While comfortable with the moral teachings of religion, many modern congregants are uncomfortable with the dogma and ritual of organized religion. This is especially evident in the way modern congregants view the Bible and the stories in the Bible as well as the teachings and liturgy based on the Bible. While written for a long-ago audience, the Bible concerns issues that are still relevant today and should not be dismissed out of hand merely because the stories in the Bible appear to take place in a time and place that is far removed from today and have protagonists that appear to be foreign to a modern audience. Questions such as “Who am I?” “How did I arrive at my present time, place and situation?” were important then and are still asked today. Questions concerning God, repentance, assimilation, and personal identity are still asked today. Jews, reading the Hebrew Bible (also known as the Old Testament) also ask questions concerning Israel and Judaism.
However, these questions are answered differently for a modern audience whose members are literate and scientifically knowledgeable than they were for a Biblical audience whose members may be illiterate and science was rudimentary at best. The problem with the Bible is not with the message, it is the way the message is understood by the audience. As stated by Jorge Borges, “Two people write good literature: the writer and the reader”.
The essays in this blog are directed to looking at the stories in the Jewish Bible, or the Torah, as well as the Tanakh, through the lens of modern society, its views, mores, and ethos. Modern science as well as the latest discoveries in archeology are also considered and factored into the essays.
The stories are reviewed as though they were short stories in an anthology of short stories each of which fits within one or more themes that overarch the entire work. For example, the story about Jacob at Shechem is fit into an overarching theme of the dangers of assimilation. The short story/anthology concept will not be religious or religiously indoctrinating. One need not be religious or a believer, or a Jew or even believe in God, to engage with these essays – they are presented as short stories and the characters in these short stories, including God, are treated as just that: characters in a short story. For example, the blog includes essays which concern the Garden of Eden story. This story is viewed through the lens of modern understanding of evolution, with the particular emphasis being placed on the development of human imagination and its influence on the development of human beings. The effects of the development of human imagination on the various characters in this story, Adam, Eve, the serpent, Satan, and, in particular, God or Yahweh, and the development of the human/God relationship which is an overarching theme of the Bible are considered without sacrificing the reason the story was included in the Bible. This approach changes the story into a one that is palatable to members of a 21st Century audience. The blog has a presentation of definitions of the terms pertinent to the essays so the reader and the writer will both have the same understanding of the terms being used. The blog also has a section which presents the overarching themes of the Bible so the essays on the stories will be better understood because they will better fit together. Fitting the stories into overarching themes allows many otherwise enigmatic stories to make sense because they can be viewed as being part of an overall story. Each essay will include a set of Discussion Questions which, hopefully, will engender further thoughts by the audience.
The essays consider issues and stories concerning God and the Messiah, free will, the prophets, Jewish identity, as well as stories specific to events occurring in the Books of Genesis and Exodus. In fact, several of the essays are dedicated to viewing Bible events in the manner of a Star Wars-type journey.
Several essays are specifically directed to the women of the Bible and present those women in a thoroughly modern way which allows their heroism and importance to emerge from seemingly to exist only in the margins and between the lines of text onto center stage to blaze loadstar bright.