Many people put the Bible or other scripture on their desert-island reading lists. It could be that those books must be read with the kind of focus only a castaway would have. Or it could be that a holy book can kill any amount of time. Once upon a time, the only books in many houses were scripture. When I was a child, we had the ISKCON Bhagavad Gita with commentary by Prabhupada, and nothing else. So I read that, often.
Reading the scripture is useful. We are often told we mustn’t do this or that because our shastra s forbid it, so it makes sense to read the shastra s for ourselves, just in case. Why take another person’s word for what is prescribed and what is proscribed? Maybe a believer does not parse meanings when it comes to her own creed, but even on first reading it I found the Gita’s message unified and simple. (It didn’t forbid sewing on a Friday, but I may find that in another good book.)
There is nothing so simple about the Bible. I began to read parts of the King James Version in college on the suggestion of one of my professors, in order to understand the world view of 19th century writers. I did not look for truth or doctrine, only for insight into what compelled Jane to leave Rochester, or why Hetty Sorrel must confess in order to be “saved.” When some verse chafed my soul, I ran lightly over it, like a fire walker who does not dawdle on burning coals.
The Bible is not one book but a body of literature. Its stories don’t always help us with right and wrong. Rachel steals her father’s sacred images and is never pulled up. Joseph uses a seven-year famine to acquire the people’s land for the Pharaoh, a tradition governments carry on to this day. God Himself seems rather too involved in parcelling out real estate. Many chapters end with a census enumerating how many were in this tribe or that. There is prophecy, dire and reassuring. There is sudden, mesmerising poetry. There are parables. And there is testimony. In the New Testament, Peter says that in telling the life of Jesus, “We have not followed cunningly devised fables ... but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.”
Even apart from the text, the Bible offers endless complications. Whether there are 47 or 39 books is itself an article of faith. The history of their various translations and editions is as long as the text itself. My professor pointed me to the King James because that was the translation Thomas Hardy and Charlotte Bronte read. If I want other English translations, the Septuagint, the Wycliffe, the New International Version, and a hundred others are available online. It’s all online, in fact, the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Koran. But we’d do best to keep hold of our actual good books, just in case we do end up on that desert island.
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