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Comment by p0d | Hacker News Reader

I read through the bible every year and each time it shapes my thinking. For example, I was reading Exodus this morning about how we should care for the foreigner. I imagine several thousand years ago this was pretty radical. It also seems very relevant today.

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Not only that, but the 4th commandment (of the 10) was changed to include their experience in Egypt related to "foreigners" and the sabbath.

Exodus 10:11,12 (NASB)

"...but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; [in it] you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you. For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day and made it holy."

Then notice the change in Deuteronomy, it's specifically to address the experience of being a "foreigner" and being mistreated in Egypt.

Deut 4:14,15

"...but the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; [in it] you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant or your ox or your donkey or any of your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you, so that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to observe the sabbath day."

It's really sad when people who claim to be "Christian" do not understand that the most foundational teachings of God in the bible include caring for foreigners in a very personal and special way.

I've been listening to the Bible when I drive somewhere almost every day since the beginning of last year. I use Prof. Horner's plan, which divides it into ten lists, and provides a consecutive chapter to read or listen to for each lists. So, ten chapters a day at 1.25x (it sounds like a New York cadence) takes about 25-35 minutes. The YouVersion Bible app makes it automatic for me. The idea is that you get an intense survey of all the books. Here's a brief description of the plan: https://www.bible.com/reading-plans/19-professor-horners-bib...

It has gradually shaped my thinking in ways that is hard to describe. I've really began to understand just how much the Old and New Testaments tie together; many ideas and concepts are repeated several times in different books.

does the YouVersion app continue all 10 lists for the full length of the plan? Each list has a different number of chapters and I haven't done the math, but it looks like they aren't going to evenly line back up after 1 or two cycles. Looks like an interesting plan to me, but based on my YouVersion experience it seems like they are probably non-ideal. Obviously you like it, so I'm curious how it works.

Yes, that is the beauty of the plan. The shortest list is just the book of Acts (28 chapters), and the next shortest in the book of Proverbs (31 chapters). When a list ends, it starts over again. So over the course of the year, you'll go over those books ~12 times. The longest two lists are the Pentateuch books (200+ chapters) and the prophetic books (250 chapters). So on any given day, you are listening to various books that keep changing, and you get a mix that helps you form connections between the books.

I have just two minor quibbles with the YouVersion plan:

1. As the chapters are being read, each chapter is announced with just the number, not the book. So you have to guess the book from the context. This was confusing the first couple months, until I became familiar enough with them to be able to guess the book from the content and the context of the chapter.

2. The plan is meant to continue indefinitely, but the YouVersion plan must be restarted after the first cycle (250 days). It irks the perfectionist in me, but in practice it's no big deal.

I second that. For a book that's the foundation of our entire Western Civilization it's amazing that so few read it these days. No wonder our civilization is breaking down. Not to mention how mythologies in so many cultures have embedded remnants of its first book, Genesis. Also the inspiration of countless masterpieces of literature like the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (1989), mentioned at the top of this list.

> For a book that's the foundation of our entire Western Civilization

That might be putting it a bit strongly. "western civilization" derives from ancient greek society, which wasn't christian, but contained many concepts that are considered foundational to our society (such as democracy).

Actually learned persons in the west have considered democracy a terrible form of government that inevitably gives rise to tyranny for millenia. It's hardly foundational, rather it's a known anti-pattern. Republics were an attempt to harness the benefits of democracy without the drawbacks.

It may be putting it a bit strongly, but biblical references and allusions permeate the Western canon and Western culture pretty thoroughly. For the last 500 years it was the only book that nearly everyone had read. Before that it was for over a thousand years the only book everyone knew at least some of.

Few books have ever had such penetration of a culture. The Koran, the Analects, the Pali Canon are perhaps the only meaningful comparisons.

I think you're greatly overstating the literacy levels of Medieval Europe.

The 500 years figure I chose was not a coincidence. The printing press and the Reformation are connected. If a person in Europe or the New World could read, they would have read some or all of it.

Before that familiarity came from weekly readings at Mass, which is why I talked about partial familiarity for the thousand years prior.

I'm an atheist, but there's a difference between dismissing the book's contents and dismissing the impact and influence of the book's contents.

Luckily some of the major narration lines, thanks to the modern art forms, are in the very accessible form:

http://www.thebricktestament.com/

https://www.amazon.com/Book-Genesis-Illustrated-R-Crumb/dp/0...

And there are also people who e.g. carefully count the details, so that we don't have to:

https://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/2006/08/who-has-kil...

But of course always check the references. Use the work of textual critics to establish what is in which version of the original text, and compare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_criticism#Bible

I set out to read through the bible once, but I don't believe I can get much from the prose style of KJV or similar. I decided on some website that would send me a free "modern", more readable, version. Unfortunately, they never sent it and I moved on.

Is there a version you might recommend? Or just advice on reading the archaic prose?

For reading, I like the English Standard Version ['ESV']. Kind of splits the difference between erudition and enjoyability.

KJV is cool for the Cormac McCarthy-esque prose [strike that, reverse it], sounds great when declaimed, but it is kind of a chore to machete through as a reader.

There are so many variants these days, it's not unlike choosing a Linux distro

Yeah, ESV and NIV (new international version) are pretty solid. Also the NKJV (new king james version) is a good one.

http://bible.com has ~60 english versions and a way to show 2 in parallel if you want to compare a few. http://biblegateway.com lets you look at 5 at a time... I thought I remembered one that let you do arbitrary number, but I can't find that one.

Came here to say this. It's the most printed book in the world for a reason.

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