Bible as ethnography

So, a while ago, Ben Zvanwas talking about doing something with the Bible, which would involve processing the text through some filters and recompiling it. This sort of thing has always interested me: Not recompiling the bible, but rather, textual analysis in general using the basic material stripped of intended meaning by classifying and ordering arbitrarily. What, for example, is the vocabulary of the Rosetta stone, or the Kensington Rune Stone (a probable fake Viking misssive on display in west-central Minnesota). Does the rune stone sample the lexicon of a particular time period or…

I have a cousin in law who tells this story: Her youngest child found out about sex. Then he made the connection that if he existed, his parents must have had sex. So he confronted the parents with this, and mom was forced to admit, yes, of course, this is how babies get "made" and this is simply how things are. The child did not seem too concerned. Moments later, the child noticed his sister playing in the other room. A thought occurred to him ... a light went on, as it were. He turned back to his mother with an expression somewhere between accusation and perplexity. "You did it twice…

In Genesis 4, we see specific reference to herdsmen and farmers as distinct groups, represented by Abel and Cain, respectively. God indicates a preference for the results of herding over planting, and the sibling troubles that ensue result in the world becoming a difficult place to farm, and humans becoming more nomadic, as herders. This is interesting, because it seems like a dramatic shift from reference to irrigation agriculture to herding. Given the usual role of origin stories, we may be seeing a layering of blame in this case. If this is the origin story of cattle keeping nomadic…

Genesis 2 ends with Adam and Eve being naked yet not ashamed. In Genesis 3, the Serpent, who is wiser than average, tricks Eve into partaking of the forbidden fruit of one of god's two magic trees. This results in Adam and Eve recognizing their own nakedness, and compelling them to produce the first clothing. The word "naked" in the original Hebrew is either eromim or arumim. The former means naked (no clothes) and the latter means exposure as in exposing lies. The original Hebrew for the "clothing" that they put together, "chagowr" probably means "belt." The parallel (and probably…

Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 (5 - 25) are distinctly different and contradictory origin stories. The biblical origin story represented in this text has long been known to resemble a set of Sumerian stories that mainly deal with a multitude of gods interacting (some of these gods are converted to humans in the biblical version). What is consistent about all of these stories is the relationship between status and labor, in the context of a labor-intensive agricultural system. Genesis 1 is very systematic, resembling a post-hoc construction of events, and its main practical purpose may be to…

As a child in Catholic school, and later in public school and being sent off to "release time" religious instruction, I had the opportunity to read most of the Old and New Testaments of the standard bible. Later, in junior high school, I became interested in comparative religion, and read it all again, together with some other texts that are not normally considered part of the Bible. Then all that fell to the wayside as I went off to do different things. repost In graduate school, I was lucky to have Irv DeVore as my primary advisor (eventually ... it did not start out that way). In fact…