Eat This Book

Recently, I've been subscribing to an RSS feed of the bible that provides a few big chunks of scripture from different places in the Old and New Testaments each day. It's one of those read through the bible in a year plans, but I've been using this one in particular because it's not a "read straight through" method.

Here's the reason- when we're dealing with a book like the Bible (which is actually a number of books, poems, stories, genealogies, historical accounts, and letters encapsulated into one binding) it's important to take context seriously. Every word must be read in the context of the sentence, every sentence in context of the paragraph, ever paragraph in context with its chapter, and so on and so forth. But rarely do we read a passage in the context of the entirety of rest of scripture. We usually limit ourselves to the context of the particular setting in which its found.

For the ancients, this wouldn't have happened. Most boys (sorry girls, this was before women's suffrage) grew up in Synagogues and memorized the entire Torah. And if they were really good at it, they'd go on to memorize the rest of the scripture as well. Until the proliferation of paper and mass production of books, anyone serious about their faith would have done the same. It was the only way for them to have ready access to the scriptures in the same way we do today.

So for them, after having memorized entire books and themes of the bible, each verse and each chapter would resound within the context of the entire Biblical account. They would read the ten commandments within the context of the ENTIRE narrative of the bible, not just within the context of Moses' climb up the Mountain.

Unfortunately, my brain hasn't been programmed for memorization the same way the ancients were and so this is why, these days, I'm reading big chunks from all over the scriptures each day. It's the only way for me to mimic the understanding of someone who would have read John's Revelation within the context of their ever-present knowledge of Exodus, Isaiah, Micah, and Luke.

Example of why the whole story is important: Today, my friend Chris picked up on a literary technique that Matthew was using in his genealogy of Christ. As Matthew tallies through a long list of people at the beginning of his gospel account- he uses 3 sets of 14 generations as a narrative hook and may be subtly hinting that Joseph is Mary's Kinsmen-Redeemer in the same way Boaz was Ruth's. Just one of the things that a Hebrew would have possibly picked up on because he's so saturated in all the accounts of scripture. Why does this matter? I haven't figured that out yet, but it's kind of cool none-the-less.

Eugene Peterson mentioned in the book I'm reading- EAT THIS BOOK- that we must never forget the entire narrative of scripture when reading any one verse of passage. He writes that: "...it takes the whole Bible to read any part of the Bible. Every sentence is embedded in a story and can no more be understood accurately or fully apart from the the story than any one of our sentences spoken throughout the course of the day can be understood apart from our relationships and culture and the various ways in which we speak to our children and parents, our friends and enemies, our employers and employees- and our God."

Northop Frye adds that: "the immediate context of the sentence [any sentence in Scripture] is as likely to be three hundred pages off as to be the next or preceding sentence. Ideally, each sentence is the key to the whole Bible. This is not a factual statement about the Bible, but it helps to explain the practice of preachers who knew what they were doing, like some of those in seventeenth-century England. In the sermons of John Donne, for example, we can see how the text leads us, like a guide with a candle, into the vast labyrinth of Scripture, which to Donne was an infinitely bigger structure than the cathedral he ws preaching in."

So, with this memes in mind, I've decided to saturate myself with big passages from all over the Bible instead of reading from cover to cover or focusing only a single account. This is probably the best way to do it considering that the Bible isn't in chronological order anyhow. I'm hoping that this way of reading scripture train my brain to see the nuances and narrative of the WHOLE story instead of merely the smaller narratives that are captured within one piece of the puzzle.

You can get your own feed HERE if you're interested. The translation is English Standard Version which I've found to be more readable and accurate than NIV (although a few of my friends will argue with me on that).