I'm about to start reading the Tanakh.
What should I expect?
>>7579309
delusional nonsense
>>7579313
this
read the god delusion instead
The Septuagint with squiggles all over the place.
>>7579309
Just read it yourself. It asks questions and teaches you to think and ponder and to not accept everything at face value but symbolically.
>>7579309
Pretty nice stories about troubled characters traveling, early on it has an epic tale feeling to it and early on it becomes a lot more about wars and kingdoms in the broad plot sense.
Also has some interesting allegories and allusions to how civilization developed, obviously the relationship between man and God, the human condition, the harmony between the rational consequential nature of life and the mystical layer beneath it.
Best characters: David, Johnathan, Elijah and Samson.
Best arcs: Genesis, Sodom & Gomorrah, Joseph and his Coat of Many Colors, exodus from Egypt, Samson's death, David & Goliath, Jonah and the Whale.
As for the most poignant and meaningful book I'd definitely have to choose Psalms.
OP here. Things I was not expecting (thus far):
1. God creates "the earth" out of extant material, rather than from scratch.
2. God doesn't create creatures and plants, the earth and the sea do.
3. God doesn't prohibit Adam from eating from the tree of life, only from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
4. An incredible amount of ambiguity in the text.
>>7580637
If this is bait then fuck off. It's not funny and overused. Believe what you want.
>inb4 a gorillion autists fall for your bait
>>7580641
Is this pasta? Because I was being completely serious.
>>7580637
>1. God creates "the earth" out of extant material, rather than from scratch.
>2. God doesn't create creatures and plants, the earth and the sea do.
These are retconned in the second part of Genesis (because it focuses more on man than the creation of the Earth)
>>7580655
Technically the second part of Genesis is retconned by
>1. God creates "the earth" out of extant material, rather than from scratch.
>2. God doesn't create creatures and plants, the earth and the sea do.
>>7579309
Are you reading it cover-to-cover, or are you moving from one section to another as you read?
Also, with that image and you referring to it as the Tanakh, are you reading it in Hebrew, or in translation?
>>7580692
Cover-to-cover and intranslation because I'm a silly goy that never fails to disappoint.
>>7580705
Okay, i wasn't doing the >translations meme or anything, just wondering. And I was wondering about the reading order since it seems like a lot of the time cover-to-cover reading gets bogged down in Leviticus, and people (myself included) have found it helpful to alternate among different books/genres (such as among the Torah, Prophets, and Writings specified in the name Tanakh). (I've been working on a Bible reading guide for /lit/ in fact, so I'm doubly curious right now about how others go about it.)
>>7580718
Neat. I'd be interested to see that when you're finished.
I'm confident I can power through any of the dryer books but I suppose I'll only really know when I get there.
>>7580749
*drier