The Holy Bible

Many of my friends doubtless will be surprised to learn that I do not give The Lord of the Rings pride of place. But I did not begin with that book.

The Bible was not the first book I read, but it certainly has been significant in my life. My father is an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ, as was his father and my mother's father. All of these men were deeply invested in biblical scholarship. My grandfathers had reading fluency in both Greek and Hebrew, and my father and mother had studied the Bible in the original languages as well. As a child, I was fascinated by Greek and Hebrew particularly because of their alphabets: Hebrew I found especially attractive.

The translation of the Bible with which I have the greatest familiarity is the Revised Standard Version, and I still consider this to be one of the better ones. For a decade or two I collected as many translations as I could find, some of them I thought better and some worse based on my limited ability with Greek. The Watchtower Tract and Bible Society translation I find particularly intriguing, with such eccentricities as its dogged insistence on the tetragrammaton for "kyrios" and its rendering of the prologue to the gospel of John such that the Word is "a god". I appreciate the honesty and literalness here. All people with a claim on the New Testament should confront the Jehovah's Witness approach with an open mind and heart.

The Bible is one of a very small group of texts with which (in my view) every literate person should be familiar. I believe this is so for several reasons:

1. The Hebrew Bible, or "Old Testament", is the core of the Jewish scriptural tradition. To understand Judaism, then, one must be familiar with the Hebrew Bible.

2. The Hebrew Bible together with the New Testament is the core of the Christian scriptural tradition. To understand Christianity, one must be familiar with the Holy Bible as a whole.

3. The Western cultural tradition is not exclusively based on Judaeo-Christianity, but Judaeo-Christianity is central to this tradition. As the West has now hegemonic control of the world, an understanding of its basis presumably gives one an edge in comprehending the current state of the world.

This last point extends to understanding of politics and economic systems, structures of the family, and art motifs in literature, applied and fine arts, and architecture, as examples. It is possible, certainly, to have appreciation of these sorts of points without reading the Bible. Still, the effort expended in examining this "crucial" text will be well rewarded.

In brief, to understand Judaism, Christianity, and the state of the world today, one should be familiar with the Bible. This alone will not confer status or wealth, but without it one will be acting from ignorance.

I am shocked by those Christians whose version of Christianity permits them to remain ignorant of the Bible. At the same time I am shocked by those non-Christians who feel that, because they are not Christians, they need not engage the Bible. I feel that the significance of the Bible is such, whatever one's allegiance to its contents, that all literate humans should read it at least once.

How to Read the Bible: My Approach

The Bible is a collection of works, not a continuous narrative. Some have attempted to interpret the Bible as though it had unified authorship (as though one person had written it), or as though it expresses a unified viewpoint. The contradictions in which anti-Biblical critics delight are problematic chiefly when one begins from the idea that the Bible is unified. Extreme mental acrobatics are required to relieve the cognitive dissonance produced by this clash, and I doubt that such acrobatics are ever very effective.

I do not recommend that the Bible be read from cover to cover, although I have done it just to be able to say that I did it. The Bible is often dry, or inexplicable without a guide. Therefore it is useful to "study" the Bible with a group, or to read it with an accompanying readers' guide. Most publishers of the Bible have also published such guides, and many Christian and Jewish organizations offer study groups on a regular basis. I have participated in several such groups and find them to be uneven not only from group to group but from session to session.

The Bible to me is an excellent book to dip into here and there, to read a few chapters, as long as one can remain interested. Eventually, through this method, one can read the whole thing relatively painlessly. Anyone who has a substantial interest in the content of the Bible, from either an historical or religious perspective, should also investigate the vast supporting literature of interpretation and translation. Reading multiple translations is a comparatively easy way to start.

Pustakam ki Mala: 108 Books That Formed Me

Several years ago I moved to my current home in Slackwater, outside of Millersville, Pennsylvania. At that time I found it convenient to package most of my belongings in boxes designed to hold 10 reams of paper. I had about eighty-five boxes, with all sorts of materials in them: manuscripts, correspondence, office supplies, bolt cloth, musical equipment, drawing and painting supplies, botanical and geological samples, and so on. I cultivated the idea that I would write a story based on the content of each of the boxes, explaining the significance of the items to me, and after having written this, I would feel free to sell, give away, or otherwise dispose of the contents, freeing myself of the physical burden of boxes upon boxes of stuff.

What I did in the end was give away or burn boxes upon boxes of stuff without the intermediate step, whittling the collection down to about fifty boxes, which still strikes me as being too much. In addition, I left my position at the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design and therefore brought half of my collection of books home (the other half I gave away): something like a thousand volumes line the hallway and two rooms of the apartment. Part of me feels that I have culled the collection as much as I dare: I frequently search for a reference in a bound volume, rather than conducting a side internet search. Yet part of me feels like the books are a burden: I have to vacuum them frequently, as they are on the floor, and the Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs who have taken up residence in the apartment in droves cluster behind them.

So, the notion of a story about boxes has become a notion of an annotated bibliography of books that have been significance in my life. I like the notion of 108 books, connecting with the number of beads on a japa-mala (which typically has also a "head-bead", bringing the total to 109). 108 books seems to be a plentiful supply, almost too many to be really significant books. I suppose it depends on how one interprets "significant".

I have been surprised as I proceeded with making lists of 108 books how wide-ranging the books were, and as I tried to gather bibliographic information on them I was surprised, too, at how pathetic certain of the books seemed which in my memory were so wonderful.

I am not, therefore, presenting a canon of standard school texts, or necessarily even books that I would recommend -- although some of them I certainly do recommend as standard school texts, or as classics which should be widely if not universally read. I am also not presenting the texts in any kind of strict order of importance or chronological sequence of my reading of them. I hope to begin and end with particularly significant books, but I suppose in the middle passages some of the selections may seem odd or weak, or present just to fill the required number, like party-guests at Bilbo's eleventy-first. These will prove themselves, nonetheless, in some way or other.

And so, to the books.