The books of Genesis and Exodus, and many (or most) other books of the Bible including the Gospels, were written in the language of legend. I don't think the writers intended the stories to be understood as "factual" - and I don't think people even attempted to claim them as fact until fairly recent times. These books were written to convey a message of the relationship between humankind and God, not to report factual or scientific information.

If you tried to relate the relationship between me and my wife in "factual" terms, it would be pretty boring- and it wouldn't do justice to how wonderful that relationship is. We met in 1995 and got married in 2002, and we're still married. If you want to understand the impact of that relationship, you have to go into legend. My wife was married to Peter, and I didn't like him, and her life was a mess and I wasn't interested in her after Peter died. Then she married St. Jim, and Jim was an absolutely wonderful man who worshiped his wife and made her whole again. Jim and I were best friends. Three weeks before he died, he asked me to watch over his widow and her son. If anything romantic happened, he thought that would be wonderful. Within a month after he died, we were engaged - and we were married with St. Jim's blessing a year later. And we're still happily married after eleven years.

Now, that's our story, and I've told it a hundred times. No, it's not exactly, factually true. I left out the parts about how hard it was for us to get used to living together, and how angry we got at each other sometimes. Still, it conveys the essence of our relationship far better than a precisely factual account could. Tonight, we had a lovely evening at the symphony together and I am remembering how wonderful it is to have lived with this woman for eleven years. Am I lying if I leave out the difficult parts?


-Joe-