The Bible: A Biography

5 comments for The Bible: A Biography ↓

#1 Leopold Boeckl on 03.12.10 at 6:02 am

What other reviewers miss in their assessments of this book is the single most important fact about this book. Karen Armstrong presents the reader in a straight forward chronological timeline the historical evolution of the Bible. As she has written many books in this area some may feel it is a rehash but I disagree. She never walked the reader from early Hebrew history all the way to today and then overlays the Christian additions and movements to the most read book in the West. She does all of this in her succinct but deeply passionate style which conveys how important the evolution of this book has been and remains to be in our current culture and society.

With other books one can get pieces of this perspective but only in highly related and academically correlated subject areas. This means that for instance one can find books from a leading scholar on the Dead Sea Scrolls from the esteemed Dr. Lawrence Schiffman but one can’t find a book where Dr. Schiffman addresses the entirety of what is known relative to the Bible and related ancient writings. This is what is unique about Karen Armstrong. I wrote Dr. Schiffman and asked him where to find a book like this and he referred me to the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary. In those reference books scholars have annotated what is commonly agreed to in terms of biblical scholarship. The problem with that approach is that it is not a complete linear overview. It comes in pieces and does not address the end to end to approach that Armstrong delivers with this book. What Armstrong is doing in her works, and this book in particular, will be understood later in history as having been on the same footing as what Guttenberg did with the printing press for the bible or what Martin Luther did when he translated the good book into his native language for all of his countryman to read. The importance of making this historical information available to all of us, the common everyday people can not possibly be under rated.

Armstrong writes so powerfully and with such care and precision that one also wonders whether or not she is creating new insight for the many which might someday either be incorporated or by itself seen as having the majesty of the Vedas, Psalms, Koran and several other seminal spiritual texts. Given the current state of spirituality in the world this may seem far fetched but from the perspective of where new spirituality is headed it is conceivable, more so than one might initially suspect.

The scope of this book is so large that Armstrong can not go into the level of detail equally for each subject area. However what she does for us this time is to leave markers with individual names and dates so that one could delve further into an area which further interests them. I personally am such a fan that I could read 10,000 page offering from Armstrong on this subject and still be left wanting for more. I am hopeful that she may construct future writings in such a way where we will be able to bolt them together for the production of detailed grand view of agricultural eras contributions in spirituality to our world. On a personal note, I would dearly love to see and read Armstrong take on the all of it. From the hunter-gatherer era, through the agricultural era up into the current industrial era. She has touched on the inherited structures from the hunter-gatherer world views in previous works spanning the Fareast and Near East. She also touched on the industrial eras main focus for the leading edge thinkers when she briefly discusses Kant, Hegel and Feuerbach in this book (the rise of social governmental systems). Therefore I have no doubt that she clearly sees the direction that all of this is headed from a future facing perspective. The implications in understanding the direction for humanities evolving world views requires no further qualification on import for us today. However even without such a book, Armstrong’s legacy is in helping us construct an understanding for the trajectory of humanities spirituality. We hope she continues her work well into the future!!!!!

Rating: 5 / 5

#2 Garman Lord on 03.12.10 at 7:17 am

If you already know a lot about the Bible i.e., the real historical Bible, not the imaginary version that dwells in the fantasy lizard-brain of the average lay believer,) you won’t necessarily find a lot to get excited about in this book. You could just as well read Bart Ehrmann or any other qualified commentator, or quite a lot of Karen Armstrong’s excellent previous work, for that matter, of which this outing is largely a rehash. That said, it’s worth noting that this book doesn’t pretend to be much more than that, a liesurely overview of what is knowable or worth knowing about the whole etiology, over the centuries, of how such a strange, and strangely important, work as The Bible came to be, and to survive down to the present era.

The Bible, as we have it today, is the compiled and redacted work of many hands over many centuries, most of whom had no idea that they were writing a Bible, or even a holy book of any kind, for that matter, at the times they wrote what they wrote. Karen Armstrong covers the whole historical process as smoothly and evenly as she needs to without burying the reader under a mountain of unnecessary detail, and with no pretension to revealing any earthshakingly new insights about it all. Which is not to say it’s a dull read; Karen Armstrong is never dull. To myself, what makes this book interesting is the occasional obscure minor fact she offhandedly churns up and brings to light along the way on some arcane aspect or topic of the evolutionary process, such as you might not find out about anywhere else, simply because she knows such a tremendously lot about her subject. On the one hand, this is not her best work. On the other, it’s hard to imagine anything Karen Armstrong might have to say about a subject whose staggering complexities she has so thoroughly and uniquely mastered that wouldn’t still be worth paying attention to.
Rating: 4 / 5

#3 Didaskalex on 03.12.10 at 8:27 am

“from the first, the biblical authors contradicted each other, and their conflicting visions were all included by the editors in the final text …, the Bible has been a subversive document, suspicious of orthodoxy, since the time of Amos and Hosea.” K. Armstrong

Finding Shalom:

According to statistics, the Bible is still the most influential of all books, in all time, even when biblical criticism has preached new meanings for revelation and ways of religious expression. But the talented narrator, and drifting nun, who made a name since her first best seller, ‘The Battle for God’, is advising her readers to examine their pattern of spiritual life, and decide if Bible significance can be achieved as living scripture. The Hebrew Bible scripture development remains debated, even with the Dead sea Scrolls overwhelming research. Gospels message and meaning is even more controversial, since the translation of the Coptic Gnostic Library in the late seventies. Over the centuries, oral tradition preserved the text that has been revised, redacted, translated, and interpreted. Armstrong concluded that when the second temple was destroyed, the Jewish believer had to find a new way of finding shalom in a tragic, and repeatedly violent world. With the destruction of the second temple, animal sacrifice, a basic ritual of Mosaic Judaism was abandoned, but rabbis could coin an ancient message new, that “God desires mercy, and not sacrifice.” (Hosea 6:6)

Bad Concepts of Scripture:

Her notion that, “Today scripture has a bad name,” due to terrorist misconception of the Qur’an to justify atrocities, is rather myopic. She wrote, “If religion preaches compassion, why is there so much hatred in sacred texts? … She interprets the Hebrew bible with Regina Schwartz, in ‘The Curse of Cain,’ depicting it as the violent legacy of monotheism!

The allegation that the Lord Yahweh orders to Joshua, made Marcion suspicious about the harsh nature of Elohim, the Semetic name for God, does not serve sociopolitical science. Accordingly, she could have examined the nature of revelation, as James H. Breasted wrote in the preface to the ‘Dawn of Conscience’, that “Revelation was an ongoing process; it had not been confined to a distant theophany on Mount Sinai; …”

A Biography Shortcomings:

Even though, the able narrator persuades you, in the way of the great orators, to relax while enjoying the story narrated from her own creative imagination. She engages the reader in eight episodes: Torah, Scripture, Gospel, Midrash, and Charity, a Judeo-Christian Kerygma that leads to a Lectio Divina, and Sola Scriptura, two basic polarizing Christian dogmas.

Every now and then some secondary facts pop up, showing lack in her intellectual building! Alexandria is not in upper Egypt (pp. 48), the number Six was not a symbol of perfection (pp. 52), but the expression of wanting, while seven which proposes creation became only perfect with Sabbath. The story of the seventy translators, was not Philo’s own (pp. 49) but is part of the Letter of Aristeas, a Biblical Apocrypha.

Armstrong’s last chapter, Modernity, may be her debut on the history of theological thought. Even a reader who is not particularly interested in such subject, can be persuaded to read through her brief history. She mentioned earlier p-Dionysius, the father of mystical theology, who overwhelmingly impacted Byzantine as well as Western spirituality with his amazing apophatic writings. She was informed and informative on the rise of the Hassidic movement of European Jewish Mysticism.

Alexandrine Allegory:

Armstrong concludes that language is thus a means of revelation, incarnated in scripture. “But when we speak we also get something back: simply putting an idea into words can give it a luster and appeal that it did not have before.” What is novel here is her belief that inspiring speech requires virtual linguistic incarnation, Allegorical interpretation of Philo and Origen. Our meditation is a human experience that makes us aware of its transcendence, that believers have regarded scripture as sacred writ and inspired lit, and mystically the texts have enlightened them in return, adding a transcendent dimension.

This was why the great Alexandrine Jewish Christian exegetes, Philo and Origen, proposed four levels of scriptural meaning, to avoid hermeneutical embarrassment. But, Ms Karen narrative of Philo is extended into a novel and appealing explanation, writing compellingly on Origen’s use of symbolism and typos, in which Augustine followed suit.

K’s Terminal Declaration:

At the book’s epilogue, where she counts, not only Paul, but even Jesus within the company of great Jewish rabbis: Hillel, Ben Zakkai, and Akiba, of whom most readers may have never heard. Moreover, she has a terminal declaration to pronounce, “from the first, the biblical authors contradicted each other, and their conflicting visions were all included by the editors in the final text … Hans Frei was right, the Bible has been a subversive document, suspicious of orthodoxy, since the time of Amos and Hosea.”
Rating: 3 / 5

#4 Sam Horwich-Scholefield on 03.12.10 at 10:24 am

Karen Armstrong’s biography of the bible is part historiography and part geopolitical history. Her relatively short work (the earlier “History of God” is much longer) recounts the often strange and traumatic history of how and when the bible was cobbled together. She examines the historical circumstances surrounding the interpretation and reinterpretation of different books, accounts of genesis, psalms, etc. Besides recounting the various wars, diasporas, pogroms, and splits which served as the backdrop to biblical stories, she also launches a more detailed and, in my opinion, more interesting investigation into exegesis, the critical explanation or interpretation of the bible. For example, she explains the motivations behind certain prophesies in the bible by relating them to their historical context, and then details how, centuries later, stories were reinterpreted by the rabbinate seeking new explanations to new circumstances.

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have sought to, with their biting English wit, reinvigorate modern atheism. I recommend some of their books, especially Dawkins’ “God Delusion,” but I think Armstrong’s work is an important counterbalance to the new forces of atheism. The main thrust of the work, the part which is most relevant to contemporary theological debate, insists upon the ever changing conceptions of god that can be found in the bible and among those who wrote about it. Many readers will find it surprising, no doubt, that some theologians centuries ago asserted that the world was obviously not created in 7 days. Her book is most revealing, and at its most interesting, when seeking to debunk the supposed conservative assertions of anglo-protestants who believe that Darwinian science is the enemy of religion. Her analysis of the worth of God (“The Case for God” is coming out within weeks) lies in God’s ability to unleash the creative forces of interpretation in the religious. As she recounts the history of the bible, one cannot help but find amazement in the ability of humans to appropriate an idea, whether from the Jews, the Greeks, or Arabs of North Africa, and turn it, blatantly, to their favor. It is a curious aspect of modern day America that we must insist upon all truths being eternal and immutable. “The Bible: A Biography” goes a long way towards shaking the assumptions of both modern day atheists as well as anti-evolutionist evangelicals.

Rating: 5 / 5

#5 Wm Ibrahim Muslim on 03.12.10 at 12:52 pm

A booik that should be made mandatory reading for every person who professes to be an adherent of any of the three monotheistic, Abrahamic faiths but espeically for the moder and supposed “Christians” who seem so lacking in their personal and expressed knowledge of the what they label the “unchangeable word of God”.

This is just an introduction into the topic of the text however, if understoodd properly, it should serve to be rather enlightening to those who wish to gain some insight into the manner in which and by which the Tenakh/Torah and the Christian Old and New Testaments were compiled and composed.

As good as this work is, there were some glaring oversights as to the manner in which the New Testament authors worked and the way in which the Gospels were codified and the Christian faith became institutionalized following the Council of Nicea under the Emporer Constantine.

However, it is a first step that this one hopes many “Christians” will utilize so as to become a bit more knowledgeable as to the scriptures they hold and claim.
Rating: 4 / 5

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