The Sword Project

If you aren't interested in the Bible, you'll probably want to move on right now.

Mind, this doesn't mean that you have to be particularly religious to continue reading. The Bible is such an important part of our culture that everyone is affected by it each and every day, no matter what their personal opinion is. If you think not, start reading David Plotz's Blogging the Bible over on Slate. Don't worry, it's a secular take on the Bible. It's also highly entertaining.

Still with me? The problem with reading the Bible is that it was written in ancient Hebrew and Koine Greek. This makes a translation necessary for roughly 99% of the population. For English-speaking Protestants the traditional translation has been the Authorized (aka King James) Version. While beautifully written, it has certain deficiencies from the modern point of view, mostly because we know a lot more about languages and theology in the Classical period than we did in Shakespeare's time. As a result, there has been a massive proliferation of Bible translations in my lifetime.

All of which puts those of us who occasionally teach Bible study in a quandary. Which translation to use? Is it really right? Is there another take on this passage? While these questions are addressed by many writers, sometimes it's worthwhile to try to tease the answers out of the text itself — and that means either learning Hebrew and Greek, or looking at a variety of translations and trying to figure out the sense of the passage by looking at it from all sides.

Looking up at my bookshelf, I see I have seven translations here (King James, New Revised Standard, Jerusalem, New King James, New American Standard, Contemporary English, and Living Bible). I didn't set out to buy all of these. Some are confirmation Bibles, one (Oxford's NRSV) I use because it has copious notes, and one (Jerusalem) I bought for 10¢ when the local library was cleaning off its bookshelves. But I only have a small number of translations. There are literally hundreds. And you can't spread all of them out on a table to easily look at a group of translations of a particular passage. Plus, you can't search them easily, and you certainly can't pack them all up and haul them around the countryside.

Enter the Open Source SWORD Project. This includes software for Linux, Windows and Macs, along with a set of modules which can be loaded onto each platform. The modules include Bible translations (even Joseph Smith's), not all of them in English, as well as Commentaries (including translations of Luther), Dictionaries, Maps, and the complete surviving works of Josephus.

There are some things missing. You won't get the NRSV, for example, because that's under copyright, even though you can read it online. The best modern translation available is probably the Net Bible, though some versions of the software leave out the massive translator's footnotes available from the Net Bible's own download.

If you run a Windows or a Mac, you can go now. The rest of this is for Linux users.

The software for Linux is available in two versions: GnomeSword, for use with (duh) the Gnome desktop, and BibleTime for KDE. Both are available using apt-get or synaptic. (On this, I'm agnostic. I use FVWM.) I tend to like GnomeSword's interface better than BibleTime, but BibleTime shows the translator's footnotes and/or cross-references, and so far I haven't been able to figure out how to do that with GnomeSword.

The biggest challenge will be installing the modules. Ubuntu has a limited set of modules available, but not many. To get more, you have to download them from Sword's modules page. With GnomeSword you can do this by going to Edit =>Module Manager =>Configure. There you'll have the choice of installing in your local directory, e.g. $HOME/.sword, or in /usr/share/sword. To do the latter you'll have to have root access. The software thoughtfully warns people living in "a persecuted country" that they should probably not be downloading over the Internet.

If you use BibleTime, or if the module you want doesn't come up on GnomeSword's menu, you'll have to do a manual install. This isn't too hard. Pick the Raw ZIP version of the module, save it as, say, ~/downloads/module.zip. Then

• To install it in your local directory,
  $ cd ~/.sword
  $ unzip ~/downloads/module.zip
  
• For a global install:
  $ cd /usr/share/sword
  $ sudo unzip ~/downloads/module.zip
  

The module will be available the next time you start either GnomeSword or BibleTime.

The 06/06/06 post

Yes, it's that day of days, the sixth day of the sixth month of the sixth year of the millennium — unless you were one of those that insisted the millennium started on January 1, 2000. Just to drive home the point, they're releasing a remake of The Omen.

This brings to mind the hoards of people who have prophesied about the end of the world. For some reason, I suspect that this isn't a good idea.

First of all, of course, Jesus said "About that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father." (Matthew 24:36) So you can't figure it out anyway.

But suppose, just suppose, that you predicted the last day, and you were transported to your eternal home. What would happen?

• You'd start bragging about it. Can't help it really. I mean, all of those people making all of those predictions, and you were the only one that got it right? Even if it was just random chance — someone was bound to get it right some day — you were the lucky one.
• The people sharing your eternal home would begin to get tired of listening to you. Eternity is a long time, after all.
• Eventually, one of the would say, loudly, "It's Hell listening to that guy!"
• He'd be right.
• So he's in Hell.
• But you just heard him complain.
• So you're in Hell, too.

And that, children is why you shouldn't try to predict the end of days.

The Biggest Story Ever Told

My children discovered early on that you're only going to get a few stories in Sunday School: the creation of the world and the fall; Joseph; David and Goliath, David and Samuel; Shadrack, Meshack, and Abendigo; the Christmas Story; Palm Sunday/Good Friday/Easter; Pentecost; and Saul's trip to Damascus. There may be a few other stories, but basically you get the same ones, over and over and over. Child I said that everything was learned by about third grade, and basically tuned it all out after that.

There are many more stories, characters, and events in the Bible. At our church we take a book or two a year and try to dissect it, to learn who wrote it, why, for what audience, its historical importance, and why we should study it today.

Over the last year, for example, we spent about twelve weeks on Paul's Letter to the Romans. This is generally known as Luther's source for the doctrine of justification by faith, but it's also Paul's statement to the Jews about his belief that Jesus was the looked for Messiah.

Anyway, Slate's David Plotz recently discovered that the Bible has more to it than he learned in Hebrew school, so he's begun to blog his way through the Bible. He's currently up to Genesis 25, Abraham's death. So far he seems surprised, I think, to see that the Bible is a rather bloody book, and that there aren't too many real heroes in it.

Just wait. We've been working our way through various books of the Bible, and there are a lot of things that are at least as, uh, interesting as what he's read to this point:

• You do not, ever, want to buy a used car from either Jacob or his father-in-law, Laban (around Genesis 30). (I started this entry a week ago. Plotz has since gotten to this part.)
• You think Abraham almost sacrificing his son is bad? Look at the story of Jephthah and his daughter (Judges 11:29-40).
• All of Joshua and Judges (basically the founding stories of Israel) show that the conquest was a lot bloodier than you might think from reading about Jericho. There was a lot of internal bickering, e.g., the fate of the tribe of Benjamin (Judges 20). Oh — stay away from women with hammers. (Judges 4:21)
• David and Goliath? Well, maybe it was "Elahanan son of Jaaretoregim, the Bethlehemite." (2 Samuel 21:19). The books of Samuel and Kings are basically court histories, maybe they forgot the official story here.
• Speaking of David, look at his death-bed instructions to Solomon in 1 Kings 25:9. Read them aloud, as Brando in The Godfather.
• The prophet Hosea was hopelessly in love with a prostitute.
• Job? Patient? Actually, the book has three parts: Job's "friends" telling him how he must be the biggest sinner, ever; Job whining about his unjust fate, and demanding that God come down and talk to him, right now; and God delivering the most poetic "because I said so" in the history of parenting. (Job 38-42) I had to become a parent to understand this, and why He might have done that.
• Jesus's disciples are essentially clueless throughout the Gospels and Acts. Peter denies Christ. John ("the Beloved") and James want a guarantee of the Head Jobs in the Kingdom. Paul has to be hit in the head with a rather large club before he believes.

The point of this all isn't to run down religion. The Bible is a book about People. Mostly, they're people just like you and me, which means that they are mostly driven by self-interest, and aren't necessarily nice to be around. Yet God works (in his mysterious way) to make everything come out the way He wants — not necessarily the way we think it should come out (go back and read Job again), but the way He wants.

I'm aware that reading the Bible this way can destroy faith. But so can the traditional Sunday School version. In any case, I submit that a faith that can be destroyed by learning and thinking about its origins isn't much of a faith.

So I hope David Plotz keeps up with the blog. He's slowed down since the beginning, I hope that's not boredom. The good parts of Exodus (you know, Charlton Heston and all that) are coming up next. Then, of course, there are all the laws and regulations in Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, but the story picks up in Joshua and Judges, and then we get all the stuff about David, which would make a good movie in and of itself. Keep it coming, Mr. Plotz.

Happy Solstice

Everyone's favorite phone caller, Bill O'Reilly, has an article called Take Your Christmas and Stuff It. Basically, evil secularists are taking over Christmas, banning the religious aspects, and turning us all into secular humanists.

Bunk. The secular aspects of Christmas predate the religious ones by centuries, if not millenia.

3-400 years ago, or so, what we'd now call the leading Conservatives (based on Church of England and Lutheran norms they were raving radicals, but what the heck), aka the Puritans (and some Presbyterians and other Calvinists), didn't celebrate Christmas. Why? BECAUSE THEY KNEW THIS WOULD HAPPEN!!! Christmas is, and always has been, an invitation to party. And I don't mean just sitting around over a week glass of wine and a stuffed turkey.

The Church (Orthodox and Catholic) didn't pick December 25 as the day to celebrate Christ's birth because of any evidence that He was born then. They picked the day because that was during the time of Saturnalia, the Roman pagan festival. And what did people do during this festival, which lasted a week or so, you may ask? The generally debauched. There were some minor religious celebrations, but mostly they did the Party Hardy bit. There was even one day when slaves were allowed to boss their masters. (Sort of like a day when the Republicans let the Democrats win something in Congress, but this actually happened once a year.) I suppose you could put a statue of Zeus in the local parade, but I'm also sure that most people didn't care one way or another.

Oh, and outside of Rome, up in Germany and further north, trees that stayed green all year were special. Especially during the Winter Solstice. I.e., "Holiday Trees" predate "Christmas Trees" by centuries.

The Church took all this over, toned down the celebrations, and put Epiphany 12 days after Christmas, giving rise to a two-week celebratory season (take that, pagans), as well as millions of partridges in pear trees over the centuries (but that started much later). Germans began to regard the tree as a symbol of Christianity. (Mistletoe and Holly are still popular, though.)

So Christmas started out as a secular holiday. It's celebrated at a time when most pagans, European ones at least, celebrated a wild secular holiday. Why do we expect it to be anything else? Of the "90% of Americans [who] celebrate the Federal holiday of Christmas," how many actually go to church that day? On Christmas Eve? What's the percentage of them for which this is the only day of church in the year?

The most important day on the Christian calendar isn't Christmas, by the way. It's Easter. Tied to a time of year mentioned in the Bible. Celebrated since the 2nd century AD. Where people don't go wassailing, give big gifts (mostly), or try to score with the secretary in accounting during the office party. I'm pretty sure that 90% of Americans DON'T celebrate Easter, but I'm certain that 100% of Christians do.

Even the Puritans.