On Inspiration and the Bible [View all]

Some people try to look backwards at this, starting from some old Jewish philosopher and imagining that he imagined the real story of it all. Nonsense.

Where did the Bible come from? Ignoring the idea that the deity handed it down word for word to someone, it's pretty simple, really. Imagine some bronze age goatherds camped somewhere, sitting around the fire after sunset. A little child asks, "Where did everything come from." There's always a story-teller in a group. Humans have great imaginations.

So, one of the older gents around the campfire came up with a story about the beginning of time and the creation of the known universe, which wasn't very well known at all at the time. But he weaves his tale and everyone listens. Maybe someone has another question about his story, and he fills in the space with some other story.

Move ahead a couple of generations. Now, that original story has been told and retold and changed, with miscellaneous substories filling in the gaps when some bright kids point out those gaps. Other storytellers add to it, modify it, and it starts sounding like the first chapter of Genesis, pretty much.

Move ahead some more, and someone who is literate writes the story down, along with many other stories about Kings, deeds of derring-do, and commands of God and so forth.

And there you have it. It's all out of the imagination of a long line of storytellers, telling and retelling and changing and reforming stories to pass the time around the campfire. When those stories are old and fixed in their telling, they become scripture and are read and remain the same for centuries and even millennia. Once written, they are fixed in time and are no longer told in different words by the storytellers, who have changed their job titles to Rabbi.

Oddly enough, or not so oddly, many of the stories have connections to stories from other cultures that the wandering goatherds have encountered. When you share campfires, you hear lots of stories. You can borrow from those when your imagination flags, too.

Don't like my story? Tell one of your own, then. Maybe you'll start a new religion, too.