> _For centuries, scholars from many backgrounds have worked on discovering how the Bible came to be. They were religious and non-religious, Christians and Jews. Their task was not to prove whether the Bible’s words were divinely revealed to the authors. That is a question of faith, not scholarship. Rather, they were trying to learn the history of those authors: what they wrote, when they wrote, and why they wrote. The solution that has been the most persuasive for over a century is known as the Documentary Hypothesis. The idea of this hypothesis is that the Bible’s first books were formed through a long process. Ancient writers produced documents of poetry, prose, and law over many hundreds of years. And then editors used these documents as sources. Those editors fashioned from these sources the Bible that people have read for some two thousand years._ > -Richard Elliot Friedman --- ## Exegesis Exegesis. (noun). 1. Critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially of scripture. This book is a translation of the bible under a very nonstandard interpretation: the interpretation that parts of the bible were originally intended, at least in part, as satire. This book is not meant to be a parody of the bible. We aim to analyse and translate the book from the above perspective, not to argue for the perspective itself. This strengthens the case for the bible as timeless truth, and does not in any way diminish it. Nothing is more timeless or true than satire. The most timeless language of humanity since the beginning of our species has always been humor, irreverence, satire, lols. This book is a tribute to The Old Lols. Because that is what we believe the bible is. It's timeless truth in many ways, but in just as many ways, to the extent that it is timeless truth, it only manages to be so because it first manages to be funny. The best and most true news is the news that places humor before truth, and thus tells the truth through humor. We believe a large part of the bible's popularity in the early days arose from tapping in to this timeless piece of human nature. You need not believe anything specific about any god or gods to read this book. We aim to make no point about the existence or nonexistence of any (G/g)od(s) in order to see how incredibly hilarious this book is. Only by approaching the book under the assumption that it is satire can we see the integrated whole that is this text. With that, we now turn to the book. --- ## Axioms In this file, we the Authors make our first attempt, from a developers perspective, to reverse engineer the bible data format. We assume the following as given: - The authors of the bible were human. - Therefore, both as regards their individual personalities, and as regards the cultures from which they came, we assume the authors of the bible possessed (at least on average) the attributes that have been documented in all known human cultures. For a list of these attributes, see [[Universals]]. - By "on average," we mean that while individual human beings may lack, for example, empathy (in psychopathy) or theory of mind (in autism), on average in any group, most members will possess most human universals, both individually (as cognitive capacities) and culturally (as general features of the cultures to which they belong). Given these assumptions, we now proceed to our reverse engineering analysis of the bible data format. --- ## Goal Our goal in this file is to translate the main events of the Torah from the perspective of the Authors. In what follows, we assume without proof that the original Authors of the bible were: (1) humans, and (2) possessed something like what we would today call "human nature," including at minimum Donald Brown's list of human universals that have been found in all known cultures. From that perspective, what follows is a translation of the main events in the Torah, using the following rule of thumb: 1. For each sentence, we ask not "What does this mean," but "What would cause an Author to write this sentence specifically?" We extend this frame of mind to every aspect of the writing, from word choice, to grammar, to symbolism, to the cultural and historical references the Authors chose to include. Such a reading leads to an unavoidable conclusion. This entire book, or at least large parts of it, may have been something like satire. In other words, the genre of the bible may in fact be the genre of the book you are now reading. Rather than attempt to defend this surely indefensible position, we will now proceed to the bible. Enjoy. Love always, -LD --- ## Names Proper Translations of Names: - Adam: Guy (Adam means "Human", "Man", "Dude", or "Guy" in Hebrew) - Eve: Vivian (Eve means "life" or "the living one" in Hebrew.) - Joseph: Addam (Means "May he add" or something like "Add 'em") - Moses: Drew (Moses means "Drew" as in "I drew something out of the water.") - Gershom: Wallace (The name "Gershom" Moses's son means "foreigner." Possible translations include Wallace, a Scottish name meaning foreigner or stranger; Barbara, meaning "foreign woman"; or Gallagher, meaning "descendant of foreign helper.")