There are so many possible answers to this. It's a very long book about God - that's certainly true. It's the Word of God - that's true as well, but a statement that needs interpretation, which we'll look at in a later post. It's a religious history book - to a large extent, yes. It's a long, boring book - a very common perception, but if that's how you feel, hopefully this series will help you to see it in a better light. It's a library of shorter books, written by quite a lot of different people - definitely true, and that's our starting point for today.
The Bible is indeed a very good book, whether you believe it to be God's word or not. If you know it well you will realize that, in addition to all the wisdom and guidance that it contains, it's actually a ripping yarn. There are kings and battles, giants, prophets and witches, angels and demons, and of course God and the devil. Miracles abound amongst other supernatural happenings, there are tender love stories, glorious poetry, exquisite prose and a great deal of factual historical detail. What isn’t there to like?
Well, it's true that it's very long (over 1,000 pages in most English translations) and it's made up of isolated stories that have to be brought together into some sort of whole. If you're going to get to know the Bible you need to recognize that it's actually a collection of 66 books written by different people over a period of thousands of years - and they're not in chronological order. It's normally best not read cover to cover from beginning to end; rather, each book has something different to say, but they all dovetail together remarkably and present a single overarching story. So what are these books and why are they there? Today we shall look at the first section, called the Old Testament, which can be divided into four parts.
The Bible in most English language versions starts with a group of five books called the Pentateuch (meaning a five-volume book!), sometimes also referred to as the books of Moses. In the Hebrew Bible this is called the Law. It is essentially ancient history, in particular tracing the ancestry of those who would eventually found the nation of Israel. Genesis takes us up to the time when the first Israelite family moved to Egypt. The other four books (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy) describe the Israelites' escape from Egypt about 400 years later, led by Moses and Aaron, followed by some details of their life as nomads in the desert for 40 years. During this period, God told Moses the Laws by which they were to abide, the blessings that would follow, and the consequences of disobedience. In the midst of it all there is also friendship and intrigue, loyalty and deception, love and warfare, faithfulness and immorality.
The next section is a series of what are essentially books containing details of how various kings, prophets and ordinary people led dynamic lives in step with God, or failed completely to follow him, making similar mistakes to what we still do today, turning their own lives upside down and affecting those of people around them; others fluctuated between the two. They're referred to as history, but are much more than that. They take us from the time when the Israelites first entered Canaan to conquer it as their new home (Joshua), through the period when there was no fixed ruler but God raised up prophetic military leaders to act as divinely appointed presidents (Judges and Ruth), up until the end of the subsequent monarchy (1&2 Samuel and 1&2 Kings, in parallel with 1&2 Chronicles), finishing with the exile of the Jews in Babylonia and their return to Jerusalem for those who chose to do so, or not as the case may be, as described in Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther. There's a lot more intrigue, deception, fighting and immorality - as well as friendship, loyalty, love and faithfulness of course.
The Old Testament is about real people loving and failing their real God, loving and fighting, hoping and despairing, rejoicing and lamenting along the way.
There then follows a group of what is called wisdom literature. This comprises a story about a man's suffering and how he found God through it (Job), five sets of poems about worship, righteousness and anger (Psalms), two books of wise sayings with very different characters (Proverbs and Ecclesiastes) and a highly erotic love poem (Song of Songs). Much of this, but not all by any stretch of the imagination, was written by the second and third official kings of Israel: David and Solomon.
The final section of the Old Testament is the writings of 16 prophets, together with an associated set of sorrowful poems (lamentations) over the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. These books tell us what God was saying to his people at various times from the latter part of the time of the monarchy (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk and Zephaniah), through the Jew's period of exile in Babylon (Lamentations, Ezekiel and Daniel) and into the period of the restoration of Jerusalem (Joel, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, although Joel could possibly have been written in an earlier period). The various prophecies contained within them interweave with the historical books. Malachi, and perhaps Joel, take us to the end of the Old Testament period, around 400 BC. In these prophetic books there is a lot of heartache and judgment, but equally vast amounts of love, comfort and blessing.
So if you thought that the Bible was just a tame book, suitable for inspirational Children's stories in primary school, I hope that I've opened your eyes to the more X-rated side. If on the other hand you thought that the Old Testament, in particular, was a horrendous book mainly about wars and judgment, then maybe you've missed the love, joy, grace, hope and promise contained within its pages as well. It's a warts-and-all depiction of a typical nation of good and bad people, constantly swaying between pleasing and frustrating their ultimately loving but equally just God and how he dealt with that. It's also the story of how people just like us still do please and frustrate the same, one and only God, who wants to be our friend if we'll let him.