Introduction

agree that the Bible should be read with reverence. But part of the Bible’s richness stems from the fact that it comes out of and refl ects real life in all of its complex beauty and weirdness. The Bible deals with the sublime and the very mundane—important issues like the meaning of life and the majesty of God, but also such run-of-the-mill matters as breeding animals and managing your own sex life.

Since the Bible comes from a different time and culture, modern readers may tend to miss or misunderstand some of those earthy texts, especially if our focus is on the divine and holy. We hope this book increases readers’ appreciation for the richness and diversity of the Bible’s contents.

We also aren’t out to ridicule Bible scholarship. Heck, we’re Bible scholars ourselves. We have doctoral degrees from universities that, at least until this book was published, were respected institutions of higher learning. We also teach Bible in a liberal arts college, although it’s our wives who really earn a living for us. We love what we do. And we love our fellow Bible geeks, er . . . scholars.

Of course, just because a person is a scholar doesn’t mean his or her interpretations are right. And just because an interpretation is new doesn’t mean it’s correct. Bible scholars sometimes fl oat ideas that are lead balloons. We’ve included a few examples of these in this book because they’re so odd and preposterous that we couldn’t resist taking a swipe at them. But for the most part, each of the proposals we discuss has some merit and needs to be carefully evaluated before it gets a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.

So how do we decide if an interpretation is right or not? Bible scholarship isn’t math or rocket science, so the rules are less clear, but there are still plenty of ways to get at the truth by weighing the linguistic evidence, looking at archaeological findings, and using plain old common sense. Each case has to be evaluated in its own xi