Obvious Caveats

I guess some obvious caveats are in order before I really get going. The first is that I am not going to be basing my biblical interpretation on a literal reading of The Bible. I am going to be taking the position that The Bible is an allegorical construct; it is a great book to go to for advice, but it is not to be read literally. This is not to disrespect it by any stretch; the problem is that there are a number of historical events and personages mentioned in The Bible, but they are mentioned in terms of what they stood for. A good example is the destruction of Jericho through sound; although there is some evidence of Jericho being destroyed by earthquake at the same time as the Israelites coming through, it is unlikely that the town was destroyed by the power of trumpets, unless they were a lot bigger than we have been led to believe. It makes a great story and warns of God's power, but is not likely to have happened as reported.

The second is to keep in mind that most of my academic training is science. I'm not going to try and justify the difference; it is my personal belief that there is no need for a reconciliation between the two; science explains the what, when, where and how of existence, religion grabs the who and why. As humans we need all of those questions answered, and sometimes we need some sort of higher power. This is not to weaken the case of science, but rather to simply say we don't know. There are also those really weird coincidences that no one can explain, ranging from something as simple as a candy bar being sold long after no one even makes it all the way to the orderliness of a particular organism. There just sometimes hits a point where something is so well ordered that it has to be an artificial construct even when we know it's 100% natural. We need someone to blame, and we know it's not us this time.

The last is that you need to keep in mind that the biggest problem with studying The Bible is that it's hard to do with the original language. Hebrew has a number of limitations when it comes to expressing thoughts, as does even Greek; the languages are old enough that there just simply are not the words to express certain concepts. There are also some concepts that the ancients had to deal with on a daily basis that we simply don't. We have no problems with the concept of an atheist in this day and age; the idea of someone who did not believe in some sort of a god would have been completely foreign to our ancestors. Because of this there will always be translation issues as translators need to not only know the language but the nuances of the culture, and that's not always easy. So be prepared for some weird translation issues...

With that said, I guess I can start having some fun.