Fourth Blog Question: Response

Before this class, I had never really considered the genre and literalness of the Bible in my reading of it. I suppose subconsciously I’d just assumed that the Old Testament was historical fact and never paid attention to the small details. Actually, I’d never really spent a whole lot of time thinking about the Old Testament in general. I had wondered about the repetitiveness of the Old Testament but had never even heard of the idea of redactors.

Now the idea of redactors makes perfect sense to me. In fact, I think the Old Testament actually makes a heck of a lot more sense to me than it did when I thought maybe one person had written a book and another person had written other books and then someone just sort of put them all side-by-side into one big fat book. Integrating various versions of the same stories together into one book seems more realistic and explains a lot about the way things are presented, in my opinion.

Then the idea of genre, that there are myth and legend in the book and it’s not all 100% accurate rock-hard fact. Stories spurred from actual events, stories explaining realities beyond our understanding – I can grasp that. It makes sense to me. In fact, I’m not sure I would believe in following a book and a God that has prescribed some of the laws we saw in Exodus, such as the slave-beating example we saw in class and the death to those who dishonor their parents, or what-not. To see those applying in today’s world is pretty much unthinkable, at least in what we have come to consider as “civilized” cultures.

One thing I have some issues with is this idea that the redactors sat down to write this with only images in their heads and no ideas. I understand how most writers sitting down to write a story do that, but what I understand is that these redactors sat down to record what to that time had been orally-passed stories down into a book, or maybe took different recording of those oral traditions and combined them into one book. So I guess I see them as having taken what was already there and making it whole, not sitting down and coming up with images to turn into new stories. I agree that they probably had no agenda in mind when writing them down (other than preservation), but then again we have no way of actually being certain of that, see as how they are long dead and all we have is their finished works. Anyways, I could be coming at this idea all wrong, but if I am then I guess that’s all the more reason to sit here and write about it.

I could go on and on, but I don’t want to bore you all or fill up the entire blog with one entry. This class has definitely been challenging my thinking though. I hope this entry makes that obvious.