Introduction
When King Hezekiah learns from the prophet Isaiah that he is terminally ill (with a boil) and that he ought to set his house in order, he breaks down and weeps, pleading with God to heal him. Isaiah departs and is hardly out of earshot when the Lord speaks, telling him to inform Hezekiah not to worry—more precisely, that he has heard Hezekiah’s prayer and seen his tears and will reward him with fifteen more years of prosperous rule. With a lump of figs, per Isaiah’s instructions, the boil is healed. But how will Hezekiah know for certain that God really means what he says? He is apprehensive. He needs a guarantee. (Does he have a fifteen-year planner with appointments already scheduled?) He tells Isaiah he wants a sign. Isaiah gives him a choice. The sundial can go either forward ten degrees or backward the same distance. Hezekiah, desperate for peace of mind, is determined to put God to the hardest test. He opts for backward. Isaiah cries out to the Lord, and the sundial goes backward.
Generations earlier the prophet Balaam has a short and rather routine conversation with his ass, leaving the reader with the distinct impression that the prophet and the ass may have conversed before. Later on Elisha is traveling with his students to establish a satellite campus near the Jordan River. As they are felling trees to frame out the student center, an ax head flies off the handle and lands in the river. Elisha tosses a stick into the water and the ax head swims to meet it, and the felling of trees continues.
The prophet Hosea is ordered by the Lord to marry a prostitute. Jonah, swallowed by a big fish, lives in its innards for three days and is spewed out no worse for wear. Paul is caught up to the third heaven, where he experiences such indescribable wonders that he is dumbstruck. John of Patmos tops that when he becomes more than a spectator in the most spectacular apocalyptic live production of all times.
The Bible is the most fantastic book to fall into the hands of humankind. Its characters are alive, authentic, and utterly unpredictable. They work miracles and serve the needy as often as they succumb to Satan’s wiles; they murder and rape; they marry, mourn, and manipulate; they confess sordid sins and worship God in ways that would today gross us out. Every predicament and emotion and enchantment found in the twenty-first century is somewhere lurking in the pages of Scripture.
Yet for many publishers and preachers and ordinary people, the Bible is largely a manual of propositions. The colorful personalities pushing their way out of its pages are seen as secondary—if that. But any attempt to turn this incredible chronicle into a theological dissertation destroys the very essence of its message. We learn how to live and how to die by putting ourselves into the narrative. Indeed, we recognize these characters by looking in the mirror.
By getting to know biblical characters we also find role models whose actions and words are as contemporary today as they were in ancient times. Who would have thought that stodgy old Nehemiah would rise out of the Old Testament demanding fairness in civic life? He rails at those who are grasping for wealth on the backs of workers: “What you’re doing is wrong. Is there no fear of God left in you? . . . Give them back their foreclosed fields, vineyards, olive groves, and homes right now. And forgive your claims on their money, grain, new wine, and olive oil.”[1]
My perspective on the Bible as I present these fascinating characters is not one of a textual critic. Nor do I seek to harmonize passages that appear to be in conflict. It is not my purpose to interact with the scholarly literature over such matters as the location of geographical sites or the authorship of biblical books. Rather, this volume is a serious endeavor to offer a very basic biographical overview of the Bible without any attempt to explain what sometimes appear to be historical or geographical inaccuracies or contradictions. Here we see the Bible unvarnished in its natural beauty with all its knots and rough edges. I make no effort to sand it down and smooth it over.
Indeed, we often do a great disservice to the Bible when we expend our energy in forcing the characters and events into logical formulas that fit our rational twenty-first-century minds. There is a place for simply letting the Bible be the Bible without assuming it needs our scholarly elucidation. At the same time, to maintain the flow of the narrative, I make judgments regarding such matters as geography, chronology, and familial relationship when the text is less than clear.
Like the Bible itself, this volume is at times repetitive. The account of Moses naturally overlaps with that of Joshua. So also Saul and David, Jesus and Peter. Yet it is my goal to give each individual featured his or her own story. When Abigail seems entirely glossed over in the section on David, the reader must wait for Abigail’s own story. The same is true for Joseph. He is often appended to Mary in a way that does not allow him to stand alone.
I purposely avoid controversial biblical debates such as whether and how the sun stood still, and the time frame of the six days of creation. In the seventeenth century Irish Archbishop James Ussher calculated that the earth was created in six days, beginning October 23, 4004 BC. For the purposes of this volume that date works as well as any other, far better, indeed, than the 13.7 billion-year span since the Big Bang.
The Bible comes with ready-made partitions: Old and New Testaments and sixty-six books. In this volume there are twenty-four chapters collected in three eight-chapter parts. Part 1, “From Paradise to the Land of Promise,” begins with Adam and ends with the conquest of Canaan. Land is a key theme. Part 2, “Kings and Prophets Guide God’s People,” begins with the story of Ruth that leads to the line of David and successive kings with prophets close at hand. Governance is a key theme. Part 3, “A Messiah and His Mission,” begins with a young virgin who gives birth to the Son of the living God and ends with an astonishing Revelation. Following Jesus is the central theme.
By allowing the structure of the Bible to serve as an outline, a less-than-precise chronological account, combined with a topical layout, emerges. For example, in part 3, on the New Testament, Jesus’ lesser-known disciples and his women followers are grouped together in separate chapters. In the Old Testament the so-called Major Prophets precede the Minor Prophets, and are often out of chronological order. Likewise Job, whose story is told in what is often thought to be the oldest book of the Bible, follows Esther. For the student interested in chronology, biblical time lines are readily available elsewhere.
An acquaintance recently asked if I would be including a section on the reliability of the biblical texts. I told him, much to his chagrin, that I would not. I intentionally avoid such matters as inerrancy, inspiration, poetic license, apologetics, and theological debates. Nor do I seek to present the Bible as a grand narrative. There are biblical scholars and theologians who are far better equipped to handle these areas of study than I am. My aim is to present figures in Scripture as the Bible portrays them—nothing more, nothing less.
It is true that many readers of the Bible challenge its reliability, though not always so lightheartedly as George Gershwin envisioned in Porgy and Bess. “The things that you’re liable to read in the Bible,” sings Sportin’ Life, “ain’t necessarily so.” This volume, however, is not for believers only. The Bible is universally hailed as a singularly great collection of ancient literature. Biblical stories and quotations have become embedded in our language. The Bible is the best seller of all time. Publication, circulation, and translation statistics are mind-boggling. Yet biblical literacy even among devout Christians is shockingly low. The Beloit College “Mindset List” for the class of 2016 supports this conclusion: “The Biblical sources of terms such as ‘Forbidden Fruit,’ ‘The writing on the wall,’ ‘Good Samaritan,’ and ‘The Promised Land’ are unknown to most of them.”[2]
Hopefully this book will serve to enlarge the illustrious world of the Bible for believers and skeptics alike.
But even believers struggle with believing the Bible. So it was with Billy Graham. Early in his ministry he was wracked with doubts and at a turning point, not knowing which way to go. He later recalled being alone on a moonlit night at a mountain retreat center in San Bernardino, California. He gripped his Bible and prayed a prayer that would define his life: “Father I am going to accept this as Thy Word—by faith. I’m going to allow faith to go beyond my intellectual questions and doubts, and I will believe this to be your inspired Word.”
Intellectual questions and doubts naturally arise when we read Bible stories because to our rational minds they often seem so utterly unbelievable. Perhaps we need a new frame of reference. When we open the Bible we should enter its pages with an attitude of Bring it on! Only then will we see the power of this incredible book.
Bible people are part of my earliest memories. As a child they effortlessly inhabited my psyche. I looked forward each summer to vacation Bible school. Then on graduating from high school, I enrolled in a Bible college, transferring later to a liberal arts college where I graduated with a Bible minor with four semesters of biblical Greek under my belt. I have been a member of three different Bible churches and have for some three decades taught in Bible colleges and seminaries. I have truly been immersed in the Bible my entire life. In writing this volume, however, I have come to love the Bible as never before. For the first time ever I have been able to relax and allow the Bible to simply speak for itself, without fighting to make it suit contemporary mores and my own tastes. It is my hope that readers will come to love the Bible as I do.