I recently completed a challenging, ambitious undertaking that has been a year in the making. I decided that as a member of Western society (no less as a professing Christian) it was high-time for me to read the most influential book of the Occident for the last two thousand years. To call the Bible a book is a misnomer, as it is really a collection of 66 books (at least in the Protestant canon) that are at once widely disparate and intricately interconnected. The themes that I was immersed in throughout these books are so ubiquitous in our lives that we often forget that our Western-colloquialisms had their origin in the great “King James Bible” (“can a leopard change his spots,” “bite the dust,” “blind leading the blind,” “go the extra mile”). I have included a link at the end of this blog to all sorts of English sayings that originate in the Bible, of which most are likely unaware.
However, the Bible is not all memorable turns of phrase and Sunday school stories; it is a complex, at times confusing and conflicted narrative of humanity’s first monotheistic religion and the ensuing implications. I will now attempt a broad stroke chronological overview, saying nothing of internal inconsistencies, authenticity of authors, or dates of composition.
The Bible (as organized in the Protestant canon) is the story of the relationship between mankind and a universal God who presents Himself as an omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent spiritual being with masculine characteristics. As the Creator of human beings, God demanded full allegiance and obedience, but His first two human creations, Adam and Eve, disobeyed this call and led all of humanity into open rebellion against God. The rest of the Bible is a story of human-divine reconciliation, which is not so strange or surprising a theme, except that this reconciliation does not take place on the global scale, as one might expect. It is relegated to a group of nomadic sheep herders in the Negev Desert, called the Hebrews. Ostensibly promised by God all the land west of the Jordan River, these nomads were taken into captivity and enslaved by the powerful Egyptians well before they could come to national prominence.
Following a liberation campaign at the hands of Moses, the Hebrews (now termed Israelites) march back across the Sinai Peninsula to the eastern shores of the Jordan River in anticipation of conquering the land that was promised to them from its current occupants. During this time in the desert, God entrusts to Moses an archaic and sanguinary system of ritual animal sacrifice aimed at appeasing divine wrath over the sinfulness of the Israelites. A division of the people into a priestly caste, called the Levites, and the construction of a temporary residence for the presence of God, the Tabernacle, ensued. At long last, the Israelites crossed over the Jordan River and, with the military leader Joshua of Nun at the helm, obliterated those occupying the land known as Canaan. After successive generations of leaders known as “judges,” the Israelite people beg for a king. Saul is the first king given to them by God, followed by the supreme king of Israel David and his son Solomon. These kings achieve military conquest over all the surrounding nations, and Solomon builds a permanent residence for the presence of God in the ancient city of Jerusalem.
Subsequent Israelite kings assimilate to the Canaanite cultures around the now thriving kingdom of Israel, much to the chagrin of God. After the death of Solomon, the kingdom split in two with the Kingdom of Israel in the north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south. These newcomers to the scene were no match for the superior geopolitical powers of Assyria and Babylon. Through the mouth of various prophets, God threatened exile at the hands of these military superpowers lest the citizens of Israel and Judah turn from their foreign idolatry and intermarriage. These words fell on deaf ears, however, and the northern kingdom was taken away into captivity at the hands of the Assyrian king Sargon II in 722 BCE. Soon to follow was the southern kingdom in 605 BCE at the hands of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar. This exile lasted 70 years, until the defeat of the Babylonians at the hands of the Persians.
The Persian king Cyrus the Great allowed the exiled Judeans to return to Jerusalem and even gave them financial assistance to rebuild Solomon’s temple that had been destroyed by the Babylonians. These Jews were expected to live under the rule of a satrap, but the leadership would subsequently change hands from the Persians to the Greeks to the Romans. During this transitional period, the Bible goes silent for 400 years until it picks back up in the Roman province of Judea. The Jews are living under the rule of Herod the Great and two new Jewish prophets have appeared on the scene – John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth. John defers to Jesus, and Jesus begins a period of public ministry that includes healing, teaching, and reinterpreting the harsher aspects of the Old Testament.
His followers believe Jesus to be the fulfillment of a prophecy concerning a new Jewish king from the lineage of David and Solomon who would come to restore Israel to former glory. Various Jewish religious leaders scoff at Jesus’ claim among His disciples to be divine (the Son of God). At the behest of these religious leaders, the Romans are convinced to execute Jesus via crucifixion as a potential insurrectionist threat to the reign of Emperor Tiberius among the politically volatile Judeans. Convinced that Jesus rose from the dead three days after His death, the followers of Jesus begin a global campaign to spread the message that the death of Jesus had far more than regional significance. Allegedly, it was the fulfillment of a plan dating all the way back to the initial rebellion of humanity against God, wherein God Himself would become a human and receive the punishment due humanity for their rebellion at the hands of God Himself. At this time, the concept of multiple persons existing within the one conceptual God came to the fore, primarily due to the exposition of the Apostle Paul.
Against all odds, this new message of reconciliation with a monotheistic, yet plurally existent, God became wildly popular in the Roman Empire. The Bible ends in the nascent stages of the ascendancy of Christianity, but the rest, as we say, is history. Why then, should one read the Bible? It should be noted that until the Enlightenment, very few serious thinkers in the Western world took for granted that the information contained in the pages of the Bible were authoritative and true. Since then, it has been for everyone in each successive generation to decide for himself whether the words of Scripture are inspired, or merely inspiring.
Regardless of whether one considers the Bible to contain the keys to eternal life, its secular contribution to the world stands on its own. The Bible influences (and has influenced) international wars, political elections, philosophical treatises and national amendments to social contracts written under the auspices of natural law. It guides and directs the daily lives of billions of inhabitants of our planet, and its timeless stories, words and phrases have been inextricably woven into the fabric of Western society. And while I have fixated on its Occidental preeminence (one really cannot understand the history of Europe and the Americas apart from the Bible), it must not be forgotten the Bible was written entirely in Asia. It is as much a legacy of the East as it is the West. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Mormonism all find their foundation in this book, and its narrative is the personal narrative of so many individuals.
The leather binding on my Bible reminds me of the bovine that had to be slaughtered for me to read this book. This harkens back to the untold number of cattle, sheep, and oxen that were sacrificed as an appeasement to the wrathful God of the Israelites – which points me forward to the brilliant story of redemption wherein that same God became a human and delivered Himself up to sacrifice at the hands of the greatest empire of rebellious human beings the world has ever known. This then reminds me that this sacrifice came to dominate the imaginations of said empire and the entire Western world thereafter. Even with the blow suffered by the Enlightenment, one need only look at the modern Zionist movement and the firestorm that emerged when the American embassy was moved to Jerusalem to understand that this collection of books has not yet lost its fervor. As the prophet Isaiah foretold: “the grass withers, and the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.”
https://unlockingthebible.org/2012/03/common-english-sayings-bible/
Written by Cal Wilkerson
Brains and Brawn 