There are at least three ways people read the Bible—for the theology, for its history, and as literature. If we were in a church, it would be appropriate to look at the Bible for its theological content: we would discuss salvation, angels, sin, and other religious concepts in order to formulate a system of belief that we could all agree on. If we studied the Bible in a history class, we would downplay the religious content and focus instead on the peoples of the Bible, key events of their times, and changes that took place.

However, since I taught the Bible as literature at a secular school, I’d like to use this blog (and maybe one more) to concentrate instead on the Bible as literature. Most people are puzzled initially at this idea because they don’t think of the Bible as literature. They believe it is a huge religious tract that abstractly tells the reader how to live a godly life. But this is simply not true.

The Bible is literature—it’s made up of dramatic stories, highly charged poetry, carefully crafted letters, clever proverbs, and homey parables. Like other great literature, the Bible follows literary conventions that should be understood to fully appreciate what the author is attempting to do. For example, there are certain rules that Biblical poets followed as they created their work. In addition, the Bible is like other great literature for its exploration of the human condition; we see all types of people in all sorts of situations, which allows us to see ourselves better.

Let’s continue this in the next blog.

The land of Palestine, where all the wonderful Bible stories took place from Abraham to Jesus, is surprisingly small. It is roughly the size of Vermont with north-south dimensions of 150 miles and east-west distances ranging from 100-125 miles. It’s hard to believe so much history took lace in such a small area.

In the south is the Negev, a flat desert area that we sometimes wrongly think is typical of all the Holy Land.  So many pictures of barren land have been taken of this area and used in movies based on the Bible.

To the west, bordering the Mediterranean Sea is a flat coastal plain that gradually changes to limestone hills in the east. This area of scrub forest acted as a buffer between the peoples of the plains(the Philistines, primarily) and the Jews further up in the hills. Lots of battles took place here as the two cultures (coastal, civilized outsiders and Jews of the mountains) clashed.

Around Jerusalem it is hilly (about 3,000 feet altitude) with fertile, forested areas that were easy to defend. Many Bible passages talk of going up to Jerusalem, meaning no matter whether you are north or south of the city, you are going “up” literally to get there.

Continuing east, the land drops down to the Dead Sea in a wilderness area called the Rift Valley, part of a giant break in the earth’s crust. It is here that the ancient city of Jericho lies.

The land of Samaria, north of Judah, has rolling hills with good farmland. Unfortunately, it was not as easy to defend as Judah, and it fell to the Assyrians in the 700s B.C.

To the far north is Galilee, a rugged, wooded area. Overall, Palestine is a rugged, arid land that was made for tough people.

The Jews languished in foreign lands until the Medes and the Persians toppled the Babylonians and became the next world power. The Persians had a policy of  better treatment for their captives, so they allowed a remnant of the Jews to return to Jerusalem around 530 B.C.

You can see something called the Cyrus cylinder that talks about this return. Cyrus had a stone cylinder inscribed with his boast that he let many peoples return to their lands. There is actually a lot of archeological evidence for the Old Testament stories.

Much later the Greeks spread their civilization into the Middle East, thanks to the conquests of Alexander the Great(331-323 B.C.). In 165 B.C. the Jews revolted against Syrian leaders and briefly ruled their own land until the Romans conquered Jerusalem in 63 B.C.

Dealing withe the Romans was tough for the Jews. Relations with the Romans festered until the Jews attempted to rebel against their rulers in 70 A.D. Roman forces besieged Jerusalem, destroying nearly one million Jews in five months.

As the Christian faith gained in popularity over the next fifty years, it came into conflict with the Roman authorities also. However, persecution and martyrdom failed to wipe out either the Jews or the Christians, who can look back with pride at the courage of  faithful believers.

Well, it’s the start of the S’19 semester at Palomar, and I want to continue with my blog. Let’s see more of the history of the Bible regions–see the last blog for the history leading up to this point.

For the next 300 years the Jews invaded and attempted to conquer the land of Canaan, located between the two major powers along the Nile and the Tigris/Euphrates rivers. The most famous king in Israel’s history, David, ruled an expanded kingdom from 1011 to 971 B.C.

Unfortunately, the glory faded quickly when the Jews started a vicious civil war that split the country into two kingdoms; Israel to the north and Judah to the south. By this time another power had arisen in the Fertile Crescent, one that ruled by terror and cruelty—Assyria with its capital at Nineveh.

In 722 B.C. the northern Jewish kingdom was overrun by the Assyrians who hauled the inhabitants off to captivity. The southern kingdom lasted a bit longer until in 586 B.C. the people there  were conquered by the new power of the Middle East—Babylon.

OK, we spent a lot of time on confusing and controversial Bible people, places, and events. Let’s move to another area people often struggle with–history especially when it comes to the Bible.

Two river valleys saw the start of the first important civilizations connected with the world of the Bible. In the Middle East the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers formed a curve called the Fertile Crescent that reached  from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf. You can see this curve on any map–no way could people start a civilization in the desert areas between these two rivers and the other hugely important river to the west, the Nile.

Along this Nile River in Egypt, a second great civilization started that was to have a big impact on people of the Bible. Nearly 3000 years before Jesus, the Egyptians began building the huge pyramids that showed their engineering skill. It’s amazing to see ways they may have used to construct such well-built memorials for their kings.

The city of Babylon, so important in Biblical literature, became important in the Fertile Crescent about 1,800 B.C. when Hammurabi made it his capital. Probably around 2000 B.C. the well-known Biblical figure Abraham migrated to the land of Canaan, a place that served as a bridge between the two river valley civilizations. This location guaranteed that the Jews would be involved as the two major areas struggled for domination of the region.

Much later, perhaps 1800 B.C., the Jews settled in Egypt due  to famine in their own land. Initially, they were welcome, but over time they were enslaved by the Egyptians. Around 1400 B.C. Moses led the Jews to their freedom in an event known as the Exodus.

Any good series of stories based on the Bible covers events related to Sodom and Gomorrah, as described in Genesis. The inflamed passions,the dark of night, the narrow escape, the destruction, . . .  It makes for good drama. But what about the cities themselves?  Were they real?

At one time, historians were excited because they thought the cities were mentioned in the Ebla tablets, uncovered in Syria and dated to 2500 B.C. But more recent understanding of the language used has dispelled that idea. So what do we know?

These two famous cities were located at the south end of the Dead Sea. This area is part of the Jordan Rift Valley, a huge crack in the earth going down into Africa. Earthquakes are common here. This is an area rich in bitumen (asphalt) and petroleum deposits as well as sulfur and natural gas. Some people who have investigated this area say natural gas could be exposed by an earthquake and lit by fires in the city, creating a conflagration such as Genesis explained.

If you have a chance, go online and look up the Shroud of Turin. It is a single piece of linen, 14 feet long by 3 ½ feet wide that bears the faint image of a man, both his front and his back. It was first mentioned in 544 A.D., and a French knight displayed it in 1356 A.D. The claim was that it was the burial shroud of Jesus. People had to look long and hard to figure out that it was an image of a person.

But something remarkable happened in 1898. For the first time the Shroud was photographed, and an amazing thing was discovered when the photographer looked at the negative of the picture. He found that the Shroud itself acts as a photographic negative. In other words, if you take a picture of the Shroud and look at the photographic negative, that image becomes a positive record of the image on the Shroud.

The person on the Shroud appears to have been beaten in the face, jabbed in the scalp with small, sharp objects, crucified with nails through the wrists rather than the palms, stabbed in the side, and beaten on the back. If it was a fake, why would someone in the Middle Ages create it so that hundreds of years would have to go by before photographic negatives could be produced to truly see the image?

Of course, there are two big questions – Is it a fake? Is it the image of Jesus?  Archaeologists and historians have noted that very early paintings of Jesus show him with a face similar to the one in the Shroud. Tests show real bloodstains, rather than paint. Another test done in 1989, using carbon 14 dating methods, placed it as a medieval cloth. So that seemed to suggest it was a fake. However, newer carbon dating shows it to be roughly 2000 years old. Why the differences in dating? The first dating was made from an area of the cloth mended with newer cloth, plus there was a thin coat of bacteria that threw the dating off. Some believe it may be a natural evaporative process while others think it could’ve been a hoax in which the cloth was placed over a hot statue. There’s obviously much more that could be said on this topic, but go online if you want more details.

Here are another two words related to the Bible that get confused–Samaritans and Sumerians.

Samaritans are natives or inhabitants of Samaria, a distinct territory or region in central Palestine. This area used to be occupied by some of the tribes of Israel until Assyria came and hauled them off into captivity. The deported Israelites were replaced with foreign colonists who intermarried among the Israelites that had remained in Samaria. They were a mixed race, which ended up being despised by the Israelites concerned with racial purity.

It was important to note that Jesus talked to a Samaritan woman at a well–he treated her kindly, not something that Jews were supposed to do. In addition, he told the story of the good Samaritan, a shocking idea to the Jews of his day. He was indicating that our neighbors are not just those close to us in beliefs and geography. We are to treat everyone well.  There are actually Samaritans surviving today in a couple of small areas of the Middle East.

Sumerians, on the other hand, were ancient people existing in what is now the southern part of modern Iraq. This was in an area referred to today as the Fertile Crescent. In Sumer people developed the first high civilization in the history of mankind around 3000 B.C.  It was this culture that first developed writing, which consisted of a form of cuneiform (wedge-shaped symbols) script. One of the major cities of ancient Sumer included the biblical Ur, the city from which Abraham migrated.

I’m not brave enough to attempt an explanation for the book of Revelation. It’s an example of apocalyptic writing, a popular genre with particular characteristics that we have discussed during English 245 classes in the past.

Let me just say that there are several ways to interpret this book–the preterist view (most prophecies referred to events around 70 A.D.), future (the Tim LaHaye approach with his Left Behind series), and symbolic (a general picture of God’s ultimate triumph over evil).

I get irritated by those who tell me they have this book all figured out and here’s how it works. They need to be humble and explain that this happens to be their particular interpretation but that there are many other ways to see this puzzling book.

There are many intriguing prophecies in the Bible, which have created heated arguments. Take Isaiah 44:28, for example. If it was written in 700 B.C. as many think, it would truly be a miraculous prophecy  since Cyrus the Persian didn’t exist until the early 500s B.C. Needless to say, there is a raging debate over the dating of Isaiah.

Another puzzling prophecy is from Daniel 9:25, which seems to lay out a timeline from a decree to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Messiah comes. It appears to be a reference to the decree of Artaxerxes in 444 B.C. (see Nehemiah 2:1-8). If these weeks referred to in Daniel are taken as groupings of seven years, this timeline takes us up to 33 A.D., the time of Jesus. Nobody claims Daniel was alive in the time of Jesus, so the controversy has to do with the way the weeks are interpreted.

Then there is Ezekiel 26, which is a judgment on the city of Tyre. The Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to the city. People moved from the city to a nearby island in 585 B.C.  Later, Alexander the Great in 333 B.C. tore Tyre down and use its broken structures to build a raised walkway out to the island to attack the people. Again, the controversy is on the dating of Ezekiel, because if it was written as many believe around 600 B.C., it involves miraculous prophecy.

Christians see many prophetic comments in the Old Testament as referring to Jesus. For example, Micah 5:2  suggests it will be Bethlehem from which a future ruler will be born; the indication is that he is an eternal being. Then there are the famous chapters in Isaiah (49, 50, 52, 53) that  Christians apply to Jesus – his life, sufferings, and purpose for his existence. One other interesting set of verses comes from Psalm 22, where it seems to speak clearly of someone’s death by crucifixion, a type of punishment, unknown in the psalmist’s  time.