So What Are you Reading?: Generations

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Second Kings. Jezebel is about to get her comeuppance (or is it her "falldownance"?)

Nothing quite like the KJV, and its juxtaposition of "and he knew her not" circumlocution and "pisseth against the wall" bluntness (and I've read commentaries that assert that the translations that give that as "adult males" miss the point, i.e., that a man who "pisseth against the wall" is implicitly a lowlife).

 

[Christopher]

Nothing quite like the KJV, and its juxtaposition of "and he knew her not" circumlocution and "pisseth against the wall" bluntness

I don't think that was circumlocution in the Jacobean era, though. It was just everyday speech. My understanding is that the intent behind the KJV was to use a fairly small, basic vocabulary to make it accessible to the uneducated.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Yes, a deliberate choice of language that was entirely understandable, yet already noticeably archaic. Doesn't change the fact that they used polite euphemisms in place of sexual obscenities, yet used a scatological dysphemism to refer to lowlifes.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

About to start First Chronicles. Pity we don't have a "snore" emoji.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Yes, a deliberate choice of language that was entirely understandable, yet already noticeably archaic.

Well, sure. The KJV was ultimately derived, though intermediate translations, from Tyndale's Bible of eighty years earlier.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Finished No Ocean Too Wide. On to book 2, No Journey Too Far.

 

[Avro Arrow]

About to start First Chronicles. Pity we don't have a "snore" emoji.

If you're not enjoying it, can't you just... stop?

 

[Bryan Levy]

If you're not enjoying it, can't you just... stop?

Isn’t that the fundamental question about religion to begin with?

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Now on to Second Chronicles. The secret of staying awake through First and Second Chronicles is to read them as quickly as possible: you probably don't need to pay much attention to long lists of names, quantities, or statistics; save your attention for the things that happen between those lists.

And reading the entire KJV cover-to-cover between Fat Tuesday evening and getting up at 0-dark-thirty for Easter Vigil (something I highly recommend, as it gives one an unparalleled view of "The Big Picture") is not even remotely the hardest of my usual Lenten disciplines. And if you're not tired of Lent by the end of the first week, then (to put it in LOLspeak) "UR DOIN IT RONG."

Last night, on the way home, while KUSC was playing a cue from Howard Shore's score for the first Peter Jackson LotR movie (and I was musing about how glad I was that they weren't playing a cue from Leonard Rosenman's score for Ralph Bakshi's LotR movie), it occurred to me that there is probably more verbiage devoted to graphic depictions of extreme violence in Joshua and Judges than there is in the entire text of LotR. And yet, what occupied the most screen-time in Bakshi's LotR? Right, (as "Alex" from A Clockwork Orange would say) "the old ultra-violence."

 

[Bryan Levy]

Now on to Second Chronicles. The secret of staying awake through First and Second Chronicles is to read them as quickly as possible: you probably don't need to pay much attention to long lists of names, quantities, or statistics; save your attention for the things that happen between those lists.

And reading the entire KJV cover-to-cover between Fat Tuesday evening and getting up at 0-dark-thirty for Easter Vigil (something I highly recommend, as it gives one an unparalleled view of "The Big Picture") is not even remotely the hardest of my usual Lenten disciplines. And if you're not tired of Lent by the end of the first week, then (to put it in LOLspeak) "UR DOIN IT RONG."

I’ve “watched” you do this a few times now, and i think it’s pretty neat. When I was a kid, I had a camp counselor who was reading the Bible not as a religious act, but out of a kind of pretentious intellectualism. He wanted people to think he was a smart 17 year old, when he was really just an asshole. I find your reading, while very much an act of faith, to not be all that rose colored. You supply really good criticism when appropriate!

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

You supply really good criticism when appropriate!

Thanks. I thought I was just being snarky. And I'm completely serious about the value of getting "The Big Picture." And understanding the historic context behind it (e.g., Onan shirking his Levirate obligation to Tamar was a serious thing in an era where underpopulation was as big an existential threat as overpopulation is today).

 

[Christopher]

Now on to Second Chronicles. The secret of staying awake through First and Second Chronicles is to read them as quickly as possible: you probably don't need to pay much attention to long lists of names, quantities, or statistics; save your attention for the things that happen between those lists.

I may have mentioned this in response to one of your previous readthroughs, but my impression on reading those long lists of begats in the Bible (the small amount I got through) was that they were transcriptions of what had originally been oral history lessons. The repetitive phrasing would make sense for something intended as an oral lesson to be memorized by rote and passed on verbatim. By the same token, I wonder if they were originally sung.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

By the same token, I wonder if they were originally sung.

That would certainly make them easier for many people to remember.

And I find myself thinking of the Yip Harburg/Burton Lane song, "The Begat." (Being a fan of Joan Morris and William Bolcom, who has had the good fortune of actually meeting the Bolcoms a couple of times, and exchanging email with them*, I have it on their album, Bolcom, Morris, and Morath Sing Yip Harburg.)

_____
* Even though I once visited the University of Michigan, where they had tenured faculty positions at the time, I refrained from looking up their offices; doing so would have be creepy at best, and at worst might have been misinterpreted as stalking!

 

[Smiley]

You may already know this, hb, but it wasn't until after college that I learned in a Bible class that 1st and 2nd Chronicles are retellings of the time period of the books of Samuel and Kings, just with different details and emphasis. Where Kings would talk about one or the other of the northern and southern kingdoms, Chronicles would usually provide details on what was going on in the reign of a king of the other kingdom at about the same time. I think of it like a DVD commentary track or a Paul Harvey "The Rest of the Story" sort of idea within the Bible.

There's a lot that you can get just from the Bible itself, but unless you are extremely familiar with the history, culture, and geography of the Middle East and surrounding areas, most of us can benefit from classes, study Bibles, multiple translations of the Bible, and commentary volumes that may bring greater knowledge and understanding. One book that I found very useful recently was A Catholic Introduction to the Bible: The Old Testament.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

I never read the Bible from cover to cover like a novel before. I just read verses from Our Daily Bread devotionals, and whatever else I find while browsing.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

You may already know this, hb, but it wasn't until after college that I learned in a Bible class that 1st and 2nd Chronicles are retellings of the time period of the books of Samuel and Kings, just with different details and emphasis

That's one of the things that becomes obvious when you're plowing through at the pace necessary to get through all of it during Lent. Especially if you include the Apocrypha Supplement. And yes, there are times when I will pull up an online copy of the KJV's polar opposite, "The Message."

Another thing that becomes obvious at that pace is how often it contradicts itself. Like two different creation stories, one right after the other. Or like the way that so many of the most significant people either violated the taboos about miscegenation with the goyim themselves, or were the fruit of such violations. Moses married a shikseh. Ruth was not just a shikseh, but (gasp!) a Moabitess, and yet the line of David passes right through her.

 

[Christopher]

Another thing that becomes obvious at that pace is how often it contradicts itself. Like two different creation stories, one right after the other.

Yeah. I've long suspected that the Bible was sort of an anthology, a compilation of available written texts from different sources, and thus has various inconsistencies and differences of detail and emphasis. And sometimes they may have had to settle for what they could get in the absence of a better source. For instance, after seeing Noah's Ark treated as this big important Bible story throughout my childhood, I was surprised that the account of the Flood in Genesis was so cursory and brief, like they had to settle for the Cliffs Notes summary of a longer story. (Although that may be because it's basically the Utnapishtim myth from The Epic of Gilgamesh retold with the polytheism edited out.)

 

[Avro Arrow]

And reading the entire KJV cover-to-cover between Fat Tuesday evening and getting up at 0-dark-thirty for Easter Vigil (something I highly recommend, as it gives one an unparalleled view of "The Big Picture") is not even remotely the hardest of my usual Lenten disciplines. And if you're not tired of Lent by the end of the first week, then (to put it in LOLspeak) "UR DOIN IT RONG."

Ah, so a deliberate self-flagellation then? Fair enough, understood.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Ah, so a deliberate self-flagellation then? Fair enough, understood.

Not just that; you'd be amazed at the "Big Picture" insights that may be impossible to get without rushing through.

I've long suspected that the Bible was sort of an anthology, a compilation of available written texts from different sources, and thus has various inconsistencies and differences of detail and emphasis.

Well, yes, of course it is. Of diverse texts in diverse generes, written for diverse audiences and diverse purposes (as The Rev'd Cathy Cathie Capp pointed out in her sermon last Sunday). And the only people likely to tell you differently are also likely to tell you that Adam, Eve, all the Patriarchs, Moses, Aaron the Kings, the Prophets, Jesus, and the Apostles all spoke fluent Jacobean English. And to believe it devoutly.

(And in the unlikely event you're reading this Pastor Cathie, my apologies for the initial misspelling.)

 

[Greg Cox]

An author friend of mine once observed that the world is divided between people who think that the Bible is an anthology and those that believe it's a single-author collection.