Sorry I haven't replied sooner; I was away.
The long and short of it, THE SHORT FIRST, is this.
In the Bible, God said to Noah “I will establish My covenant with you and your offspring to come” – hence the term, Noahide Covenant. Noah’s offspring to come is all humanity. “When the bow (rainbow) is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant” – it is relevant today because this covenant will always be in effect. Noah was called “righteous” because he obeyed God’s instructions, just as Abraham was later called righteous because he obeyed God. This is all straight from the Bible, not from any commentary. Noah and Abraham were Gentiles; Israel did not yet exist. These Gentiles were called “righteous” because they obeyed God, God’s instructions, that we call the “Noahide Covenant” or “Noahide Laws.”
When you read the Bible, from the beginning until the life of Abraham, you find many instructions from God to people – all Gentiles. After this point in Tanakh, God gives additional laws (aka instructions, obligations, commandments) to specific people whose descendants are Israel, the Jews, and those Gentiles who “convert” to become Jews. Israel is taught to not only obey the precepts of the eternal Noahide Covenant, but also the additional ones that only Israel is obligated to observe – an additional everlasting covenant. From Abraham on, you learn what is expected of Gentiles via what God says or does in response to Gentile behavior. One must read the Tanakh to learn “Noahide Law.”
Regarding details, like the animal cruelty issue you brought up, we can discuss those in later posts, as you wish.
To summarize, I offer this story:
Again it happened that a non-Jew came before Shammai and said to him, “Make me a proselyte, on condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.” Thereupon he pushed him away with the builder’s ammah-stick which was in his hand. When he went before Hillel, he (Hillel) said to him, “What you hate, do not do to your peer: that is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary. Go and learn it.”
That’s the short reply to the previous two posts here.
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The LONG VERSION is this:
Yes, it is good to read the Bible in the historical and cultural context because that helps us understand what was said and why. And three millenniums of wise, scholarly commentary are helpful, but without the education to understand that commentary, it can be confusing and even misleading to the untrained eye. It can lead one to not be able to see the forest for the trees; so it can be difficult to cut through all that to see the core of God's message in the Bible (Tanakh / Christian Old Testament) and why it is relevant today.
If you believe in God, you already have a relationship with God. What you do with that relationship is up to you.
Do your beliefs in God stem from what you want Him/Her to be, how you think God should behave? And if those imagined characteristics and behavior you assigned to your God prove to be false? Do you stop believing in God, because you think God disappointed you? Perhaps your view of God was faulty because it came from your imagination rather than the Bible.
I came to a belief in God on my own. Years later, I began to read the Bible; as I continued to read and study it, I came to understand God, myself, and other people better. I studied history, archeology, and biblical commentaries to help me place the biblical text in context. I also made two trips to Israel to see and touch many of the places referred to in the Bible. These combined experiences, all this research and travel, gave me external evidence to confirm the authenticity of the Tanakh. My eventual conclusion: the God I know and pray to is the same One that gave us the Tanakh – as a gift and guide for life – one that is as valuable and relevant today as it was in the past and as it will be in the future. The Bible teaches us how to live our lives with God-given wisdom via stories, history, poetry, and allegory. The truth of this wisdom is timeless.
The Bible says of Noah, “Noah was a righteous man; he was blameless in his age; Noah walked with God.” Although in English, this passage appears to be saying that Noah was perfect, that is not what it really means in the original Hebrew language. God considered Noah to be righteous because he “walked with God,” meaning that he lived conscience of God’s presence; Noah made a continual effort to live as God instructed him. This is akin to later passages that call Abraham “righteous” because he obeyed God.
There is NO reference here connecting righteousness to “heaven” or to life after our physical bodies have died. Biblically, we don’t do what’s right (moral according to God) so that we can get into heaven or avoid eternal punishment in “hell.” The Bible teaches us to be righteous because this behavior improves your life (and the lives of others) here on earth, today. Manmade religions have a curious obsession with “life after death” – e.g. heaven and hell, “day of the dead,” “book of the dead,” or choosing to be martyred in order to obtain some heavenly reward. The whole idea of a god sending you to “hell” if you don’t believe this or that is not taught in the Tanakh. In contrast to manmade religions, the Tanakh contains very few passages regarding the soul / spirit living on after the physical body has died. Rather, the emphasis is on how we live our lives here on earth – how we treat ourselves and other people, how we treat animals and our physical environment. For me, a big part of learning Tanakh was to “unlearn” all the incorrect teachings that I had previously received.
To summarize: The life instructions God gave to all humanity are relevant to everyone, everywhere, in every age because that’s what Tanakh teaches us.
P.S. For those who are interested in the historical and physical context of the Tanakh, one book I enjoy is Bruce Feiler’s “WALKING THE BIBLE – a Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses” found in bookstores or at
Bruce Feiler - walking God Was Born, Walking The Bible.
