Some Stories Are Meant to Disturb Us
What one of the Bible's strangest stories taught me about reading Scripture.
Welcome to today’s reflection.
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Over the years, I have accumulated quite a collection of Bibles.
They occupy an entire shelf in my study, each one waiting to be pulled out whenever I wonder whether another translation might shed fresh light on a difficult passage. Sometimes it does. A familiar verse can suddenly come alive because a different translator has chosen a slightly different word or phrase. It is one of the joys of reading Scripture in more than one translation.
Then there are those passages where every version seems just as baffling as the last.
I reach for a study Bible, consult a commentary, or, if I am feeling particularly determined, open my Bible software and begin digging into the Hebrew or Greek. Occasionally, that solves the puzzle. More often, it simply introduces another possible interpretation. Before long, I have many respected scholars all saying slightly different things, each making a convincing case for their own conclusion.
There are moments when I wish the biblical writers had added just one more sentence. Just enough to explain why this story was included, or what they wanted us to notice.
But perhaps that silence is intentional.
Perhaps if every difficult passage came neatly packaged with an explanation, we would lose something important. We would stop wrestling with the text. We would stop pondering it and returning to it. We would stop discovering that the same story can speak differently at different stages of our lives.
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One passage that has always left me feeling this way is the story of Jael.
