Download How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now AudioBook Free
In How to learn the Bible, Harvard teacher Wayne Kugel leads the listener through the "quiet revolution" of recent biblical scholarship, exhibiting how radically the interpretations of today's research workers differ from what people have always thought. The storyplot of Adam and Eve, it turns out, was not at first about the "Fall of Man," but about the move from a primitive, hunter-gatherer population to a resolved, agricultural one. As for the stories of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Sarah, and Jacob and Esau, they were not about individual people by any means but, alternatively, explanations of Israelite population as it existed centuries after these statistics were said to have lived. In the initial version of the Exodus tale, Moses probably didn't divide the Red Sea in half; instead, the Egyptians perished in a storm at sea. Whatever the initial Ten Commandments might have been, scholars are quite sure they were different from the ones we've today. What's more, the folks long supposed to have written various catalogs of the Bible were not their real authors: David didn't write the Psalms, Solomon didn't write Proverbs.Such findings pose problems for adherents of traditional, Bible-based faiths. Hiding from the discoveries of modern scholars seems dishonest, but accepting them means undermining much of the Bible's stability and power as the word of God. How to proceed? In his search for a solution, Kugel leads the listener back to traditional biblical interpreters who flourished at the end of the biblical period. Far from naïve, these interpreters consciously set out to depart from the initial so this means of the Bible's various stories and prophecies—plus they, Kugel argues, hold the key to handling the issue of reading the Bible today.How to learn the Bible is, simply, the best, most original audiobook about the Bible in decades. Clear, often funny, but deeply serious in its purpose, this is an audiobook for Christians and Jews, believers and secularists similarly.
