Not everyone likes or chooses to go on adventures...
“I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it's very difficult to find anyone.'
I should think so — in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
This month, we plan to go on 30 adventures through the history books in the bible: Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther. There is heaps of ground to cover this month so just skim read, hopefully that would mean reading just half an hour a day. We will rush through Chronicles in particular because most of the material would have been covered in Kings. If you are wondering why there are two accounts of history, this article presents one possible view http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/per358026.shtml. There are other views.
All the books we will be reading are narratives or stories; we are familiar with storytelling conventions from our own cultures but to read these adventures well we need to know about Hebrew Narratives (for more information http://bible.gen.nz/0/). Gordon Fee, in How to Read the Bible for All its Worth, warns us against three misreadings:
1. The narratives are not allegories or they do not have hidden meaning.
2. The narratives are not intended to teach moral lessons. If you read the story of Esau and Jacob as the negative effects of parental favouritism, you are misreading the story.
3. Biblical precedent does not establish a norm for specific action. In other words, the narratives do implicitly illustrate what is taught explicitly elsewhere in the bible. However, just because an action appears once in the bible, it does not necessarily mean the bible is telling us to do it all the time .
