The Absolute Beginner's Guide to the Bible introduces you to the bestselling and most influential book ever published. The Bible is the core document of Western civilization, the pinnacle of world literature, and the backbone of three major world religions. To know the Bible is to know the world--and, many say, to know much more than the world. Yet those interested in learning more about this important work discover a surprising paradox: It is both widely discussed and widely ignored. The Bible is a formidable book, and many people love it from a comfortable distance but don't want to get too close. The Absolute Beginner's Guide to the Bible will help you close that distance and experience the Bible as it should be experienced, as a vibrant, living, and vital collection of texts that are just as inspiring and full of life today as they were thousands of years ago.
Get ready to feel like an expert right away. Inside The Absolute Beginner's Guide to the Bible, you'll learn how to:
Find a translation or study Bible that's perfect for you.
Interpret difficult Bible passages, taking into account their literary features and historical context.
Appreciate the Bible's breadth. As a literary work, it includes poetry, philosophy, folk tales, history, theology, religious law, and even erotica.
Understand the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) as the deeply Jewish document that it is--and learn the approaches that rabbis have traditionally used to interpret scripture.
Recognize the courageous missionary spirit behind the New Testament, a collection of documents, secret and illegal at the time, that would later shape the faith of billions.
By day, Tom Head is a freelance nonfiction writer best known for his ability to turn nonexperts into experts. By night, he's a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy and religion at Edith Cowan University. A lifelong student of the Bible with years of formal training in theology, hermeneutics, and biblical languages, he is primarily interested in giving people the tools to read the Bible with confidence, regardless of their academic background or personal beliefs. "Religion can be intimidating," Tom explains, "mainly because people grow up hearing that they're not good enough to ask the kinds of questions religion asks. But the secret is that nobody's 'good enough'; whenever we start talking about God, the universe, and the meaning of llife, we're all absolute beginners."
His 22 books include Conversations with Carl Sagan (University Press of Mississippi), Possessions and Exorcisms: Fact or Fiction? (Greenhaven Press), and Freedom of Religion (Facts on File). He also maintains www.absolutebible.com, a site dedicated to serving the needs of this book's readers.
Scholars say that the biblical tradition as we know it probably started about 3,000 years ago. Life was incredibly hard in those days. Babies often died before they were old enough to even become children; children often died before they were old enough to become adults; and those who made it to adulthood were already lucky—luckier still if they made it to see their 30th birthday. And those brief, fragile, painful lives were washed away like dust in the rain whenever they encountered forces like war, famine, disease, floods, storms, and wild animals. They had no medicine, unreliable harvests, and poor shelter. And they faced the constant threat of horrible, bloody war.
The ancient Near East was ravaged by conflict as empires assembled: The Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, were all ruled by ancient generals who had no concept of ideas that we take for granted now. Cruel and unusual punishment was considered an effective deterrent; torture, a standard operating procedure; death of civilians, a natural consequence of war. Men were men, in all their violent and obscene glory. Women were often reduced to property, captured and raped and beaten and killed.
And in these angry cultures rose stories of angry gods. In the time before creation, as the ancient Sumerians wrote, the primeval cosmos was caught in a struggle against the beast Tiamat, who fought alongside an army of bloodthirsty sea creatures against the gods. But one god—Anu or Marduk, depending on which version of the story you read—defeated her in battle and tore her corpse in two. One half became the sky; the other half became the earth. By the standards of the ancient Near East, that was a pretty normal creation story.
Every empire had its gods, and when one empire defeated another, it would often assimilate the old religion into the new. Gods were as interchangeable as vacuum cleaner parts. Sometimes the followers of these religions produced works of great and lasting wisdom, but more often the connection between religion and ethics generally boiled down to a single principle: Obey. Obey Pharaoh, the god-man who wielded power over the earth. Obey Baal-Hadad, who demanded the blood of children to satisfy his wrath. And most of all, obey the man with the axe or spear who stood for Pharaoh, or who stood for Baal-Hadad, or who stood for Marduk, who could just as easily make earth and sky of your own body if you belonged to the wrong tribe.
In the midst of this were 12 tribes, 12 factions claiming common ancestry as the children of Abraham (Hebrew for "the father of many") and Sarah (Hebrew for "the princess") and of Abraham and Sarah's grandson Israel ("wrestles with God"), and they followed a deity they called Yahweh ("the one who is"). At first, it would have been possible to mistake Yahweh for any of the countless other gods of the time, but this one was different. This was a god who, stories say, was disobeyed and still forgave, who was defied but often spared those who defied him. This was a god that human beings of no particular physical power could argue with, wrestle with, and doubt. And the stories of Yahweh, the stories of Israel, were passed faithfully from mother to child and from father to child. These stories created cultures and a vibrant, powerful nation: Judah.
One day, in 586 B.C., this nation met an end. Its capital, Jerusalem, fell. The Babylonians swept in and destroyed the holy temple of Yahweh, and they did what nations of that time generally did to conquered cities. To Judah's king, Zedekiah, they issued special treatment: They killed his sons before his eyes and then, to make sure that was the last thing he would ever see, they tore his eyes out. He was exiled with thousands of others to Babylon. Yahweh, the triumphant god of Judah, had not spared them from the Babylonians. Their religion, Judah-ism—what we now call Judaism—seemed to be at an end.
But in Babylon, Jerusalem's former religious leaders did something remarkable. Not knowing how long they would be exiled, or the pressure their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren might face to conform to the local gods, they gathered up all that they could of what had been written of their people and of Yahweh and wrote down what they had received that had not yet been written. They told the story of Yahweh—or Adonai ("the LORD"), as he was more commonly called because his name was too holy to pronounce—putting into writing the stories they had faithfully received. Fifty years later, Cyrus the Great of Persia would let them return to Jerusalem with their battle-hardened faith, their new books, and their newfound appreciation for their old books. Even though only 1 of the 12 tribes remained, and even though that tribe would not have an independent nation again until the founding of Israel in 1948, those old books, those precious books that relate the stories of Adonai, form the core of what we now call the Bible.
Quick Start: How to Find a Specific Bible Book
Roaming for Romans? Jonesing for Jonah? Hunting for Habakkuk? Look no further:
Tom Head is a native of Jackson, Mississippi. He holds an M.A. in Humanities from California State University, Dominguez Hills, and is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Ideas at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia. He is author or coauthor of 24 nonfiction books on a wide range of topics. He is also author of the New York Times Company's About.com: Civil Liberties reference site (http://civilliberty.about.com), as well as his own Mississippi Human Rights Report (http://www.mississippihumanrightsreport.net).
This review is from: Absolute Beginner's Guide to the Bible (Paperback)
There are vast quantities of books out there on the Bible. There are even a reasonably large number of books that purport to be for beginners. Why buy this one?
Because, and this is important, the others are so biased as to make them unreadable and they are usually not particularly well-written.
Tom Head's book has the style of a seasoned writer coupled with the research skills of the doctoral student he is. It offers an unbiased look at the Bible and succeeds. You walk away from reading this with a real sense of the majesty and mystery that is the Bible.
Well worth the money. Buy it for yourself. Even moreso, consider buying it for your friends who do not have experience with the Bible.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
