One challenge the writers of the Bible faced was the fact that there were no books. Written records were rare and took a lot of effort to produce, and there were a lot of different people in different places and situations the message needed to be able to reach. So the question is, how do you teach people, how do you educate them and guide them, how can you help them remember, if you can’t use books? And the answer is: songs, stories, and rituals.
Those are the sort of things people can remember. Those are the tools previous societies used to preserve and transmit knowledge. They’re unusually well suited for humans and play to our strengths. It’s a way to encode knowledge into our behavior and into the way that we see the world and the things that move us and trigger our memories. Not everyone can remember key points from a lecture. But most people can remember a song, a story, or a ritual.
And that’s what the Bible is full of, a record of the songs and stories and rituals of the people of Israel. It takes a little more work to draw out the underlying, encoded meanings, but it also means they’re embedded in something living and performative. So not only are they preserved, they are embodied in something more than just an intellectual proposition. You’re getting a story, people, words that delight and terrify and move you, a way to practice living. That may seem less straightforward to those of us today who are more used to plain prose and textbooks, and surely those have value. But the Bible wasn’t meant only for intellectuals. It was meant for all humans, in all times and places, the numerous children of Abraham, whether they can read or have been to advanced schooling, whatever time and place they live in, whatever their age or opportunities.
And the Bible does eventually get around to recording some letters that are more ordinarily prosaic. But even in those, in order to understand them you have to understand who they were being written to and what they were in reference to, and by and large they consist of a model of the sort of explication of the meaning and practicum of the stories, songs, and rituals we have been talking about. They are examples of how to draw out those lessons and apply them in practice, as well as plain instruction and advice. And they are still very personal, written by specific people to specific people. There is an underlying story that they are about.
So, as odd as the content of the Bible may seem to us today, there is a brilliance to it. The variety, the methods used. There’s a reason it’s able to be such a very, very, very old book but still be read and appreciated widely by people of all ages, education, language, and culture. That’s quite a feat. Very few essays from three thousand years ago (or even three hundred) are still being read regularly by such a wide and varied audience.
Making Nobody Happy 