Finished the BIBLE!!

Wow, okay, so I just finished the Holy Bible. That's right, the Old AND New Testament. I began on May 15th at an unknown time and finished this evening/morning, July 15th, 2 AM. Hallelujah!

The experience was at times difficult, often exhausting, and frequently tedious. But all in all I greatly enjoyed the experience. My views of the Bible and characters within have been in some ways reinforced by my readings, but in many more ways my preconceptions were often revealed as misguided and off-the-mark.

Yahweh is a bit of a prick, but in reading the whole of His story I feel like I understand His motives and personality a little bit better. Reading the Old Testament directly into the New Testament rewarded me with a perspective on Jesus that I think I could never have had reading them seperately. The contexts of the time, the hopes, fears, and desires of the Jewish nation are powerfully expressed in the last books of the OT, and the arrival of Jesus, and his subsequent appeal to non-Jews as well, cannot be fully appreciated without proper context.

I'll definitely return to this subject again, and I'll be posting chapter by chapter summaries of each book. Real summaries. Like one or two sentences a chapter. Should be interesting.

All in all, my favorite books were Genesis, Exodus, Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Jonah, Luke, and Revelation.

If you want to read a verse that will blow your mind with the absolutely grotesque and horrifc nature of the image, check out Deuteronomy 28:53-57. The guys who wrote Saw didn't think of anything that messed up.

If you're looking to understand the history that is recorded in the Bible and want to read narratives, read, in order, Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 Samuel, 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, 2 Kings, Matthew, Luke, Acts, and Revelation. That's the meat of the Bible, the history, the story-telling. Everything minus the prophecy, poems, and tedious dictation. Those books were, as a whole, pretty interesting.

Reading the Bible was absolutely amazing, and I liken it akin to viewing the entire Star Wars series from beginning to end. As when Anakin shows up alongside Obi-Wan and Yoday, so was the final "Amen" in Revelations incredibly powerful. I read a story of a people, the supposed human race, rise from the dust to take over the world, fall, rise again, catching themselves in perpetual conflict, and finally fall to the Kingdom of God. It was epic in every sense of the word.

All the same, I can't imagine how anyone thinks that stuff is true.

Great stuff; highly recommended :)