrew scripture. The latest work included in the Ketuvim, the Book of Daniel, was written around 150 b.c. All of which is to say that there were Jews for more than a thousand years before there was anything like the Jewish Bible we know today.A key point is that the idea that the Bible is literally true and inerrant is a very modern innovation. It was obvious to everyone that it is a compilation of various kinds of writings, and the many contradictions, absurdities, and multiple version of th...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs