With much thanks to my iPod and my newly purchased copy of the TNIV on MP3 CD I've started listening to the Bible on the way to work. I've got through Luke, John, Philippians, Ecclesiastes and Isaiah. The church I'm going to at the moment is doing a series (just 4 weeks) on all of Isaiah and I thought I'd give myself a heads up by a least listening to the whole book. After listening to Isaiah (and a few other books) it got me thinking about the many sermons and bible studies I'd been too and how bad we are as Xns at reading the whole of a book. Isaiah is a great case in point. Written by three authors covering different time periods, using apocalyptic prophesy and written at accomplished different time place and culture to ours, it's surprising we make any sense of it at all.
Our faith is set in history and therefore we need to know
- when a book is written
- what time was the book set
- what genre the book was and what does this mean
- who it was written by
- to whom was it written
- what was happening in history when the book was written (who is in power, what was the state of God's people at the time)
- what was happening in history at the time the book was set (who is in power, what was the state of God's people at the time)
I've always found Stephen Miller's How to get into the Bible a really easy starting point and manuscript discovery a good way to read the bible too but, I think I'd like a website or book where you can go from the smaller detail giving context to just passages of text to bigger picture of history where you can see how books and history fit into the big scheme of things, like the dividing into the northern and southern kingdoms and times of exile for instance. This is why we tend to gloss over the first (old) testament, it's just too hard to read without a context or a knowledge of the genre in which it is written.
Whinge post over :) Sorry
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History Trivia for non-Dummies Blog
A Different View of an "Eye for Eye"
The quotation from Exodus 21:24, "eye for eye, foot for foot..." is often understood to mean that that people have a right to revenge an injury to them. This was true in Old Testament times, even though the Gospel of Matthew at 5:38 refers to it and then rejects it at 5:39 ("turn the other cheek") in the New Testament.
What is interesting about the "eye for an eye" quotation, however, is that in Old Testament times it was also meant to put a limit on the amount of vengeance people could take when they suffered at the hands of another.
In ancient times it was customary that if one person from a family killed a person from a different family, the tradition was to kill not only the killer, but also kill everyone in his whole family as well.
So an "eye for an eye" was not only meant to allow for retaliation, but also to limit the extent of the vengeance so that wholesale bloodshed did not occur between families. Vengeance was to be proportional to the harm a person received.
Source: A Short History of Philosophy, Solomon & Higgins
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