Secret Bible: A Secular Approach to the Bible - Tapa blanda

The basic thesis of The Secret Bible: A Secular Approach to the Bible is that the traditions which comprise the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) were in their original form secular. It was only later when the existence of the Jewish people was threatened that the texts that made up the Bible were religionized, that is, God was made the center of the stories and histories and was seen as the single, all-powerful deity who had a special relationship to the Jewish people. Before the Bible was religionized, Israelite society was much like the others in the ancient Middle East with a secular government and sacrificial cult centered on altars in various temples. Many of the laws found in the legal codes of the first fivebooks of the Bible are secular. The stories of the first Hebrew found in the Pentateuch are essentially secular accounts of families and their problems. Religious elements were later added. The secular nature of the Bible will make it more accessible to those readers who do not accept God as the author of history and in control of nature.

Joseph R. Rosenbloom holds degrees from the University of Cincinnati, the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati and Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, MO. He was ordained as a Reform rabbi in 1954 and has served congregations in St.Louis and Lexington, Kentucky. He retired from Temple Emanuel in St. Louis in 2003 and is now their rabbi emeritus and senior scholar. He serves a small congregation in Ames, Iowa on a monthly basis. He is also Rabbi-in-Residence at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in St. Louis. He joined the faculty of Washington University in 1961 and continues to teach there as member of the Department of Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Studies. He is the author of three books and forty scholarly articles.