Author: dquiroz

In “The Dispute about Slavery in America,” Caroline Shanks said “The vast majority still firmly that all parts of scripture were equally channels of truth. To them, “The Bible says,” was synonymous with “God saith.” They regarded the authors of the Bible as only the agents of the Holy Spirit.” I really identified with this statement. When I used to go to church every Sunday, this was exactly how I felt and how I was taught to feel. It seemed strange to me to think of the authors as actual people who had their own sets of feelings, ideas and beliefs. It still does. That’s why it was hard for me to know how to believe because I was taught that every word was truth, but some of them- especially pertaining to slavery- felt so wrong. I had no idea how to interpret texts especially one of such cultural significance of the Bible. I feel like most of us are like this, therefore we are impressionable to those who wish to use the Bible to further their own agenda.

In our viewing of “Audience of the Ten Commandments,” I was confronted by some things that I hadn’t thought about. Specifically, I had always believed the “Decalogue” was meant for everyone men, women, and children alike. However, Cheryl Anderson says that you can tell a lot by the language of the Decalogue. It is more addressed to adults and specifically adult men who have households. It isn’t addressed to women at all which surprised me. The Decalogue was always presented to me as a universal blanket of general rules for everyone. However, upon further consideration it seems to be leaving out many groups of people. Basically only privileged or somewhat wealthy individuals were addressed in this text.

Another viewing of “Law and the Bible,” gave me some things to consider as well. I never knew that the law about adultery only matters if the woman is the married one. It doesn’t apply or intend consequences to any married man going outside his marriage. This seems pretty strange for me because I hadn’t thought a lot about gender inequalities in the Bible. Actual laws that are used to outline moral codes of today aren’t actually being represented as what they were truly meant to say when they were written. It’s pretty upsetting to realize this about a text that used to play such a huge role in my life.

I have heard that some of the most common arguments condemning homosexuals find their origins in Leviticus. In our assigned chapter “It’s the Purity, Stupid: Reading Leviticus in Context,” Jay Michaelson says that verses used to condemn are often taken out of context. In reading the chapters around Leviticus 18 “reveals an agenda entirely different from those usually proffered today.” I know this is a huge problem and has been for a very long time. People pick and choose verses out of context to meet their agenda. They make these verses seem to mean one thing, while in their original context they can mean something entirely different. Sometimes these verses are eluding to a larger plot and an idea that gets missed and overlooked when you look at pieces independently instead of looking for what their role might be in the bigger picture.

There is also the issue of what we tend to do to make the Bible seem more relevant to us. In some areas we ignore or brush over things that seem to be emphasized and in some we prioritize and highlight others that we think should be more important in today’s climate. Michaelson says “Yet when we clumsily attempt to make the Torah “relevant” to our times, we often import our own biases and agendas into a text that, like it or not, is about ancient cultic purity and the prohibition of foreign actions and mixtures that contaminated it.” This is the reason that so many controversies can be argued from both sides using the Bible. It seems that in the Bible you can always find evidence for what you choose to believe.

I had never thought in depth about Hagar’s role in the Bible. I knew surface elements of her role, but I know for sure that I never envisioned her as black. Brown perhaps, but it had never been suggested to me that she was black. That was the first thing that caught my eye in our reading of “Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible.”

The other thing that caught my attention was our discussion in class about how the conception of Hagar and Abraham’s son was likely not consensual. I have heard the story of Hagar being the slave of Sarah and Abraham and taking the role of surrogate for their son, but I never thought that Abraham likely raped Hagar to conceive this son. Thinking through it it makes sense to me now because Hagar was Abraham’s slave, and it has really made me reevaluate how I view women in the Bible. Sarah and Abraham viewed Hagar’s body as just a vessel to carry a son.

I found our assigned reading of the flood stories very interesting. It showed both the Yahwist Version and also the Priestly Writers Version. I was surprised at how short the Yahwist version was. It seemed in the other version there were much more details. Between the two there were also significant differences.

One difference I found interesting was the nature of the flood. In the Yahwist version, the flood is presented as more like heavy rain that after a while was able to lift the ark off the ground. In the Priestly Writer’s version, however, the flood is portrayed as a “cosmic upheaval.” This is a big difference for me. I think that the cosmic upheaval version perhaps seems more like a myth because of this element of a more cosmic destruction. In the summary it says “the cosmic waters above the heavens and the waters of the cosmic deep below the earth effect a return to chaos.” This is something that will really affect how I view and read the bible in the future.

I had never heard that there are any sorts of doublets and contradictions in the flood story. In her lecture on Doublets and Contradictions, Christine Hays talks about some of these things. She talks about how it is said that the amount of time where rain was present isn’t consistent. Some passages say 40 days and others say 150. It seems strange to me that I would not have known about or noticed this before.

She also says there is a lot of repetition and contradiction in the Bible whether they are in the same passage or not. Some parts of books are basically repeated again in another book later on. There are two creation stories in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. It seems as though the image of God is different in Genesis 1 and 2 as well. This leads us to believe there could be different authors and a lot of revisions. Growing up, I never learned about these kinds of propositions and ideas. I had never been introduced real studies of the bible and what religious scholars actually were saying about the text that was a big part of my life.

I had heard the creation story growing up in Sunday school at my church. I remember coloring pictures of Adam and Eve eating an apple off an apple tree with a little snake on the ground. Even though it was never actually said in the Bible that the fruit was an apple, I had always grown up picturing that as what it was. Being confronted with the question of what kind of fruit was on the tree, I would have immediately said it was an apple. It just makes me wonder how many other things in the Bible I have consciously or subconsciously gotten mixed up or made assumptions about.

In our class discussion, we talked about how translations and their original language can have very big differences. We also talked about idioms and how difficult it can be to translate them because we have to have an understanding of cultural references. I hadn’t thought a lot about how things are translated and how the text that we are reading in English of the Bible can have a different meaning than the original language of the Bible. For example when I read “slept with” in the Bible I assume that the text is making a sexual metaphor. But we talked about how this phrase is also used to say that two people were buried together. It just serves to show us that we can make incorrect assumptions and interpretations of our own that aren’t what the text is actually saying.

In Back Door Introduction to the Bible, John Kaltner and Steven L. McKenzie state that “The problems that have come from taking Genesis 1 as history are well known.” They were not so well known to me. I grew up thinking that Genesis was accepted by all Christians as plain historical fact. I was surprised when this book so confidently said that this theory isn’t supported by careful reading of the text. It really changed my perspective on the text. I had always gone into reading the bible as though everything written was historical fact. The possibility that Genesis could be fictional- more like a fable- had never crossed my mind.

I think this serves as an example of how perspective can deeply change people’s interpretations of things. In Back Door Introduction to the Bible, the authors talk about how differences in interpretation lead to the “fight over teaching creationism as science in public schools, and museums featuring Adam riding on a brachiosaurus.” Imagine if people had come in reading Genesis as possibly more of a fable. These kinds of things wouldn’t have been argued for so hard. Genre really changes the context of words and how people translate them.

Hello everyone! My name is Dominique Quiroz and I am a sophomore this year. I am in my second year of pre-pharmacy. I am from Berne, which is a super small town in northeast Indiana. My family moved to Indianapolis after I graduated high school and now I commute to Butler. I am taking this class mainly because of the TI requirement, but also out of curiosity. I was raised going to church, and my town was pretty religious. I wanted to see what I could learn about the Bible from a different perspective.

In my opinion, a Bible is a book of books. It is the Christian/Jewish scripture and provides a sort of book of advice on how to best live your lives in your religion. A Bible contains the beliefs, practices, and principles that followers should listen to.

My preconception is that the Bible was written by a bunch of different men. Their writings are “the word of God” because he worked through them so that their words were his words. At least that’s what I remember from when I went to church.

When I Googled “What is a Bible,” I got a lot of results that were religiously affiliated websites. I also got a lot of Wikipedia pages. Most of these search results were “.com” with a few “.org” results in the mix. I’m super glad that we’ll be learning about which sources can be trusted and how to tell which ones are too biased to be used in research because if I had to do research about the Bible at this point I would be pretty lost.