MarkT

Bernard Boas "It's Time To Rewrite the Bible"

from Bernard Boas "It's Time To Rewrite the Bible" (Hudson:1994)

I find much of value in the moral and ethical principles which the
scriptures offer.  But I also hold sacred the principles of knowledge and
wisdom: they too are holy; they too are worthy of respect and reverence. p.3

... (my) studious father ... I knew that he too was bored with the
repetition and dullness in many of the Services and my Christian friends
complained of the same problems. p.5

I hear my father's deep voice saying, "Read everything that comes to hand.
Read and learn and themn make up yur own mind.  This interpretation may not
be the correct one; try others too and keep asking qustions.  Some of the
things in there  I think nobody will ever understand". p.10

The les conformist ways of expressing religious ideas encourage individual
freedom, but may weaken the powers of the insrtitutions in the society. p.14

Genesis 4:19-21, where we hear about the descendents of Cain. They include
Jabal, the ancestor of all those who dwell in tents or amidst herds, and
Jubal, who was the ancestor of all who play the lyre and the pipe. But the
only survivors of the Great Flood were Noah and his family, descendents of
Seth, not of Cain.  Yet there were clearly many hersmen and musicians after
the Flood.  Such inconsistencies are to be expected in a collection of folk
writing, but not in a work which reprersents God's literal truth. pp. 40-41

(The Creation) ... the late arrival of the Sun.  This is not created until
the fourth day. yet on the first day, God divides the darknesss from the
light, and calls them 'night' and 'day'. ... The Bible is simply wrong,
logically as well as scientifically, in making night and day (and the earth
itself) exist before the creation of the Sun. On the second day the sky is
created. .... On the third day come the plants, and on the fourth comes, at
last, the sun.  That even the plants come before the sun is a particular
puzzle, as primitive people would have been aware of the importance of the
sun in nurturing crops. p.45

The polar bear, the penguin and the platypus would not have been happy in
Mesopotamia, and what were Adam's names for them?  Did the wombat turn up at
the roll-call and then make his ungainly way to Australia? p.45

God gave the Israelites detailed instructions on how to deal with the
Canaanites, but not with the Babylonians, the Romans or the Nazis. p. 48

... a selective interpretation was already being followed within Biblical
times.  The hereditary priesthood of the Levites was abolished; monogamy
became the general rule, and the elaborate rituals of sacrifice fell ionto
disuse.  Laws which were described as 'for all time' had already been
changed within the Biblical period. Are we to believe that this evolutionary
process was supposed to stop then? pp.48-49

In the earliest days (as the story of cain and Abel tells us) God took
sacrifices very seriously. ... God was still offered burnt offerings in the
period covered by Leviticus, though their purpose had changed. By the end of
the Biblical period the practice had been more or less abandoned.  had the
Creator changed His mind about it, or was this due to the evolution of human
understanding? p.51

... the practice of sacrifice was not only a matter of religious observance
and atonement for wrong-doing; it was also (in modern jargon) 'revenue
raising'.  Sacrifices supported the Levites ... p.52

Discussion and interpretations ... some guidelines ....When we read
something like 'The Lord said', must we believe that the Creator spoke as a
human speaks? If so, we have real problems.  But what if we are actually
reading messages that some humans reported receiving from the lord?  It
often helps to ask who could possibly have done the reporting, and in what
form the Lord's message reached them: a dream? the voice of conscience? Ask
yourself, "Who said that?  Who told the tale?".  It is the same with
miracles and mysteries: think of the real situation being described and ask
yourself just what actually happened.  let us, in the language of the
psychological field of Neurolinguistic Programming, reframe it.  That is,
set it in a new perspective, one that might give us some fresh ideas. ...
Sometimes we canclearly see that a story is a piece of folklore, but may
have a social meaning (as our story of Cinderella does) or a psychological
one (as the Oedipus story does).  It may be just a morality tale, or an as
if illustration of a point. How nearly literally true does a story have to
be in order to be The Truth? ... Remember that the stories were not written
down for several centuries after the latest of the events they depict; the
earliest events were by then even further in the past. pp.63-64

When we ask the question, "What is a Jew?", we get all sorts of answers.  If
the test is anywhere in the religious field, one answer is "He belives in a
single God". In fact, he nails it down to the mast of his life with his
central prayer, which is a statement of faith from tyhe torah. This is
called "The Shema", the statement which begins "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our
God, the Lord is one." p.68

To give the Eternal a voice that speaks in our words and in human language,
apprently emerging from some imaginary larynx, is to degrade God to just a
large and mighty human. p.72

A name for God .... The first is Alohim ... Abraham ... used the plural
noun, which could also be ranslated as idols or gods. ... The second name
which Abraham used was El Shaddai, meaning somthing like the Supreme God.
This might leave room for lesser gods as well. ... In Genesis Chapter 14,
Abraham addresses the king of Sodom with I swear to the Lord, God Most High,
using the phrase E Elyon.  This name was used by the Phoeniceans for one of
their superior gods and for themn it implies the existence of other gods as
well.  Names for the Almighty include: God, Creator, Eternal, the Lord,
Adonai (Adon originally meant just a human superior, perhaps a landlord, or
a local baron). ... In the story of the Binding Of Isaac, the name of the
Deity appers several times as Ha-alohim, translatable as The God (or gods).
pp. 74-75

Beth-El, House of God, though the canaanites had already dedicated it to a
god of theirs called El. p. 78

People had a very limited idea of what a God who was not like a human would
be like, so they made god very human-like in word and deed.
Anthropomorphism made the incomprehensible easier to grasp.  Perhaps we are
not wiser today. p. 80

The number 7 appears some seven hundred times in the Bible.  Its staus as a
sacred number is possibly from the sun, moon, and the five (known) planets.
The Hebrew word Shabbat, is in fact the number seven. p. 90

In the days of the King James version, it would not have been proper to
translate correctly the relationship of Adam and Eve as 'man and woman'.
They translated the word 'ishah' (meaning 'woman') as 'wife', with no
justification exceptiong their own standards of propriety.  There was no
word for wife that far back in mankind's history and, of course, no
weddings.  biblical Hebrew has no word for 'wife'. p.97