Beast Question: How Do You Read the Bible?

How do you read the Bible? ...it's a bunch of words all jumbled and it looks like a dictionary and it looks like some of it isn't even English.-Beast-----------------

For the record, Beast didn't actually send me this question. He doesn't think of me as his pastor and probably doesn't know I write this blog. I'm pretty certain his name isn't even Beast. But he did ask his Mom the question, and she mentioned it on Facebook, and I thought, hey, questions like that are basically what this blog is for. So Beast, if you see this, thanks for asking the question, because I've been thinking about how to answer it all morning!

So the Bible is confusing to read for many reasons. It is very old, and written in languages that no one speaks anymore. Since those languages died out, it has been translated over and over again, and not always the same way, and so depending on whose version you read, the words will be different, which means the meanings are different.

Even if you focus on just one version, it can look like a mess to read. The text is usually pretty densely packed (making it look like a dictionary, as you said) and there's also a bunch of numbers scattered through it. And yes, some of it isn't in English, even when you're supposedly reading an English translation. So what gives?

But maybe the biggest part of why the Bible is hard to read is the fact that it isn't a book. Sure, it LOOKS like a book. We bind it and sell it like a book. It's frequently called the highest selling Book of all time. Even the word, bible, comes from the Latin biblia, which means book. But the Bible ISN'T a book. It's a library, or collection of books.

When you flip through the Bible you'll frequently come upon what look like chapter headings, titles like Genesis, Exodus, Psalms, 2 Kings, 3 Peter, etc. These aren't actually chapters, like you would expect in a normal book, but actually little books themselves, written by different authors at different times about different things. They aren't all stories, either. In the Bible you'll find stories, letters, books of law, books of poetry, books of philosophy, books of prophecy, even books of erotica.

So when you read the Bible, if you just read it from beginning to end like a normal book, you're gonna get confused. Not so bad as if you read a Choose Your Own Adventure Book (ask your Mom) the same way, but it still won't make a whole lot of sense.

So there is your first clue on how to Read the Bible, pick one book at a time and read that. When you finish, remember that the next one you read is a completely different book. Even though it might be about the same thing.

Oh yeah, that's another thing. Sometimes the Bible tells the same story more than once, just from a different perspective or according to a different author. For instance, the Gospels (or the books Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) each tell the same story: the life story of Jesus Christ. But while there are similarities all four share, they also diverge from each other wildly, reflecting the different perspectives of the different authors.

This is going a bit long so I'll sum up with some (hopefully) helpful hints.

1- The numbers you see weren't originally there and aren't part of the story. The Bible has been printed so many times and in so many languages that for people to find where someone else was reading in the scripture would be almost impossible. Page numbers wouldn't work, and sometimes the words are almost completely different. So instead we used the number headings (called Chapter and verse) to make it clear where exactly we are reading. They are fairly universal, so even with very different translations, you'll be able to find the same part and look at how different people read that passage. So if you read a line that you can't really understand, you could always look up the same line in a different translation (there are a bunch available for free online) and see if that one clears it up for you.

2- The authors of the different books don't always agree with each other. For instance, the prophet Nehemiah felt strongly that Jews shouldn't marry foreign women. But the author of the book of Ruth (we don't know their name, sadly) wrote a story about how one Hebrew married a woman from another country, and she ended up being the great grandmother to Israel's greatest king!

3-  About the language. Sometimes you'll come upon a word that you don't know, even if you try to look it up in the dictionary. This is for a couple of reasons. A lot of the time, the story will translate it for you, later. (Even though the languages these were written in is very old, sometimes the language the people who lived it spoke was even older.) There are a few words, however, that aren't translated anywhere. These are words that are so old that we have no record of them existing anywhere except in the Bible, and so we can't translate them... we can't find them anywhere else to figure out what they mean!