Reading the Bible in the 2020s

Back in my churchgoing days, someone thought it was a good idea to give me the job of explaining the Bible to college students. I know, right? Anyway, one of the things I quickly learned was that many parts of the Bible, and particularly the Old Testament, are apt to be misunderstood without some background knowledge of the sometimes very different cultural assumptions of the original authors and their intended readers. The past is, as they say, a foreign country.

For example, consider this passage in Genesis (24:2-3, 9).

And Abraham said unto his eldest servant of his house, that ruled over all that he had, Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh: and I will make thee swear by the Lord, the God of heaven, and the God of the earth, that thou shalt not take a wife unto my son of the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell: but thou shalt go unto my country, and to my kindred, and take a wife unto my son Isaac. . . . And the servant put his hand under the thigh of Abraham his master, and sware to him concerning that matter.

This may strike us today as funny, disgusting, indecent, or just bizarre, but that's how things were done in those days. You solemnized an oath by putting your hand not on a Bible (Bibles hadn't been invented yet) but on the party of the second part's you-know-what! Traces of this once prevalent practice can be found in such modern words as testify, testament, and testimony -- linguistic fossils attesting (so to speak!) to the connection, once taken for granted, between solemn oaths and the testicles.

Here's another example, from Exodus (33:11).

And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend.

That's right, as disgusting, dangerous, and downright selfish as it seems to us today, in ancient times it was acceptable and even expected for friends -- friends, not enemies! -- to speak face to face, without even wearing masks. What today would convey the message "I hope you get sick and die" was in those days actually seen as a token of esteem and intimacy. We can see linguistic "fossil" evidence of this, too, in such terms as Facebook and FaceTime, dating back to an era when seeing another person's face was actually seen as a positive good!

It is with this cultural context in mind that we must interpret all the seemingly blasphemous references in the Bible to "seeking the face" of the Lord. We must remember that in those benighted days, before even the germ theory of disease had been discovered, let alone the importance of masks and social distancing, "face" had a very different connotation. The face was not then seen primarily as a disease vector which all decent people keep covered up, but simply as another part of the body. Seeking the "face" of the Lord simply meant to seek his presence. We can find a partial parallel in such modern colloquialisms as "Get your ass over here!" in which, without necessarily implying anything unseemly, a rather dirty and indecent part of the body is used synecdochically to refer to the person himself.

Hopefully these little notes have helped to shed light on some of the Old Testament's "hard sayings." We must keep in mind that, no matter how far we may have progressed since Bible times in terms of scientific knowledge and standards of decency, the spiritual message of the Bible remains relevant today!