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Deborah Stoll continues her project to read the Bible cover to cover:

So the flood waters have abated, and we now find ourselves deep in the valley of Shinar, where a brand new people are living together in a brand new world, washed clean by God Himself.

The people of Shinar decide to build a city for fear of being “scattered all over the world". Tales of strange lands and twisted tongues clearly haunted these people, who became so anxious about the world beyond what they knew that they toiled feverishly to preserve their way of life. They thought a tower would keep them safe.   

And the Lord said, "If, as one people, with one language for all, this is how they have begun to act, then nothing that they may propose to do will be out of their reach."  read more »

COMMENTS: 5 |

• BIBLE
• Books

My project to read the Bible cover to cover begins, of course, with Genesis. Like a mad scientist emerging from thin air, God appears on the scene and spends five days creating the world as we know it. On the sixth he creates man and then rests on the seventh. Solid. But then we get to the next chapter, where the entire thing is reversed: here God first creates man (Adam, in Hebrew), then makes the land and beasts and stuff and finally, in the end, tears out one of Adam’s ribs and creates a woman. This chapter is far more exciting, full of conflict and as fantastical as J. R R. Tolkien’s "Lord Of The Rings".

Of course I was familiar with the story of Adam and Eve, but I had no idea Adam was such a whiny tattletale. He gives Eve up the second God senses something is amiss. “The woman You put at my side–she gave me of the tree and I ate.” Nice going Adam. No wonder men and women have trust issues.

In Genesis 4:1 - 26, Eve gives birth to Cain and Abel. This is another tale that has trickled into mainstream storytelling, so I was shocked to learn that the tussle between these two brothers takes up only two paragraphs. Cain thinks God loves Abel more, so he kills him. Easy. God banishes Cain, there’s a bunch of begetting and then, just like that, God says, “I will blot out from the earth the men whom I created–men together with beasts, creeping things, and birds of the sky; for I regret that I made them.”  read more »

My bat mitzvah took place aboard a boat floating through the turgid waters of the Gulf Of Mexico. Like most Jewish kids, I read my haftorah (the weekly Torah portion) in Hebrew, a language I learned to memorise rather than understand. And so it was that I entered womanhood: speaking phonetic gobbledegook aboard a rocking boat filled with family and friends, as well as a blind man rumoured to be a wizard. Also there was Brad Holland, who would later kiss me as the moon dipped low over the bow.

I had not picked up the Torah since. That is, until now: I am sitting with the very copy I used when I was 12, signed over to me in 1985 by Rabbi Klayman. I have resolved to read the thing cover to cover, and to take notes on my selective and highly interpretative sense of God’s words. (Or is that the words of Moses interpreting the words of God? Or the words of God as translated by a number of guys trying to recall what some guy told him that some guy told him that someone said God said the other day over by the Burning Bush?) The Bible may very well be the original game of telephone, or Chinese whispers, that childhood metaphor for the unreliability of communication and the faultiness of memory.

Whether the Torah is the word of God as written by Moses or a meditation on the proper ways to live, as translated by an untold number of scholars culling stories and information from suspect hearsay, I’m excited to find out what the fuss is all about. Watch this space.
 
 ~ DEBORAH STOLL

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