Bible reading Commandment

Commandment Seven: Remember that the Bible wasn’t written yesterday.

I am amazed at how people, in an effort to make the books of the Bible relevant, act like the books were written last year.
The Bible is very old. The most recent book in the collection of 66 is nearly 2000 years old. Many of the books are at least 2,000 years older. Some of the earliest books were orally transmitted before they were written down. When they were written, they were written on scrolls and parchments made out of animal skins. Finally, they were collected into what we know as the Bible.
Because the Bible is so old, it should not shock anyone that the modern reader will be confused now and then.
The writers of the books of the Bible spoke of people, nations, and customs with which they were familiar. Of course, the modern reader is not familiar with the same people, nations, and customs.
For instance, very few people understand who the Canaanites, Jebusites, Babylonians, Egyptians, or the Persians were. Y et, the writers of the books of the Bible were very familiar with such people. They were as common to them as the French or the Canadians are to those in the 20th Century. These nations were not allegorical. They were real people with real governments.
During the Bible times (5000 years ago) it was common for a nation to be ruled by kings, emperors, or other autocrats. The modern reader finds such concepts difficult. A king who has absolute authority over life and death seems incomprehensible to most 21st Century people.
The people in the Bible also had customs that modern readers find offensive and which the Bible writers found commonplace. For instance, it was not unusual for a man to have many wives. In fact, for a king it was expected as a gesture of good will and treaty for a king to take a wife from the royal line of another kingdom to seal treaties and other agreements.
If the modern reader understands these marriages to be like the ones entered into today, they will be misled.
In Bible times, slavery was a common thing. Everyone had slaves. If one nation conquered another, the people in the conquered nation were subject to being made slaves.
Some of their lives were very harsh, but most of the slaves were brought into the families of those who owned them.
In Bible times, the society was absolutely patriarchal. The women were treated like property and had very little to say about anything including who they would marry.
This was done so that the family line and the family property would go where the patriarch wanted it to go, namely, to his heir in the family line. It is not that women were not loved, they were. It is not that women were treated as objects, they weren’t.
They simply did not have any say in property ownership or their own destiny. Men longed for sons. The reason they longed for sons was because only sons would be allowed to inherit the property of the father, and the father was always concerned about the continuance of the family line and the family name.
To have one’s name erased from the earth was like never having been in the first place. This was unthinkable to most people in the ancient world.
No, the Bible was not written yesterday. To think that one can read the Bible and not expect to run into cultures, societies, governments, and customs that are foreign to the modern mind is illogical.
The people who wrote the Bible were real people who lived in real time. The people with whom they interacted were real as well. The fact that they would record and report this interacting should be a matter of course when reading the Bible.
This makes the books of the Bible difficult to understand for some people. They run to Bibles with little notes at the bottom of the page to explain the parts that are difficult.
They buy Bible handbooks and think that they cannot read the books of the Bible without having one type of aid or another. This is not true. If the reader is somewhat familiar with ancient history (and by somewhat, I mean knowing the main cultures of the ancient near east, not be a history major) they will do fine in their reading.
Another misconception is that the Bible people and societies were not populous or sophisticated. The ancient world was very populated.
Millions of people lived in a very small area. Millions. Their society was very specialized and multilayered. Just because they didn’t have air conditioning and Wal-Mart doesn’t mean they were backward.
These people discovered or created writing, math, alphabets, geometry, calculus, iron, and bronze. They dreamed up and built chariots, catapults, and many other machines and inventions that we take for granted and upon which other new inventions are dependent.
They dressed differently, lived differently, had different social roles and mores, used different measurements and money and spoke different languages.
None of this makes the books of the Bible impossible to understand or appreciate. A basic understanding of the cultures and their beliefs will make the Bible a living book–a set of books that come from another time to reveal another world–a world we cannot see.