There are two common opinions about the Bible that I run into when I teach:  one is that the Bible is a book composed completely of answers, that it is a fixed, immutable book that has been read everywhere and at every time in the same way.  The other is that being religious is a matter of being certain, of having all the answers and no longer needing to inquire after anything.

I think instead that religion is a matter of profound and poignant questions - why do we suffer?  What happens after we die?  Why did I feel that great sense of oneness and peace on the mountain top or by the seashore?  I think religion, any religion, asks us repeatedly who we are and what we aim to do; they try to urge us towards the necessary, the right, the better (which may be, every morning, doing the ritual that permits the sun to rise for the whole earth.)

Of course one does not need religion to ask these same questions and to make the same effort towards goodness:  these are universal human questions and most thoughtful people want to do what's good, whether by obligation or compassion.  Yet whatever way one chooses to approach those questions, they are at times overturning and disturbing.  Some are drawn to religion, perhaps, from a wish never to ask them again - but anyone who stays in a religion will encounter them, again.  (Unless you believe you are perfect and utterly done with your soul's own growth.)

One might also expect that the Bible (and perhaps other scriptures, as well) is much more like a hands-on self help book.  There are many ways of reading the Bible to make it to speak to a moment in history (like some of the pesherim in the Dead Sea Scrolls) or to an individual situation, yet even with them the plain sense of some verses (2 Chron 8:18) can scarcely be understood individual, personalized direction to anyone's immediate circumstances.  A thoughtful reading of the Bible shows it to be wrestling with the patterns of history, with human injustice, with differences between societies, with the nature and intentions of God.  It is sometimes dark and cynical, it asks profound questions (only to leave them hanging in air) it is tremendously beautiful, it celebrates sex, and over it all is a God who curses fig trees - even though the Establisher of lights and seasons knows full well it isn't fig season.  To say the Bible is a book of answers is, I think, to not give its mysteries and paradoxes their full due.

 I also don't think history, even doing history with the Bible, is a matter of answers.  History is full of places where our information is partial or does not point clearly to any sole conclusion.  Part of what delights me about the finds of a new archaeological dig or the recovery of a new ancient manuscript is that it shows more clearly what was going on, back then:  my greatest historical questions come from a lack of information.  (Just what kind of a Jew was Paul before he became a Christian?  The more one learns about the Judaisms of his time the less he fits into them  .... one prominent scholar was forced to conclude that either the apostle or his parents must have been very recent converts.)  I do see my field solving puzzles, bit by bit, as we carefully examine what we know and learn - "But well that's settled" is a surprisingly rare thought for a professional historian.

 There are plenty of sites with "Bible and "Answer" in their titles:  I wanted one that did justice to the questions and spoke to why history is a matter of questions.

-Kushana

Note to self: Talk about the Big Questions, belief on Why are we born, Why do we die, where do we come from before we're born, where do we go after we die, what is the meaning of life, what is the purpose of life, the afterlife, ghosts, reincarnation, transmigration, Heaven, and Hell.