Ezra 1-10 - Caught up

The readings - Days 141-143 - Ezra 1-10

So I now have an official answer to give people who try to act like never having read the Bible cover-to-cover is somehow anathema to being Christian. (Yes, I have been told that before, by both crazy Christians and crazy Atheists alike)

It was never meant to be read this way.

I'm not saying that I'm regretting doing it, or that I'm planning on stopping, or even that it's not (at times, at least) incredibly rewarding and enlightening to do it this way. What I'm saying is there's no way that this book was intended to be read through like a novel.

The only alternative to that conclusion is that whoever compiled it had absolutely zero concept of how stories work, and how people would like to read things in order to actually comprehend them effectively.

As if the complete discord of reading through the summarized history of Israel (the single and split kingdoms)  - twice - in Samuel, Kings and Chronicles wasn't enough to convince you that this is not a linear collection of episodes/chapters, here we are in Ezra, which opens with a reference to a prophesy that will not actually be made (according to the way the books of the Bible are laid out) for quite some time.

Cyrus lets the Israelites go home and rebuild stuff, and he does so, according to the text, to fulfill the prophetic words of Jeremiah. For those keeping score, we still have to go through Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon and Isaiah before we get to Jeremiah. Anyway, rant over.

Anyway, so the exiles are on their way home to rebuild the Temple and Jerusalem, but because nothing can ever be straightforward, the neighbours had to go and cause trouble, resulting in a three-king delay before the construction can actually finish. Artaxerxes gets a letter from Judah's enemies, who point to Jerusalem's "rebellious past" and successfully convince him to put a stop to the rebuilding process, and it's not until Darius takes over that Cyrus's original "send them back" decree was dug out of the archives and followed.

And then, as soon as they're back on home soil, what happens? The good ol' intermarriage things starts up again... This time, though, there's a twist. We get a sense of Ezra maybe being a fair shake more attentive to God's wants for His people than previous rulers - and by a remarkable coincidence, he's not actually a king, but instead is acting as Israel's leader from the office of priest. Funny how the whole "king" thing never took off all that well, eh?

Oh well.

This post is another in an alarmingly long list of posts that are shorter than usual for the somewhat counterintuitive reason that it tries to cover too much stuff, but I'm happy to say that we're now completely caught up. Tomorrow should bring another post that's more focused and, therefore, likely a lot longer and more in-depth.

Judges 1-7 - Times have changed. Or not.

The readings - Days 77-79 - Judges 1-7

I suppose there's something worth addressing, now that we're in the books of the Old Testament normally categorized under the heading of "history."

While these works contain decidedly more detailed and intentionally historical documentation of events, etc, and therefore ought to be treated as more accurately depicting events/people/places/etc than other portions of the OT (IE the Psalms or bits of the Pentateuch), there's something that still strikes as odd about using these books in the same way that we would use a modern history text.

Gen. 41-42 - "Has it been two years already?"

The readings - Day 14 - Genesis 41-42.

A note about timing, since it's easy to forget how these things actually go, according to the text. It's a relatively recent phenomenon that people are interested in the mundane, day-to-day aspects of historical figures, and most ancient histories skip vast swaths of time, often without much notice at all, in order to get to the good stuff. Seems the Bible is no exception.

Day 1 and 2 (Genesis 1-3, 4-7)

So as you've no doubt noticed, I'm doubling up today, since I started reading yesterday and only started writing today. I'll mash my thoughts together for this one, but they'll roughly occur in chronological order. This'll also hopefully be the last time I include an editorial-ish opening to the post itself. Most of the time I hope to just leap right in.


Like now...

Genesis 1-3, 4-7

It's funny how hard it actually is to really read something that you're so familiar with as the opening chapters of Genesis. It's almost like you just automatically shift into 'skim' mode because your brain just assumes that you can fill in the blanks on your own, which you can - in a way.

In another more accurate way, this is a great method of getting nothing out of the experience other than what your brain provides by dipping into the murky waters of prevailing cultural interpretation of what's said, rather than what's actually there.