What was your take on whats happening in the book ?

@Scottzillyun The gist of it is a people who are lost in every sense of the word when they feel their god has deserted them and left them enslaved in places like Babylon. They had to create a national story to keep them together and survive as a separate people. This started about 650 BC, I think. There two strands to the story - the priestly and the scribe - forgive me if memory serves me badly. That first shows up in the two different accounts of creation. Looking at the stories as written in the 7th century BC to create a past rather than document the past is the angle taken in the Yale lectures.

Ya are silly arent ya and cranky and not very fun or informative to talk to arent ya .
I did just block someone else for being like that .
Why learn math or spelling or language or anything at all when ya could be volunteering somewhere ? Blah blah blah .
Why try to understand something that has had such a grip on humanity ?
Now , I give your statement a tiny bit of credibility if I am willing ( which I shoulnt have to be ) to venture off into ' what you didnt say but might mean ' which Im assuming might be related to the common xian notion of studying the bible being a very repetitious chore that never ends.
But to me , studying , in this context , isnt a permanent continuos burden , more like studying a map as ya drive through a strange place and then not needing to do that any more after youve left that particular strange place .

@Scottzillyun oooohhhhh, the "block" threat, again. yawn

Those who guard their lips preserve their lives, but those who speak rashly will come to ruin.

I like that verse because it focuses on a certain type of talk. I hate all those other ones going on about the more talk, the more sinning you'll do.Then keeping quiet became secular wisdom too so now it's safer to stick on a pair of headphones than talk.

What happened?

@brentan studying religious history and the mental gymnastics scholars have gone through to justify violating the fairly good standards in the NT showed me it's all BS

@educatedredneck Good for you for not accepting it.

@brentan I drank the kool aid for nearly 21 years, wasted life man

@educatedredneck I suppose we wouldn't get to think of our years as wasted if we had never woke up to what was happening at all. I can only feel comfortable about wasted years and wrong decisions by putting a value on how it has formed the way I think today. And it is a hard but sobering truth for me to think that it simply had to be that way because if it had been some other way, it couldn't have been me.