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This article gets a few things right but the author doesn't seem to understand the full purpose of characters like David in the Bible. You don't even have to be
by farleykr 3y ago
This article gets a few things right but the author doesn't seem to understand the full purpose of characters like David in the Bible. You don't even have to believe they were real people or be religious, much less Christian, to see and understand their purpose.
Right in the beginning in the Eden narrative there's a prophecy about one who will ultimately defeat the snake. Characters like David are portrayed as anointed by God yet flawed because they are supposed to build anticipation for a true Messiah or Christ who will not make mistakes or sin and really, truly offer redemption for mankind and a return to union with God. As you read the Bible you watch each leader rise while hoping they will be the one to defeat the snake and then you return to anticipating the true king when they fall.
This is one of the reasons Jesus was consistently referred to as the "Son of David."
Jesus is presented as the true and greater version of every flawed leader of God's people who came before him, especially the big names like Noah, Moses and David.
What's interesting to me is that you don't even have to agree with the claims of the Bible to see how the characters function in the story. But as I've learned more and more about the Bible, it seems that most people make arguments about the claims of the Bible or its purpose as a religious text without understanding how it actually functions as a group of different stories and types of literature.
For anyone interested, Robert Altar's works about Biblical narrative and other literary styles delve deep into these subjects.
- empath-nirvana 3y agoI don't think that outside of a religious perspective, that a reading of the Bible as any sort of coherent overall narrative makes any sense at all, given the circumstances of it's composition. Different books of the bible were written by different people at different times, many of them were almost certainly edited by others at different times, and then it was all collected at a later time by other people for their own purposes. In particular, reading any kind of redemption narrative into the Hebrew bible is basically a christian viewpoint.
- farleykr 3y agoRedemption is absolutely baked into the Hebrew Bible. The claim that Jesus is the Christ is the Christian bit. The fact of multiple authors and time periods doesn't categorically negate the possibility of a coherent narrative. One may end up at the conclusion that there's no coherent narrative. But to correlate the impossibility of an overall coherent narrative with the fact of multiple authors over multiple time periods is to misunderstand the culture and circumstances that were responsible for its creation.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoI'm curious how the apocrypha fit into this. Books have been actively filtered in order to create a coherent narrative.
- farleykr 3y agoNow I'm curious too. What parts of the apocrypha would throw a wrench in the gears of an otherwise cohesive narrative? Also, maybe I wasn't as clear about my point as I could have been. By cohesive narrative I don't mean that the Bible reads seamlessly like a novel. I mean that it has very clear themes that are introduced and fulfilled over the course of the whole book.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoI don't know. That's why I'm curious. The apocrypha were removed for reasons, and I'd like to know why. This is not a topic I'm even remotely an expert on.