The Book of Job, which relates the story of a devout and wealthy man from the land of Uz whose devotion to God is tested by profound suffering, is easily the most fascinating and enigmatic book of the Old Testament. In looking into it, I found that, once again, what is said of the text and what the text actually says are two very different things.
Category: bible
Readings and analysis from the Holy Bible
Apocalypse
The New Testament Book of Revelation is one of the most distinct and bizarre books of the entire Bible, and I think that its writer was saying the same things about what was to come that I had learned from both my Christians teachers and from history.
Faith and Sacrifice, pt. 1: Sacrifice in Sacred Literature
“Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.” Abraham awoke in the early morning. He remembered his dream and he knew immediately what had befallen him. He arose,…
Bizarre Bible Stories #2: A Gay Orgy with Jesus
A Biblical scholar, Morton Smith, was doing research in a library Jerusalem in 1958 when he chanced upon a letter that appeared to have been written by one of the 2nd century church fathers, Clement of Alexandria.
You Are Going to Die Soon
It is commonly thought that the Bible details the blissful afterlife of the righteous in Heaven and the torturous existence of the damned in Hell; in fact, the Bible has nothing of the sort to say about Heaven, and has little to say on the topic of the afterlife in general.
Bizarre Bible Stories
Most of my research has focused on stories in the Bible with which I am already familiar. Often I find in the text aspects to these stories of which I was not previously aware (such as Noah’s sacrifice to God after the flood), but I also find stories that I have never heard mentioned before at all. One of these follows after the stories of the Great Flood and the Tower of Babel in Genesis, about which I have already written. This is the story of Abram, who later came to be called Abraham, and his wife Sarai (later Sarah), and their exile in Egypt.
In Search of the Religion of Jesus
Christianity is not the religion of Jesus. It is not the religion that he followed. It is not the religion that he preached. It was not the religion that he would have had his followers pursue during his life or after his death. What do we know of Jesus and the religion that he promoted?…
Imagining a Better God
The Bible has its own narrative of the origin of language, or at least the origin of its diversity, and it paints a problematic picture both of God and of language.
The Great Flood
What’s interesting to me is that the story of a great flood is one that many people have been telling for a very long time. But in many traditions, and in the Abrahamic tradition in particular, there is an aspect to the story that is particularly troubling: God became displeased with us. So They murdered almost the entire world.
Summa: A Satanist Reads the Nicene Creed
Summa is a choral setting of the Latin translation of the Nicene Creed, composed by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt in 1977. He later arranged it for strings, and that rendition is perhaps the more popular, but I have never been able to appreciate the music apart from the text. It is one of my favorite works of music, but I can’t listen to it without hearing the ideological dissonance within it. The music seems to be expressing something to which the text is antithetical.