The bible: full of stories and a story in itself. I like stories. As a journalist, my work is all about creating stories. As an english major, my work is all about reading and analyzing stories.
This is the story of me working my way through the bible.
Today I graduate Ithaca College Summa Cum Laude with a degree in Journalism, degree with honors in English. I minored in religious studies (and rowing, though it does not say so on my transcript and is not an official academic program). I wrote my English Honors thesis on the use of the word "apocalypse" within the environmentalism movement, examining the religious and secular connotations and implications of the word. Throughout my college career I have attempted to mix my passions, with essays like a T.S. Eliot's pseudo-midrashic technique (for Religious Studies class) and mystical experience in Walt Whitman's poetry William Gibson's Neuromancer (two separate essays, both for English classes).
Here is my most current amalgamation: A blog in which I read the bible as a piece of literature. I will work my through the entire Harper Collins Study Bible, one narrative strand at a time. Apparently this has been tried before.
Where appropriate I will include other relevant information about composition, historical references, etc. (You will see what I mean in tomorrow's post on Genesis.) Mostly, however, this blog will focus on the bible as literature.
This is my covenant with you: every day I will post before midnight a summary of my reading for the day. The sign of our covenant will be this blog, which is interactive, so if you find something interesting or would like to give me advice or criticism, please comment. I would like this to be a conversation about the bible as I work my way through. If you do not have access to a bible, I would recommend using the oremus Bible Browser.
The bible is a composite centuries composed over many centuries by many authors. Even individual books of the bible may have a number of authors and redactors. The bible might therefore be viewed as a collection of stories. But it can also be viewed as complete piece of literature itself, with its own distinct narrative. Though I will be blogging about individual narrative strands, I hope to connect these strands into a cohesive whole.
Through my study I will summarize biblical stories, working my way through the Harper Collins Study Bible, which uses the New Revised Standard Version text. This is useful tool because it is translated in a clear manner and is careful in the language of gender, a large concern for contemporary audiences. The NRSV conveys the text more literally. For example, Genesis 1.26 in the NRSV reads:
Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness...
The King James Version, on the other hand, translates the gender neutral Hebrew word "adam," meaning a universal "humankind" as the universal but gender-biased word "man":
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness...
The Harper Collins Study Bible represents the Protestant canon (canon means a selection and arrangement of books). It contains all the books of the Torah, though in a different order, as well as the New Testament and the Christian apocrypha (books deemed useful or important, but not a part of the biblical canon). I will therefore work my way through both Jewish and Christian canons, though the texts will not necessarily be in the established order.
This is a lot to throw at you. If you are confused about any terms, I will try to explain them as I work my way through the bible.
I hope you enjoy.
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