The Bible

Haha, yeah there is a lot of madness already even tough I'm only just beginning, what the fuck did Noah do in his tent with his son when he was drunk? Also I kek'd when Lot's daughters made him drink wine and impregnated them, wtf?
Do priests read this shit out loud in the church or do they just skip those parts?

Yeah I'm not expecting that I will fully understand it the first time I read it but I'm hoping to atleast go deeper than surface level.

What book is good?

I'd recommend jumping to the New Testament after Genesis & Exodus, reading it through and then going back to the OT.
Hebrew minutiae get really boring later on and many people give up on it. The NT is is a great read though.

The Catena Aurea is a collection of commentaries on the Four Gospels by the Church Fathers, compiled by St. Thomas Aquinas.

But muh autism wants to read it cover to cover.

> what the fuck did Noah do in his tent with his son when he was drunk?

I've read a couple things that suggest it was just shame over nudity and Noah blames Ham for seeing him naked instead of blaming himself for getting drunk and passing out naked. So Noah curses Ham's son Canaan over it.

Madness..

I'm reading the Codex Sinaiticus cos its the oldest version of the bible.
which one are you reading?

KJV, because it's probably the most influential.

ESV because I read the first answer here.
quora.com/What-is-the-best-English-translation-of-the-Bible-And-why

This is probably a good reading list. I guarantee that you will burn out, especially if you're doing it for more secular reasons.

That's how I interpreted it.
What is so strange about these stories? Don't you believe man is fucked up enough to do those things

>What is so strange about these stories? Don't you believe man is fucked up enough to do those things
No, just didn't really expect them. Also hard to believe that Lot didn't notice what was happening.

St John Chrysostom goes through most books of the Bible almost verse by verse. Here is a wonderful resource that has a lot of Chrysostom in addition to many other Fathers: newadvent.org/fathers/index.html

St Gregory of Nyssa in his "The Life of Moses", follows the scriptural record of Moses's life and unpacks many of the deep spiritual truths found therein.

Other particular works I can recommend:
>St Irenaeus - Against Heresies
>St Athanasius - On the Incarnation
>St Maximos the Confessor - On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ

Other Fathers to read, without particular works:
>Justin Martyr
>Clement of Alexandria
>Basil the Great
>Gregory the Theologian

>early church fathers
which ones specifically? there are a few

Unironically Peterson's lectures on the Genesis stories

These would be good if you trimmed down each one to the 15 minutes of content that is actually about the Bible and not Dostoyevsky, Jung, Solzhenitsyn, The Lion King, etc.

pray before you read the bible, you will gain full wisdom

try harder
still sad and you're not going to get into heaven listening to snakes preach the gospel user

Listen to this poster, for he speaks the truth

Existence is heaven

Agree to disagree

Careful. Mods will remove this thread. They are against all threads about the bible.

You need a little bit of commentary to understand the cultural context in which things were written, otherwise you'll just be lost in a lot of ways, but unfortunately most Christian commentators give just the opposite as you'll notice they have a tendency to treat pre-Christian Judaism as proto-Christianity rather than its own thing and to treat early Christianity as identical to whatever their denomination is. New Oxford Annotated Bible is the best I've seen for providing basic, useful information for understand the text.

The point of these stories is go give the origins of Israel and their neighbors. Tribes were viewed as the descendants of a single person with the name of that tribe. Moab, Amon, and Canaan were all tribes that were enemies of Israel, so they made a story about how Moab and Amon were the product of incestuous rape and Canaan was cursed by Noah to be subservient to the descendants of Shem, which included Israel. Basically a lot of the Old Testament is "fuck these other desert tribes, ours is the best and so is our God."

desu here's all the boring shit you can skip
>any or genealogy or census
>the building of the Tabernacle in Exodus
>maybe just skim Leviticus
>Deuteronomy (literally just a recap of Exodus-Numbers)
>the allotment of the land in Joshua
>Chronicles (literally just a recap of Samuel/Kings)
>probably not necessary to read all of Job, maybe skip to Elihu's speech after the first round of speeches
>probably not necessary to read all the psalms either if you don't want to
The rest is pretty interesting imo.

If you want someone to discuss it with and can tolerate a level of conversation barely above high school English class level, try visiting a church on a Sunday. Shit is free and your choice to self study proves you can stomach the less enjoyable parts of it, like singing awful Christian rock songs

That's not how it's meant to be read. It's a collection of books, a library, in one cover. It's not a novel. The different "books" are of different genres, some of which are not as interesting.

Do as user says. Read Genesis & Exodus (as well as the other three books of the Pentateuch if you are really committed) then skip to the New Testament. Then you can go back and read the Psalms & Wisdom books (Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Proverbs) and also the books of Kings. Then the Prophets if you like.

>don't read all of the best book in the entire OT
Definitely read Job.