Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [2]
At least they didn’t think it was “Just do it.”
Even those who think they know the Bible are surprised when they learn that their “facts” are often half-truths, misinformation, or dimly remembered stories cleaned up for synagogue and Sunday school. For centuries, Jews and Christians have heard sanitized versions of Scripture that left out the awkward, uncomfortable, and racier Bible stories. Sure, most people have some recollection of Noah, Abraham, and Jesus. But they are less likely to know about the tales of rape, impaling, and “ethnic cleansing” routinely found in the Bible. These are timeless stories with timeless themes: justice and morality; vengeance and murder; sin and redemption. Pulp Fiction and NYPD Blue have nothing on the Bible!
There was Cain knocking off Abel. Noah’s son cursed for seeing his drunken father naked. Abraham willing to sacrifice the son he desired all his life. The population of Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed for its wanton ways. Lot sleeping with his daughters. A tent peg driven through a man’s head in Judges. King Saul asking young David to bring him a hundred Philistine foreskins as a bride price to marry his daughter. King David sending a soldier into the front lines so he could sleep with the man’s wife. Then there is that ever-popular tale of wise Solomon threatening to cut a baby in half. But did you know that the two women who brought King Solomon that baby were prostitutes?
Raised in a traditional, Protestant church with a full menu of Christmas pageants and confirmation classes, I thought I possessed a fairly solid biblical education. In the annual Christmas pageant, I rose from angel to shepherd to Joseph—a nonspeaking role; Jesus’ earthly father stood mutely behind Mary with nothing to say. I never made it to the plum role—one of the “Three Kings” who call on the infant Jesus. They had the coolest costumes. Three very tall brothers in my church always got those parts. I didn’t know until much later that they weren’t three “Kings” at all but magicians from Iran.
While attending a Lutheran college and later, Jesuit Fordham University, I continued to study the history and literature of the Bible. But then, in writing an earlier book called Don’t Know Much About Geography, I posed a few simple questions related to the Bible:
“Where was the Garden of Eden?”
“What is the world’s oldest city?”
“Did Moses really cross the Red Sea?”
That’s when I got some surprises. In researching the world’s oldest city, for instance, I learned that Joshua’s Jericho is one of the oldest of human settlements. It also lies on a major earthquake zone. Could that simple fact of geology have had anything to do with those famous walls tumbling down? Then I discovered that Moses and the tribes of Israel never crossed the Red Sea but escaped from Pharaoh and his chariots across the Sea of Reeds, an uncertain designation which might be one of several Egyptian lakes or a marshy section of the Nile Delta. This mistranslation crept into the Greek Septuagint version and was uncovered by modern scholars with access to old Hebrew manuscripts. While it would not have been as cinematically dazzling for C.B. DeMille to have Charlton Heston herd all those movie extras across a soggy bog, this linguistic correction made the escape from Egypt far more plausible.
To me, the fact that the Exodus, one of the key stories in the Bible, was garbled by a mistranslation was a striking revelation. And it set me to thinking. How many other