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

While living as slaves in Egypt, the Israelites would have passed down oral traditions and remnants of stories about Abraham and the promises God made to them. But this was still a long time to live in slavery, hundreds of years immersed in Egypt. Day after day they would wake up to see Egyptian statues of Egyptian gods, living in the Egyptians’ world with Egyptian values. The Egyptians didn’t worship the God of the Israelites, instead worshiping many different types of gods including the sun, the moon, several animal-like gods, a few goddesses, and even some people. The Egyptians had creation stories to explain how their gods had created everything. This is the world the Israelites lived in—not just for ten years or fifty years or a hundred years—but for four hundred years. The Israelites’ understanding of the world was inevitably affected by their time living in Egypt. Remember, at this time there was no written Bible for them to read. There were no Ten Commandments, no Psalms to read for comfort or to remind them of God and his promises. Day after day they lived in a pluralistic Egyptian world of many different gods and religious practices.