The Bible story¶

Having taken a quick look at the Bible’s contents page, we can turn to the story that gets told. First we must establish some of the chief characters. Now the various books have a multitude of scenes each with their own particular characters and plot. But standing back, we can see there is an over-arching plot and one dramatic relationship which is central to all of it.

Chief characters¶

Jesus?¶

Given his prominence for Christians, and if you have an impression of the Bible as Christian literature, you may expect it to all be about Jesus Christ. Which it isn’t. Over eighty percent of the Bible is not about him, and was written before his time. He appears only in the last act, the New Testament. The final hero, yet not the protagonist for the rest of the book.

However, and here is an important point, the widespread Christian belief is that the rest was really written with his saving mission in view. Hence many passages from the Old Testament can now be interpreted, or re-interpreted, as referring to him. You may wish to bear this in mind.

Yahweh the God¶

So who is the main character? Without doubt it is the creator god who starts the world going and drives the action throughout. Monotheists may prefer to call this deity just ‘God’, but he does have a personal name.

Out of piety, people stopped speaking this sacred name, and in most English translations it is replaced by the word Lord. The actual name may be spelled a few different ways (such as Jehovah), but nowadays many biblical scholars write Yahweh, and that is what we shall call him.

Yahweh is the only constant presence throughout the various books, as the action spans some thousands of years, and the human characters live and die in a shorter space of time. He creates the world and its people, and interacts with his creation in a variety of ways.

His prophets have direct conversations with him, or receive visions. They deliver his messages in impassioned poetry, threatening doom on one kingdom or another, and holding out promises to his faithful. To others he sends angels, or sometimes dreams. Very occasionally, he speaks from the sky.

Yahweh is a jealous god, as he tells us himself. He demands of his worshippers that they obey only him, not seeking other gods. In return, he will defeat their enemies in battle and grant them success. But if they go astray or stand against him, he may open the earth to swallow them, or send down fiery destruction or a lethal plague.

Yahweh is the one with a grand plan for the world, yet a plan that at every turn is open to being thwarted by the rebellion and disobedience of his very own creatures. This ironic situation underlies the whole plot.

The Israelites¶

Individual human heroes come and go, including Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, and Jesus. In their particular parts of the story, they are principal characters. The tension and drama unfolds with each of them going through their own struggles and triumphs, and I will not attempt to summarise them all here. We will meet them as we go along.

The most important individual characters, though, are all descendants of Abraham through his grandson Israel. In the book of Genesis, Abraham hears the call of Yahweh, who promises land and blessings for his descendants. These descendants, the Israelites, form the most important collective character.

Much of the action concerns the struggles between the Israelites en masse and their successive enemies, the rival peoples with whom they do battle, such as the Canaanites, the Philistines and so on. Later these are succeeded by invading armies of conquest, the Assyrians, the Babylonians.

However, the central plot theme is played out through internal tensions within the collectivity of the Israelites. Prophets or other leaders act as the spokespersons of Yahweh, and the faithful are those who follow them on the right path. Opposing them are those who represent the antagonistic standpoint, whether this is a stubborn king or the members of a rebellious faction. They stray from the path of obedience and worship other gods.

In the New Testament, the successors of the Israelites are the Judaeans or Jews, specifically those who oppose Jesus and his followers. The same tension is now played out between Jesus the prophet (or son, or incarnation) of Yahweh and these stubborn and rebellious people.

Themes and plot¶

The governing idea¶

The essential, and repeated, theme springs from this idea of human rebellion spoiling Yahweh’s good plan for creation. Divine punishment leads to downfall, but is followed by a restoration built on the foundation of a faithful remnant who were not rebellious.

This plays out in different ways over and over again through the various books. As a good illustration of the pattern, consider a story most people are already aware of – that of Noah and the flood, which is in the book of Genesis (chapters 6 to 9).

After creating the world and populating it with the first humans, Yahweh sees that they tend towards wickedness. So he wipes everybody out with a great flood, permitting only Noah and his three sons, along with their (un-named) wives, to be saved.

We are told that Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time (Genesis 6:9), and furthermore, Noah did everything that Yahweh commanded him (7:5). This second observation stresses Noah’s obedience to divine commands, a central aspect of righteousness in the biblical ethic.

Note that instead of destroying absolutely everybody, Yahweh chooses to retain a very few humans who will be the foundation of the next cycle. The world rebuilt by this remnant of eight people therefore has an essential link with what went before, rather than being a totally new creation. Similarly, the animals are re-populated from a small saved number, either two or seven of each kind (see Genesis 7:2-3).

Thus the act of restoration is not to be pictured as simply wiping the slate clean and starting again. This theme of restoration recurs in the story of the Exodus, in the return of some of the people after the Exile, and elsewhere. It is fundamental to the grand arc of the whole Bible.

Story universe¶

At this point, I want to head off anyone who is bursting with questions like: Where could all the water have come from to flood the entire Earth? How could all the animals have fitted into one ship with a volume of less than half a million cubic cubits? What did they all eat for a year? And so on.

Such questions have their place, but there is also a time not to ask them. Would you interrupt a children’s bedtime story to say, "A bear couldn’t really make its own way from Peru to Paddington, and furthermore no member of the species Tremarctos ornatus is anatomically equipped to talk"? Or do you lean over to your friend when a Star Trek movie is playing and mutter, "the physics of antimatter-powered warp-drives is not at all plausible"? Of course not. At least, if you do, remind me never to go to the cinema with you.

We aren't doing that kind of reading here. To appreciate the stories, we enter into the story-world, putting aside some of our disbelief during the experience. That doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with sceptical questioning. After the movie it might be great fun to argue about the possibility of faster-than-light travel. I’m more than happy to be sceptical when it helps, for example, when I encounter someone who truly believes there are demons, or gods, or ghosts, or fairies.

We will read the Bible as the history of a fantasy universe. One that overlaps in many ways with our own, but that we can consider on its own terms as we explore. Yahweh is real and his chosen people endlessly rebellious. The angry god may strike them down or kill their children. Partings of the waters, raisings from the dead, fireballs from the sky, and other divine interventions are the order of the day. Plus there are talking animals (although not bears – that would be silly!).

The search for an ending¶

So the twists and turns of the plot follow the fortunes of the Israelites as they travel from Egypt to conquer the land of Canaan, the rise and fall of the monarchies and the return from Babylon. At this point, they rebuild the Temple of Yahweh and continue to hope for salvation.

All the action of the Old Testament is placed within this framework. But what of the ending?

The prophets often make predictions about a future Day of Yahweh, or final judgement, when doom would come to sinners and the righteous would find their reward. But when would this happen?

In the final book, Malachi, we find Yahweh speaking through his prophet, making one more promise to his followers that they will be vindicated. The wicked will be destroyed by fire, and the faithful will dance on their ashes:

"For behold, the day comes, burning like a furnace, when all the
proud and all who work wickedness will be stubble. The day that
comes will burn them up," says Yahweh of Armies, "so that it will
leave them neither root nor branch. But to you who fear my name
shall the sun of righteousness arise with healing in its wings. You
will go out and leap like calves of the stall. You shall tread down
the wicked; for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet in
the day that I make," says Yahweh of Armies.

The sign before all this will take place will be the return of the great prophet Elijah, and Yahweh dishes out a final threat of destruction to encourage everyone:

"Remember the law of Moses my servant, which I commanded to
him in Horeb for all Israel, even statutes and ordinances.
Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and 
terrible day of Yahweh comes. He will turn the hearts of the 
fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to their
fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse."

The placement of this book at the end of the Old Testament leaves us in a state of tension, feeling the lack of a definitive ending. After this was written, scriptural writings kept on accumulating, with increasing focus on the idea of a coming saviour. There were prophetic works, visions of heaven and of the end-times, but not much agreement on what was going to happen or what kind of divine intervention to expect. Most of these apocryphal books were excluded by both Jewish and Christian religious authorities, so that they are not in anyone’s Bible today.

The Christian finale¶

The most successful attempt to supply the missing ending came with the books now making up the Christian New Testament. They tell of the astonishing career of the messianic Jesus of Nazareth, who preaches and performs miracles, before being executed, rising from the dead for a time, then flying into the sky only to return triumphantly to carry out the long-awaited final judgement.

This final restoration repeats the basic theme of the old order being swept away, except for a faithful remnant, out of which a new creation can be built. However, in a new twist, the canvas is enlarged from just the Israelites to the world at large. Now everyone is potentially eligible to share in the new dispensation, a prospect which has sometimes been hinted at by the Old Testament prophets but is now realised.

The finale comes in visions seen by a certain John of Patmos, contained in the book of Revelation. After tumultuous scenes heralded by angels and trumpets in the sky, there is a time of tribulation and chaos on earth and cosmic battles between heavenly beings. Finally, sinners are thrown into a pit of fire, while a new heaven and a new earth are provided for the faithful.

John does not say when what he sees is expected to come about, except to say it must be soon. Let us suppose the end did come in time to meet the prediction by Jesus, who also spoke of the Judgement Day, that it would be within the lifetime of his hearers. For our purposes, then, we can consider the story universe as having a finite course spanning about four thousand years, from Creation to the Last Judgement. The End.