Bible Uncommentary: Title/Preface/TOC

"Thou shalt not add to, nor take away ..."

 

Bible Uncommentary

Joel Matthew Rees

Copyright 2022 Joel Matthew Rees

Amagasaki, Japan

Preface

Marion G. Romney sometimes used a rather colorful analogy for scripture study, comparing the dependency on scripture commentary and other interpretive aids to drinking downstream from where the cows are wading. 

(He was not the only apostle to use the metaphor of drinking directly from the source, but others usually used less colorful terms. Oh. For what it might or might not be worth, Elder Romney was a cousin of Mitt Romney's father.)

Like Elder Romney, I recommend drinking from the source, that is, getting your knowledge of scripture from scriptures and prayer. It just makes more sense to prioritize what the scriptures themselves say over what mortal, fallible men and women say about them.

That said, my initial (teenage) attempts to read the scriptures mostly burned out in sleepiness and cognitive dissony. (Let me use dissony here. Cognitive dissonance isn't quite explicit enough.)

I had heard at school, and in Sunday School, so many opinions, ideas, ideologies, traditions, and interpretations that conflicted with what I was reading, that reading sometimes gave me a headache, if it didn't put me to sleep first.

Sleep is a useful thing when studying anything. When you're awake, it's easy for your conscious mind to try to force meaning and interpretation into what is familiar and already understood. The sleeping state of the mind is often much more able to deal with conflicts between what you are studying and what you expect. Sometimes you even remember that dream state consciously when you wake up.

Which is to say, not all of the downstream pollution comes from commentary and scripture study guides, etc. Some of the misunderstanding comes from what you think you already understand.

I could compare this to, say, learning in first grade that you can't subtract large numbers from small. It makes sense, really, that you can't take away what isn't there. 

And then another teacher explains about extending the number line in the negative direction from zero, and then another explains about debt and promises to pay back.

And you learn early on that you can't take a square root of a negative number, and then later they mention imaginary numbers -- hopefully in context of a second number line at right angles to the one you've been used to using, so you can see that imaginary numbers are actually real.

Extending your knowledge into the range where the simpler rules you start with change in application can be a source of frustration, dissonance, and just plain getting tired.

I could theorize about education techniques and more careful wording when presenting simpler rules, but language itself is not perfect. Words have meaning, and so does grammar, but the meanings can change in new contexts. And sometimes, ...

When I was in middle school ...

I called it junior high school. In Japanese, it's 中学校 (chūgakkō). 中 (chū) is middle, so that's middle school. But, at the time I'm writing this, most English language materials for Japanese students still translate that to English as junior high school. 

The language changes.

Up until the time I was in middle school, most of the context in which I had heard the word "virgin" used referred to the virgin Mary, and generally in the context that she was pregnant with Jesus -- Christmas, you know. In my mind, virgin was a fancy, maybe polite, way of saying pregnant.

Then, in middle school, a friend and fellow (but disaffected) Christian asked me if I were a virgin. I treated the question with contempt, which I'm afraid led to misunderstanding.

(And that cute cheerleader I had that terrible crush just happened to be there and listening. チェッ。)

Then I went to the trouble of finding out what the word really means, and I was too embarrassed to correct the misunderstanding. I'm afraid I'm going to have to confess that mistake in the resurrection, since I've lost the opportunities to do so in this world.

We aren't perfect. We do not understand things perfectly. Learning comes line-upon-line, precept-upon-precept. And we need to give ourselves and others room to make mistakes -- not just room to make mistakes, but space to correct them.

It took me something like five years of regular scripture study after I had served two years as a missionary to get past the bulk of false assumptions that made it hard to study the scriptures. My first time through each book in our standard works (what some would call our canon) except the Pearl of Great Price was mostly a buzz of concepts that I just missed. Similar to the way listening to a Buddhist priest read お経 (o-kyō) can mostly go in one ear and out the other, the words seemed to go in one eye and out ...

I'm pushing a metaphor too far. But you get the idea. I had to have a fair amount of patience, a certain amount of willingness to let go of things I didn't understand, the first several times through. You might say, a lot of patience. The two years dedicated to missionary service helped establish that habit of patience.

And I still don't expect that I have to understand everything, now. I have a lot of living still to do.

Some people would find fault with me for putting up with the things I don't understand. Some would even call it "submitting to grooming". 

If that's the case, what excuse do we have for any attempts at any sort of education at all? If students shouldn't be patient with the learning processes because it's hard and requires changing the ways we think and do things, what point is there in education, and in life itself? But I don't have time to debate education methods here.

There is a choice to be made, and it may take an entire lifetime to make it:

Do we trust God? Or do we assume that the universe is out to get us?

I personally figure, even if destruction turns out to be our ultimate end, I'm going to look for meaning anyway. And the way I've chosen to look for meaning happens to involve studying the scriptures.

It's gotta be better than just deciding to seek destruction now.

With that apology, I have decided to share some of the things I have learned, and some of the things I have unlearned. 

For the record, Joseph Smith said (and I agree with him), 

We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.

(per the 11th Article of Faith of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). I'm laying out some of my beliefs. I do not intend to say anyone else must believe the way I believe.

There is a lot to share, so I'm going to take it a chapter at a time. 

(Yeah, this is going to be a huge project.)

Table of Contents

• Genesis
  
  • Ch. 1 (In the Beginning ...)
    
  • Ch. 2 (... And Not a Man to Till the Ground.)
  • Ch. 3 ()
    
• 
  

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False starts on this project:

• https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/in-beginning-gen-01-not-good-start-on.html
• https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/thoughts-on-bible-genesis-1.html