About

Goal

My goal during this project is to read through the entirety of the Bible and associated writings and record my thoughts as I progress through. I will attempt to approach each text with as little bias as possible, in the spirit of modern biblical criticism, so I can hopefully let the texts speak for themselves. I want to try to understand these texts in their historical social and political context so I can in turn better understand human history.

Why

A few years ago I somehow became utterly fascinated with the Bible and have been “studying” it as a hobby ever since. But I haven’t ever actually read the whole thing. Sure I’ve read this book or that book once or twice, and I grew up with stories and sermons in church during my youth, but I’ve never embarked on a mission to actually read it.

I’m hoping to gain a better perspective on these ancient writings and just generally be better versed in what is the most influential collection of works in the history of western civilization. Also because learning is fun and knowledge is power!

Okay, but why a blog?

Accountability, I guess? If I make this a public endeavor maybe I’ll be more motivated to actually follow through on this project. Once I actually finish this maybe I can move on and read the Quran or the Vedas, or the Bhagavad Gita or something else more exotic (A.K.A. outside of my cultural wheelhouse.)

Sequence

There are a lot of strategies one can take here – many will attempt a cover to cover reading or follow a variety of “bible in a year” reading plans or devotional plans or whatever, but that’s not what I’ll be doing. I plan to tackle a few chapters at a time, working my way through scholars’ best guess at a roughly chronological authorial sequence. But bear in mind: working through these texts in the order they were written is basically impossible, as the hands of various redactors have touched virtually all books of the bible as we have it today.

Why try to do this chronologically then, if there is so much debate about when different texts were written? I have to read it in some sort of order, and since I am extremely interested in the theological evolution of Israelite monotheism (and similarly interested in later developments in Christology, to a lesser extent) I’m going to try to approach the texts in roughly the order they were written, to hopefully see how perspectives on divinity, ritual, and religion varied as a function of time and place.

Format

Each blog post will cover ~5 chapters and a psalm or proverb. No, I won’t be doing the psalms & proverbs in order, because reading all of the psalms in a row sounds awful. For each post I will give my general thoughts and reactions, highlight a passage or two of interest, and briefly touch on the psalm or proverb.

Schedule

Hopefully I can post here a few times a week. Ideally I could do this every day, but let’s just see how it goes for a while, okay?
Lol.  Nope.