Chapter One

When I was in the sixth grade, a building was going up across the street from my school. Like most ten- or eleven-year-old boys, I preferred watching bulldozers in action and concrete being poured to whatever was being written on the blackboard. I spent a lot of sixth grade gazing out the window. I don't think I learned anything that year.

The redbrick structure I watched rising with such absorbed fascination was a church. Unlike the soaring Gothic cathedrals of Europe or the formidable fortress-like stone church my family attended, this was not a typical church. It was being built in the shape of a mighty boat. Presumably, it was Noah's ark. Most of us have a mental picture of Noah's ark and we all think it looks like a cute tugboat with a little house on top.

Except that Noah's ark didn't look anything like that. You can look it up yourself. Right there in Genesis, you'll find God's Little Instruction Book, a set of divine plans for building an ark. Unfortunately, like most directions that come with bicycles or appliances, these are a little sketchy, providing little more than the rough dimensions of 300 by 50 by 30 cubits (or roughly 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high). God told Noah to add a roof and put in three decks. Beyond that, God's instructions came without a diagram, unless Noah threw away the blueprints when he finished. So we should count Noah putting this thing together in time to beat the rains as one of the first miracles.

Many years after I gazed out that classroom window, I discovered that the original Hebrew word for "ark" literally meant "box" or "chest" in English. In other words, Noah's ark actually looked like a big wooden crate, longer and wider than an American football field, and taller than a three-story building. So the architect who designed that church to look like the Titanic may have understood buttresses and load-bearing walls. But he didn't know his Bible.

He wasn't alone. Millions of people around the world own a Bible, profess to read it and follow its dictates. Many say they study it daily. But most of us have never looked at a Bible, despite insisting that it is important. According to one recent survey, nine out of ten Americans own a Bible, but fewer than half ever read it. Why? For most folks, the Bible is hard to understand. It's confusing. It's contradictory. It's boring. In other words, the Bible perfectly fits Mark Twain's definition of a classic: "a book which people praise and don't read."

Not only do we praise the Bible, but we quote it daily in public and private. It permeates our language and laws. It is in our courts for administering oaths. Despite the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, it is on the Capitol steps when America inaugurates a president. It is cited by politicians and preachers, playwrights and poets, peace lovers and provocateurs.

As its phenomenal sales prove, the Bible holds a special place in nearly every country in the world. The worldwide sales of the Bible are literally uncountable. It is even tough to keep track of all the translations of the Bible that exist around the world. There are complete Bibles in more than 40 European languages, 125 Asian and Pacific Island languages, and Bible translations into more than 100 African languages, with another 500 African-language versions of some portion of the Bible. At least fifteen complete Native-American Bibles have been produced. The first Native-American translation, completed in 1663, was made into the language of the Massachusetts tribe, which the Puritan colonists then promptly wiped out.

In English, there are more than 3,000 versions of the entire Bible or portions of the Bible. The King James Version, first produced in 1611, and the Revised Standard Version remain the most popular translations, but publishers thrive on introducing new versions and "specialty" Bibles every year. The Living Bible, one contemporary, paraphrased version, has sold more than 40 million copies since 1971. Around the world, active Bible study classes attract millions of students. So, whether we worship in some formal setting or not, it is clear that people of nearly every nation remain fascinated by the Bible and its rich treasury of stories and lessons.

To many of them, it is still the "Greatest Story Ever Told." For millions of Christians, the Old and New Testaments make up the "Good Book." For Jews, there are no "Old" and "New" Testaments, only the collection of Hebrew scriptures that are equivalent to the Christian Old Testament. In spite of these differences, the common chord for Christians and Jews is strong: these books have been the source of inspiration, healing, spiritual guidance, and ethical rules for thousands of years.

The Bible is clearly many things to many people. The problem is, most of us don't know much about the Bible. Raised in a secular, media-saturated world in which references to God and religion leave us in embarrassed silence, we have wide-ranging reasons for this ignorance. For some, it was simply being bored by the drone of Sunday school or Hebrew class. Others received their Bible basics from the great but factually flawed Hollywood epics like The Ten Commandments, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and The Robe.

But most people simply never learned anything at all about a book that has influenced the course of human history more than any other. Public schools don't dare go near the subject of religion —perhaps we should be grateful for that, given their track record on the other three R's. The media generally limits its coverage of religion to the twice-yearly Christmas-Easter stories, unless there is a scandal or a lunatic-fringe disaster, like those of the Heaven's Gate or Branch Davidian cults. We've stopped sending our children to Sunday school or synagogue, and stopped going ourselves. The ignorance doesn't stop at the churchyard gates. In a 1997 survey, the London Sunday Times found that only 34 percent of 220 Anglican priests could recite all of the Ten Commandments without help! All of them remembered the parts about not "killing" and not committing adultery. But things got a little fuzzy after that. In fact, 19 percent of these priests thought that the eighth commandment is "Life is a journey. Enjoy the ride."

At least they didn't think it was "Just do it."

Even those who think they know the Bible are surprised when they learn that their "facts" are often half-truths, misinformation, or dimly remembered stories cleaned up for synagogue and Sunday school. For centuries, Jews and Christians have heard sanitized versions of Scripture that left out the awkward, uncomfortable, and racier Bible stories. Sure, most people have some recollection of Noah, Abraham, and Jesus. But they are less likely to know about the tales of rape, impaling, and "ethnic cleansing" routinely found in the Bible. These are timeless stories with timeless themes: justice and morality; vengeance and murder; sin and redemption. Pulp Fiction and NYPD Blue have nothing on the Bible!

There was Cain knocking off Abel. Noah's son cursed for seeing his drunken father naked. Abraham willing to sacrifice the son he desired all his life. The population of Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed for its wanton ways. Lot sleeping with his daughters. A tent peg driven through a man's head in Judges. King Saul asking young David to bring him a hundred Philistine foreskins as a bride price to marry his daughter. King David sending a soldier into the front lines so he could sleep with the man's wife. Then there is that ever-popular tale of wise Solomon threatening to cut a baby in half. But did you know that the two women who brought King Solomon that baby were prostitutes?

Raised in a traditional, Protestant church with a full menu of Christmas pageants and confirmation classes, I thought I possessed a fairly solid biblical education. In the annual Christmas pageant, I rose from angel to shepherd to Joseph —a nonspeaking role; Jesus' earthly father stood mutely behind Mary with nothing to say. I never made it to the plum role —one of the "Three Kings" who call on the infant Jesus. They had the coolest costumes. Three very tall brothers in my church always got those parts. I didn't know until much later that they weren't three "Kings" at all but magicians from Iran.

While attending a Lutheran college and later, Jesuit Fordham University, I continued to study the history and literature of the Bible. But then, in writing an earlier book called Don't Know Much About Geography, I posed a few simple questions related to the Bible:

"Where was the Garden of Eden?"

"What is the world's oldest city?"

"Did Moses really cross the Red Sea?"

That's when I got some surprises. In researching the world's oldest city, for instance, I learned that Joshua's Jericho is one of the oldest of human settlements. It also lies on a major earthquake zone. Could that simple fact of geology have had anything to do with those famous walls tumbling down? Then I discovered that Moses and the tribes of Israel never crossed the Red Sea but escaped from Pharaoh and his chariots across the Sea of Reeds, an uncertain designation which might be one of several Egyptian lakes or a marshy section of the Nile Delta. This mistranslation crept into the Greek Septuagint version and was uncovered by modern scholars with access to old Hebrew manuscripts. While it would not have been as cinematically dazzling for C.B. DeMille to have Charlton Heston herd all those movie extras across a soggy bog, this linguistic correction made the escape from Egypt far more plausible.

To me, the fact that the Exodus, one of the key stories in the Bible, was garbled by a mistranslation was a striking revelation. And it set me to thinking. How many other glitches are there in the Bible? How many other "little" mistakes in translation have blurred our understanding of the real story? After all, the Bible has been through an awful lot of translations during the past two thousand years, including, only in fairly recent times, into English and other modern languages. Moses and Jesus never said "thee" and "thou." In fact, even the name Jesus is a muddled translation of the Hebrew name Joshua. In the words of one politician, "Mistakes were made." They were compounded over time. What if one of those medieval monks had slipped a bit with his quill when he was illuminating a manuscript? Or perhaps one of King James's scribes had too much sacramental wine the day he worked on Deuteronomy.

My questions about the Bible took a more troubling turn when I wrote Don't Know Much About the Civil War. I discovered that Christian abolitionists and defenders of slavery both turned to the Bible to support their positions. Slaveholders pointed to the existence of slavery in biblical times, as well as laws and biblical commands requiring slaves to be obedient, to justify America's "Peculiar Institution." Abolitionists cited Jewish laws for emancipating slaves and sheltering runaway slaves, New Testament verses that suggested freeing slaves, and Jesus' commandment to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." How could the Bible be right for both of them? The moral quandary pitting slavery against abolition marked a turning point in American history: for the first time, doubt was cast on the Bible's authority.

Copyright © 1998 by Kenneth C. Davis