Remember Resilience? Reasons for Reading the Bible, Today.

One century in the life of the Kingdom of Judah — mostly in the 8th century BCE — includes one queen and four kings ruling the House of David in Jerusalem, three of them assassinated, four major wars with neighboring nations, an ongoing war between Judah and Israel, at least 20,000 slain soldiers in battle, and multitudes more unrecorded civilian casualties on all sides.

All of that — in just five chapters of the Book of Chronicles, the chapter we read this past week, with only two weeks to go before we wrap up three and a half years of 929 daily chapters below this bloody Bible belt. What a week.

So what about this ancient history is so important? What lessons do we learn from reading through these sacred scriptures? And what are the lessons not learned — the traumas that keep repeating themselves? What do we do with this history, this legacy, here in the midst of war and violence in our own world?

Jacob Wright and other scholars remind us that Chronicles isn’t just keeping score of kings and corpses. It’s rewriting history to make a point: the community survives not only by winning battles, but by holding on to the dream of repair — Tikkun.

Wright reminds us that the Hebrew Bible emerged from centuries of loss, displacement, and rebuilding — not in spite of those crises, but because of them. Chronicles, in his reading, is not just history but nation-building literature: it tells survivors, “Yes, we’ve been fractured, invaded, betrayed — and still we endure.”

Chronicles knows the cost of war, but it also knows the cost of forgetting who we are when the fighting stops. Over and over, in between the campaigns and the coups, we get images of faith at play for the common good — rebuilding the temple, restoring the covenant, re-establishing justice. These moments of repair are small compared to the carnage, but they are what hold the story — and the people — together.

Tikkun is not naïve optimism. It’s the stubborn, deliberate choice to fix what’s broken, knowing it will break again. It’s what keeps a century of conflict from being just a century of loss.

We can read these chapters as a grim tally of kings and wars. Or we can read them as a long, hard-won meditation on resilience — on the work of generations before us, those who wrote this book and those who’ve been reading and interpreting it, to keep trying, repairing the world while the world is still on fire.

In “Why the Bible Began” Wright writes:

“Going forward, the Bible can continue to shape our public cultures if we are willing to assign it a new role. It cannot be taken as normative. But it can be mined for wisdom – wisdom that bears directly on questions of corporate life, common welfare, and collective survival.”

If the Bible was indeed written as a response to a national crisis, then what’s within these chapters — and between the lines — can give us tools and recipes for our resilience and repair, right now and for whatever comes next.

While this Below the Bible Belt journey will come to an end on August 27, these conversations and questions will continue in the months ahead, with monthly Zoom sessions exploring lessons learned and unlearned from the Bible, and how we can — and maybe must — continue the massive, ongoing project of moral repair that centuries of wrestling with this sacred text invite us to pursue.

Our celebratory Zoom session on August 28 is open for all — link in the post — and more information about monthly events is coming soon.

I hope that every page of this page-turner helps us be part of the healing so that peace may yet prevail.

Thank you for joining me below the Bible belt.

Shabbat Shalom.

Please join me n August 28th, 5pm ET online , for a final and festive Zoom conversation that will wrap up this journey.

We will mark this completion with gratitude, have time for some questions, and start wrapping up and reflecting on what it means to read the Hebrew Bible in the 21st Century.

This is open to all readers - zoom info below.

PLEASE NOTE:

There will be monthly zoom sessions between September and December to continue reflecting on this journey, and to plan for its next phase.

Information coming soon.

These Zoom sessions will be open and free for ALL subscribers. A recording of the session will be shared with all subscribers during the following week.

Next Zoom session:

August 28th at 5pm ET.

Zoom Session Login Info:

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84558113928

Meeting ID: 845 5811 3928