What is the Bible? How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything

This is a great book.

A book about the Bible? Really?

Yes. If you’ve forgotten (or maybe you never knew?) that the Bible is surprising and fun, even in its ancient antiquated ancientness, this book will help you see the surprising, subversive nature of stories like Noah and the flood or God telling Abraham to kill his son. Stories that seem barbaric on the surface are stories that invite you to ask questions. They’re stories that subvert themselves in order to say something about the God who loves, blesses, and graces. The point is that to take the Bible seriously you go below the surface level of any story. It’s one of the reasons why I feel so uncomfortable reading simplistic stories from a kid’s Bible to my 4-year-old daughter. The surface-level is often not the point. The point is what lies below the surface, turning upside-down the conventional wisdom about who God is.

I read it when it came out in 2017 and just read it again. There’s personality. Depth. It’s fun. It’s a book about the Bible that makes you want to read the Bible more and gives you hope that others reading the Bible might start loving people more and fighting less.

It’s pretty long—322 pages. But you can read the first 200 pages as a cohesive unit (even though he bounces all over the place, Rob Bell Style™), and then just enjoy the final 100+ pages of “The Questions That Always Come Up” after the fact. Even the endnotes are good, sort of an annotated bibliography or reading list with commentary. Just look at the table of contents—some of the chapter titles made me laugh out loud.

Here are a few of my highlights and takeaways.

But the Bible is a book about what it means to be human. And we are all, before anything else, human.

On the weirdness, in this case, of advice regarding throwing pearls to pigs:

Where does the one thing take you, and then why is the next thing after it? Why would the writer place them in that order?

And always, always keep in mind: the weirder, the stranger, the more unexpected—
it’s probably intentional.
That’s what’s so powerful about so much of the Bible. It’s about the disruption that occurs when you’re jarred out of your present mode of thinking and seeing.
It’s the moment of upheaval when you realize that the way you’re living or thinking or treating people isn’t working. You’re the one throwing pearls to pigs, and it’s absurd. And you need to stop.

On the flood:

But to dismiss this story as ancient and primitive is to miss that at the time this story was first told, it was a mind-blowing new conception of a better, kinder, more peaceful God whose greatest intention for humanity is not violence but peace and love.
It’s primitive, but it’s also really, really progressive.

On being human:

What does this story tell us about what it means to be human? We have tremendous power and ability as humans. We can invent things and build things and dream things up and then make them. It’s extraordinary, and it’s to be celebrated and enjoyed. (Say it with me now: HD flat screen. Chipotle. Almond Surfboards. Anything made by Apple. Rickenbacker guitars. I could go on. So could you.) We also have the tremendous capacity to use our energies and minds and power and abilities to further our own purposes through greed and empire building at the expense of those around us, making the world less and less of a peaceful place where everybody is thriving.

On death and resurrection:

Death is the engine of life. All around us, all the time. This death-and-life rhythm is built in to the fabric of creation.

So when you read the Bible and it tells the story of a death that is somehow the engine of new life in the world, this is not a new story. This is not a new truth. This is how the world has worked for a long, long time. This idea—this truth—did not come out of nowhere.

If you think about it, after the first 10 pages or so of the Bible, the story zooms way in to focus on one family: Sarah and Abraham’s. And the rest of the Bible is about their family. About that:

Now, let’s think about this in relation to the Bible. What is the Bible about? It’s about a tribe of people who have this sense that they are called to be a tribe unlike the other tribes. At that time, tribes existed to serve themselves, to accumulate and form alliances for self-preservation. But this tribe—this tribe starts with a story about a man named Abram whose God tells him that the whole world is going to be blessed through him. This tribe believes they have a calling that extends way beyond themselves, to the ends of the earth. It’s a tribe that exists not just for their own well-being but also for the well-being of all the other tribes.

That’s probably enough.

I read the Bible a lot and have for 20 years, since I was about 12 years-old. I like to read the Bible with other people, and do that quite a bit with friends and neighbors. This book makes me want to read the Bible even more. If you don’t read the Bible, but you’re curious, this book will give you about 50 ideas about where to start.