A while back (probably close to two years, but that's just depressing to consider) I set myself the goal of reading the Bible (actually may be closer to three or four years, sigh). It's slow reading, but for a book to have lasted so long it must have something in it, I figured. I have devoted quite a bit of time to reading the classics of literature and I refused to neglect this collection simply out of spiritual prejudice.

So I'm reading it.

I don't read the Bible exclusively. I poke in a few other books just to keep my eyes from drying out. Ive read books of a classical nature right alongside popular fiction and pulp. I've read science fiction both old and new. But I keep coming back to the Bible.

Sadly, I recently reached the 32% mark. That's a nice thing about Amazon's Kindle: it gives you a percentage complete. I am less than one-third of the way through the Bible. I just finished the Book of Ezra. About the best I can say about Ezra is at least it furthered the story rather than just being a rehash of the Book of Exodus or I Kings. I found it amusing in a Monty-Python sort of way when the men of the exiles agreed to dispose of their wives whom they had married from outside of the Chosen. I chuckled as I pictured the looks of surprise this must have generated. I chuckled until I remembered the basic status as property women enjoyed then. These women, wives, were now used goods. Their husbands were abandoning them, to what? Would their families take them back? Not likely. Could they find jobs to support themselves and their children? Hardly. The book of Ezra does not detail what fate awaited these women, as if they were not worth caring about. Their former husbands had to make sacrifices to appease God for their sin and we can only assume the women and children died.

Protection of marriage should have gotten an earlier start. But maybe that's one of the fine traditions of one-man-one-woman union that's being savagely fought for.