Why the Bible Began Quotes

“Going forward, the Bible can continue to shape our public cultures if we are willing to assign it a new role. It cannot be taken as normative. But it can be mined for wisdom – wisdom that bears directly on questions of corporate life, common welfare, and collective survival.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“nationalism is about who we are not, while peoplehood is about who we are. One feeds on insecurity, fear, and hate. The other grows out of love, openness toward the other, and hope for the future.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“In the biblical corpus, nationhood is a state of mind – a kingdom of not only collective consciousness but also collective conscience.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“Knowledge is power, and throughout history rulers have gone to great lengths to control the flow of information.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“The biblical project was ultimately about creating a new national culture under conditions of foreign rule, and in the process of creating this new culture, its authors rewrote their battle stories with a surprising twist: no one dies.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“To put things into perspective for those who hastily condemn the biblical authors, assuming that they were just sitting around looking for opportunities to make life more difficult for their women, we need to remember that these folks were writing three thousand years ago.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“The overarching theme to the work is the trauma men wreak on others in their quest for power and the barometer that women’s lives provide for the nation’s well-being.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“From the vantage point of the intended audience, the maternal maneuvering of this aged matriarch on her child’s behalf made possible their own existence.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“It suggests that the most formative time for biblical literature was the period following the destruction of the kingdom of Israel in 722 bce, the decades leading up to the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586 bce, and especially the centuries thereafter, during which new communities re-emerged in both the North and the South.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“As many scholars today agree, the biblical notion of covenant emerged in direct response to Israel’s and Judah’s experience of political subjugation and defeat. However, the authors of the Pentateuch have concealed those origins. Indeed, texts like explicitly link the covenant not to defeat but to a great victory over the nation’s first imperial oppressors.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“An independent state may be ideal. But in a world dominated by superpowers, native sovereignty is not a given. It must be always be negotiated, and often it is not even on the table as an option.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“Judeans were searching for hope in the wake of disaster and devastation that had been inflicted upon them by foreign armies, but they did so by constructing a history of their own culpability.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“A society that fails to care for the socio-economic conditions of its members, and does not establish an equitable system to justice cannot endure, let alone be free.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“Being a survivor is about bearing witness to the past, not consigning it to oblivion”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“Both then and now, the most powerful means of creating community is to tell stories.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“Law without a story was ineffective.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“In the Song (of Songs), love defies death itself.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“Without couples, there can be no communities. Without friendship, trust, and intimacy between two, the bonds connecting three, or four, or four thousand, are easily severed.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“..when two come together in mutual desire, something new blossoms, and when couples come together as a collective people, something monumental emerges.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“Without partnership between two, it is not realistic to expect a community of thousands to survive let alone thrive.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“Pushback and questioning make a system more flexible and resilient, and this intuition clearly informed the inclusion of a couple of other controversial books.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“..they force their readers into a challenging dialogue with earlier works. They defence the reader's right to argue - with the text, with the tradition, and even with the deity. In so doing, they validate, and give voice to those who struggle with the perennial problem of the theodicy that arose from the new covenantal order.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“The promise of reward for righteousness applies only on the collective, systemic level, yet does not work for the individual. A society that perpetrates injustice against its own members will inevitably fall; however just as wicked individuals often get away with murder, the sinless often suffer.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“Lying underneath this majestic memorial of military grandeur(Arc de Triomphe) is the "Tomb to the Unknown Soldiers". The edifice affirms the bloody truth that statehood requires triumph, and triumph requires sacrificial death.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“Let us begin here with the prophetic office. Prophets guide the nation long before kings. They warn the nation about the monarchy’s pernicious influence on society. They call kings to account for the suffering they repeatedly inflict upon the nation. And last but not least, they survive the monarchy’s demise.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“And because war is a consequence of collective sin (rather than a natural, perennial phenomenon), it does not require a king and standing army.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“Thus, Shakespeare took the greatest rulers in the English imagination and revealed their all-too-human qualities. The authors of the Palace History did the same for their most celebrated monarchs, reworking older texts and composing new ones that provide behind-the-scenes glimpses of them in action.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“When the authors of the Exodus-Conquest Account incorporated Joshua into their narrative, they made a dramatic change to his identity: instead of saving a population and becoming their king, he is now a prolific regicide, warring against, and later executing, a myriad of monarchs”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“Israel constitutes a people not limited to its historical territory and longstanding monarchies, and it can survive without its temple and armies.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins

“the Bible extols characters who, instead of being passive and pliant, courageously stand up to human and divine authority.”
― Jacob L. Wright, Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and its Origins