ari :)’s Reviews > The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary > Status Update

Chronicles was a quick read—it is effectively a (self-censored) summary of material we've seen in Samuel and Kings. and with that, I have now read the whole Hebrew Bible. damn.

well that sucked. Ezra-Nehemiah (in theory two books, treated as a unit since Late Antiquity) is a collection of documents relating to the founding of the Second Temple and the canonization of the Torah. they are mostly lists and imperial edicts. the rest is a staunch polemic against the intermarriage of Jews with the local population, enforced by banishment and violence. now to read Chronicles, and we're done!

Daniel is a weird little book. it points forward in time, for the most part: angels have names, the dead are resurrected on Judgment Day, and the post-facto (!) prophecies are about Greece and Rome. much closer to Christ's milieu than that of the Yahwist. on to Ezra and Nehemiah!

the Book of Esther is a raunchy, violent comedy culminating in the bloody revenge of the Jews against those who would wipe them off the face of the earth. that is to say, it roughly shares a plot with the 2009 Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds. in this video essay i wi

i took my time with Ecclesiastes. much like Job, this is a dissenting voice in the Biblical canon: if Job asks whether God is just, Ecclesiastes asks what we should do in light of our ephemerality. he doesn't give us a straight answer, but rather works through contradiction and dialectics. as is often the case in the Bible, Ecclesiastes is possessed of a rare beauty; thought expressed through prose poetry.

Lamentations is not a fun read. it is in all likelihood the eyewitness testimony of a refugee fleeing the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE, and it is truly, truly bleak.

(the text, traditionally read during Holy Week, has been set by a number of composers; Couperin's "Leçons de ténèbres" are a favorite)

done with Ruth! a lovely pastoral vignette about a young Moabite widow and her mother-in-law negotiating the patriarchy and finding themselves around good people. on to Lamentations.

Job is... troubling. the questions of divine justice posed by the book, in utterly stunning language, are left completely unresolved in the end. God is omnipotent, certainly, but is He just? even He admits that Job "spoke rightly" (דיבר נכונה) in the end.

done with Proverbs. a strange book, full of pragmatic advice from the Iron Age—better sleep on the roof than with a nagging wife, beat your children regularly, that sort of stuff—and very little of the grand historical narrative of the rest of the Hebrew Bible. the concluding poem, Éšeṯ Ḥáyil, is quite beautiful though. on to Job!!

done with Psalms. within these poems, products of the cult around the Temple in Jerusalem and often hidebound and conventional, there are genuine jewels of myth and faith and great humanity to be found. i particularly liked 114 and the songs of ascents—131 above all.