Customer Reviews

What the Bible Really Says

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Bookstore shelves are full of Apologetic writings trying to prove stories in the Bible are literally true. If that's what you are looking for, get another book. What the Bible Really Says is thought-provoking, appealing to the intellect of the beliver. Yet the book is surprisingly readable.

As we journey through the Old and New Testaments, Barthel digs through the controversial stories in the Bible and the similar myths in ancient religions without ever questioning the authority of the Scriptures. He constantly shows us that the Bible is more than a collection of Sunday school stories, but he never leads us to question our faith.

Highly recommended!

I am a layman who is interested in the study of the Bible. I am most interested in books about the Bible that are responsible and scholarly without preconceived ideals and theological agendas. I am not interested in books that make odd claims for shock value or that go out of their way to try and break new ground. This book delivered what I was looking for better than any other I have read so far.

This book which was originally written in German and translated to English provides the layman with fascinating insights which are responsible and scholarly. One such example is the observation that many ancient traditions included written laws prior to the laws of Moses (designed to regulate the affairs of a society which usually involved denoting retaliation). What was unique about the laws of Moses (i.e., the Ten Commandments) was not only "You Shall have no Other Gods before Me" but "You Shall Love Your Neighbor as Yourself" which has no other precedent in the laws of ancient religions. You will also be treated to such wit and wisdom as "... the first law of biblical criticism - speculation flourishes when facts are in short supply..."

If you are looking for commentary, this is not the book for you. You will be disappointed as the author only examines two of the five Books of Moses: Genesis and Exodus. He indicates that the other three books of Moses primarily concern sacrifices, statistics, and long lists of place names and then he moves on to the Book of Joshua and the Conquest of Canaan. This book is a reader meant for those who are interested in the highlights and fascinating insights about the Old and New Testaments that have been learned over the course of time.

This is the first book I have read by Manfred Barthel. Barthel is an excellent example of the detail, thoroughness and thoughtfulness for which German writers are known.

The English translation by Mark Howson, with additional material adapting it and providing context for English-language readers, is likewise superb. It sounds like an original writing in native English, not like the stodgy, unnatural and rough English we sometimes get of the German scholars.

Barthel probes Bible content and related backgrounds and evaluates cultural updates from archaeology and other sciences that will shed light on biblical content. He does not seek just to simplistically prove that what the Bible says is true in an objective modern factual sense.

His goal is rather to enter the world of the Bible, to develop a feel, and an appreciation for the text and the cultural and historical context it seems to represent. He reaches for the worldview behind what he reads there, attempting to see what would be meant in that original context, what styles of expression and what cultural format comes to light.

He does an excellent job of critically evaluating findings of modern sciences, such as archaeology, new historical findings and textual studies to relate them to events, perspectives of personalities in the Bible. This is particularly fulfilling in regard to the Old Testament, which is rarely probed at the level of popular Bible study and pulpit theology.

Few people seem to really know what the stories in the Bible really say, and less of an idea how they might fit together, or how you can make sense of two or three versions of the same story in Genesis or other parts of the Torah. I bought this book in 1985 on one of my trips to the United States form Kenya, when I gathered books on various subjects. I never got around to really reading this till 2003.

It was an exhilarating experience, very satisfying as part of a three-year study of the Old Testament I planned for myself, supplemented with additional background studies in the New Testament, the Dead Seas Scrolls and related historical periods. I read the book leisurely, with critical reference to other sources over about a month's time in September and October 2003.

Barthel provided some very stimulating discussions on various findings in archaeology that throws light on names and laces and events in the Bible. Anything in history and archaeology related to the Middle East and the Bible interests me.

He goes through the Bible books in sequence and gives information from various sciences that help explain, clarify or verify each. There is more on the Old Testament, but also some related to the New Testament and a good section about the Essenes that gives some helpful insights.

This was interesting and helpful because it brought to life the contemporary situation in these biblical events. I always like to study the Old Testament, particularly, to understand the stories, not just as history, but as real-life experiences of humans like me, in another culture and place.

These people were trying to make sense of their challenges and insights in their own context and living situation, just as we do today, but with no benefit of all the centuries of gathered information we have access to!

I try to get a personal sense of their encounters with the Divine in the events of their lives. It is a challenge further to try to understand the worldview they lived in and see how that helps clarify their understanding of the events reflected in what we now have recorded. Barthel did that.

This has been one of my favorite books for nearly 20 years, and I credit it with igniting a burning intellectual curiosity that inspired me to write my own book on religion and the bible.
While this book is BASED on Barthel's writing, don't overlook the fact that it was *adapted* for English-speaking cultures as well as translated from German by Mark Howson.
Mr. Howson's breezy style and humor certainly make for easy and fun reading, but is frustratingly lacking in useable references, or in many cases even providing enough detail to perform a reasonable search should one wish to further pursue a particular subject.
The process of publishing a book like this presents many opportunities for errors to creep in at several points - in the translation/adaptation, copywriters, editors, etc.
Some of the most egregious errors in this book occur when discussing biblical Hebrew. For example - on page 18 we get off to a very bad start with, "...in the written form of verbs, there is no distinction between the past, present, and future tenses; the tense can only be deduced from the meaning of the entire sentence." Actually, while biblical Hebrew has no formal tenses, it does have two temporal 'states' - perfect, referring to completed action (cf. Past tense), and imperfect, incomplete or continuing action (cf. Present and/or Future tense).
It gets even sloppier with his following example - "So when a reader came across a word written 'KSR', he would simply have to decide for himself whether the three characters were intended to mean 'he breaks', 'he broke', or...".
First of all, there are some 40 verbs in biblical Hebrew (and Aramaic) listed in the concordance that can be (and are in the AV) translated as 'break' - and 'KSR' is NOT one of them. KSR is, in fact, modern Arabic - which while a Semitic language, is in a completely different linguistic branch. That said, KSR (kasar) would unambiguously mean 'he broke' - all the other forms ('he breaks', 'you break' 'we break', etc.) would have additional letters added to the triliteral root as part of normal verb conjugation - Hebrew (and Arabic) is a highly inflected language.
Then on page 122 we have the rather startling "...qaran, 'to be radiant, to shine', which when written without the vowel points is indistinguishable from qeren, 'to bear horns.'" This is unforgivable - as even a cursory glance at any Hebrew lexicon will quickly tell you, qeren is NOT a verb, but a noun directly related to 'qaran' that simply means 'horn(s)'. Moreover, 'qaran' appears in Psalm 69:31 - "This also shall please the Lord better than an ox or bullock that HATH [sprouts] HORNS [qaran] and hoofs." Note that the use of 'qaran' here does not give the ox a radiant or shining countenance, but horns. There is a definite pattern here - 'halal' means 'to shine'; 'helel' means 'the shining one'. 'Habal' means to be or act vain; 'Hebel' means 'vapor, vanity'. Although qaran means 'to sprout/bear horns' and qeren means 'horn(s)', qeren can *figuratively* mean rays of light, as famously in Hab 3:4 - "And his brightness was as the light; he had horns [qeren] coming out of his hand..."
On page 96, we have no less than two jarring cognitive dissonances. First, a reference of the use of alcohol as an ingredient in ancient Egyptian embalming fluid (distilling alcohol wasn't discovered/invented until the 7-8th century AD, well after the Egyptian mummification tradition had long ceased), and that tomatoes weren't cultivated in Egypt 'until Hellenistic and Roman times' (tomatoes are indigent to the New World, and were not even cultivated for food in Italy until the 19th century; certainly not in Egypt until the 20th!)
Add the fact that there have been a lot of significant discoveries in the past 30 years since this was written, and one could make a very good case that a new revised edition is well overdue.
It is probably a blessing, in a way, that this book is NOT presented in a scholarly manner, which can quickly become quite tedious.
All in all, however, the book remains well worth the time and effort to leisurely peruse, or as a study guide, and is indispensible as a gentle introduction into - well, What the Bible Really Says.

WHAT THE BIBLE REALLY SAYS has an accurate assessment on the Bible being a "best seller that no one reads."
"This curious state of affairs has inspired a whole series of new translations, all trying their best to make the venerable, familiar words of the Gospels keep pace with the 'living language.' This may not be the right way to go about it though; as new revisions and translations multiply, more and more questions are being raised about the linguistic accuracy of Scriptural verses that we have been familiar, if not always comfortable, with since childhood." Page 12.

Another interesting quote was on page 305 regarding Messiah's birth-
"The traditional date of December 25 was fixed by Pope Liberius in the fourth century. The date was a shrewd choice, because the Romans celebrated the ancient pagan festival of the winter solstice on the same day, which allowed the pagan celebration of the unconquerable sun to be absorbed by the Christian celebration of the triumphant Son of God."

Mr. Barthel addressed some interesting Bible topics and offered some ideas on obscure items. Among them:
-- A definition for "slime" used as mortar in Gen. 11:3.
-- A corrected definition for the name Abraham.
-- Identity of the "burning bush" seen by Moses.

Some of the most pertinient information in this book in my opinion was the translational shortcomings of the King James Version.

He demonstrates how a simple translational slip resulted in Moses having "two horns" in both the early latin Vulgate and the German Bible.

He also dedicated some pages to explaining how the scribes approached the Sacred Name when they were transcribing texts.

This book is outdated in one respect. As Mr.Barthel stated, the translation and publishing of the Dead Sea Scrolls was and continues to be, a work in progess. So there are more current books on that subject.
Overall this book really falls somewhere between a 3 and 4 star rating in my opinion. Not a bad book.