The Bible: A Biography (Books That Changed the World) by Karen Armstrong (2008)
… the world’s most widely distributed book and its best-selling, with an estimated six billion copies sold in the last two hundred years. But the Bible is a complex work with a complicated and obscure history. Its contents have changed over the centuries, it has been transformed by translation and, through interpretation, has developed manifold meanings to various religions, denominations, and sects.
… acclaimed historian Karen Armstrong discusses the conception, gestation, life, and afterlife of history’s most powerful book. Armstrong analyzes the social and political situation in which oral history turned into written scripture, how this all-pervasive scripture was collected into one work, and how it became accepted as Christianity’s sacred text, and how its interpretation changed over time. …
Great idea.
A biography of The Bible.
Karen Armstrong is expert. I respect her opinion.
At one point she asks, Why so much hatred in sacred texts?
Joshua 8 – “The Capture of Ai; Blesses and Curses at Mount Ebal” …
1-2: The LORD said to Joshua, “Do not be frightened or dismayed. Take all the fighting troops with you, go and march against Ai. See, I will deliver the king of Ai, his people, his city, and his land into your hands. You shall treat Ai and her king as you treated Jericho and her king; however, you may take the spoil and the cattle as booty for yourselves. Now set an ambush against the city behind it.”
18: The LORD then said to Joshua, “Hold out the javelin in your hand toward Ai, for I will deliver it into your hands.” So Joshua held out the javelin in his hand toward the city.
24-25: When Israel had killed all the inhabitants of Ai who had pursued them into the open wilderness, and all of them, to the last man, had fallen by the sword, all the Israelites turned back to Ai and put it to the sword. The total of those who fell that day, men and women, the entire population of Ai, came to twelve thousand.
29: And the king of Ai was impaled on a stake until the evening.
The Koran is criticized as violent.
I’d make the same criticism of our current version of The Bible. It was translated into Latin more by one man than any other — Sophronius Hieronymus (Saint Jerome 342-420).
Did Jerome get it right?
There are all kinds of stories like the Capture of Ai out of line with my understanding of the teachings of Jesus Christ.
Slavery. Polygamy.
Anyone who takes the Bible literally has not read it.
Rick McCharles 