Big Ideas · Prologue
The Bible is a monument to defeat
When Babylon razed Jerusalem in 586 BCE, Judah should have vanished like its neighbors. Instead, a few circles of scribes built their people's literature around the catastrophe itself.
Owning a failure can be the start of a future.
Dig deeper
Conquered peoples usually buried their humiliation and celebrated past glory. As far as we know, no other defeated capital answered its destruction with an enduring literary monument to its own downfall. The Bible's scribes gathered the fragments of their pasts and wove them into one sweeping story of a people.
Source: Why the Bible Began, pp. xiii–xiv
Reader thoughts
Loading comments…