Friday Fun

There’s a scene in Walking the Bible (okay, okay…I’m ALMOST done with it, it’s a thick book) where Feiler and his colleagues are travelling through the Negev desert toward a mountain where Moses presumably stood to survey the Promised Land, overlooking the area where the Israelites spent 38 of the 40 years they spent in the desert.  They are discussing memorials, when this interchange occurs…

"In the Bible, Solomon says, ‘There’s nothing new under the sun.’"

"I thought that was the Beatles," I (Feiler) said, half joking.

"If so, they took if from Solomon."

"Wait.  I can accept that Israel comes from the Bible, that the Ten Commandments come from the Bible, that monotheism comes from the Bible.  But the Beatles?"

"If you check their songs, their ideas, you’ll find a lot of things from the Bible."  He thought for a second.  "Like ‘All You Need Is Love.’ It’s the same thing Rabbi Akiva, the famous sage, said.  When he was asked to summarize the Bible in one sentence he said: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  That’s not an exact translation, but it’s similar."

"There’s another song," Doron said, "on the Abbey Road record, the song before the last.  ‘And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.’ Also from the Bible."

He went on like this for the next twenty minutes, pulling lyrics from his memory and aligning them to biblical verses.  It was the most awesome display I’d yet seen of the Bible’s ability to reinvent itself for every generation.  One person’s daily inspirational is another’s Woodstock.

"And another example!" Doron said.  "The whole point of the Bible is that you keep reaching for the perfect world but never reach it.  It’s like Paul Simon said, ‘The nearer your destination, the more you’re slip-slidin’ away.’"

So my challenge to you is this…any songs, not hymns, not praise songs, that come from the Bible?