The Bible: Commentary and Controversy

As you may or may not know by now, I’m sort of slowly working my way through the bible, trying to discover what it means – at least to me. And it occurs to me that the bible as we know it is not really The Bible, as we would like for it to be, and as many teach that it is. Because of what it really is. And knowing what it really is answers many of my questions about it. Like why did God change from the old testament version to the new testament version after – according to the begats, etc. – more than 5,000 years of appearing to people, and killing whole bunches of people, and generally acting like one of the “pagan” gods of Rome, Greece, Egypt, etc.

The answer that occurred to me is pretty simple, and I’m sure obvious to more capable brains than mine. God is not God in the bible. Instead, the God of the bible is man’s idea of God. God anthropomorphized. Does that mean the bible is not a sacred work, or is just a bunch of fables? No. I have no idea whether it’s all true, or part true, or all untrue. And that’s not my point.

My point is the folks who passed the bible down from generation to generation verbally, and then later with the written word, made God act the way they thought a god should act. Sodom and Gomorrah, for example. Terrible, promiscuous, God-ignoring people who needed to be taught a lesson. So God wiped them out. “The LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah — from the LORD out of the heavens. Thus he overthrew those cities and the entire plain, including all those living in the cities.” Wow. He only took pity on Lot and his family, because they were good, God-fearing people. Except, of course, Lot’s wife and the pillar of salt thing, but that was really her own fault, right?

Makes a great story, teaches a great lesson. True? Archeologists say such a place might have been destroyed by a rain of meteorites. There is also a theory that subterranean deposits of petroleum-based bitumen, common in the region South of the Dead Sea, could have been released by an earthquake through a fault line, and somehow been ignited by a spark or surface fire. It would then fall to earth as a fiery mass. In fact, it was only after this theory was formulated that Sodom and Gomorrah were found – modern-day Bab edh-Dhra, thought to be Sodom, and Numeira, thought to be Gomorrah.

So suppose I’m an elder, or a “keeper of the faith,” and I run across the story of a city that was destroyed by fire. Pretty good opportunity to teach a lesson, I’m thinking. Noah and the flood is another obvious example. The beings He created aren’t behaving, so he wipes them out. I don’t want to appear irreverent, but that doesn’t seem very Godly to me.

Am I saying those things didn’t happen? Absolutely not. I’m saying if they did happen – whether God was involved or not – they were great grist for the mill of the religious. The truth is, the Judeo-Christian God presented in the bible isn’t so very different from all those other gods already mentioned, who were petty, tyrannical, and unreliable. Because they all have been humanized by the storytellers and writers. Does this refute the credo that every single word of the bible is divinely inspired? Of course not. Divinely inspired, however, is several miles from “divinely written.”

God obviously didn’t write the bible. It was written by men to record certain events, many of which contain reference to or the actual presence of God. And as a writer, I can’t imagine sharing those events, either vocally or in writing, without embellishing them at least somewhat. And I think it perfectly plausible that actual events would be attributed to Him and His power to make Him more awesome, more memorable, and more frightening.

Because that’s what writers – and good teachers – do.