Why the Bible is a horrible book...

​"Read literally, the Bible can be a terrible book: a bullying patriarchal God who justifies slavery, rape, the marginalization of women and people with special needs.  Shouldn’t we  just close the Book of Books and run away? Rabbi Artson shows a better way:  armed with a vision of justice, love, and peace, the Bible becomes the world’s most powerful tool for the dignity of all people, for living harmoniously with our planet, and for a vision of universal peace. We just need to learn to read it right!"

Listen to the sermon by clicking on the button below.

The Bible is a Horrible Book (unless you learn to read it right)

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On this page you find excerpts from the first part of the sermon; but please make sure you listen to the whole sermon.  Rabbi Artson makes a strong case for loving the Bible and reading it on a regular basis, even as we also read it with critical eyes.  He also makes a case for thinking of God, not as a bully in the sky who is almost always outraged, but as spirit of love and justice who cares for all people and for the whole of life deeply.  He proposes that we read the Bible with this image of God in our minds, such that we are free to reject what needs rejecting and embrace the spirit of love and inclusion and also leaps forth from the pages.  In one short sermon he captures the spirit of a process approach to scripture. Christians have at least as much to learn from his approach as Jews; the New Testament has its awful sides, too.

It's an awful book.  If you were coming up with a book that was making a sustained argument that women aren't actually people and they're only important when they come into contact with men, you would go to the Torah for support. If you wanted to make an argument that the only people that can have sex are straight males, you would go to the Torah for that argument. If you wanted to make an argument that the earth is there to be plundered however we choose to plunder it, you might want to use...sections in the Torah to bolster your point. If you wanted to argue that God was a distant, paranoid, guy with anger-management issues, you would go to the Torah. Do I need to go on?  If you wanted to make an argument that enslaving most human beings, wiping them out after war, kidnapping women and raping them as the fair bounty of a war well-fought, well, I have the book for you. And every week we take out this atrocious iron-age book and we read it!. And we kiss at it...So what's a Jew to do?...If you believe that the book is literally describing reality as it actually is: in fact, that the world was created by a God who is almost always outraged, and who worries the little things while seeming to ignore typhoons and harvests of control and global climate change being a disaster and the fact that we are surrounded by militant enemies who want to kill us, and that we created a state by mostly ignoring them -- if that's the literal world, then this book you'd better read all the time, because otherwise you are next to be zapped.  And there are an awful lot of Jews who venerate the Torah because they think there is a guy in the sky who is in complete control and this is his book, and if we don't follow it to the letter, we're doomed.  ​

And worth reading on a regular basis

I would like to offer you a relationship to the Bible that allows us to do what, I think, it was originally intended to be, which is a source of light, a source of affirmation, a source of deeper humanity. The Bible that you hear preached by some is a bible of rules, a bible of rigidity; occasionally, a bible of fear. This is not what draws me to the Bible, and it is important that somebody publicly present a different take.

So here goes.

The Bible starts with two profound stories: The first story we are given is of a God who cannot bear to be alone. A God who is driven by love to create a world of flowering and cascading diversity in which nothing is precisely like what came before it; in which each new creature is delightfully fresh and novel; in which God, thrilled by each new creation, says: This is good. And then God creates a creature with the capacity, also, to look at diversity, and to look at novelty, and to say: This is good! And we are told in this story that we are made in that God's image.

What is the characteristic of the God of Genesis? Unearned love that can only be made real when it is given away. And so without obligation, God creates a diverse and flowering universe, because God cannot be God if God cannot love. We are, my friends, in God's image. And we also, though, shrivel up and die if we do not have the ability to pour out our love; to celebrate difference; to rejoice in novelty; to see in each other's divine sparks; and to be delighted and thrilled by what we see. That is, says the Bible, our most God-like attribute.

The second book of the Bible, the Book of Exodus, tells the second foundational story of Western civilization. It is the shocker! The story tells of an obscure small group of people who are described by the Hebrew term to'evah -- abomination. Those people are so abominable that the Egyptians will not even sit at a table with them; they will not eat with them; they force them to live in a different neighborhood so they do not have to deal with them. And they oppress them, ruthlessly and harshly. And the Torah announces that the force that created the cosmos, the force that is known in the giving away of unearned love, that force cannot abide pharaohs. That force will rise up on behalf of the oppressed, on behalf of the abominable and that force will set them free. We Jews know that as our core story. Every year we recall that we, each of us, were slaves in a land that viewed us as outsiders, and that we were visited by the very forces that make the universe what it is: forces of liberation and freedom and wholeness. And that we were brought out of that narrow land into a place where we were free to be ourselves.... more

- Rabbi Bradley Artson, The Bible is a Book of Inclusion and Love