The Bible Isn't Fake... It's Just Not Always Sharp

Don't panic, it will make sense with a short story

Tennesseans are not used to this much snow and barely survived. Make fun of us. I don’t care.

After six days of isolation due to the 2024 Snowmageddon, we spent the day at our friends’ house for hours of much-needed connection. The kids had the time of their lives sledding outside and magically avoided broken bones. The adults had hot cocoa and snacks inside because adult bones- well, at least my adult bones, wouldn’t dare. One of the kids ran upstairs and came back down with big news: “The sword upstairs is fake!”

We laughed, trying to figure out what he meant.

Turns out there was a sword on display upstairs from a movie my friend was in— it was a gift from the production company to take home as a souvenir. My friend quickly said, “It’s not fake. It’s just not sharp.”

I instantly thought, “This captures how my relationship with the Bible has changed in adulthood.”

The first time my undergraduate professor said there were other flood narratives in the ancient world that predated the one we have in Genesis, I remember panicking: “The sword is fake!” This happened hundreds of times in my 20s, when I was faced with evidence that bucked up against my inherited beliefs and threatened the “realness” of the Bible. At that point, the only options I had were real or fake, literally true or false, trustworthy or propaganda.

Those options did not set me up for success. I couldn’t ignore the complexities of the Bible because it’s really, really complicated. Being intellectually honest required that I move beyond fundamentalist binaries and into complexity.

Just the other day I was reading the beginning of Exodus when Moses was placed in the river, and my footnotes said this: “This is reminiscent of a theme- an abandoned or exposed child who is rescued and eventually grows up to perform some heroic deed- that turns up in a wide variety of other literature. The story closest to the Exodus account is the Legend of Sargon from Mesopotamia, which tells the rise to power of a Mesopotamian king from around 2300 BCE. Like Moses’ mother, Sargon’s mother places her baby in a reed basket, seals it, and set it adrift on a river. Like Moses, Sargon is then taken from the water by the one who eventually adopts him….Moses has ‘hero’ written all over him.”

I read that and thought, “Cool!” and moved on with my life.

Maybe you are already there and it wouldn’t phase you to know Moses’ story is not unique, but this is a huge area of growth for me. For much of my life, I thought the Bible’s authority or inspiration came from its uniqueness. Like… SINCE THIS IS GOD’S BOOK WRITTEN TO US, IT MUST BE COMPLETELY UNLIKE ANYTHING ELSE AND PERFECT AND VOID OF CULTURAL INFLUENCE.

So to learn the Bible did not come from a cultural vacuum was scary. But it didn’t have to be. The Bible never claims to come from a cultural vacuum. I had expectations for it that it doesn’t even have for itself.

Just because it’s not sharp, doesn’t mean it’s fake. Just because Moses’ story is not unique, doesn’t mean it is not inspired. Just because there are other flood narratives doesn’t mean the narrative in Genesis isn’t valuable. Things don’t have to be literally true for them to be true.

The more I study the Bible, the more I realize it will not adhere to binaries. We cannot use a “true or false, real or fake” framework when it comes to our complicated, ancient, sacred Scriptures. It is not a fair expectation. Instead, at least for me, I am training my brain to tolerate nuance: Real, not sharp.

-Savannah

Writing Prompt: What does the story of the “fake sword” bring up for you? Does it resonate with any part of your faith journey?

Recommended Reading: A More Christlike Word by Brad Jersak. I’m more than a hundred pages in and it’s been a beautiful, soft look into a more Christlike way of reading the Bible,