The Bible

Overview

The first thing to understand is that the Bible is not a book. It is a library, assembled over roughly a thousand years, in three languages, by dozens of authors who mostly did not know they were contributing to a collection. It contains law codes, chronicles, love poetry, proverbs, short stories, letters, hymns, a dramatic poem about suffering, apocalyptic visions and four biographies of the same man that disagree with each other. Reading it front to back as though it were a novel is the commonest way to fail to read it at all.

The second thing is that there is no single table of contents. The Jewish Bible, the Tanakh, has twenty-four books in three divisions: Torah, Prophets and Writings, ending with Chronicles. Christian Old Testaments contain the same material rearranged into Law, History, Poetry and Prophets, ending with Malachi so that it points forward. Catholic and Orthodox canons include books that Protestant ones print as Apocrypha or leave out: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, the books of Maccabees. The New Testament’s twenty-seven books were not fixed as a list until the fourth century. When a course says “the Bible”, ask which one.

The third thing is that you are reading a translation of a text that was itself edited. The Hebrew was written without vowels and standardised centuries after composition; the Greek New Testament survives in thousands of manuscripts that differ; some famous passages, including the woman taken in adultery and the longer ending of Mark, are absent from the oldest copies. Good study editions tell you this in the notes, and the notes are worth reading.

What happens

Printed in the order a Christian Bible uses, the library does tell one long story: a world made, a family chosen, a people enslaved and freed and given a law, a kingdom won and lost, an exile, a return, and then a man in Galilee and the movement that followed him. Law, poetry and letters are attached at the points where they belong.

Torah, the five books of Moses. Genesis from creation to a family settled in Egypt. Exodus, the escape and the law at Sinai. Leviticus, sacrifice and purity, which is where most straight-through readers stop. Numbers, forty years of wandering and complaint. Deuteronomy, Moses’ farewell speeches, restating the law for a generation about to cross into the land.

The historical books. Joshua and Judges, conquest and chaos. Samuel and Kings, the rise of a monarchy under Saul, David and Solomon, its split into two kingdoms, and the destruction of both, first by Assyria and then by Babylon. These books are not propaganda for the crown; David commits adultery and arranges a murder, and the narrator says so. Ezra and Nehemiah cover the return from exile and the rebuilding.

The prophets. Not fortune tellers. They are political and religious critics addressing their own societies, usually in poetry of extraordinary force, and their characteristic move is to attack their own people for keeping the festivals while cheating the poor. Isaiah spans two centuries and at least two authors. Jeremiah watches Jerusalem fall. Ezekiel, in exile, has the strangest visions in the collection. Amos is the sharpest on economic injustice, in eight pages.

The writings. Psalms, a hymnbook of a hundred and fifty poems covering praise, rage, despair and revenge. Proverbs, practical wisdom. Job and Ecclesiastes, both of which reject the confident moral arithmetic of Proverbs, from inside the canon. The Song of Songs, unembarrassed erotic poetry that both traditions have read allegorically. Ruth, Esther, Lamentations, Daniel.

The New Testament. Four Gospels: Mark first and shortest, Matthew arranging the teaching for a Jewish readership, Luke writing history with the poor at the centre, John doing something entirely different in long meditative discourses. Acts, the movement’s first decades. Twenty-one letters, thirteen attributed to Paul, of which Romans is the most systematic and Galatians the angriest. Revelation, an apocalypse in coded imagery, written under persecution, and the most abused book in the collection.

How to read it

Do not start at Genesis 1 and push on. The standard failure point is Leviticus, around chapter 40 of 1,189.

A workable first route: Genesis, Exodus 1 to 20, then Samuel for the story of David, then Amos and Isaiah for the prophets, then Job, Ecclesiastes and a selection of Psalms, then Mark for the shortest Gospel, Luke for the fullest, John for the strangest, and Romans for the theology. That is perhaps a fifth of the whole and it gives you the shape.

Get a study edition. The New Oxford Annotated with Apocrypha is the standard in secular classrooms because its notes are historical rather than devotional and it includes every canon’s books. For the Hebrew Bible as literature, Alter is unmatched, and his commentary explains what the wordplay is doing.

Read each book as the kind of thing it is. A psalm is not making a claim in the way a letter of Paul is; a proverb is a generalisation and Job is the counter-example; Revelation is using a coded genre its first readers knew. Most bad readings, hostile and pious alike, come from taking one kind of writing for another.

Keep the King James somewhere in reach even if you work from a modern version. Tyndale’s phrasing, which the 1611 translators largely kept, is the source of an enormous amount of ordinary English, and four hundred years of literature quotes it.

Expect to find it strange. Large parts of it are alien, some of it is morally difficult, and the collection argues with itself. That internal argument is one of the most interesting things about it, and a reading that smooths it out has lost the best part.

Questions it raises

• What holds a library this varied together? Is the unity in the text, in the communities that assembled it, or in the reader?
• Job and Ecclesiastes contradict Proverbs on whether the righteous prosper. What does it mean that all three were kept?
• The histories record their own kings’ crimes in detail. What kind of national literature does that?
• The prophets attack sacrifice and festival in favour of justice. Are they rejecting the cult or demanding it be meant?
• How should a reader handle the passages that endorse things we now think plainly wrong: the conquest narratives, the laws on slavery, the treatment of women?
• If the New Testament reads the Hebrew Bible as pointing at itself, is that interpretation or appropriation, and does it matter which you call it?