How to Read the Bible

The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture.

Why has all the fun gone out of it? Well, it is because, hundreds of years later, it was hijacked by the leaders of the Christian Church and made to serve another, grimmer purpose. What happened was that these old remembered stories from the waking days of the children of Israel were appropriated by Christian thinkers and used to perpetuate a syste

Although scholars have differed about how many sources there are, where they are found, and when they should be dated, in its most widely accepted form the Documentary Hypothesis states that behind the present text of the first five books of the Bible lie four earlier sources, commonly identified by letter.

Above all, the key experience of Judaism, from Mosaic times to today, is studying the Torah.