More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
(Well, almost all of them. The artists failed to include Jael, whose precious moment involved assassinating a general by driving a tent peg through his skull.)
“What if the Bible is just fine the way it is? . . . Not the well-behaved-everything-is-in-order version we create, but the messy, troubling, weird, and ancient Bible that we actually have?”2
When you stop trying to force the Bible to be something it’s not—static, perspicacious, certain, absolute—then you’re free to revel in what it is: living, breathing, confounding, surprising, and yes, perhaps even magic.
The ancient rabbis likened Scripture to a palace, alive and bustling, full of grand halls, banquet rooms, secret passages, and locked doors.
“Fairy tales are more than true—not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
“Yes. All people are God’s emissaries,” Papa says. “We are each created in God’s image, charged with watching over creation. We are not slaves, my son.”
scholars believe the writing and compilation of most of Hebrew Scripture, also known as the Old Testament, began during the reign of King David and gained momentum during the Babylonian invasion of Judah and in the wake of the Babylonian exile,
But in the sixth century BC, King Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Jerusalem, destroying both the city and its temple. Many of the Jews who lived there were taken captive and forced into the empire’s service. Others remained, but without a king, without a place of worship, without a national identity.
It should come as no surprise to any writer that all this emotional suffering produced some quality literature. Jewish scribes got to work, pulling together centuries of oral and written material and adding reflections of their own as they wrestled through this national crisis of faith.
Israel’s origin stories weren’t designed to answer scientific, twenty-first-century questions about the beginning of the universe or the biological evolution of human beings, but rather were meant to answer then-pressing, ancient questions about the nature of God and God’s relationship to creation.
Even the story of Adam and Eve, found in Genesis 2 and 3, is thought by many scholars to be less a story about human origins and more a story about Israel’s origins, a symbolic representation of Israel’s pattern of habitation, disobedience, and exile, set in primeval time.
To demand that the Bible meet our demands is to put ourselves and our own interests at the center of the story, which is one of the first traps we must learn to avoid if we are to engage the Bible with integrity or care.
The question that Genesis is prepared to answer is whether Yahweh, the God of Israel, is worthy of worship.”
We’ve been instructed to reject any trace of poetry, myth, hyperbole, or symbolism even when those literary forms are virtually shouting at us from the page via talking snakes and enchanted trees.
God stoops. From walking with Adam and Eve through the garden of Eden, to traveling with the liberated Hebrew slaves in a pillar of cloud and fire, to slipping into flesh and eating, laughing, suffering, healing, weeping, and dying among us as part of humanity, the God of Scripture stoops and stoops and stoops and stoops.
Dignified or not, believable or not, ours is a God perpetually on bended knee, doing everything it takes to convince stubborn and petulant children that they are seen and loved. It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letters, and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime. This is who God is. This is what God does.
The Bible’s original readers may not share our culture, but they share our humanity, and the God they worshipped invited them to bring that humanity to their theology, prayers, songs, and stories.
In short, we have on our hands a Bible as complicated and dynamic as our relationship with God, one that reads less like divine monologue and more like an intimate conversation.
Cultures worldwide treasure their creation myths, those passed-down tales that orient a people in the universe and explain how it all began, whether it was from a lotus risen from the navel of Vishnu (Hindu), or out of the belly of the Rainbow Serpent (Aboriginal), or from the Spider Woman guiding the lost to a new world (Hopi).
Good therapists encourage clients to engage their “storied selves,” as research shows people who can construct the events of their lives into redemptive narratives have healthier outcomes.
“Every people has a story to tell,” wrote theologian James Cone in God of the Oppressed, “something to say to themselves, their children, and to the world about how they think and live, as they determine and affirm their reason for being. The story both expresses and participates in the miracle of moving from nothing to something, from nonbeing to being.”
Spiritual maturation requires untangling these stories, sorting fact from fiction (or, more precisely, truth from untruth), and embracing those stories that move us toward wholeness while rejecting or reinterpreting those that do harm.
Activist and theologian Monica Coleman engaged in this untangling in her stunning memoir, Bipolar Faith.
Coleman’s story reminds us there are demons in our stories that can only be cast out when we call them by name.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion famously wrote. “We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.
The creation account of Genesis 1, in which God brings order to the cosmos and makes it a temple, is meant to remind the people of Israel, and by extension, us, that
God needs no building of stone from which to reign, but dwells in every landscape and in the presence of the humble will make a home. Should all other identities or securities be thrown into tumult, should nations be fractured and temples torn down, this truth remains—God is with us and God is for us. It’s a story as true now as it was then.
What both hardened fundamentalists and strident atheists seem to have in common is the conviction that any trace of myth, embellishment, or cultural influence in an origin story renders it untrue.
We know who we are, not from the birth certificates and Social Security numbers assigned to us by the government, but from the stories told and retold to us by our community.
We meet God in narrative too.
midrash—those imaginative explorations and expansions of Scripture that serve as the most common form of biblical interpretation in Jewish traditions.
Womanist Midrash
“Midrash interprets not only the text before the reader, but also the text behind and beyond the text and the text between the lines of the text. In rabbinic thinking, each letter and the spaces between the letters are available for interpretive work.”10
Midrash, which initially struck me as something of a cross between biblical commentary and fan fiction, introduced me to a whole new
posture toward Scripture, a sort of delighted reverence for the text unencumbered by the expectation that it...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Was God using Abraham to make a point against the practice of child sacrifice, common among the pagans? Or did Abraham only imagine he heard the voice of God? Was God disciplining Abraham for his treatment of Ishmael? Would Abraham himself have finally relented, before actually committing the act, and would disobedience have ultimately been the right and ethical thing for him to choose? How should parents understand the moral of this unsettling tale?
While Christians tend to turn to Scripture to end a conversation, Jews turn to Scripture to start a conversation.
Her story reveals how the biblical text comes alive in the context of community, its endless shades and contours revealed in the presence of a diversity of readers—young and old, learned and unlearned, rich and poor, historic and contemporary, living and dead. This style of engagement not only brings us closer to Scripture’s many truths, but closer to one another. The sacred text becomes a crucial point of contact, a great dining room table, erected by God and set by God’s people, where those who hunger for nourishment and companionship can gather together and be filled. “The Bible creates
...more
Midrash, with its imaginative engagement of the Bible’s stories, reminds us that biblical interpretation need not be reduced to a zero-sum game, but rather inspires endless insights and challenges, the way a good story does each time it is told and retold. Our relational God has given us a relational sacred text, one that, should we surrender to it, reminds us that being people of faith isn’t as much about being right as it is about being part of a community in restored and restorative relationship with God.
The narrative tradition of Jewish interpretation is supported by the colorful cast of characters that comprises Israel’s family of origin, characters whose antics, in the words of Rabbi Visotzky, unfold in the book of Genesis like “the longest-running family soap opera in history.”
From now on, Jacob will be known as Israel, which means “He struggles with God.”
The significance of this story of family origins to the people of Israel cannot be overstated, for it demonstrates how the dynamic, personal, back-and-forth relationship between God and God’s people is embedded in their very identity, their very name—Israel, “because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome” (Genesis 32:28).
they go looking for a blessing, a better way of engaging life and the world, and they don’t expect to escape that search unscathed.
All I know is when I opened my eyes, a stranger stood beside me—a presence neither male nor female, neither Egyptian nor Hebrew, neither safe nor threatening—and in a voice that sounded like my mother’s, spoke:
Call him Ishmael, for it means ‘God hears,’
“You are a God who not only hears, but also sees,” I said, surprised by the strength in my voice. “I have seen the One who sees me.”
So I named God as I named the well: El Roi, the God Who Sees.
Yet just one person in all your sacred Scripture dared to name God, and it wasn’t a priest, prophet, warrior, or king. It was I, Hagar—foreigner, woman, slave. Don’t you dare forget.
It is said that even in the concentration camps of Poland during World War II, Passover was observed. Even there, without food or wine or candlelight, the Jews reclined.
“African Americans found the Bible to be both healing balm and poison book. They could not lay claim to the balm without braving the poison. . . . The antidote to hostile texts of the Bible was more Bible, homeopathically administered to counteract the toxins of the text.”
