Reading the Bible Differently: What Are We Missing? | Dror Ben Ami

You spent a lot of time looking at the biblical textual languages, metaphor, and comparative literature, and some of the interpretations are very different from the one people grew up hearing.

Mm-hmm.

What was the moment or process that made you start questioning the familiar interpretation of sto- of these stories?

Okay.

So, uh, basically, um, I studied comparative literature, and I s- I studied Japanese, Chinese, Greek and Roman, uh, literature, uh, European literature, American literature, and English literature.

And when you're doing that, you're studying, um, s- cultures, and you're studying style of language.

And during those years, I was given a book by, uh, Maurice Nicolle, but actually, it's Dr. Maurice Nicolle.

He was a psychiatrist, uh, during World War I, and by World War II, he had s- drifted into, um, mysticism.

And after the war was over, he started studying, um, the Gospels.

And it was Dr. Nicolle's position that the stories in the Old and New Testament, uh, probably were not literally true, but they were spiritually too, meaning they had a message that was spiritually and very important, but this message was based in metaphors.

So for example, a very important metaphor is food.

And Paul of Tarsus, for example, said that milk is a s- easy to understand spiritual teaching, but meat is a difficult to understand religious teaching.

And in Hebrew, the word for Gospels actually means meat.

It's, it's, uh, the word in Hebrew is basar.

So in Hebrew, we would say like the meat of Mark or the meat of, uh, Luke.

Another metaphor with food is, um, bread.

And in Israel, we say that the Torah, the five books of Moses, is the bread of life.

Um, Jesus said that his body was bread, and in the Roman Catholic Church, they give you a little piece of bread, and you eat it during the, the service.

Uh, Jesus said that his blood was like wine.

So in the Roman Catholic Church, they drink a little wine.

And, um, the idea here is that each f- fruit or bread or meat, each type of food represents a different type of knowledge.

So if you accept that and, and you understand that, so then we have the story of, um, Mary and Martha f- arguing in the kitchen, and Mary wants to leave the kitchen and go sit next to Jesus.

Now, in stories like this, it's important to take the name Jesus and put in Word of God.

So Mary is saying that she wants to be closer to the Word of God, and Martha is saying, "No, it's important that we work in the kitchen." But if you understand that food is a metaphor for knowledge, then the kitchen becomes a metaphor for the school or a school.

So Martha is saying, in order to get close to the Word of God, we have to study in a school.