/lit/ - Literature

>>19254536
>The Israeli psychologist

>>19088788
>So don't expect there to be one authoritative reading that fixes everything (although people will often present theirs this way with shocking confidence, naturally). Again one of the simplest but most disappointing readings of Job is that it's simply a composite narrative, written at various stages, possibly adapted from another source, with various editors and rewriters trying to answer to the problem of evil (why does Job suffer despite not deserving it?), in ways that subsequent writers found unsatisfying. Apparently someone found it satisfying so long as Job gets a happy ending, even if his family and animals are all dead. That doesn't really do it for us today.
>That's the irreligious answer anyway. You don't have to accept it completely. Revelation may take many forms, for example dispensationalist revelation in which different esoteric levels of the text reveal themselves or are developed from the text in accordance with God's plan for mankind. Origen helped inaugurate the symbolic and esoteric reading of the Bible as against the literalist interpretation.
>Perhaps you're right and God really had to roll up his sleeves and slowly reform the Bronze Age world from within the almost completely corrupted material it presented itself in. Perhaps the flood wasn't a cruel act against a defenceless humanity but the sole remaining memory of an entire antediluvian, Lemurian/Atlantean epoch in which God and His angels actually lost a cataclysmic battle against evil (the Nephilim?) and had to wipe the slate clean. Thousands of years of antediluvian history are glossed over very quickly.
>It helps a lot if you value free will, which some Christians (Calvinists) and some Jews don't. If you value free will, then you have to take seriously that God gave man the ability to choose Him, but also to choose wrongly and be lost. If this is true, the bumpiness of the Bible becomes a brutal, almost embarrassingly real story of man's fuck-ups, rather than a confusing story of God not just making everything perfect the first time around. There are schools of theology which argue that God specifically restricted His will from determining creation. For example some argue that the angels are what we would be, perfect but unchanging and practically inert, if we weren't human. God made us, free and fallible, and not just the angels or more angels, for a reason.
>Am I just to understand them as fallen imperfect men?
>Boy, wait till you get to the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. All the familiar names are assholes who commit at least one or two inexcusable acts each. The Jews constantly fall into polytheism, human sacrifice, and moral degeneracy of every kind. It gets weirder, not less weird, from here on out, at least if you're expecting a kind of fairy tale narrative of "Hebrews good, why you should become Hebrew."
>But again, think of the peculiarity of a moral people chastising itself and even cataloguing its failures to be better than its surroundings.

What books are shilled in popular media despite being mediocre literary works?