Why the Bible Seems Weird—Until You Read It Psychologically

Let’s be honest—the Bible can seem downright bizarre if you try to read it literally. A talking serpent convinces a woman to eat fruit. A man lives inside a fish. God impregnates virgins, opens barren wombs, and people marry their cousins, servants, and even sisters. If this were Netflix, it’d be flagged as ancient soap opera meets surrealist fantasy. 

But here’s the twist: it’s not meant to be taken literally. The weirdness is the clue.

When read symbolically, the Bible stops being a confusing history book and becomes something far more personal: a psychological drama playing out inside your own mind.

The endless family trees and odd relationships? They’re not about actual bloodlines. They’re the coded language of consciousness. Every husband, wife, father, son, and concubine is a symbolic representation of mental activity—how you, the reader, form, impress, and express assumptions within.

In Genesis, God creates man in His image—not flesh and bone, but conscious awareness. “Man” is the thinker, the chooser, the imaginer. “Woman” is the subconscious, the creative womb. Their union is the inner marriage—the Law of Assumption in action. Whatever you impress upon the subconscious with feeling and conviction, she conceives and gives form to in your outer world.

So when the Samaritan woman at the well is told she’s had five husbands and the one she’s with now isn’t her husband, it’s not moral judgment—it’s a diagnosis of her inner life. She’s been emotionally tied to past states (fear, doubt, lack), and now she’s flirting with a new idea but hasn’t married it yet. She hasn’t committed to a new assumption—so nothing is born.

And what about the genealogies - Abraham begat Isaac, Isaac begat Jacob…? That’s not ancestry it’s inner progression. Faith gives birth to laughter (Isaac), which matures into struggle and persistence (Jacob), which eventually produces dominion (Israel). It's the evolution of your inner world—not your DNA.

The stories of divine conception, barren women suddenly giving birth, or younger sons inheriting blessings are not strange accidents. They are illustrations of how imagination creates. The wombs are psychological. The offspring are states of being. And the scandals? They're metaphors for just how chaotic and dramatic our inner worlds can be when we don't consciously direct them.

The Bible’s drama is yours. It's not about them—it's about you. Once you stop reading it like a history book and start reading it like a dream journal dictated by your soul, it starts to make more sense than you ever imagined.