How (Not) to Read the Bible: Making Sense of the Anti-women, Anti-science, Pro-violence, Pro-slavery and Other Crazy-Sounding Parts of Scripture

by Dan Kimball

Questions Israel Likely Had That Genesis Was Written to Answer • Are we going to survive here in the desert? Are we safe here? • Is there really only one God? What about all the Egyptians gods? Are they angry we left Egypt? • Is this God who rescued us still here, or are we alone? • What do we have to do to please this one God so we will have crops that won’t fail and have food for our families? • Should we worship the sun? Should we worship the moon like the Egyptians? Or worship like the Canaanites, who are now nearby? • Is the Egyptian story of how the world was made the true one? Newly freed from four hundred years of living in the polytheistic world of Egypt, God was about to give them a new story, a new history.