Reading the Bible

So I’ve been listening to a lot of iTunes University classes over the last year or so, which has been really interesting and I’ve enjoyed learning a ton about all kinds of different subjects.

One of my favorite classes to date has been an introduction to the New Testament, from Yale’s Open Yale Courses. This led me to buy an annotated Bible so I could actually do the reading for the course. This is actually a newer edition than what I got (it’s brand new, I guess), but I recommend it very highly.
Anyway, following listening to this (and thus reading all of the New Testament), I thought “I’ll do the same with the Old Testament, how hard can it be?” There’s a corresponding class from Yale for the Hebrew Bible, so I thought I’d listen to that and read along in the Bible.
I somehow hadn’t really looked at the fact that there’s a lot more material in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible than in the NT. And also just how much extra time it takes to read if you’re going to read all the footnotes. So my planned read has taken rather longer than I anticipated it might. But I’ve now read most of it, actually and only have a few books left.
There’s a big difference in the ordering of the books in the Hebrew Bible vs the Old Testament, so I ended up reading things kind of out of sequence of either, but I’m sticking mainly with the Hebrew Bible order for my reading, except for a few deviations.
So far I’ve read the Pentateuch/Torah, Joshua, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, The Twelve, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Daniel, and Ruth.
This leaves me with Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Solomon/Song of Songs, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther.

So why am I doing this? Well, I guess I feel like the Bible is such a major part of our cultural history that it’s interesting to actually read the whole thing and understand it in textual and historical context (this is where the footnotes and listening to the podcasts are extremely important). And I keep coming across expressions and thinking “So that’s where that phrase comes from” and feeling kind of ignorant for not having previously known it.

Once I’m done with these, there’s still the Apocrypha left, of course, but I’m going to hold off on that for a little while, I think. I was getting a little burned out a couple hundred pages ago, but now that the end is in sight (really, less than 500 pages to go) I’m picking up speed again.

Once this is done I can get back to reading The Great War for Civilization, by Robert Fisk. Some day I may even start reading regular fiction again…