What's a guy to do when a Bible passage doesn't make sense?

[MineralMan]

For many, the answer is to simply say, "Well, that's allegorical, or a metaphor for something, or I don't know..."

But how do people know which parts of the bible are accurate and which are cloudy figures of speech designed to deliver some ancient message?

The answer typically heard is to pray for the wisdom to properly parse things out. But, if lots of people do that and get different answers from that 'quiet, still voice,' who is right and who is wrong.

Take the parting of the Red Sea by Moishe. Now, there is no actual physical phenomenon that could account for a gap in that body of water to form, allowing Moishe and his followers to cross into a new land and then look back as the Egyptians chasing them drowned. So, in a real world, it's pretty hard to believe that actually happened.

But, then, if you try to figure out what that story is a metaphor for or an allegory about, that's equally hard to parse out of the story. It's difficult to "rightly divide" the Word, regardless of how much study you put in, as it says in 2 Timothy 2;15: "Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth." Study isn't going to find a natural law of nature that could cause the Red Sea to part.

I guess most people have to rely on what they are told by their minister or pastor about such difficult passages. Did the Red Sea part for Moses, really? If not, why is that story in the Bible, and what does it really mean? Why are such confusing things in there? Questions. Lots of questions.

So, when someone tells you that some story in the Bible, from a great fish eating Jonah and then spitting him out on the shore, or a story about why there are so many different languages of humanity is an allegory or metaphor, you might wonder. Did that really happen? Or is there some substory that I'm supposed to get?

You could look it up on Google, of course, where you'll find many people who have "studied to shew themselves approved" attempting to make some sense of it, but which of those is correct? Which scholars are "rightly dividing the word of truth?"

Which begs the question: Why wasn't the Bible just written more simply and with less confusing contents? Why doesn't it just say that God led Moishe and his people out of Egypt, through many hardships, and leave it at that? Then, it could move right on to Moishe climbing the mountain and coming down with graven tablets containing the law. But, wait...what?

For that question, I have no sensible answer.

[DangerousUrNot]

1. This is in no way an attack on religious people but

the Bible is nonsense. You ask 100 different pastors about a single bible verse and you’ll get 100 different answers. It’s all up for interpretation and has no definitive meaning.

[MineralMan]

2. Well, I wouldn't say it is nonsense.

Like most scriptural volumes, it's a hodge-podge of stuff written at different times by different people, and in different languages. If you are reading an English Language Bible, it's been translated in various ways, by various people with different concepts about how to do that translation. There are dozens and dozens of English Translations. People have been fighting about which one is best for a very long time.

People, at least most of them, are justifiable confused by all of this. Heck, the most popular English translation, the King James Version, was written old fashioned English from the early 17th century. We no longer even bother to use thee and thou, and very few people living now can even conjugate verbs to go with those pronouns today.

I won't even get into translation issues, but every published Bible in every language involves translations from the motley assortment of languages used in the fragmentary and disconnected second-hand original materials.

It's an odd thing, the Bible.

[shraby]

8. Right in Genesis when Adam and Eve and their sons were the only people on earth

the bible says they went and found themselves wives.
Where were they hiding?

[MineralMan]

9. Oh, yes, that one.

It begins there, of course, and then carries right on through the Bible. Who did they marry? That question comes up in Sunday School, when even small children see the problem.

They get answers: Well, that doesn't matter, see...someone, I guess. Maybe God made some women for them, but since women aren't really important, it wasn't mentioned. Something like that, I suppose. All you need to know, see, is: God Did It and That's That.

Now, children, stop asking such questions, please. They're inconvenient. Now, let's move on to the story of Lot and his daughters...

[Kablooie]

12. I always thought they pulled out their ribs and conjured up some women for themselves.

[SCantiGOP]

3. Easiest answer?

Wouldnt this answer it: a tribal myth from
events hundreds of years earlier was recorded by barely literate superstitious fishermen living thousands of years ago?

If you have trouble rationally explaining the parting of the Red Sea, try to explain the Great Flood and Noah somehow getting anilmals from contingents he didn’t even know existed. And then, what did he feed the carnivores when they landed on a mountain?

I explain those two events the same way I explain how Jack climbed the beanstalk and how Frodo used the magic ring to become invisible.

[MineralMan]

4. Yeah, and goatherders.

Tales told around the campfire by the tribal Shaman. Here's a metaphor explained:

[longship]

7. I prefer Maxwell's version to Disney's.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

5. "Why wasn't the Bible just written more simply and with less confusing contents?"

Because "The Bible" (which just means "the book" ) isn't a single book with a single author or theme; it's a collection of stories, myths, legends and folk-tales written in a variety of languages by many different people over hundreds of years; so of course there's no consistency throughout the whole thing. Different Christian denominations don't even agree as to what should and shouldn't be included in it. And it's been translated with varying degrees of accuracy from the original languages and through several other languages. For example, a guy named Coverdale translated one of the first English Bibles - but his translation was to a considerable extent from German (Martin Luther's translation). Luther knew Latin and Greek, but the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and later translated into vulgate Latin, so who knows? Some of Coverdale's translations still survive in the Anglican liturgy, and they are wonderfully poetic and fall trippingly off the tongue, but accurate? Not so much. The subsequent King James version was more accurate (and still poetic) than Coverdale's but scholars have poked a lot of holes in the translation.

So those who claim the Bible to be inerrant aren't considering that angle, but then, they probably thought it was written in English in the first place. Even so, there are words of wisdom to be found here and there, whether or not God was ever involved. Here's one of my favorites, very applicable to current events: "The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself." Ecclesiastes 10:12

[MineralMan]

6. Yes, of course.

I have a copy of the Coverdale Bible on my shelf, along with several other translations.

There are also a number of Internet websites that let you compare different English translations for any verse. It can be fascinating, particularly with some passages. Here's one of them that I use:

https://www.biblegateway.com/

[Kablooie]

10. Do what all good fundamentalists do...

Invent a meaning that supports your ideology and use it to bludgeon those who have different views.

[mercuryblues]

11. For many people

The bible is like a software agreement. Scroll through to the end and click on I agree. No thought needed. I take it all as allegory, but like you said everyone has different interpretations. The Bible was written 1000's of years ago by men that believed they received the word of God and were infallible. It reflects what they were going through and how they wanted to see their near future. The stories were written in terms of what they were going through at the time. I'm sure there were quite a few flimflam men in there, just as there are today. Cruz, Bachman, Santorum, Rubio have all said that God told them to run for president. If that is true, God has a wicked sense of humor.

Take the great flood for example. There is zero evidence that the entire Earth was completely flooded at the same time. Yet many different religions have a great flood in their scripture. However, there is scientific evidence that there were many substantial floods at various times dating back. In people's view at that time a large flood like that was their entire world. Did Noah build a huge ark and bring on animals to save the species? A big fat no. I do believe it is possible that he built a huge (for that time) boat and brought animals and plants on to eat while they were stranded. Noah had a good PR man.

Is there a great moral lesson with that story? I don't think so. The take away lesson is fear God. If you behave a certain way, God will kill you. We still see religious leaders use that as a weapon today when we experience natural disasters. IOW they used natural disasters to control people into subservient lives.

Only in today's world it carries a different weight. Katrina is a good example. Some religious leaders blamed gays and a good portion of society's acceptance for a "natural" disaster. That and Bush's response to it became the story. Not the man made contributions that increased the level of disaster. Wetlands filled in, the failure of the pumps, and rerouting waterways. Where it was historically used as a way to control the populace, Today it is used to make the populace turn on each other. Which is a different means of controlling, just not as effective. Thus there has to be additional levers of control, from different sources other than religious.

[MineralMan]

13. Exactly, I think.

Last edited Sun Dec 3, 2017, 02:16 PM - Edit history (1)

What's hilarious is that there are all sorts of people who try to sell the idea that everything in the Bible is the absolute truth, and it all happened just as it is written. Today, we know better, but desperate people trying to keep things from changing just keep insisting that "God Did It! The Bible Says It! That's It, So STFU!"

That's where the comedy comes in, really.

Really, it's all no different than insisting that throwing a virgin down the mouth of the volcano is the only way to appease the volcano god and prevent an eruption. It makes no sense, and the volcano erupts periodically anyhow, but they just keep throwing virgins in there. Tradition and the island's shaman says it's necessary.

[mercuryblues]

18. Ah, the virgin thing

I always wondered why women slated to be tossed into the volcano, just didn't have sex to avoid it. (only being slightly sarcastic)

But even that doesn't make much sense if you look at it historically. Many women did not have long life spans as it was. They died from complications from childbirth along with other diseases of the time because they were typically caregivers to the ill. Why would the PTB toss a young, healthy woman in a volcano? The Shaman could just as easily said tossing an older woman into the volcano would accomplish the same thing and people would have believed him and done that instead.

[MineralMan]

19. I dunno. Maybe the shaman only sacrificed the virgins who

refused to have sex with him so they wouldn't be sacrificed. Revenge?

Propitiating deities is a tricky business. You have to do the sacrifice exactly correctly or it will backfire on you. The safest thing is to buy the sacrificial animal or whatever right there at the temple where it will be sacrificed. Then, it will be taken into the temple for the actual ceremony, which is conducted in secrecy, as the deity demands.

You go away, feeling satisfied that the deity has been propitiated. The temple priests bring the animal back out and sell it to the next sucker who shows up. It works something like that, I suspect.

It's trickier with sacrificing virgins, though. How does one know that the sacrifice is truly a virgin? Complicated stuff...

[Nitram]

16. As for a great flood covering the whole earth:

Every society in pre-historical times had a relatively small area which was "the world as they knew it." Certainly a number of great floods and tsunami occurred throughout man's time on earth, and each one would have left quite an impression on the local inhabitants. NPR just had a story about the Great Galveston flood, and it would have seemed like the end of the world to ancient people inhabiting that particular island.

[Nitram]

14. There are lots of reasons a biblical passage might not make sense.

One of them being the fact that the bible is an mishmash of oral history spanning centuries of re-telling by numerous narrators before it was recorded in various versions in different languages and then translated by people with varying linguistic skills and various ideological, philosophical, and theological beliefs.

[MineralMan]

15. Yes. So, why do so many people claim that it is inerrant and flawless?

That's the puzzle, and we face such people on a daily basis. That's really the core of my question.

[Nitram]

17. Clearly some people can't face the world's uncertainties and tribulations without

blindly clutching a set of beliefs that make sense of it all to their little, frightened minds.