After fifty-nine years of preaching most Sundays since I was first appointed at age 19, I retired from the pulpit in September, 2013. Since I have no longer needed to prepare a new weekly sermon, I engaged in the rather ridiculous project of re-reading and checking six research books and four translations on every word of the Bible. In spite of the rare probability that some publisher might accept still another “book about the Bible,” I gave my 400 page project a book title–Reading the Bible Again and Seeing It for the First Time.
My late mother read the Bible through every year for many years and into her nineties. She committed massive amounts of scripture to memory, but I often wonder what she did with the sections that had to be beyond her comprehension. Many Christians every year decide to read the Bible from “cover to cover” but most all of them bog down. So much of the Old Testament is cultic, meaningful only for Jews who follow the Mosaic law or for students of Hebrew liturgy who are interested in the tassels on the robes of the priests! Then many ambitious “walk through the Bible” readers give up on the visions of the prophets that are expressed in terms that baffle even the best of linguistic and cultic scholars!
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