Do you skip most of Numbers? What about portions of Deuteronomy?

For the life of me I just can’t get through those books in their entirety.

Door this way: https://chnetwork.org/free-resource-upd ... ear-guide/

That way you aren't stuck with a solid diet of dryness.

I have. I agree the genealogies in Numbers and the books of Chronicles are tedious. Numbers, though, is a far more interesting book than Leviticus.

That's because you're a mathematician.

No. Numbers has actual narrative in it (for example, the account of the Israelites being bitten by serpents and Moses erecting a statue of a serpent on a rod is in Numbers). Leviticus does not, so far as I can recall.

I have read all of Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy numerous times, but what I find most tedious of all is the long genealogy that starts 1 Chronicles, a genealogy, which when read aloud in audiobook form, takes more than an hour to read, and the last 8 chapters of Ezekial which provide an incredibly boring description of a new temple, complete with many, many, many measurements, and I will not hesitate to say that I completely skip over these parts.

I have marginal notes alerting me to where an actual story is placed in the list of names. Makes it easier to skip.

I don't agree with that, the strictly ceremonial laws in Leviticus are pretty boring, but there is a lot more than that in there are a lot of law governing things like war, slavery, marriage and other moral issues, and when you do the study of it, you come to see that, by the standards of their time, the laws of Moses were extremely progressive and defied the moral standards of their time.

An excellent example of this are the laws describing the treatment of female prisoners taken during war. According to the moral standards of Israel's neighbors, there was nothing wrong with murdering a woman's entire family and gang-raping her over and over until she was dead. But this is not allowed under the law of Moses. Instead, you are supposed to give her 30 days to mourn the loss of her family, shave her head completely a sign of mourning, and then marry her, and once you marry her, you are not allowed to divorce her ever and if you abuse or mistreat her, you have to set her free to return her hometown if she wishes to.

I've seen many internet atheists (who aren't exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer) complain about how this practice is 'barbaric', and maybe by the standards of our time, it is, but it was a dramatic moral improvement over the standards of the time and was incredibly sensitive and compassionate. And I don't think modern people understand the significance of shaving her head, which would not only be a sign of her mourning but would also make her significantly less attractive, and perhaps make one have second thoughts about whether he really wanted to marry her. And forbidding divorce means that once a man marries a female captive, he becomes responsible for her forever, he can't just use her for sex for a couple months and then toss her aside, leaving her with no means of support leaving her homeless and possibly starving, and may have to turn to prostitution to survive.

And you don't realize just how progressive these ideas were unless you read Leviticus in depth and several commentaries on it

I wonder how much of this is a modern hangup

When you read the Illiad, do you skip the catalog of ships? Probably

But for ancient peoples, genealogies and the like were of far greater importance. They cared about their ancestors in a way hard for us to enter into, as e.g ancient Romans would bring back ancestors through masks and acting. Genealogies make the history real in a way it would not be without.

So I encourage not skipping them, even though it is hard to enter into

I've read the entire thing (well, the 66 books I accept as Scripture) multiple times, including the sections under discussion. It's perfectly fair to say that some sections are more boring than others if what you are looking for is narrative. I don't think there's anything impious in recognizing that some forms of expression or literature or what have you are more entertaining than others. Some truths, both their content and form of expression, lend themselves riveting presentation. Others just don't. On the other hand, those truths that are much more detailed, much more in the nuts and bolts, the sorts of things we find "boring" are often incredibly fascinating and can be riveting in their own way when studied. And that's been my genuine experience with Leviticus, with the legal portions of the Pentateuch, and even with the genealogies in 1 Chronicles. If you just read them as narrative, you aren't going to be able to get through them fast enough, because, bluntly, they aren't narrative. But when you study them within their genre and, more importantly, with respect to their contribution to the book in which they are found (and from their their contribution to the rest of Scripture), I have found those very sections so very enriching. To take only one example, I took a small Bible study through the book of Leviticus in just this fashion, and I can honestly say that no one was ever bored. All of the twenty or so we were with said to me at some point over the sessions that they didn't know the book was so interesting. My response to them was just as it is here--you didn't know it was interesting because you were trying to read it as narrative. You were looking for it to be interesting in the way you would look for a book or movie to be interesting. It isn't in that way. But it is when you are looking to understand the book for what it is, the argument for what it is, and how it relates then to the rest of the Pentateuch (and thus to the rest of Scripture).

With all that said, if you don't know very well the essential story--the narrative--from Adam through the end of Acts--I wouldn't try to get into that more detailed stuff. Just my opinion, of course. Once you know the narrative, then the study of those passages will be more meaningful, and in turn, they will make the narrative more meaningful, too.

Part of Numbers parallels Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. The rest of it is the story from Sinai to Kadesh-Barnea. Contains battles and talking donkeys.

Read chs. 10 - 25, 27, 31 - 32

Based on the the responses, I think I’ll go ahead and make myself read them. I’ve never read the Bible in its entirety (although quite a bit), and it’s something I think I need to do.

So thanks to everyone for your post.

Thanks Father.

Long genealogies were important to the ancients because it was relevant to them, it is not relevant to us today, there is no practical use or need for me to memorize a long list of all my ancestors, assuming that I could even construct such a list in the first place, which I doubt I could. Since these tables are not very useful for modern Christians, there is no harm in skipping the lists or just lightly skimming through them if they become an obstacle, as they do to many.

It is much like the big books filled with trigonometric and logarithm tables that mathematicians used to rely on before the invention of the digital calculator, I understand why such things were important to them, but we don't really need them today, just because those tools were useful to previous generations doesn't mean that modern students should be taught to use them. There is use in knowing that these books exist, and why they exist, and why they were important, but there is no need to use them ourselves.

Am I the only one who found that Father's hypothesis on mathematicians has been disproved?

The CBSE board/syllabus (the one I study) allows us to use the booklets you refer to, but not calculators. We are forced to learn to use the tables (or calculate manually instead).

St Thomas Aquinas has comments on genealogies in his Catena Aurea.

Biblical commentators comment on everything because that is what Biblical commentators do, but I think it is safe to say that no doctrine has ever been proved or disproved by reference to a genealogy.

I could not disagree more with Doom. The genealogy of Christ of course is an obvious example, full of meaning, in the number of generations (3 sets of 14) in the particular persons named (Rahab of course, but of greatest doctrinal importance David)

Now the genealogies in the OT are not as readily apparent, but still hold importance. Frankly "irrelevant to moderns" just screams at me "actually very important" because moderns frankly are the worst. .. Especially in their view on knowledge, and what is important therein

That is not to say that everyone need study every bit of the bible