Ron’s Reviews > NIV, Pathways Bible > Status Update

Up to 1 Samuel 4 (30/90 readings done). Some of these stories are hella weird. For example, Samson tears a lion to pieces "as one tears a young goat" (?!) and comes back later to find the carcass filled with bees and honey. How does that even work?

Up to Deuteronomy 20 (20/90 assignments done). Lots of laws about how to live in the Promised Land. Fun fact: The Biblical version of "an eye for an eye" is specifically meant in reference to false witnesses. If you perjure yourself by testifying against someone for a crime you know they didn't commit, you get whatever punishment they would have gotten. It was never about "blood must be answered with blood."

Through Numbers (15/90 assignments down). Mostly familiar stuff: Jacob and Esau, Joshua, Moses and the Exodus. Leviticus and Numbers had a lot of rules of how to live and what to do or not do. For some reason, one of my assigned readings was three (of the many) chapters about how the Ark of the Covenant was to be built. It's very long and tedious design stuff, but I assume it was important.

Genesis 12-18 (Abraham). In Genesis 18:20, the Big Guy is clearly not omniscient. He says that he's heard terrible tales about Sodom and Gomorrah, and that maybe he should go down there to see whether it's as bad as they say.

Book of Job (chapters 1-2, 42 only; the middle is an insane amount of talking). Job actually does crack, not to the physical torments but under peer pressure while his friends talk crap about God. It's okay though; He eventually forgives them.

Genesis 1-11: Creation, Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel, the Great Flood, and the Tower of Babel. Even with the bits they said to skip, all this stuff happened in the first thirty or so pages (hard to tell because I'm reading an e-book). When somebody tells a one-minute story of the Tower of Babel, they're not summarizing; that's all there is to tell.

In order to get a better understanding of literature, I've decided to do an abridged read-through of the most referred-to book in the western world: the Bible. This version includes a 90-day "Tour of the Bible" reading plan so I can hit the main points. For example, we'll entirely skip the book of Leviticus and its endless lists of clean and unclean acts.