Invariably, when I expressed concern over these issues, well-meaning apologists would refer me to Gleason Arche’s massive Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, a heavy volume that seeks to provide the reader with sound explanations for every conceivable puzzle found within the Bible-from whether God approved of Rahab’s lie, to where Cain got his wife. The Bible just didn’t seem to want to behave the way I was told it was meant to behave-as a scientifically-provable, historically-accurate account of God’s actions in the world and a cohesive, inerrant rulebook for how to think and live as a Christian. There were other issues too: The way the accounts of Israel’s monarchy contradicted one another, the way Jesus and Paul quoted Hebrew Scripture in ways that seemed to stretch the original meaning, the fact that women were considered property in Levitical Law, the way both science and archeology challenged the historicity of so many biblical texts, and the fact that it was nearly impossible for me to write a creative retelling of Resurrection Day because each of the gospel writers tell the story so differently, sometimes with contradictory details. The similarity in style and content between the stories I knew from the Bible and the myths of other Mesopotamian cultures suddenly made those strange tales of talking snakes and forbidden fruit and boats packed with animals seem colloquial, routine-nothing more than myths operating from the religious and literary conventions of the day.
Introduction to World Literature class when my class read the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian poem purportedly written before the book of Genesis, which tells the story of a worldwide flood, a favored family, and an ark full of animals, only with Sumerian gods and heroes at its center instead of the familiar Yahweh. Why would a good and loving God call for the slaughter of little children?Ī tipping point occurred during a sleepy, 9-a.m. In any other context, this would be condemned as genocide.
In high school, in the midst of yet another noble attempt to read the Bible in a year, I remember drawing breath upon reaching the story of the Battle of Jericho and realizing that after the walls came a-tumblin’ down, the Israelites “destroyed with the sword ever living thing in it-men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys,” all on God’s orders.
(She told me to go home and ask my father.) Once, in Sunday school, I raised a slap-bracelet-bedecked hand to ask why God drowned all the world’s animals in the Great Flood-save those on the ark-when it was people who had sinned, not innocent penguins and kangaroos.
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