Bible,Religion

When I was young I treated the Bible as absolute truth:I explained contradictions,redeemed absurdities and applied much ingenuity in reconciling massacres,the deceitful behavior of the patriarchs (and the matriarchs)and God's often bizarre ways to men,e.g the almost sacrifice of Isaac with the Biblical demands for moral uprightness. (I had admit that the almost sacrifice of Isaac must have required exceptional sessions of family therapy .) This approach almost gave me a nervous breakdown I was cured by two pieces of irreverence, that quoted by Mark Twain above,and the skit in "Beyond the Fringe" in which the clergyman offers a pompous commentary on "Esau was a hairy man and Jacob a smooth one"

Later, at the age of 19,when I went to israel as a Zionist youth leader, I read the Bible as the Isrealis do, as a national epic such as the Iliad, or Beowulf. This was far more satisfying. The Kibbutz I was working on was was adjacent to the Mountain of Gilboa ,the battle where Saul and Jonathan fell.I walked in the footsteps of prophets ,in the wilderness of the Dead Sea,the parched lands of the Negev and, most inspiring of all I interpeted the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel through the prophecies of Ezekiel especially those of the ingathering of the exiles and prophecy of the dry bones were elctrifying. In later years I found that this nationalist reading of the epic began to lose its electricity. First most of Jewish Israel,Tel Aviv etc.was on the coast,the Land of the ancient Philistines, secondly the religious literalism of the settler movement turned the Bible into a political ideology that is distasteful to me. Ariel Dharon once demanded that the educational system feature the Book of Joshuah, that is he saw the Bible as a military manual. I prefer the prophcies of social justice. In any event the archaeologist Finkelstein told me a few years ago that the Biblical narrative, up until the era of King Solomon was a poetic invention.
When I came back to Dalhousie my teachers read the Bible as theology. I was very impressed by this I became interested in Hegel and tried to read the Biblical phrases as philosophical propositions. AS we know there is a long tradition of such commentary.Philo Judaeus, who live din New Testament times is often said to have initiated this enterprise.called the allegorical interpretation of the Bible. Some of his commentaries e.g Abraham's cruel expulsion of Hagar for the sake of Sara signifies his abandonment of mathematics and his rise to philosophy. Really! This in turn reminds me of those seventeenth century clerics who explain the absence of scientific discussions in the Bible pertaining to newton's physics as proving that the the Biblical figures took Newtonian mechanics for granted.One of the most gripping writings on the Bible by a philosopher is Hegel,who in his early theological writings provides a powerful portrait of Abraham, the lonely figure, whose monotheism broke the bond between humanity and nature(which Hegel, unlike contemporary environmentalists ,thought was a good thing) he goes onto say that Christianity restored the bonds with nature. He says this before Weber wrote on the connection between Protestantism and Capitalism.
How should we reead the Bible? I love it but this is a good question?