THE OLD TESTAMENT

For most of my life I have ignored one of the great pillars of literature in any language; one of only two books assumed to be essential reading by those marooned on the fictional Desert Island of BBC Radio.  That is not the only thing The Bible shares with the works of Shakespeare. In its best known form -" The Authorised Version" or "The King James Bible" -  it is a celebration of the language of Shakespeare, the form of English which, in the seventeenth century, still had evocative echoes of its roots in Anglo-Saxon.  

Now, at 70 years of age, I have set myself the goal of reading that same version from cover to cover, or rather from digital page 1 to "mark this book as closed". (I haven't risked losing my place in the bible e-book to see if this phrase is there. It would be a rich irony if it were!)  It's hard work I can tell you. I had got as far as the wanderings of the Hebrew tribes in exile when I decided I would need some help. First I looked to the web, and was immediately swamped in all manner of commentaries, almost all from America and many of them  reflecting their peculiarly frantic brand of fundamental Christianity. Some were very helpful, but in the end I decided I would need a book - a real printed one which I could have to hand beside my screen.  I was fortunate to discover "A Beginner's Guide to the Old Testament" by Robert Davidson, an academic and one time Moderator in the Church of Scotland.  Davidson succinctly explains the background and significance of all these strange and ancient writings. This morning I found this in his account of  Psalm 8.

 

"The Bible is only too grimly aware - as we are or ought to be today - that when we grasp at independence, when we decide to go it alone, accepting no restraints except our own desires and needs, we are on the way to disaster. All that we have and are has been given to us to be used responsibly within the context of the adoration of God the giver." 

Now one of the central tenets of environmental politics (the Green Movement) is the repudiation of the Christian and Judaic belief that human beings are set above the animals - "You make him master over all you have made." We now know that has no basis in fact. Our beginnings were as accidental as any other life form. Religion has many things to teach us but the origins of life are not amongst them. This is not a question of "belief" but empirical knowledge. Evolution is simply the best hypothesis to explain what we see around us. The idea of an omnipotent God doesn't square with what we know, and the more we learn about genetics the less distinct from other animals we become. 

At the times when the books of the Bible were written people had no way of acquiring that knowledge, but they were the same species with the same needs and desires as us, and  I am confident that with Davidson's help I shall find inspiration from all these stories and poems. Returning to the quotation above, I  can see a parallel with the idea that humans face disaster when they turn away from God, to our present belief that we face disaster when we ignore the lessons of evolution - "accepting no restraints except our own desires and needs."  Time and again in the Old Testament the tribes of Israel are dealt with in what to us is a shockingly violent fashion whenever they start to think they are above the Lord their God (The Hebrew word Jahweh).  

If I substitute the word Evolution for the word Jahweh I open up the possibility of a better understanding of religion, or even of  life in general. I have a gut feeling that Jahweh would see our current profligate use of fossil fuels and the obscene wealth of the top 1% as eminently worthy of a plague of boils or even a flood….now look where that's taking us!