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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

As a non-religious myself, I can't understand how you found the willpower to read the Bible and even want to read it again. I tried reading some chapters and was either bored to death or couldn't understand the text because of how badly it is translated/written.

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For me, the Bible didn't become appealing until I aqcuired a fascination with ancient history. Being able to track the lineage of certain writings through the Bible is a massive thrill for me. Here's a few examples of what draws me in...

Famously, the story of Noah is also recorded in the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. One of the psalms in the new testament contains parts of the egyptian opening of the mouth ceremony, which I believe was also recorded in the book of coming forward by day (aka the egyptian book of the dead). The crazy thing about the book of coming forward by day is that parts of it were regarded by the ancient egyptians as being of immense antiquity, stemming from a pre-cataclysmic source thousands of years prior. If anyone is familiar with Plato's Crimeus and Timmeus, Atlantis was supposed to have founded Egypt as a colony, and if we're willing to humor this sole tenuous connection, we may consider that there are sections of the Bible containing quotes/memes/symbolism from Atlantian culture :)

This is all just food for thought, just one more way of approach the Bible as hypermedia (per se).

Religious myself. Agree that having a modern translation can make a great difference in readability. I've read parts of the King James translation, and the language makes it a though read.

Personally I enjoy this translation: https://www.jw.org/en/library/bible/study-bible/books/ I read it in Dutch, but it's available in multiple languages.

As a bit of an experiment (/procrastination) I randomly clicked through until I arrived at some text. I ended up Judges 19, which is a bizarre story of a concubine (*) that cheats, returns to her parents, then her husband (after a four month delay) goes and finds her there. There's an odd narrative detour where the father in law continues to pressure the husband to stay, but eventually he leaves. While stopped at a strangers home on the journey back, some bandits want to rape him but his host offers his own virgin daughter and the concubine instead, so they rape and kill the concubine. When the protagonist finally gets home he cuts up his dead concubine's body and sends the parts across the land.

This leads to a war (Judges 20) where tens of thousands of people were killed but I decided to stop at this point!

https://www.jw.org/en/library/bible/study-bible/books/judges...

Wikipedia article on the story:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levite%27s_concubine

(*) Searching afterwards, I found this is a somewhat rough translation of a role that doesn't exist in today's society: a lower status wife that hasn't been paid for (!) by her husband.

By the way: (would be an edit but it's too late)

This is not meant to imply any particular judgement on the bible in general or even this particular story. I just found myself on a journey that seemed to me to be very odd, and thought I would share in case others found it interesting.

You are right KJV isn't easy understandable ... the NWT is easy to read

NWT also contains small changes to accommodate the Russellites' belief system.

I don't even speak English natively and can read KJV. I guess it just isn't more difficult than reading in foreign language in general.

Update: Samuel Johnson's dictionary helps with word definitions from 18th century. Noah Webster's dictionary is good too.

Does that even matter though? The KJV was written to best fit in with Christianity in that period of time and situtation. You won't find a Bible or any religious text without bias from those who are translating it.

The dynamics of the KJV were different. N competing Versions had caused divisions among the people, so the king ordered the making of one universal standard. The translation committee was aware of the goal and tried to avoid bias. Curiously it didn't result in N+1 competing Versions, but KJV was almost universally approved and many older Versions were retired. Readers have been content for over four centuries now.

In the case of NWT I think the bias matters because JWs deviate fatally from Christian orthodoxy.

Note that the Christian Bible is not a single book but a collection. As such the order of the books within it is not optimized for comprehension.

New readers should start from Matthew.

Many of the English translations try to keep much of the paragraph structure from the older English translations which limits readability also. I'd encourage more radical translations like The Message over New King James as examples.

It's a collection elaborated over thirteen centuries. I think having in mind the shifting context of writing and the various forces bearing on it make it a far more compelling text. Otherwise a lot of it just reads like out of date mythology and antiquated propaganda. You can see the evolution of Canaanite polytheism to Jewish monolatry and monotheism over time, the political conflicts between the groups of the region following the Bronze Age collapse, the conflicts between Canaanite polities, the retcons to invent a unified Kingdom of Israel, the creation of a literate orthodoxy with the Babylonian exile etc. And that's just the Jewish stuff. The dynamics of Late Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity are also fascinating.

If there is a story, try to adapot it for nowadays. Keep asking what is the point of it and what would happen today.

Of course there are boring parts with family trees etc., so skip it.

try this: https://thebricktestament.com/legacy.html

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