Last year I realized that I only knew bits and pieces of the Bible. I had never read it growing up nor were we required to read any of it during my Catholic grade school or high school years. I made my decision to read the entire thing based on the fact that it is the foundation for hundreds of millions of people all over the world, so I thought it best to know exactly what it said.
What does it say? Well, quite a few things. Some of them are pleasant and contain wisdom that extends into the 21st century. Other statements and prophecies are violent, extreme, ridiculous, and sometimes flat out wrong based on what we now know about the world.
I did not begin this task with the idea that the Bible was the true, inerrant word of god. I see the Bible as the story of the Israelites and their struggle for survival over the past 6,000 years. It is a remarkable story, filled with moral leaps and strange ideas about how the universe operates. I found that it is often helpful to put yourself in the place of the writer of a book in the Bible in order to see why they might be writing what they did. The fact that the Israelites were often enslaved, tortured, or attacked made the people extremely bitter, resentful, and often looking for help when they had nowhere else to turn.
I do not believe that this book should be considered the end-all and be-all of moral guidance, nor should it be considered the source of answers to our common problems. I do believe that it does contain some wisdom and some lessons that can be used in our current world and time. There are very few of these, but they do exist. It is a book produced in a much different time and place by people who did not understand how the universe operated. We should always be aware of that essential fact.
I believe that every generation of humans has to reinvent the world and it also has the arduous task of teaching its children about the past. One of the problems with this task is that we often rely too heavily on the idea that the ancients were right and that we could never possibly get it more right than they did. This is a false idea. Every generation creates new wisdom, new knowledge that it can sow in its young to make that generation, and the one after it, even better than before. I believe the Bible represents our attachment to some ancient truths, but they are not everlasting, nor are they universal. It is our task in the 21st century to find out what the writers got right and what they got wrong. To take an absolutist position that it is either entirely right or entirely wrong would be to claim ignorance of the fact that every generation has flaws.
We can learn from books like this. But we can also do better every time we think, write, and teach.
And for my money, Ecclesiastes takes the cake for best book in the whole Bible.
Also, I did not give this a star rating because it is not a book about one thing nor is it written by one person. To say that it has a quality from 0 to 5 would be too simple and deny its complexity as an ancient text.