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I WAS TRYING TO READ IT BUT I COULDN'T REALLY UNDERSTAND ANY OF IT. THE PSALMS ARE TOO CRYPTIC FOR MY DENSE BRAIN, I THINK. IS THAT NORMAL AT ALL?
The main reason the Bible has survived and been revered for so long is because it's such a huge, steaming pile of ambiguous crap that people have always been able find just about anything they want to confirm their personal prejudices and basic human idiocy somewhere in it, and because people who have a deep need to control other human beings have used the so-called Word of GOD to guilt people into conformity and compliance.
If you're involved in health care, you don't read the Roman author Galen for advice on how to treat leukaemia. If you're a farmer, you don't pay any attention to ancient Greek texts which claim female ewes are born when the wind is from the south when the mother is mounted by the ram, and male lambs are born if the mother ewe is mated when the wind is from the north.
So, apart from an effort to understand the narrow, ignorant perspectives of an aggressively expansionist iron age tribal people who lived in a harsh desert environment, or maybe to try to get your head around the equally ignorant, bigoted mindset of today's Bible bashers, why the hell would you want to read the book?
There’s plenty of other good fairy tale books out there. Why don’t you just read them instead?
“The books you think I wrote are way too thick. Who needs a hundred metaphors to figure out you shouldn’t be a dick?”
- From the Perspective of God by Bo Burnham
Yep same. It's as if it was made vague intentionally so people could get clout from their "interpretations" or to spend 2 hours every sunday just to explain that shit to everyone else....
Romans is my favorite book because it’s pretty straight forward. I once did a month of Psalms and I was also confused at some points! That’s ok :) I encourage you to keep reading though. Maybe try a difference version too.
Try a newer translation. I can never make heads or tails of the King James version.
If the Bible were written today, the editor would send it back to the author, asking them to focus on coherence and continuity. The amount of contradictions is overwhelming.
Consider the Harry Potter series; it's a much better series of the same genre.
Yessse i know its fuckin impossible to understand. Old english bullshit. How about instead of "Thou shalt not kill" say something like "do not kill"
Someone once told me Shakespear wrotethe bible. Well not originally but the versions that say stuff like thou shalt noteth fucketh thine neighbor's wife, thou shalt noteth coveteth thine neighbor's ass".
The King James translation of the Bible was published in 1614, which was just a year after Skakespeare wrote his last play. So it is true that the English of the KJ version of the Bible is the same as that of Shakespeare's plays and poetry, but not even a rationalist, anti-religious cynic like me would believe that ol' Will wrote the text of the King James Version. Unlike virtually everything actually in the Bible, there is strong historical evidence of the translation and publishing history of the KJV.
The Psalms aren't really supposed to "make sense". Sure, they mean something, but each Psalm is a completely different piece of text than all the other Psalms.