Religious Reading

I want to read the sacred texts from many different religions to better educate myself on them and to better form my own views and opinions. It's specifically important to me to read the Bible since I was raised Catholic and biblical ideas shape so much of western civilization and continue to influence our society today, especially in the United States. However, they tend to be long, ancient, and difficult reads, making them hard to tackle.

So far I've completed the Torah, which is the first part of the Jewish Tanakh and the Christian Old Testament of the Bible, consisting of five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. That was easy enough to get through. I continued reading after that and am now stuck about a third of the way through the Old Testament and haven't had enough time to read more in nearly a year. Yet the Bible remains permanently on my "to read" list (or I suppose my "currently reading" list would be more accurate) and I haven't let go of my goal of someday finishing it. I think I've made significant progress! According to Goodreads, I'm over 20% of the way through the Bible. It may have taken me three years or so, but I put a nice dent in it.

Unfortunately, I haven't had much opportunity to read many other original texts. As far as eastern spiritual, philosophical, and religious traditions go, I've read the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, a central text to Taoism. I've also read many ancient mythological/religious/spiritual texts including ones from ancient Mesopotamian, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Norse religions. I've studied a fair bit of other religions, but only through reading sections of their primary texts and secondary sources, not by reading their primary texts in their entirety.

I want to compile a To Read List made up of entirely books that are spirituality/religious based, but also more specifically, a To Read List of the actual sacred texts themselves. As I read each item on the list, I'm going to try to compile my thoughts here on this blog.

What I will say right now is that I find the Old Testament very interesting from a historical perspective. I LOVE LOVE LOVE ancient history. I was a History and Classics double major (Classics meaning Classical Civilizations, so focused primarily on Rome and Greece but also included some Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Medieval stuff as well). I love learning about Canaanite and Hebrew mythology, cultures, and society, as well as that of their neighbors in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

You can learn so much about life then from the Bible. Everyone's so busy arguing about whether the theological aspects of the Bible are true or not, that they don't focus on the educational historical aspect. And god forbid when I do bring it up, they say something asinine like "oh yeah, I'm sure it's historically accurate and they really fit every animal on earth on one boat." No, assholes, that's not what I'm talking about. That particular story of Noah's Ark is no more historically accurate than the story of the flood myth in the Epic of Gilgamesh and Atrahasis, because both are myths. However, WE CAN LEARN FROM MYTHS. We can learn about the fears, values, and beliefs of the people who believed them, we can learn about their society and culture. The myth of Noah's Ark was Hebrew, but it originally came from Mesopotamia and the flood myth in the Epic of Gilgamesh and Atrahasis, although some changes were made when the Hebrews adopted it. The Sumerian version had the gods destroy mankind because of the noise they made, whereas the biblical version saw God destroy mankind because of their evil ways. These are two vastly different ways to view the gods they worshiped. One destroyed their own creation due to being annoyed at them and viewing them as an inconvenience. The other destroyed them due to regret over creating beings who could be so evil. This suggests to me that Sumerians viewed their gods and religion in a much different way than Hebrews viewed Yahweh. And why did the myth focus on a flood? Perhaps that's not readily evident if you only look at the biblical version of the myth, therefore causing people still to this day to search for some evidence of a widespread flood throughout the Mediterranean region or worldwide flooding to back up the myth, but if you look at the Sumerian version one major thing sticks out to me. Sumer was located in a floodplain in between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Floods happened often, could destroy their homes and crops if they were too severe, and could literally cost them their lives. Floods were something they feared if the flooding got too bad, but living in a river valley was necessary for their agrarian society and the earliest civilizations. The rivers provided them with their very livelihoods, but as with anything in nature, could also just as quickly take their lives away. They probably also wanted an explanation for why the flooding happened, so of course they looked to the gods, as all societies did at this time. It makes sense that they would think if the gods were going to take out their wrath on them, that they would do it with a flood. In fact, a vicious flood probably did happen in Sumer at one point or another that caused widespread destruction in their early civilization, therefore causing the myth. Perhaps since the Hebrews didn't experience this constant dread, they were able to view their god as more benevolent (at least by a little bit, there are certainly many not-so-benevolent things in the Old Testament, and wiping out all of mankind counts as one of them).

I also had the opportunity to participate in an archaeological excavation in Israel at a site that was in use during the Roman, Byzantine, and Crusader eras, which was originally a small town which sprung up around a polytheistic Roman temple dedicated to a goddess. There were many Hebrew and Canaanite sites nearby which had already been excavated that I had the opportunity to visit. It was amazing to me to be able to see in person some of the things and places I read about in the Bible.

However, all of that being said, I felt that the Tao Te Ching was more spiritually enriching. The parts of the Bible that I read honestly feel more like a primary source historical text, written from the perspective of people who were there at the time and therefore held the beliefs that they held (which of course, that's what it is, I'm just saying that's all it feels like, it doesn't feel like a spiritual guide). It felt like reading Livy's History of Rome, with the exception of Genesis, which felt more similar to something like Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days. It definitely felt like a religious and historical text, completely with the theological aspects, but not so much how I view spirituality. Perhaps that's because the Tao Te Ching is more philosophical in nature. I'm not sure, but I'll see if I feel differently after reading more of the Bible.

Stay tuned for future reviews!
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