So You Want To Read The Bible
A friend of mine has posed a question to me: If someone, namely a nonbeliever more interested in an academic approach, has made the decision to read the whole Bible, what translation should that someone read?
Shortest answer: Don't.
Short answer: The NRSV (New Revised Standard Version), probably the Harper-Collins Study Bible version of it. If you're really invested in getting into it, get one of those study Bibles that divides the text into 365 days' worth of reading, and pace yourself accordingly.
Longer-than-you-wanted answer:
First sub-question: Do you really want to do this?
The reason I say 'don't' when someone tells me they're going to read the whole Bible is that it was never, ever, ever meant to be read that way. It wasn't! Saying you're going to read the whole Bible is like saying you're going to read the whole library -- there's a whole lot of stuff there, and some of it's going to go over your head, and some of it's weird and outdated, and some of it's predicated on books that aren't even in that library. The people who wrote the Bible did not, not a single one of them, mean for you to read the whole Bible. I've never read the whole Bible.
But! As long as you recognize the scope and magnitude of your goal, go for it!
Second sub-question: What are you expecting a translation to look like?
There are basically four kinds of Bible translations you're going to find out there: translations made for believers; historical translations; translations made from an academic perspective that still hedge enough to keep believers happy; and super-specific, small-scale translations. Let's learn more about those!
Translations made for believers are pretty much exactly what they sound like. The translation is informed by the theological agenda; a tie, as it were, goes to YHWH. This is not to say that they're wrong, so much as to point out that when the original texts can be translated in one of several ways, these versions will take the option that best suits their particular creed. They are also often simplified (sometimes to a shocking degree!) so that they're easier for layfolk to understand. Examples: New Life Version, Good News Bible, The Message, any of the Messianic translations.
Historical translations are translations made for believers, but I made a separate category because they're given a lot of extra, traditional authority. Most prominent among these is the King James Version (KJV), of course, which has actually seen such a resurgence in use in recent years that you'll find a lot of Evangelical Protestants out there who'll argue any other version -- including the Hebrew and Greek texts -- is corrupted. Examples: KJV, New King James Version, American Standard Version.
Translations made from an academic perspective that still hedge enough to keep believers happy are complicated beasts. On the one hand, they want to be accurate to the original texts and give appropriate context. On the other hand, they're often sponsored/co-staffed by faith-based institutions who have a real stake in not just tossing out the window what people want to be in there. So they're a weird combination of wanting to acknowledge that there are different ways to translate the text and wanting to keep happy the believing audiences who may buy their translations. Examples: NRSV, JPS Tanakh.
Small-scale translations are usually single books or collections of books translated with very specific purpose, usually in an attempt to preserve the rhythm/flow of the original text. They are very specific and can be hard to come by, but when you find them, they're often excellent. However, they tend to be a bajillion dollars each, and they vary wildly depending on the academic, so I can't really recommend this as an approach if you're committed to reading the whole Bible. Examples: Five Books of Moses, Give Us a King!
Here's a fun way to tell kind of what kind of translation you're looking at: Go to Exodus 10:19 and see what body of water is described there. If it's the Red Sea, you've got one of the first two. If it's the Red Sea but there's a footnote that it could also be the Reed Sea, you've got one of the third. If it's just the Reed Sea, you've got one of the fourth kind.
For my money, the NRSV and the JPS Tanakh are the way to go if you've got an academic/folkloric interest in the whole thing. In fact, I'd say that the Tanakh is the better translation -- though for reasons that should, uh, be kind of obvious, it doesn't include the New Testament. Thus, the NRSV is pretty much the scholarly standard, especially among people who want the Full Jesus Experience.
Third sub-question: How are you planning to read it?
If you answered that question 'well, I think I'll start at the front and work my way toward the back,' no. Don't do it. You will give up before you get out of the second half of Exodus. You may not even survive through Jacob's lengthy blessings at the end of Genesis. If you do make it to Leviticus, you will be left wondering not many chapters later what the hell you're doing with your life.
But you can't skip the boring parts, either, because even the boring parts matter. Here is a thing to consider: Literacy and writing materials were in such short supply in the ancient world that few people wrote down anything they didn't think was hella important, and nobdy kept copying and recopying text for generations if it didn't have some meaning to them. Every stupid law, every 'begat', every story told three different times -- all of these were considered important enough to preserve.
The Jewish order of the Hebrew Bible seems a little more sensical, breaking the TaNaKh into the Torah (first five books), Nevi'im (prophets), and Ketuvim (writings). Except if you tackle that in order, that puts the history that contextualizes the prophets' grievances after the prophets themselves. And that still doesn't fix the problem about how you're never making it out of Leviticus alive.
And sure, the New Testament looks a little more manageable, but that's only because you're not seeing the problems in the structure: the same story told four times, the third telling of that story continued, lots of letters arranged by length instead of subject or chronology, and a crazy dream vision in coded language. Good luck with that.
...Well, great. You can't read it in order, but you can't skip anything either, and it might not even make sense when you get there. And what's an Apocrypha, and who left it here in the middle? Good grief! What the hell are you supposed to do?
You do what all those old martial arts movies always taught you to do! You ask the masters.
It's dangerous to go alone! Take this:
When I teach Bible, depending on which part I'm teaching, I assign either The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, by Michael Coogan or The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, by Bart Ehrman. (The nice thing about those, too, is that if you're not doing this for school purposes, nobody gives a damn what edition you get! You can pick up some super-cheap copies that way.) I do not agree 100% with their analyses of things, but they're at least a place to start.
Because a major problem with reading the Bible is that people think they can just pick it up and dive right in. After all, don't all the bumper stickers call it God's Little Instruction Book? Aren't instructions easy to follow? If we just plow forward, won't we make it?
Well ... no. You wouldn't know the Enûma Eliš if it kicked you in the head, much less how Genesis 1 doesn't really make sense without it. You have no idea about calf-worship culture in the Northern Kingdom or how the whole Moses and the Golden Calf bit is actually a polemic against worship outside of Jerusalem. You've never heard of Antiochus IV Epiphanes and you can't tell from a translation which parts of Daniel are written in Hebrew and which parts are written in Aramaic. You're not likely to notice that Son of God and Son of Man are not interchangeable terms. And no amount of just picking up the Bible and going with it is going to give you any of that background. Thus, guides like Coogan and Ehrman are important for the context you don't know anything the hell about.
If you're looking for something a little more like a class, Yale has Open Courses in Religious Studies where you can watch the videos and/or read the transcripts.
Be warned, though, that Hayes' and Martin's classes are biased -- and by that I mean that the classes are slanted toward their respective professor's particular interests. That means that while I'm often rocking on with Martin's hot takes on gender and how he's all over Paul, I often wish Hayes would stop it with the wisdom literature already, okay? But that's what you get when you take a class! You get personality!
But wait, there's one more sub-question:
What are you expecting to get out of this?
If you're doing this out of general curiosity, to see things in context, then sure! Go for it! It's good literary discipline and quite interesting, to boot!
If you're doing this for basically any other reason, though, you're going to be far better off reading what other people have written about the Bible. Don't worry, they'll quote the text for you -- and in doing so, they'll often give their own nuanced translations, which is super! But I would say that if you want to know What The Bible Thinks About [X], the worst way to find that out is asking the Bible to its face. The Bible is often impenetrable, and it is often meant to be impenetrable. Why not trust people with better battering rams?
And in that case, I can give much more specific reading recs based on more specific queries!
In a lot of ways, it comes down to this: The Bible is great! The Bibe is nifty! I like it! And culturally, what we think it says is so much more important than what it actually says. I'm the kind of person who thinks that's equal parts awesome and troubling: awesome because it's great to acknowledge it as a living document with dynamic instead of static relevance, troubling because claiming supreme authority based on the infallible wisdom of something you basically just made up five minutes ago has troubling implications for ... uh, everything. And one of the best ways to counteract the cultural weight of that latter problem is to reject the idea that the way to get to know the Bible is to pick it up in isolation, start from In the Beginning, and hope you make it to the last Amen in one piece.
Shortest answer: Don't.
Short answer: The NRSV (New Revised Standard Version), probably the Harper-Collins Study Bible version of it. If you're really invested in getting into it, get one of those study Bibles that divides the text into 365 days' worth of reading, and pace yourself accordingly.
Longer-than-you-wanted answer:
First sub-question: Do you really want to do this?
The reason I say 'don't' when someone tells me they're going to read the whole Bible is that it was never, ever, ever meant to be read that way. It wasn't! Saying you're going to read the whole Bible is like saying you're going to read the whole library -- there's a whole lot of stuff there, and some of it's going to go over your head, and some of it's weird and outdated, and some of it's predicated on books that aren't even in that library. The people who wrote the Bible did not, not a single one of them, mean for you to read the whole Bible. I've never read the whole Bible.
But! As long as you recognize the scope and magnitude of your goal, go for it!
Second sub-question: What are you expecting a translation to look like?
There are basically four kinds of Bible translations you're going to find out there: translations made for believers; historical translations; translations made from an academic perspective that still hedge enough to keep believers happy; and super-specific, small-scale translations. Let's learn more about those!
Translations made for believers are pretty much exactly what they sound like. The translation is informed by the theological agenda; a tie, as it were, goes to YHWH. This is not to say that they're wrong, so much as to point out that when the original texts can be translated in one of several ways, these versions will take the option that best suits their particular creed. They are also often simplified (sometimes to a shocking degree!) so that they're easier for layfolk to understand. Examples: New Life Version, Good News Bible, The Message, any of the Messianic translations.
Historical translations are translations made for believers, but I made a separate category because they're given a lot of extra, traditional authority. Most prominent among these is the King James Version (KJV), of course, which has actually seen such a resurgence in use in recent years that you'll find a lot of Evangelical Protestants out there who'll argue any other version -- including the Hebrew and Greek texts -- is corrupted. Examples: KJV, New King James Version, American Standard Version.
Translations made from an academic perspective that still hedge enough to keep believers happy are complicated beasts. On the one hand, they want to be accurate to the original texts and give appropriate context. On the other hand, they're often sponsored/co-staffed by faith-based institutions who have a real stake in not just tossing out the window what people want to be in there. So they're a weird combination of wanting to acknowledge that there are different ways to translate the text and wanting to keep happy the believing audiences who may buy their translations. Examples: NRSV, JPS Tanakh.
Small-scale translations are usually single books or collections of books translated with very specific purpose, usually in an attempt to preserve the rhythm/flow of the original text. They are very specific and can be hard to come by, but when you find them, they're often excellent. However, they tend to be a bajillion dollars each, and they vary wildly depending on the academic, so I can't really recommend this as an approach if you're committed to reading the whole Bible. Examples: Five Books of Moses, Give Us a King!
Here's a fun way to tell kind of what kind of translation you're looking at: Go to Exodus 10:19 and see what body of water is described there. If it's the Red Sea, you've got one of the first two. If it's the Red Sea but there's a footnote that it could also be the Reed Sea, you've got one of the third. If it's just the Reed Sea, you've got one of the fourth kind.
For my money, the NRSV and the JPS Tanakh are the way to go if you've got an academic/folkloric interest in the whole thing. In fact, I'd say that the Tanakh is the better translation -- though for reasons that should, uh, be kind of obvious, it doesn't include the New Testament. Thus, the NRSV is pretty much the scholarly standard, especially among people who want the Full Jesus Experience.
Third sub-question: How are you planning to read it?
If you answered that question 'well, I think I'll start at the front and work my way toward the back,' no. Don't do it. You will give up before you get out of the second half of Exodus. You may not even survive through Jacob's lengthy blessings at the end of Genesis. If you do make it to Leviticus, you will be left wondering not many chapters later what the hell you're doing with your life.
But you can't skip the boring parts, either, because even the boring parts matter. Here is a thing to consider: Literacy and writing materials were in such short supply in the ancient world that few people wrote down anything they didn't think was hella important, and nobdy kept copying and recopying text for generations if it didn't have some meaning to them. Every stupid law, every 'begat', every story told three different times -- all of these were considered important enough to preserve.
The Jewish order of the Hebrew Bible seems a little more sensical, breaking the TaNaKh into the Torah (first five books), Nevi'im (prophets), and Ketuvim (writings). Except if you tackle that in order, that puts the history that contextualizes the prophets' grievances after the prophets themselves. And that still doesn't fix the problem about how you're never making it out of Leviticus alive.
And sure, the New Testament looks a little more manageable, but that's only because you're not seeing the problems in the structure: the same story told four times, the third telling of that story continued, lots of letters arranged by length instead of subject or chronology, and a crazy dream vision in coded language. Good luck with that.
...Well, great. You can't read it in order, but you can't skip anything either, and it might not even make sense when you get there. And what's an Apocrypha, and who left it here in the middle? Good grief! What the hell are you supposed to do?
You do what all those old martial arts movies always taught you to do! You ask the masters.
It's dangerous to go alone! Take this:
When I teach Bible, depending on which part I'm teaching, I assign either The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, by Michael Coogan or The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, by Bart Ehrman. (The nice thing about those, too, is that if you're not doing this for school purposes, nobody gives a damn what edition you get! You can pick up some super-cheap copies that way.) I do not agree 100% with their analyses of things, but they're at least a place to start.
Because a major problem with reading the Bible is that people think they can just pick it up and dive right in. After all, don't all the bumper stickers call it God's Little Instruction Book? Aren't instructions easy to follow? If we just plow forward, won't we make it?
Well ... no. You wouldn't know the Enûma Eliš if it kicked you in the head, much less how Genesis 1 doesn't really make sense without it. You have no idea about calf-worship culture in the Northern Kingdom or how the whole Moses and the Golden Calf bit is actually a polemic against worship outside of Jerusalem. You've never heard of Antiochus IV Epiphanes and you can't tell from a translation which parts of Daniel are written in Hebrew and which parts are written in Aramaic. You're not likely to notice that Son of God and Son of Man are not interchangeable terms. And no amount of just picking up the Bible and going with it is going to give you any of that background. Thus, guides like Coogan and Ehrman are important for the context you don't know anything the hell about.
If you're looking for something a little more like a class, Yale has Open Courses in Religious Studies where you can watch the videos and/or read the transcripts.
Be warned, though, that Hayes' and Martin's classes are biased -- and by that I mean that the classes are slanted toward their respective professor's particular interests. That means that while I'm often rocking on with Martin's hot takes on gender and how he's all over Paul, I often wish Hayes would stop it with the wisdom literature already, okay? But that's what you get when you take a class! You get personality!
But wait, there's one more sub-question:
What are you expecting to get out of this?
If you're doing this out of general curiosity, to see things in context, then sure! Go for it! It's good literary discipline and quite interesting, to boot!
If you're doing this for basically any other reason, though, you're going to be far better off reading what other people have written about the Bible. Don't worry, they'll quote the text for you -- and in doing so, they'll often give their own nuanced translations, which is super! But I would say that if you want to know What The Bible Thinks About [X], the worst way to find that out is asking the Bible to its face. The Bible is often impenetrable, and it is often meant to be impenetrable. Why not trust people with better battering rams?
And in that case, I can give much more specific reading recs based on more specific queries!
In a lot of ways, it comes down to this: The Bible is great! The Bibe is nifty! I like it! And culturally, what we think it says is so much more important than what it actually says. I'm the kind of person who thinks that's equal parts awesome and troubling: awesome because it's great to acknowledge it as a living document with dynamic instead of static relevance, troubling because claiming supreme authority based on the infallible wisdom of something you basically just made up five minutes ago has troubling implications for ... uh, everything. And one of the best ways to counteract the cultural weight of that latter problem is to reject the idea that the way to get to know the Bible is to pick it up in isolation, start from In the Beginning, and hope you make it to the last Amen in one piece.