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History Books » Religious History Books

The best books on the bible, recommended by nicholas king.

A History of the Bible by John Barton

The Bible is not always an easy read—nor is it always obvious how or where to start reading it. Here, Nicholas King , a Jesuit priest and biblical scholar, chooses five books to help you start getting to grips with what is, arguably, the world's all-time bestselling book.

Interview by Benedict King

An Introduction to the New Testament by Raymond E Brown

Jesus the Jew: a Historian’s Reading of the Gospels by Geza Vermes

The Misunderstood Jew: the Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus by Amy-Jill Levine

Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study by Markus Bockmuehl

1 A History of the Bible by John Barton

2 an introduction to the new testament by raymond e brown, 3 jesus the jew: a historian’s reading of the gospels by geza vermes, 4 the misunderstood jew: the church and the scandal of the jewish jesus by amy-jill levine, 5 seeing the word: refocusing new testament study by markus bockmuehl.

B efore we get into your books on the Bible, I’d like to ask one very obvious question. What’s the best place to start reading the Bible?

Moving on to the books. Tell me about John Barton’s A History of the Bible: the Book and its Faiths . This is only just recently published.

Yes. It came out earlier this year and it is a general introduction for the non-specialist reader (though that does not mean that it has nothing for members of the academic guild). He calls it a ‘history of the Bible’. He’s well aware that the Bible evolves over thousands of years and that’s important for a modern reader to understand, if they’re going to cope with reading it. He knows his subject intimately; and he covers a whole range of different topics with immense skill. He never puts a foot wrong.

He says that Christianity is “not in essence a scriptural religion” focused on a book seen as a single holy work. What’s he driving at there?

He’s saying that the Bible is actually rather an untidy collection. We tend to use phrases like ‘the Bible says’, but in fact, you’ve got several different voices in the Bible and the trick is to be like a conductor managing a choir and getting all those different voices to sing from the same sheet.

Can you talk a bit about the structure of the book? What are the biblical controversies or issues that he addresses?

Well, there’s a lot of them. It’s built around fairly obvious sections. He starts with the Old Testament and the many different kinds of literature you get in the Old Testament, then moves on to the New Testament and how it all started and the different kinds of literature you have there. Then the ‘Bible and its Texts’ is his third section, how you move from ‘books’ to ‘scripture’. At some point, words on a piece of paper have turned into ‘scripture’, and they acquire a kind of authority.

“Bockmuehl sometimes talks about the ‘footprint’ left by these texts. I think that’s a very important idea and it tells you something about the literature that we call the Bible, that it’s left this mark on us and then left this mark on our civilisation that can’t be eliminated.”

He looks at the 27 books of the New Testament, but he also discusses other books, those which are sometimes called apocryphal gospels. Now, if you look at those, the church showed great wisdom in not selecting them, either because they’re not very interesting or because, where they are interesting, they are interesting for the wrong reasons. The Protoevangelium of James, for example.

What are the wrong reasons for including a book in the Bible?

Well, the wrong reasons are where they’re exciting and excitable. For example, the story of the ox and the ass at Jesus’s crib comes from the apocryphal gospel. That’s not terribly important, not terribly interesting, but people latch onto it.

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Then he has a useful thing on the different kinds of biblical manuscripts. Often we don’t really know exactly what the Bible does say because the manuscripts differ. Of the 50,000 manuscripts of the New Testament, every single one is different from the all the others.

And none of them is original . . .

None of them is written by the original author. That’s right. Which is a great sadness, but it’s true.

In spite of all that variety, does he suggests that there’s some kind of thematic unity to the books of the Bible?

I think he does. One of the ways he does it is to say that faith is the common theme, that is to say when people open the text now you find a life pulsing below the surface of the text. We give that life the deceptively easy name of God.

Does he see faith as an essential prerequisite for understanding the books of the Bible?

Let’s move on to Raymond Brown’s An Introduction to the New Testament . One of the things that Brown shares with Barton is that an aim to be centrist in his interpretive approach rather than idiosyncratic, but he focuses very specifically on the texts of the Bible’s books. Is that right?

Yes, he is focused on the text. He thinks we ought to read the text of the New Testament and preferably read it in Greek. The reason I’ve chosen him is that he’s part of a great tradition, maybe the start of a great tradition, of Roman Catholic biblical scholarship. He was a giant among biblical scholars, but an absolutely faithful Roman Catholic. I remember being at a conference in North America where he was given an award and, without any notes, he gave a wonderful talk on the Old Testament and then began to talk about his own attitudes to the church and to the faith. At one moment, he broke down because he was so moved when thinking of the church. That was in spite of the fact that many people from within the church attacked him as a heretic and denier of all truth.

“Vermes’ book is important because, with the discovery of the dead sea scrolls, for the first time scholars were able to see how Jesus fitted in to his Jewish background.”

This book is a very good piece of work. It must be 30 years old, I should think, but it’s still worth reading. Raymond Brown is always worth reading because he’s always carefully measured in what he says, but he is writing from within the perspective of faith, and from a profound acquaintance with up-to-date scholarship.

Why was he attacked?

Now on to Geza Vermes’ Jesus the Jew: a Historian’s reading of the Gospels . Vermes was an interesting character. Can you tell us a bit about him?

Geza was born a Jew in Hungary in the 1930s. His parents saw what was coming with the German invasion and so they sent him to a Catholic boarding school run by the sisters of the fathers of Zion. He never saw his parents again. They were swept up into the concentration camps and died. Geza became a Catholic. He wasn’t forced to do so, but genuinely wanted to. He became a Catholic priest, joined the fathers of Zion and then through that did his biblical studies, a lot of work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and a doctorate on the Pesher on Habakkuk (one of the best preserved of the dead sea scrolls). He became a famous scholar and then met his first wife Pam and left the priesthood as well as religious life. He spent the rest of his life concentrating on early Judaism.

When you say he left his religious life, do you mean he gave up on his Catholicism entirely?

He gave up on Catholicism and if he went in any direction, he reverted to a kind of liberal Judaism. He certainly belonged to a London synagogue. He used to pray on his own in the garden quite a lot, as he hadn’t lost any faith in God and actually hadn’t entirely lost faith in Jesus. He used to say things about Jesus that seemed to me to come very close to what Christians would believe, and I think he had a kind of personal relationship with Jesus, although he might not have wanted to say that.

But this book is important because with the discovery of the dead sea scrolls, for the first time scholars were able to see how Jesus fitted in to his Jewish background. The dead sea scrolls didn’t disprove anything about Christianity. What they did was to give us the background out of which Christianity emerged, because here you’ve got one Jewish movement at odds with other Jewish movements and we get a fair idea of what it was like to be Jewish in that first century.

Does that mean that the book is essentially arguing that Jesus was living within the Old Law. Is that right?

Shall we talk about the Levine book now, The Misunderstood Jew: the Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus ? She’s dealing with some of the same issues that Vermes is talking about in his book on the Bible. It also struck me that her book had a very contemporary feel and also that it is a very American book. It feels like she’s a voice in the middle of the American culture wars.

I think that’s right. She’s a very funny and entertaining speaker and she writes entertainingly too. She’s very much writing from a Jewish perspective. She’s part of a trend that Vermes started, of Jews who were really interested in the New Testament and rediscovering their own Judaism through it. They also realised that they could tell us Christians something about the Judaism out of which Christianity emerged and therefore are able to enlighten us about Judaism in a way that is liberating for Christians.

What’s her approach in the book? How does she go about that?

She really writes the stories. The book is called the Misunderstood Jew: the church and the scandal of the Jewish Jesus . It is a scandal that very often Christians have tried to avoid the Jewishness of Jesus and have viewed Jews as in some way inferior. She has chapters on Jesus and Judaism and then ‘from Jewish sect to Gentile church’. By the end of the first century Christianity was, in effect, Gentile, but it didn’t start like that. Then you’ve got ‘the New Testament and anti-Judaism’ and a very interesting chapter on stereotyping Judaism, her point being that Judaism comes in a multitude of dimensions and you can’t really stereotype it at all.

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The book has a lovely opening. She says “when I was a child it was my ambition to be Pope”. She has this cheerful openness, which is very attractive.

She talks a lot about the slightly painful history of Christian persecution and denigration of Judaism.

That’s right and she doesn’t pull her punches, either.

To what extent does she see that as still a contemporary problem? It feels like she’s engaged in a very contemporary argument.

I think she is. I mean most educated Christians nowadays would accept her points about anti-Judaism in Christianity, but we’re not really sufficiently aware of how much persecution of Jews has gone on in our name. We still need to resist that. You often find people casually making anti-Jewish remarks who are Christians; and she’s committed to educating them and she can do that because she is Jewish and she loves the New Testament. And she can say, “you Christians must get this sorted out.”

Does she does talk about the apparent warrant for some of this anti-Jewish feeling in particular books in the bible?

Yes. She says it’s there, for example, in John’s gospel. The Greek words the evangelist uses are Hoi Joudaioi , which can mean either ‘the Judeans’ or ‘the Jews’. I always translate it as ‘the Judeans’ meaning the inhabitants of Judea, which makes it sound less horrible.

“Barton knows his subject intimately; and he covers a whole range of different topics with immense skill. He never puts a foot wrong.”

In John’s gospel there are one or two rather dark remarks about ‘the Jews’, or ‘the Judeans’ and it sounds much worse if you translate it as ‘the Jews’. It gives some kind of impetus to anti-Jewish persecution.

Is it John’s gospel that has the cry “his blood be on us and on our children”?

Finally to Markus Bockmuehl Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study .

He calls it ‘refocusing New Testament study’ and I advise readers to look at the little miniature on the front cover. Because you’ve got Saint Luke pictured as an artist. He certainly is an artist with words, if nothing else. You’ve got him painting and you can see the model for his painting. She is a slightly slovenly looking woman gazing lovingly at her little child. The little child is mischievously pulling at her throat. Then you can see the painting that Luke is getting out of this and it’s a wonderful painting of a very pious beautiful woman and the child not nearly so mischievous and a bit calmer.

What I think Bockmuehl is saying is that the gospel paints a picture which is the truth, but it’s painting it out of the reality of human life; nevertheless it’s seeing the deeper truth that God is producing here.

And in these books in the Bible, the Gospels, what is the painting and what is the reality that we’re looking at?

The reality is both the awkwardness of ordinary human life plus the reality that God is at work in this awful reality. Luke’s gospel is a very good example of that because he’s aware of what’s going on in life and but paints a beautiful picture. Thousands of artists have tried to paint one of Luke’s greatest achievements, the story of the Annunciation to Mary and you can see artists really trying to capture that moment.

Is he saying that it is a massive advantage to come to the gospels with a faith if you want to understand them?

Honestly, I think he is. I mean you have very good biblical scholars who have no religious faith and I listen to them with interest but I think they’re missing an important dimension of the Bible. It’s not that you’ve got to be dogmatic about it. It’s not that the church forbids you from saying something. We must allow all the richness that top-class scholars can offer, whether they’re believers or not; but somehow or other if you’re not open to that dimension of the transcendent, the idea of God, the possibility of the resurrection of Jesus, then you’re going to miss out, particularly on the New Testament.

Isn’t he also saying that because the gospels were written with a sort of memory of the apostolic age you need to understand their reception, which is rooted in the underlying faith?

Yes, he sometimes talks about the ‘footprint’ left by these texts. I think that’s a very important idea and it tells you something about the literature of the books that we call the Bible, that it’s left this mark on us and then left this mark on our civilisation that can’t be eliminated.

If you can start with one of these books on the Bible, which one would it be?

John Barton’s History of the Bible , because anyone can read that book and it’s beautifully done and it’s the fruit of a lifetime’s work. It’s really well done, and it’s not heavy at all. So get out and buy that.

December 23, 2019

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Nicholas King

Fr Nicholas King SJ has taught the New Testament at Oxford University for many years, where he is now assistant Catholic chaplain.

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How to Read the Bible for All It’s Worth: BOOK REVIEW

Posted By Michael Breznau on Nov 19, 2021

InREVIEW: Book Look

By Michael J. Breznau | November 2021

Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All It’s Worth (Zondervan, 1981; 2014 reprint) 

Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart present a massive rewrite to the previous three editions of their trademark book How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth (pg. 11-12). The old adage still floats around our society, “People can make the Bible say whatever they want it to say.” Even among less cynical churchgoers who profess a high view of Scripture, many seem lost when it comes to accurately interpreting and applying God’s Word. Conservative evangelical churches are ripe with classes, small groups, and even sermons that ignorantly contort the scriptures and rip them out of context. Every election cycle in America is met with Christians publicly (yet unknowingly?) claiming promises for their “homeland” that were only intended for national Israel (e.g. 2 Chron. 7:14). Worse yet, a young crop of progressive-liberal Christians ready themselves to defend various deviant sexual activities with novel interpretations of the Bible. These hermeneutical challenges have created “urgent problems in the church today” (pg. 18).

Therefore, Fee and Stuart’s bestselling book is needed now more than ever. Their main purpose is to equip readers to understand the Bible in its various genre types (pg. 16). God’s Word contains poetic, apocalyptic, narrative, wisdom/proverbial, letters, parables and other types of literature that must be read and processed in the way the original author intended. But how does one tell the difference between these literature types? The answer to that question is the centerpiece of this book.

Fee and Stuart are undoubtedly experts – scholars in their own right. Yet they are also faithful churchmen who regularly preach and teach the scriptures (pg. 17). They are devout believers and approach the Word of God with reverence. With this combination of scholarship, practical experience, and strong faith, they offer a trustworthy toolbox by everyone. Yes, everyone . They claim, everybody can do exegesis well – we just need “to ask the right questions of the text” (pg. 19, 28). Key to their method is viewing exegesis and hermeneutics as two complementary yet separate actions in the process (pg. 18). They define exegesis as the work of arriving at the “then and there” original intent of a passage (see pg. 27, 34), whereas hermeneutics is the task of ascertaining the “here and now” meaning (pg. 33-34). [1] Both of these steps are employed throughout the book as the authors guide the reader through an in-depth study of ten different literature collections, in this order: The Epistles, Old Testament narratives, Acts, the Gospels, The Parables, The Law, The Prophets, The Psalms, Wisdom books, and Revelation. No stone is left unturned!

Strong Points

Fee and Stuart are adept at sending “cannonballs over the bow,” per se. Sacred cows of biblical misinterpretation are routinely smashed and pet-doctrines with flimsy biblical support are carefully shot down throughout the book. Each chapter begins with a bold demonstration of the need we face for leaning into sound exegesis and they do so by unearthing the ways in which so many have mishandled the text (see pg. 132). One may disagree with some of their conclusions (and there are many included throughout). But you cannot dismiss their tenacious integrity to the Word. Examples of the hot-button topics and conclusions they offer: lawsuits among Christians (pg. 79, moralizing (pg. 96-7), mode of baptism (pg. 128-31), tongues (pg. 130), drinking wine (pg. 76), women in leadership (pg. 86), and knowing God’s will (pg. 250).

They offer good, essential discussion on textual criticism (pg. 39-43) and an extensive explanation on old and new translations (pg. 44-56). Humorously, they comment, “the NKJV revisers eliminated the best feature of the KJV (its marvelous expression of the English language) and kept the worst (its flawed Greek text)” (pg. 43). They land on the NIV 2011 but also recommend several other modern translations.

Time-saving pastors will also be thankful for the Scripture reference index included in the back of the book. They also grant the reader numerous recommendations for further study (see for example pg. 136).

Weak Points

The book is titled as a popular-level work and cast to a broad audience. But it lacks a creative layout and healthy illustrative material. At times, the discussions quickly turn academic, which is appealing to me as a seminary-trained pastor, but such that I could not readily recommend the book to the average member of my middle-class church. As an example, they should have started out with smaller portions of Scripture in their instruction (see pg. 63-65).

Interestingly, the authors argue against paragraphs blocks and verse numerations in Bible translations (pg. 32). But they appear self-contradictory when they later go on to say we must “THINK [in] PARAGRAPHS” (they wrote in all-caps for emphasis) (see here: pg. 67, 140, 268).

As mentioned above, they provide a significant discussion on translations, but they do not include interaction with the NET, TNIV, or the updated NLT, all of which were available in 2014 when this revision was printed.

Reflection and Interaction

Over all, their desire is to echo the well-known words recorded by Augustine, “Take up and read” (“ Tolle, lege ”) (pg. 19). We need not attempt to “discover what no one else has ever seen before” (pg. 21) in the scriptures, but rather pick up the Word, read it well and carefully work toward the intended meaning and accurate application. Yet as Fee and Stuart point out, we bring our own lenses and contexts to the scriptures. Herein lies the danger (pg. 22-23). We are all prone to make the Bible say what [we] see as the plain sense, but that “plain sense” might not even make sense to the original author (pg. 24). So they exhort us, “The antidote to bad interpretation is not no interpretation but good interpretation, based on commonsense guidelines.” (pg. 25)

First, we must read well (pg. 30). In our reading we must gain understanding of the historical and literary context, as well as the actual content of the passage (pg. 62). We cannot merely seek to “get around” verses that are challenging to our theological presuppositions or traditions, but instead get into the text for all it is worth (pg. 76-77). Simply put, the most important question we will ever ask is: “what’s the point? (pg. 31-32, 67, 120). This strikes at authorial intent or the development of a book’s overall argument (pg. 265). Fee and Stuart providing numerous examples of developing such an argument in both Old Testament and New Testament passages.

Second, they continue with great tools for interpreting and accurately applying challenging genres like Old Testament prophecy, Christ’s parables (pg. 157, 160), and the apocalyptic vision of Revelation. I have currently found handling the narratives of Acts a significant homiletical challenge, so I am thankful for their particularly helpful tools for interpreting and accurately applying the Acts of the Apostles (pg. 112, 119).

We are all prone to a me-centered meaning of the text, therefore, Fee and Stuart remind us of this central key: “In any biblical narrative, God is the ultimate character, the supreme hero of the story” (Pg. 103 – case in point, the life of Joseph). It’s not about you. It’s not about me. The Word of God is for the glory of God and the joy of God’s people as they follow His Word as their guide for all life, faith, and practice. Sola Scriptura !

[1] They admit this is a new meaning of the term hermeneutics, which traditionally is used to denote the entire process of biblical study and interpretation (pg. 33-34).

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Author: Michael Breznau

:: Who I AM: Husband | Father | Pastor | Speaker | Author | Singer | :: I am a redeemed follower of Jesus, and I'm passionate about inspiring others to follow Him with radical faith. | :: What I DO: I love and pursue knowing the Triune God. I am crazy-in-love with my amazing wife and 4 children. After 14 incredible years in pastoral ministry, including 9 years as a Lead Pastor, I now serve as an active-duty US Air Force Chaplain at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. I am the preaching pastor for the Protestant Chapel and the day-to-day chaplain for the 88th Air Base Wing's Mission Support Group, totaling 1,800 Airmen. | :: The Wallpaper: God gave me the opportunity to be trained for ministry at Dallas Theological Seminary, where I completed the Master of Theology program (Th.M in Pastoral Ministries). I'm currently a 4th year Doctor of Ministry student at Talbot School of Theology - BIOLA University. NOTICE: All views expressed on this website are my own and do not, in part or in whole, reflect the policies or positions of the US Air Force or the US Department of Defense.

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Review: In ‘Reading Genesis,’ Marilynne Robinson treats the Bible like a great work of literature

Considering how often the Bible is characterized as a great work of literature, it is rarely read like one. Few would suggest a piecemeal approach to Crime and Punishment , jumping from chapter to chapter with little regard to the whole, but a book like Genesis is often studied only as a collection of isolated episodes.

In her latest book, Reading Genesis , Marilynne Robinson argues that such a reading is “so deeply ingrained that the larger structures of the text, its strategies of characterization, its arguments, can be completely overlooked.”

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 352p $29

Perhaps Robinson’s concern about missing the forest for the trees explains why she decided not to divide her exploration of Genesis into chapters, sections or even subheadings. It is a bold choice for a book so dense, but at the very least, it forces readers to take in the Scripture as a grand narrative, one that resists easy fragmentation. The result is a meandering journey through Genesis guided by one of the foremost Christian humanists of our age. Robinson’s sharp literary eye and clear, lyrical prose shine new light on some of our oldest stories.

Robinson argues that the early chapters of Genesis tell the story in detail of “a series of…declensions that permit the anomaly” of how human beings, flawed and foolish as we are, are so beloved and exalted by God.

Through her comparison of the Hebrew creation and flood narratives with the Babylonian Enuma Elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh , Robinson illustrates how distinct the Hebrew story’s insistence upon the goodness of God and creation would have been among other Near East peoples. Her comparative-literature approach reminds modern Western audiences just how radical the notion really is that there is one God who made all things good—and how much responsibility that bestows upon human beings. Since the Hebrews believed all things were made good, human agency is the root of toil, suffering and even natural disaster, as in the story of the flood.

Adam and Eve’s sin leads God to curse the ground but not humanity; our culpability affects the world but never denigrates our being, Robinson insists. She faces our faults dead-on, unflinching in her commitment to humanity: “That human beings were so central to Creation that it would be changed by them, albeit for the worst, is, whatever else, a kind of testament to who we are,” Robinson writes. Human beings are co-creators with God.

Because Robinson constantly jumps back and forth between episodes while drawing comparisons to other Near East literature, reading the first 80 or so pages of Reading Genesis can feel like wading through a “formless void” (Gen 1:2). The structure is sometimes circuitous and difficult to follow, but patient readers will find astute insights on the power and gravity of human agency, and even some hope. After all, our great power points to our divine origins. In her stirring prose, Robinson asks, “If we could step back from the dread we now stir in ourselves and look at all of this with some objectivity, would we not feel awe? Would we not feel struck by how absolutely unlike everything we are, excepting God Himself?”

But Reading Genesis is strongest when it turns to Robinson’s analysis of the lives of Abraham and his descendants. As a novelist, Robinson is most comfortable in the domestic, intimate complexities of human relationships, making her well-suited to tell the story of this remarkable family. As a result, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and the other men and women throughout Genesis are shown to be living, breathing human beings, flawed and complex, who nevertheless play major roles in providential history.

Although Robinson insists on a broad, thematic read of Genesis, she is ever-attentive to the sequence of the narrative in her analysis. For example, she sees Hagar and Ishmael’s exile in the desert and the binding of Isaac as parallel cases, told one after the other. They are commentaries on child sacrifice: two people exercising profound faith, entrusting their sons’ lives to God’s word, only for God to deliver them from harm’s way.

This attention to structure invites sometimes startling revelations. She says, for instance, that Isaac’s journey to find a wife and Jacob being cast out after stealing Esau’s birthright frame Isaac’s life to show his decline in fortune. But she takes this a step further to suggest that it also calls attention to Rebekah’s unhappiness: “Though the text says that Isaac loved Esau and Rebekah loved Jacob, there is really no evidence that Rebekah loved anyone.” And as she traces out Rebekah’s life from Isaac’s arrival to her pregnancy to her relationship with her sons, Robinson makes a strong case that this might be true, and even providential.

And so while Robinson explores the family feuds that exist throughout Genesis, her writing is attentive to God’s presence even in the most silly, self-serving and confounding moments of the book. “The remarkable realism of the Bible, the voices it captures, the characterization it achieves, are products of an interest in the human that has no parallel in ancient literature.” She treats all of Genesis’s “domestic malaise” with deep reverence, because, after all, so does God.

Unfortunately, Robinson’s vastly connective interpretive vision sometimes comes at the expense of accuracy. For example, early in the book she says that the boast of Lamech (Gen 4:23-24) closely mirrors his son Noah’s drunken rage (Gen 9:18-29) in order to comment on humanity’s tendency toward vengeance; it is a powerful insight. The only problem is that Lamech, the boastful descendent of Cain, is not Noah’s father, but rather a distant cousin. Noah’s father is also named Lamech, but he descends from Seth, not Cain.

So her conclusion, over 100 pages later, that “providence would act through the life of Cain to arrive at Noah,” is less of a brilliant callback than a stuttering reminder of Reading Genesis ’s shortcomings. A more thorough investigation of Robinson’s claims throughout the book would require a biblical scholar, or at least a bibliography. (At no point does she cite any external source, save the occasional, offhand reference to another book of the Bible. You wonder how she got away with it. You then remember that she wrote Gilead ; Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists earn a certain editorial license that theologians lack.)

And yet, from her attention to the intimate, human reality at the heart of Genesis, we gain insight into this family affair that only a once-in-a-generation novelist like Robinson could provide. Noting that “at no point are the actors’ motivations insufficient to account for events, and at no point are their actions out of character,” Robinson concludes, “The story could, no doubt should, function as a theological proof that the earthly and the providential are separate things in theory only.”

God’s will is not dependent on us, but using the unique, fickle motivations of each of his co-creators, God is able to make something great. To anyone who wonders where God could be in such a broken world, Reading Genesis reminds us that this question has always plagued humanity, and God has always drawn near to us anyway. Robinson’s book is an insightful exploration of “the ways in which the faithfulness of God is manifest in the world of fallen humankind.” The stability of the covenant is not due to our worthiness, but to God’s love for human beings.

In her 2004 novel, Gilead , Robinson’s protagonist, the Congregationalist minister John Ames, reflects on how the theologian is never truly separate from the God about whom he or she writes: “I suppose Calvin’s God was a Frenchman, just as mine is a Middle Westerner of New England extraction.” In the same way, Marilynne Robinson’s God is in love with humanity. In all our flaws and folly, power and glory, she insists, “Human beings are at the center of it all.”

This article also appeared in print, under the headline “Abraham and Family,” in the April 2024 , issue.

Delaney Coyne is a Joseph A. O’Hare, S.J., Fellow at America.

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How the Authors of the Bible Spun Triumph from Defeat

By Adam Gopnik

The Moshiach came to Madison Avenue this summer. All over a not particularly Jewish neighborhood, posters of the bearded, Rembrandtesque Rebbe Schneerson appeared, mucilaged to every light post and bearing the caption “Long Live the Lubavitcher Rebbe King Messiah forever!” This was, or ought to have been, trebly astonishing. First, the rebbe being urged to a longer life died in 1994, and the new insistence that he was nonetheless the Moshiach skirted, as his followers tend to do, the question of whether he might remain somehow alive. Second, the very concept of a messiah recapitulates a specific national hope of a small and oft-defeated nation several thousand years ago, and spoke originally to the local Judaean dream of a warrior who would lead his people to victory over the Persians, the Greeks, and, latterly, the Roman colonizers. And, third, the disputes surrounding the rebbe from Crown Heights are strikingly similar to those which surrounded the rebbe Yeshua, or Jesus, when his followers first pressed his claim: was this messianic pretension a horrific blasphemy or a final fulfillment? Yet there it was, another Jewish messiah, on a poster, in 2023.

The messianism on our street corners is a reminder of Judaism’s peculiarly long-lived legacy. Who can now tell Jupiter Dolichenus from Jupiter Optimus Maximus, two cult divinities once venerated at magnificent temples in Rome? But we all know what a messiah is, and some people wonder if the Brooklyn rabbi might be he. The pagans who dominated the world lost their gods when they lost their empires and saw them swept into myth by the monotheistic religions spawned from the Jewish one. And the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, is, perhaps, unique on the planet inasmuch as it is, as the scholar Jacob L. Wright suggests in his new book, “ Why the Bible Began ” (Cambridge), so entirely a losers’ tale. The Jews were the great sufferers of the ancient world—persecuted, exiled, catastrophically defeated—and yet the tale of their special selection, and of the demiurge who, from an unbeliever’s point of view, reneged on every promise and failed them at every turn, is the most admired, influential, and permanent of all written texts. Wright’s purpose is to explain, in a new way, how and why this happened.

The easiest explanation is that it happened this way because that’s the way God wanted it to happen. But this does not lessen the need to say how it happened. Or, as Edward Gibbon wrote, in one of the most perfect of sentences, explaining his ambition to provide a rational account for the rise of Christianity, “As truth and reason seldom find so favourable a reception in the world, and as the wisdom of Providence frequently condescends to use the passions of the human heart, and the general circumstances of mankind, as instruments to execute its purpose, we may still be permitted, though with becoming submission, to ask, not indeed what were the first, but what were the secondary causes?”

Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.

The “secondary cause” for the Bible’s triumph, in Wright’s view, can be put simply: losers rule. More people remember the record-losing ’62 Mets than the pennant-winning ’62 Yankees. Division and defeat, Wright explains, made the Bible memorable. Successive expulsions and exiles forced the Jewish poets and prophets, like Red Sox fans of yore, to imagine defeat as a virtue, dispossession as a gift, failure today as a promise of victory tomorrow. Defeat usually compelled other ancient peoples, as it does us, to invent rationalizations for what happened. (Yes, we failed to pacify Afghanistan, but nobody could have done so.) In the face of regular defeat, however, the Jewish scribes had to ask whether defeat wasn’t God’s will in the first place, and so opened mankind unto a new contemplative possibility: that spiritual success and failure were not to be judged on worldly terms. Nice guys, or, anyway, pious guys, finish last and should be proud of their position.

The Hebrew Bible was mostly composed—composed, recomposed, and redacted, by many hands at many times in many places—during the millennium before the Common Era, and the defeats endured by the Jews, having settled, probably peaceably, in the Egyptian-dominated land they called Canaan, are still astonishing to itemize. The most significant of these took place in the middle centuries of that millennium. First, the Assyrians, around 720 B.C.E., conquered the northern Kingdom of Israel and deported and enslaved its people. Then, around 600 B.C.E., the Babylonians—led by the impressively named Nebuchadnezzar—laid siege to Jerusalem and ended the southern Kingdom of Judah and perhaps its temple as well, resulting in another massive forced migration. So began the “Babylonian captivity,” which lasted, by legend, until the Babylonians, in turn, were conquered by the Persian King Cyrus, who issued an edict, in 569 B.C.E., allowing the Jews to go back to Jerusalem. After that came the Seleucid Greeks, who ran things briefly, only to be kicked aside by the Romans, who were running everything in those days. It was in putting down the First Jewish Revolt, in 70 C.E., that the Romans laid waste to Jerusalem, destroyed its temple, and saw its people once again scattered, this time for good.

All these historical details are controversial: the mass expulsion of the Jews to Babylon may have involved only a select number of the élite; the edict of Cyrus may have been, as Wright suspects, a retrospective invention giving a particular name to a more general Persian practice of religious toleration. Even the First Temple, the so-called Temple of Solomon, may have been nothing more than a tabernacle tent, turned by retrospective memory into a marvel of cedar and gold and twisted columns. Yet a legacy of losses seems hard to deny.

The divisions that Wright speaks of are less familiar, and—this is perhaps the chief originality of his book—just as decisive. The southern Kingdom of Judah and the northern Kingdom of Israel, which we might have imagined as agreeable sister kingdoms, were, in the centuries around 900-700 B.C.E., warring adversaries, though a single deity, one of many names, was shared between them. The oldest deity, El—“Israel” is usually interpreted to mean “One who struggles with God”—got replaced over time by the unnameable deity Yahweh, who originally had a female companion, and then by a more metaphysical maker, Elohim. Wright stresses the extent of the disruption that occurred when Israel was subjugated by the Assyrians while Judah maintained self-rule for more than a century afterward. (A blink in Biblical time, perhaps, but it’s an interval like the one that separates us from the Civil War.) It was during this period, he argues persuasively, that a fundamental break happened, leaving a contrapuntal discord in the Bible between the southern “Palace History” and the “People’s History” of the dispossessed northern scribes. The Palace History conjured up Saul and David and Solomon and the rest, still comfortably situated within a “statist,” dynastic Levantine court; the People’s History, by contrast, was aggressively indifferent to monarchs, real or imagined, and concentrated instead on popular figures, Moses and Miriam, the patriarchs and the prophets. The Jewish tradition of celebrating non-dynastic figures of moral or charismatic force—a practice mostly unknown, it would seem, in the rest of the ancient world—begins in the intersection of dispossessed Israelites and complacent Judaeans.

The northern and the southern narratives were, Wright says, constantly being entangled and reëntangled by the Biblical writers, as a kind of competition in interpolation. So, for instance, Aaron the priest is interpolated latterly as Moses’ brother in order to align the priestly court-bound southern caste with the charismatic northern one. Again and again, what seems like uniform storytelling is revealed to be an assemblage of fragments, born from defeat and midwifed by division.

This process is perhaps not as strange as Wright seems to think, and not even unknown within the nearer confines of American history. The defeated Southerners of our Civil War also made a popular myth-history out of very different material from that of their Northern brethren. The Southern scribes, too, favored non-dynastic folk heroes, such as Davy Crockett, and fictional romantic figures, such as Rhett Butler, over the Presidential luminaries whose names bedeck Northern cities. The compass directions are reversed, north to south, but one is very much a people’s narrative, the other a palace narrative. Indeed, the Western, that peculiarly American contribution to the world’s store of epic and saga, often depends on the tale of a defeated Confederate at large to enforce virtue, someone whose heroic individualism is counterpoised with the superficial discipline of the federal troops. The beloved figure of the outlaw, still haloed by Bob Dylan and others, with Jesse James (a onetime Confederate guerrilla) at its center, is that of a Southern soldier who won’t give up after defeat, so that he crosses into a subversive and (in Wright’s terms) an anti-statist role. A people’s history is not always an admirable one.

Wright is both an analyst of Biblical texts and an apologist for them. His analysis is often brilliant and persuasive, leading us to see ideological fractures in texts that we thought we knew. And though much of the textual history will be familiar to scholars who have gone deep into the weeds, or the bulrushes, Wright does a terrific job of bringing it forward for his readers. He explains, for instance, that the great opening pages of Genesis are an interpolation of the Babylonian period, and a conscious, studio-notes-style rewrite of a violent Babylonian creation myth in which a female spirit is slain by a male one, and only then the world begun. Against this, the Jewish writers post the more placid, word-centered creation tale of Elohim; in a culture where words are all that is left as weapons, it’s words that make the universe.

“North and South never managed to overcome their rivalry,” Wright tells us, identifying traces of it everywhere in the text. Genesis, he stresses, exists on several sedimentary levels. One level focusses on the doings of the Creator; another gives us a more familial version of the creation story. This story, rooted not in Elohim and his acts but in Abraham and his progeny, emphasizes continuity, and the idea that the Israelites had always lived in the promised land. The Mosaic account, in Exodus, is a sharply different and imperial alternative. “Whereas the patriarchs make peace with the inhabitants of Canaan,” Wright observes, “the Exodus-Conquest Account presents the newly liberated nation taking the country by force.” In his view, the tension between the “ecumenical and conciliatory” political model and the “particularist and militarist” model defines the character of the whole. At the other end of the Bible, Wright, having so neatly delineated the wars between the north, which was centered on Samaria, and the south, which was centered on Jerusalem, makes our encounter with the southern fable of the Good Samaritan suddenly hair-raising. Revisiting Jesus’ tale about a traveller, beset by robbers, who was left untouched by a Levite (i.e., his own southern people) but rescued by a kind Samaritan (i.e., a northerner), we realize that the parable contains within it a thousand years of contentious Jewish history. One people, divided in two, should again be one people.

As an apologist, Wright suggests, less persuasively, that the Jewish stories have a special virtue for having been forged in the smithy of suffering. “One cannot help but wonder: if neighboring peoples had not only admitted defeat but also made it central to a new collective identity, as the biblical scribes did, would they too have produced corpora of literature that continued to be transmitted for generations?” he asks. Yet the Judaean cause isn’t necessarily vindicated by the scale of the suffering, or by the lyricism of its lamentations, since the essential lesson conveyed isn’t the lesson one would wish for—the thought that nobody should conquer other people or throw them into slavery and exile—so much as the thought that it was bad luck it happened to us. The Lamentations can be universalized, but they are limited, in the first instance, to us and ours.

And is the poetic potency of defeat so purely a Jewish discovery? Homer, certainly, found greater pathos in the Trojans’ downfall than glory in the Greeks’ victory, and made the humane family man Hector at least as attractive as the triumphant Achilles; and we ourselves volubly commemorate losses, from the Alamo to 9/11. “Here’s to the losers, bless ’em all!” Sinatra sang, and, often enough, we call down God’s blessing on the losers, since they so clearly do not have man’s.

Yet Wright’s meditations on the inspirational power of Jewish loss lead one, as does that Madison Avenue poster, to a larger contemplation of the “successor” faith. How much losing is there, really, in Christianity? At first glance, the Christian story appears to reverse the polarities and make a tale of universal triumph out of the old Jewish stories of particular defeat. But is this really so? Debates still rage over whether the Jewish figure of the “suffering servant” presaged the Christian example. Whatever scholars conclude, though, the force of the Christian example surely lies in the extremity of the deity’s abasement, tortured to death in the most humiliatingly imaginable way and left to be buried as a criminal. The Christian fable potently compresses the Jewish stories of suffering into a single story, unfolding over a single year. Indeed, doesn’t the emotional appeal of Christianity rest on its very Jewish ritualization of extreme suffering and humiliating defeat as a prelude to divine favor? Consider the number of images of Crucifixion (Jesus dying) in Italian churches as opposed to those of the ascension (Christ rising). Christian art centers on a moment of anguish and defeat, and this is in essence a Jewish idea.

A more cheering moral can be found in Wright’s meditations. Wright, like so many scholars these days, cannot resist projecting pluralist, post-Enlightenment values onto societies that made no pretense of possessing them. He cites enthusiastically, for instance, the scholar Catherine Keller’s reading of Genesis, which argues that in the priestly version of Genesis the word “Tehom,” usually translated as the inanimate form “the deep,” actually represents a female deity who joins Elohim in creation, and whose “enduring presence holds recreative potential,” such that “Elohim draws on this potential rather than mastering and dominating it, as in traditional paternal theologies.”

As always, we should be skeptical about claims that fit the taste and temper of our time. We badly want benevolent female deities to tame obnoxious male ones, but this doesn’t mean that any earlier reader understood it, or any earlier writer intended it, in quite this way. Wright’s inclination to think that even the patriarchs might not be truly patriarchal can occasionally contort his prose and his perspective. (In the book’s introduction, he does admit, disarmingly, that he doesn’t entirely like the Bible, mandating as it does the execution of disobedient children.) Certainly, a culture that treats menstruating women as unclean cannot easily be made into a feminist one.

For all that, the interpolation of our Progressive narrative within the existing Palace and People’s narratives seems, after Wright’s arguments, newly graced by tradition. Given the Bible’s pliability, its kludgy fusing of one story into another, surely our ways of telling it are as legitimate as any other. The story may seem frozen, as Rebbe Schneerson seems frozen in his Polish eighteenth-century garb, but, still, it moves. All religions are a set of practices before they are a set of articulated beliefs, and perhaps the key ritual practice of the Jews was prose-writing. Sacred books are far from commonplace in ancient religions. ( The Homeric epic , that Greek equivalent, is a war-and-adventure story with the gods attendant; and the rules of how to please them, or the impossibility of ever doing so, are inferred from the story, not announced within it. The Ten Commandments of paganism are winked by Zeus to his favorites.)

A nation is its narration. By first exploding its internal differences and then annealing them in imaginative fictions at best loosely based in history—exactly as was done in this country for so long—a coherently incoherent tale gets told. To say that the Judaeans and the Israelites and their spiritual descendants are the people of the book makes sense only if we think of books as books truly are: that is, badly reviewed, sporadically revived, occasionally rediscovered, and, if any good at all, perpetually misread. The cracks and crevices, not to mention the palimpsests and overlays, in the Bible as it really is make for an ever more modern text. We like broken books, and this is one. ♦

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TGC Announces New List of ‘Best Commentaries’

More By Jared Kennedy

If you’re a church member planning a Sunday school class or Bible study, a pastor getting ready for a new sermon series, or a seminarian looking to build your biblical studies library, you may be seeking a reliable commentary. Which one should you pick up? Which commentaries are biblically faithful and suitable for your study and teaching needs? If that’s a question you’ve asked recently, The Gospel Coalition’s Carson Center for Theological Renewal is pleased to announce a new series of recommendations pages designed to serve you.

In the spirit of Don Carson’s New Testament Commentary Survey , TGC Council members, staff, and expert writers have worked together to compile an annotated list of the best commentaries on each Bible book. This project leverages the collective wisdom of scholars and church leaders who have devoted years to training the next generation in biblical scholarship and expositional preaching. Our goal has been to serve you—pastors, ministry leaders, and laypeople in local churches—by pointing you to the best resources available.

Personalized List

For each biblical book or section, we’ve listed modern commentaries under three categories.

TGC Council members, staff, and expert writers have worked together to compile an annotated list of the best commentaries on each book of the Bible.

The intr oductory commentaries are for Sunday school teachers and small group leaders without advanced training. They’re written in accessible prose and orient the reader to the text as well as its author and original audience. P reaching commentaries are for pastors and Bible teachers preparing to proclaim the Word. These commentaries include nods to the original languages but focus on exposition and application for God’s people today. Scholarly commentaries are for academics and pastor-theologians. These books assume knowledge of original languages, address various textual considerations, and interact with other scholarly works.

The first two categories primarily highlight resources written by Reformed and evangelical authors. The third category includes the best scholarly resources without regard for the author’s theological persuasion.

Designed to Serve You

To compile the list, TGC staff surveyed a selection of evangelical scholars and church leaders that included TGC Council members and seminary professors from major evangelical seminaries, and we consulted other faithful lists like Carson’s New Testament Commentary Survey and Tremper Longman III’s Old Testament Commentary Survey . “If you are a Bible teacher, preacher, or serious student of God’s Word, this curated and vetted list of faithful resources has cut through the vast ocean of commentaries and brought the very best ones to the surface,” said Courtney Doctor, TGC’s director of women’s initiatives. “This will save you time and give you considerable confidence as you study.”

Check out our new listing of “Best Commentaries.” The TGC and Carson Center teams are prayerful this resource will serve church leaders like you for generations to come.

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The Carson Center for Theological Renewal seeks to bring about spiritual renewal around the world by providing excellent theological resources for the whole church—for anyone called to teach and anyone who wants to study the Bible. The Center helps Bible study leaders and small-group facilitators teach God’s Word, so they can answer tough questions on the spot with a quick search on their smartphone.

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Jared Kennedy serves as an editor for The Gospel Coalition. He is series editor for the TGC Hard Questions series and the author of books like Keeping Your Children’s Ministry on Mission , The Beginner’s Gospel Story Bible , and with Kevin Hippolyte and Trey Kullman, Faith Builder Catechism: Devotions to Level Up Your Family Discipleship . He and his wife, Megan, live with their three daughters in Louisville, Kentucky, where they are a part of Sojourn Church Midtown.

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All 66 Books of the Bible

News flash: the Bible is huge : about 611,000 words long, all divvied up across 66 smaller documents called the “books” of the Bible.

That’s because the Bible is a collection of writings from different authors writing at different times. In some ways, that makes it easier to approach the Bible: we can read it in “chunks” rather than needing to read the whole Bible at once.

But it also makes it a bit confusing. The Bible itself is a book. In fact, the word “bible” comes from the Latin and Greek words for “book” ( biblia and  biblos , respectively). But it’s a book of books. That means if you want to know the Bible better, you’ll need to get acquainted with the 66 documents it comprises.

That can take a while, so . . .

Here’s a snapshot of every book of the Bible

I’ve written a one-sentence overview of every book of the Bible. They’re listed in the order they show up in the Protestant Bible. If you want more, I’ve linked to quick, 3-minute guides to every book of the Bible, too.

This is a lot to take in, so if you want to start with baby steps,  check out this list of the shortest books of the Bible .

Old Testament books of the Bible

The Old Testament includes 39 books which were written long before Jesus was born.

1.  Genesis  

Genesis answers two big questions: “How did God’s relationship with the world begin?” and “Where did the nation of Israel come from?”

Author:  Traditionally Moses , but the stories are much older.

Fun fact:  Most of the famous Bible stories you’ve heard about are probably found in the book of Genesis. This is where the stories of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Ark, the Tower of Babel, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob’s ladder, and Joseph’s coat of many colors are recorded.

God saves Israel from slavery in Egypt, and then enters into a special relationship with them.

Author:  Traditionally Moses

3.  Leviticus

God gives Israel instructions for how to worship Him.

Author:  traditionally Moses

4.  Numbers

Israel fails to trust and obey God, and wanders in the wilderness for 40 years.

5.  Deuteronomy

Moses gives Israel instructions (in some ways, a recap of the laws in Exodus–Numbers) for how to love and obey God in the Promised Land.

Joshua (Israel’s new leader) leads Israel to conquer the Promised land, then parcels out territories to the twelve tribes of Israel.

Author:  Nobody knows

Fun fact:  You’ve probably heard of a few fantastic stories from this book (the Battle of Jericho and the day the sun stood still), but most of the action happens in the first half of this book. The last half is pretty much all about divvying up the real estate.

Israel enters a cycle of turning from God, falling captive to oppressive nations, calling out to God, and being rescued by leaders God sends their way (called “judges”).

Two widows lose everything, and find hope in Israel—which leads to the birth of the future King David .

9.  1 Samuel

Israel demands a king, who turns out to be quite a disappointment.

10.  2 Samuel

David, a man after God’s own heart, becomes king of Israel.

11.  1 Kings

The kingdom of Israel has a time of peace and prosperity under King Solomon , but afterward splits, and the two lines of kings turn away from God.

12.  2 Kings

Both kingdoms ignore God and his prophets, until they both fall captive to other world empires.

13.  1 Chronicles

This is a brief history of Israel from Adam to David, culminating with David commissioning the temple of God in Jerusalem.

Author:  Traditionally Ezra

14.  2 Chronicles

David’s son Solomon builds the temple, but after centuries of rejecting God, the Babylonians take the southern Israelites captive and destroy the temple.

The Israelites rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, and a scribe named Ezra teaches the people to once again obey God’s laws.

Author: Ezra

16.  Nehemiah

The city of Jerusalem is in bad shape, so Nehemiah rebuilds the wall around the city.

Author:  Nehemiah

17.  Esther

Someone hatches a genocidal plot to bring about Israel’s extinction, and Esther must face the emperor to ask for help.

Books of Poetry in the Old Testament

Satan attacks a righteous man named Job, and Job and his friends argue about why terrible things are happening to him.

19.  Psalms

A collection of 150 songs that Israel sang to God (and to each other)—kind of like a hymnal for the ancient Israelites.

Author:  So many authors— meet them all here !

20.  Proverbs

A collection of sayings written to help people make wise decisions that bring about justice.

Author: Solomon and other wise men

21.  Ecclesiastes

A philosophical exploration of the meaning of life—with a surprisingly nihilistic tone for the Bible.

Author:  Traditionally Solomon

22.  Song of Solomon (Song of Songs)

A love song (or collection of love songs) celebrating love, desire, and marriage.

Author:  Traditionally Solomon (but it could have been written about Solomon, or in the style of Solomon)

Books of prophecy in the Old Testament

23.  Isaiah

God sends the prophet Isaiah to warn Israel of future judgment—but also to tell them about a coming king and servant who will “bear the sins of many.”

Author:  Isaiah (and maybe some of his followers)

24.  Jeremiah

God sends a prophet to warn Israel about the coming Babylonian captivity, but the people don’t take the news very well.

Author:  Jeremiah

25.  Lamentations  

A collection of dirges lamenting the fall of Jerusalem after the Babylonian attacks.

Author:  Traditionally Jeremiah

26.  Ezekiel

God chooses a man to speak for Him to Israel, to tell them the error of their ways and teach them justice: Ezekiel.

Author:  Ezekiel

27.  Daniel

Daniel becomes a high-ranking wise man in the Babylonian and Persian empires, and has prophetic visions concerning Israel’s future.

Author:  Daniel (with other contributors)

Hosea is told to marry a prostitute who leaves him, and he must bring her back: a picture of God’s relationship with Israel.

Author:  Hosea

God sends a plague of locusts to Judge Israel, but his judgment on the surrounding nations is coming, too.

Author:  Joel

A shepherd named Amos preaches against the injustice of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.

Author:  Amos

31.  Obadiah

Obadiah warns the neighboring nation of Edom that they will be judged for plundering Jerusalem.

Author:  Obadiah

A disobedient prophet runs from God, is swallowed by a great fish, and then preaches God’s message to the city of Nineveh.

Author: Traditionally Jonah

Micah confronts the leaders of Israel and Judah regarding their injustice, and prophecies that one day the Lord himself will rule in perfect justice.

Author:  Micah

Nahum foretells of God’s judgment on Nineveh, the capital of Assyria.

Author:  Nahum

35.  Habakkuk

Habakkuk pleads with God to stop the injustice and violence in Judah, but is surprised to find that God will use the even more violent Babylonians to do so.

Author:  Habakkuk

36.  Zephaniah

God warns that he will judge Israel and the surrounding nations, but also that he will restore them in peace and justice.

Author:  Zephaniah

37.  Haggai

The people have abandoned the work of restoring God’s temple in Jerusalem, and so Haggai takes them to task.

Author:  Haggai

38.  Zechariah

The prophet Zechariah calls Israel to return to God, and records prophetic visions that show what’s happening behind the scenes.

39.  Malachi

God has been faithful to Israel, but they continue to live disconnected from him—so God sends Malachi to call them out.

New Testament books of the Bible

40. The Gospel of  Matthew

This is an account of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, focusing on Jesus’ role as the true king of the Jews.

Author:  Matthew

41. The Gospel of  Mark

This brief account of Jesus’ earthly ministry highlights Jesus’ authority and servanthood.

Author:  John Mark

42. The Gospel of  Luke

Luke writes the most thorough account of Jesus’ life, pulling together eyewitness testimonies to tell the full story of Jesus.

Author:  Luke

43. The Gospel of  John

John lists stories of signs and miracles with the hope that readers will believe in Jesus.

Author:  John

Jesus returns to the Father, the Holy Spirit comes to the church, and the gospel of Jesus spreads throughout the world.

Paul’s epistles

45.  Romans

Paul summarizes how the gospel of Jesus works in a letter to the churches at Rome, where he plans to visit.

Author:  Paul

46.  1 Corinthians

Paul writes a disciplinary letter to a fractured church in Corinth, and answers some questions that they’ve had about how Christians should behave.

47.  2 Corinthians

Paul writes a letter of reconciliation to the church at Corinth, and clears up some concerns that they have.

48.  Galatians

Paul hears that the Galatian churches have been lead to think that salvation comes from the law of Moses, and writes a (rather heated) letter telling them where the false teachers have it wrong.

49.  Ephesians

Paul writes to the church at Ephesus about how to walk in grace, peace, and love.

50.  Philippians

An encouraging letter to the church of Philippi from Paul, telling them how to have joy in Christ.

51.  Colossians

Paul writes the church at Colossae a letter about who they are in Christ, and how to walk in Christ.

52.  1 Thessalonians

Paul has heard a good report on the church at Thessalonica, and encourages them to “excel still more” in faith, hope, and love.

53.  2 Thessalonians

Paul instructs the Thessalonians on how to stand firm until the coming of Jesus.

54.  1 Timothy

Paul gives his protegé Timothy instruction on how to lead a church with sound teaching and a godly example.

55.  2 Timothy

Paul is nearing the end of his life, and encourages Timothy to continue preaching the word.

Paul advises Titus on how to lead orderly, counter-cultural churches on the island of Crete.

57.  Philemon

Paul strongly recommends that Philemon accept his runaway slave as a brother, not a slave.

The general, or Catholic, epistles

58.  Hebrews

A letter encouraging Christians to cling to Christ despite persecution, because he is greater.

A letter telling Christians to live in ways that demonstrate their faith in action.

Author: James (likely the brother of Jesus)

60.  1 Peter

Peter writes to Christians who are being persecuted, encouraging them to testify to the truth and live accordingly.

Author:  Peter

61.  2 Peter

Peter writes a letter reminding Christians about the truth of Jesus, and warning them that false teachers will come.

62.  1 John

John writes a letter to Christians about keeping Jesus’ commands, loving one another, and important things they should know.

63.  2 John

A very brief letter about walking in truth, love, and obedience.

Author: John

64.  3 John

An even shorter letter about Christian fellowship.

A letter encouraging Christians to contend for the faith, even though ungodly persons have crept in unnoticed.

Author:  Jude

66.  Revelation

John sees visions of things that have been, things that are, and things that are yet to come.

Want to remember the books of the Bible?

This helpful visual aid makes an excellent addition to classrooms, church offices, or anywhere else you’d like to reflect on this important collection of books.

Privacy Overview

October 16, 1998 BOOKS OF THE TIMES 'The Poisonwood Bible': A Family a Heart of Darkness By MICHIKO KAKUTANI THE POISONWOOD BIBLE By Barbara Kingsolver. 546 pp. New York: Harper Flamingo. $26. lthough "The Poisonwood Bible" takes place in the former Belgian Congo and begins in 1959 and ends in the 1990s, Barbara Kingsolver's powerful new book is actually an old-fashioned 19th-century novel, a Hawthornian tale of sin and redemption, and the "dark necessity" of history. The novel's central character, a fiery evangelical missionary named Nathan Price, is part Roger Chillingworth, the coldhearted, judgmental villain of Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter," and part Ahab, Melville's monomaniacal captain who risks his own life and the lives of those closest to him in pursuit of his obsessive vision. On the surface, certainly, "Poisonwood" might seem to have little in common with Ms. Kingsolver's earlier work ("The Bean Trees," "Pigs in Heaven," "Animal Dreams," "Homeland and Other Stories"), fiction set for the most part in the American South and Southwest and dealing, most memorably, with the plight of single mothers trying to sort out their lives. These previous works, however, also grappled with social injustice, with the intersection of public events with private concerns and the competing claims of community and individual will -- some of the very themes that animate the saga of Nathan Price and his family and their journey into the heart of darkness. Narrated in alternating chapters by Nathan's wife, Orleanna, and their four daughters, Rachel, Leah, Adah and Ruth May, "The Poisonwood Bible" begins with the arrival of the Price family in the remote Congolese village of Kilanga -- a tiny cluster of mud houses devoid of all the ordinary amenities of life back home in "the easy land of ice cream cones and new Keds sneakers and We like Ike ." Here, there are plagues of killer ants, hordes of malaria-carrying mosquitoes and unseen parasites, and lions and tarantulas and snakes -- a fearsome world of nature whose perils are magnified by political and racial tensions. Moving fluently from one point of view to another, Ms. Kingsolver does a nimble job of delineating the Price girls' responses to Africa and their father's decision to uproot them. At 15, Rachel, the whiny would-be beauty queen who "cares for naught but appearances," can think only of what she misses: the five-day deodorant pads she forgot to bring, flush toilets, machine-washed clothes and other things, as she says with her willful gift for malapropism, that she has taken "for granite." Steven L. Hopp/ HarperFlamingo Barbara Kingsolver Leah, the feisty one, pledges herself to her father's mission in the face of mounting opposition, while her twin, Adah, damaged since birth and unable (or unwilling) to speak, records her observations of her family with a shrewd poetic intelligence. As for the youngest, 5-year old Ruth May, she brightly tries to make sense of the exotic new world in which she finds herself, even as she makes friends with the children of Kilanga. All this while their mother, Orleanna, struggles with the hardships of daily life -- toting and disinfecting the family's water, scrambling to make ends meet and trying to protect her family from the myriad terrors of the bush. Orleanna's misgivings about her husband mount as his hubris and utter selfishness become more and more apparent. Although the local people are reluctant to abandon their traditional deities (and fearful of baptizing their children in the crocodile-infested waters of the nearby river), Nathan vows to convert them. He proves equally oblivious to the welfare of his own family when he refuses their entreaties to leave -- even in the face of illness and escalating violence against whites. Indeed he will end up sacrificing the life of one of his daughters to his self-righteous beliefs. Nathan, of course, is meant to represent the patronizing attitude of white colonialists toward Africa -- and the devastating legacy of violence they bequeathed to regions like the Congo. Such efforts by Ms. Kingsolver to turn the story of the Price family into a social allegory can be heavy-handed at times, transforming many of her characters into one-dimensional pawns in a starkly lit morality play. Orleanna, it's clear, is a symbol of the not-so-innocent bystander, whose own passivity keeps her from speaking up against the crimes of others; Rachel is a symbol of the selfish pragmatist, who puts her own desires before the needs of others; and Rachel's lover, a white mercenary and diamond smuggler named Axelroot is a symbol of foreign meddling in the Congo. Even the Prices' pet parrot, Methuselah (long accustomed to living in a cage and eaten by a wild animal once it is released), becomes a symbol of the Congo's newly won independence -- independence that swiftly devolves into violence under the dictatorial rule of the Cold War strongman Mobutu Sese Seko. One of the things that keeps "The Poisonwood Bible" from becoming overly schematic and lends the novel a fierce emotional undertow is Ms. Kingsolver's love of detail, her eye for the small facts of daily life: the Betty Crocker cake mixes, carefully carried to Kilanga, that won't work in Orleanna's primitive African kitchen; the Clorox bleach, "measured out like the Blood of the Lamb" to wash the local produce; the endless bargaining the Congolese, under Mobutu's regime, must conduct for everything from a kidney-stone operation to a postage stamp. In addition, Ms. Kingsolver endows two of her narrators, Leah and Adah, with a sympathetic intelligence that reveals both their girlish difficulties in coping with their family's plight and their maturing need to make sense of the world for themselves. In watching these two Price sisters grow up -- one will become a doctor in America; the other, the wife of a Congolese activist jailed for opposing Mobutu -- the reader is made to understand not only the ways in which a father's sins are visited upon (and expiated by) his children, but also the ways in which private lives can be shaped and shattered by public events. As Leah will observe many years later, "We've all ended up giving up body and soul to Africa, one way or another." Each of us, she adds, "got our heart buried in six feet of African dirt; we are all co-conspirators here." Return to the Books Home Page

a wine blog

Book Review: The Wine Bible, 3rd Edition

I’ve now been writing about wine for 19 years, and the more time that goes on, the list of things that I don’t know gets longer and longer. That would be true if nothing ever changed in the world of wine, but of course, the opposite is true. Change both evolutionary and radical unfolds relentlessly, meaning that quite literally there’s more to know every year.

All of that by way of saying how terrifyingly impossible the prospect of capturing the entirety of the wine world in a single volume would be, and how amazing it is that Karen MacNeil has attempted to do it, not once, but thrice.

What has she learned along the way to publishing the third edition of her best-selling The Wine Bible ? I recently sat down with my friend and colleague to find out.

“I learned that you don’t leave Italy until the end,” she says. “Italy is chaos. If you leave Italy and Germany until the end, you’ll throw yourself off the roof of the building. You get Portugal, Germany, and Italy out of the way early on, and you don’t do them one after another. You need something easy in between that you can really handle, like Oregon.”

MacNeil wrote the first edition of The Wine Bible in 2001 without much of a track record as wine writer. “I was better known as a food writer,’ she says. ‘I didn’t have a readership, and I didn’t have any expectation of sales. The first one was a passion project.’

The second edition was published in 2015. Between those two editions, the book has sold more than 800,000 copies, making it one of the top five best-selling wine books in history, and the best-selling American book on wine.

“I feel like at this point it has its own life and it drags me along behind it helping,” laughs MacNeil. “This time it only took 4 years to write, which was twice as fast as the original.”

Updating a reference book with the kind of aspirations at comprehensiveness inherent in The Wine Bible (I mean look at the title, for Pete’s sake.. . ) doesn’t involve merely refreshing the number of hectares under vine in Romania.

“I realized I could keep the same house and paint the walls a different color, or I could take it down to the studs, put a new roof on and add rooms,’ says MacNeil. ‘I took it down to the studs. It would be faster to just change the facts, but it is much more satisfying to create a whole new book.’

MacNeil set out (both for this edition and the previous one) to largely rewrite the text, which meant re-researching every section of the book. Somewhat shockingly, MacNeil refuses to rely on other writers’ research for her own, preferring authoritative, primary sources for any facts she conveys to readers.

While many of us might be content, say, to trust Jasper Morris when he tells us the acreage of Echezeaux in his authoritative Inside Burgundy , not so Karen MacNeil. She’ll rely on government records, thank you very much.

To say there are a lot of facts in this 728-page tome would be grossly understating the case.

The Wine Bible has always stood somewhat apart in the world of wine reference books for its insistence on being a one-stop-shop for the wine-loving reader. This approach makes it unique, even in the company of some of the world’s greatest, most encyclopedic works on wine.

The Oxford Companion to Wine is as close to a universal reference for the English-speaking wine world as it comes, but it doesn’t really recommend wineries or their wines, teach you how to taste, or tell you what Baumes-de-Venise actually tastes like.

The World Atlas of Wine covers well the geographical, climatological, and regulatory facts about major wine regions and appellations of the world, briefly indicating their most notable wines, but it doesn’t explain what tannins are, or how wine barrels are made.

The Wine Bible attempts the incredible feat of trying to do it all: giving you the fundamentals about what makes wine special; teaching you how to taste and appreciate wine; explaining how wine is made; relating the history of wine through the ages; introducing you to different types of grapes; covering the major and minor wine regions of the world; and recommending and reviewing wines and producers from every major region.

If you didn’t know that MacNeil founded and taught at one of the world’s top wine education programs (the Culinary Institute of America’s Rudd Center for Professional Wine Studies in St. Helena, California) you’d certainly suspect it after a few pages worth of reading her prose.

A master of clarity and concision, MacNeil spends the first 90 pages of The Wine Bible delivering an eminently readable master class in wine fundamentals, punctuated every so often by one of the book’s signature elements: the side box.

“One of my early jobs was as one of the first food and wine editors for USA Today in the Eighties,’ explains MacNeil. ‘On my drive to work every day, I would listen to the radio and notice that sometimes the DJs would say some of the things that I had written. I realized the real power in giving people little snippets of information that they could remember.”

MacNeil says that from the beginning she conceived of The Wine Bible as a book that didn’t require someone to pick it up and read for long stretches. Instead, she says, she wanted someone to be able to open a random page and get something out of it.

While this kind of structure is more common today in the genre, there weren’t any other wine books at the time taking this bite-sized approach to wine information when the first edition of The Wine Bible was published.

After the first 90 pages, which MacNeil groups together under the heading “Mastering Wine” comes a new addition to the book, a short section on the ancient history of wine, which offers a couple of pages on what wine was like in the ancient world before the rest of the book moves on to deal with wine in the modern world.

The core 556 pages of the book (in color, for the first time in this third edition) cover the major and minor wine regions of the world. The world’s most important wine regions are covered in depth across dozens of pages, with sub-sections focused on key regions, their grapes, and recommended “Great Wines” from each, for which MacNeil provides detailed information and tasting notes.

France gets 129 pages, Italy gets 70. Mexico gets 3. Israel gets 5.

“With the second Wine Bible , I got hundreds of letters from people saying ‘Great job.’ I got four letters from rabbis asking me how I could have left Israel out of the book. I didn’t want to get any more letters from rabbis,’ jokes MacNeil.

In addition to providing the fundamentals about a region and its wines, along the way, MacNeil’s beloved side boxes offer interesting anecdotes, fascinating facts, tips for travelers, and more.

The Italian section, for instance, offers the following minor detours: How to Read an Italian Wine Label (Good Luck); Grappa (You Could Regret This in the Morning); The DOC, DOCG, IGT, VdT (Acronym Hell); How the Italians Eat Pasta; White Truffles: Piedmont’s Other Treasure; Vermouth—So Couth; Wine Glasses: A History and Italy’s Early Role; The Famous Prosciutto of Fruili; The Law of Mezzadria and “Promiscuous” Farms; and so on.

With a book of this scope, it seems impossible to include everything, but that hasn’t stopped MacNeil from trying.

“It’s so demoralizing when things get cut out of the book,’ admits MacNeil. ‘That happened in the first two editions. This time I wrote so tight to minimize the cutting as much as possible. I knew I would have to leave things out to make it all fit. At 800 pages you start getting people who want to make it two volumes, or make it a $75 book because the binding gets more expensive.”

MacNeil, to her credit, remains firmly committed to keeping the book at an affordable price, even if that means dropping standalone sections for Texas and Virginia to make room for other content, as this edition eventually required.

Israel, Great Britain, and Croatia have new sections in the book, with expanded sections for Georgia, China, and Slovenia. Portugal and Hungary have both been significantly reworked to address the dramatic ascendance of dry table wines in those regions over the past 10 years.

The book also features a 400-grape “glossary” in the back, along with a separate wine word dictionary designed to help wine lovers with some of the trickier wine terms from other languages that are often used without translation, such as recioto or vigneron .

MacNeil tasted “nearly 8000” wines in the process of writing the book, in service of completely overhauling the recommended wines at the end of each major wine region of the book. These sections now feature really excellent recommendations for benchmark bottlings that typify each region.

The phrase “herculean effort” definitely came to mind as I listened to MacNeil describe the process and intent behind her latest revision. But the result clearly speaks for itself. The third edition of The Wine Bible is certainly the best yet, and the update to full color makes it feel that much more engaging and helpful.

As a serious wine lover, I would never recommend that anyone own just a single wine book. But for those who might only need one, or even just one to start with, there’s no better single volume in the world of wine than The Wine Bible .

Karen MacNeil – The Wine Bible 3rd Edition  – Workman Publishing 2022, $36.87 (Softcover).  Purchase a copy .

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The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

B arbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible is remarkable not just for its story but also for its narrative form. It has five narrators. Orleanna Price and her four daughters accompany her husband Nathan Price, a Baptist missionary, to the Congo in 1959. The Price daughters and their mother narrate in contrapuntal alternation. By turns they describe their lives in a remote Congolese village and the fortunes of Nathan's mission to convert the Congolese.

Nathan himself never speaks to us, though his sermonising voice echoes through the novel. He is excluded because he resists all sympathy – he refuses to admit to doubt or weakness. "Our father speaks for all of us," observes Adah, and so the voices of his family are a kind of descant to his mission.

Telling a story in a sequence of monologues by different characters is a surprisingly old novelistic technique. It was pioneered in the 19th century by Wilkie Collins in The Moonstone , a crime mystery in which different characters spoke in turn as if giving evidence in a trial.

In the early 20th century it was associated with some of the pioneers of modernism – Virginia Woolf in The Waves or William Faulkner in As I Lay Dying . The Poisonwood Bible carries memories of Faulkner: the family comes originally from Mississippi, like Faulkner's, and their locutions have a Southern twang ("I was sore at father all right … But it was plain to see he was put out, too, something fierce").

Kingsolver does not, however, attempt so closely to follow the patterns of everyday speech. The voices of her characters are as much written as spoken. The convention has evolved to allow us to imagine narrative voices as expressions of different characters' thoughts.

Orleanna is given the benefit of hindsight. Back in Georgia after the years in Africa, she recalls events; her daughters' voices, however, seem to be describing experiences as they unfold. Three of the four sisters are teenagers when they arrive in Africa and Kingsolver has described how she read reams of magazines from the late 1950s and 60s in order to fabricate the idiom for American girls of the period.

Rachel is the eldest, and the most obstinately American, "heavy hearted in my soul for the flush commodes" she has left behind. Entirely resentful of the new world into which she is plunged, her truculence is expressed via a high school demotic. "I always wanted to be the belle of the ball, but, jeepers, is this ever the wrong ball".

Yet her scorn for her father's grim idealism allows for a mocking perceptiveness. "We are supposed to be calling the shots here, but it doesn't look to me like we're in charge of a thing". She speaks with a prissiness that produces frequent malapropisms, as when, in order to fend off the amorous local chief, she entertains the advances of a roguish South African pilot. "I'm willing to be a philanderist for peace, but a lady can only go so far where perspiration odor is concerned."

In contrast, her sister Leah, the dutiful daughter, seeks to follow her father. "All my life I've tried to set my shoes squarely into his footprints." Her narration combines biblical cadence with ready clichés. Her twin Adah suffers from hemiplegia and, for much of the novel, cannot speak at all. Yet she speaks to us. Indeed, speechless Adah is the novel's language expert. She plays with words and is a lover of palindromes, with which her chapters are punctuated.

She puns and rhymes and turns words inside out. She begins to learn the local tongue, Kikongo, and to discern that small differences of emphasis make one word become another. Hectoring the locals in his sermons, her father – she hears – keeps telling them something different from what he means. "Tata Jesus is a bangala!" he declares, meaning "something precious and dear". "But the way he pronounces it, it means the poisonwood tree."

Five-year-old Ruth May has her chapters, too, and as strong an inclination as any other character to cite the scriptures. Battered with chapter and verse by their father, every member of the Price family is steeped in the King James Bible. It provides the family likeness in their voices. Its verses are inescapable.

Orleanna thinks of her husband's power over her and hears Genesis in her head: in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. "Oh, mercy. If it catches you in the wrong frame of mind, the King James Bible can make you want to drink poison in no uncertain terms."

The clear purpose of the multivocal narrative is to let you piece together the apparently strange world of the Congo from these different accounts. Until Leah befriends Anatole, the young man who translates her father's sermons as he is performing them, we only glimpse the Congolese, we never exactly hear them. Yet the more the Prices speak, the odder they seem, and the more intelligible and reasonable seem the habits of the supposedly benighted people they have come to instruct.

Barbara Kingsolver will be speaking to John Mullan at Kings Place on 29 May.

• Barbara Kingsolver

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THE POISONWOOD BIBLE

by Barbara Kingsolver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1998

The first novel in five years from the ever-popular Kingsolver (Pigs in Heaven, 1993, etc.) is a large-scale saga of an American family’s enlightening and disillusioning African adventure. It begins with a stunningly written backward look: Orleanna Price’s embittered memory of the uncompromising zeal that impelled her husband, Baptist missionary Nathan Price, to take her and their four daughters to the (then) Belgian Congo in 1959, and remain there despite dangerous evidence of the country’s instability under Patrice Lumumba’s ill-starred independence movement, Belgian and American interference and condescension, and Joseph Mobutu’s murderous military dictatorship. The bulk of the story, which is set in the superbly realized native village of Kilanga, is narrated in turn by the four Price girls: Leah, the “smart” twin, whose worshipful respect for her father will undergo a rigorous trial by fire; her —retarded” counterpart Adah, disabled and mute (though in the depths of her mind articulate and playfully intelligent); eldest sister Rachel, a self-important whiner given to hilarious malapropisms (“feminine tuition”; “I prefer to remain anomalous”); and youngest sister Ruth May, whose childish fantasies of union with the surrounding, smothering landscape are cruelly fulfilled. Kingsolver skillfully orchestrates her characters— varied responses to Africa into a consistently absorbing narrative that reaches climax after climax—and that, even after you’re sure it must be nearing its end, continues for a wrenching hundred pages or more, spelling out in unforgettable dramatic and lyric terms the fates of the surviving Prices. Little recent fiction has so successfully fused the personal with the political. Better even than Robert Stone in his otherwise brilliant Damascus Gate, Kingsolver convinces us that her characters are, first and foremost, breathing, fallible human beings and only secondarily conduits for her book’s vigorously expressed and argued social and political ideas. A triumph.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-06-017540-0

Page Count: 576

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998

GENERAL FICTION

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More by Barbara Kingsolver

BOOK REVIEW

by Barbara Kingsolver

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2006

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.

Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah ( The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.

Pub Date: March 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-345-46752-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005

More by Kristin Hannah

by Kristin Hannah

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen ) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

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by J.D. Salinger

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April 02, 2024

7 Tips for Reading the Book of Revelation

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Confession: I have struggled to read the book of Revelation. I’ve had seasons where the more effort I put into studying it, the less I understand what it’s saying or why it matters for my walk with Christ.

I can point to a few reasons for this: strange interpretations that haphazardly connect Revelation’s symbols to current day events[1], myriads upon myriads of charts and views regarding the book, and perhaps most importantly, my own poor reading skills.

Maybe you’ve had a similar experience.

The temptation is to write off the book as impossible to understand and thus keep it closed. But doing so comes with significant loss. We understand why as we read the extraordinary promise in the book’s third verse:

Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near. (Revelation 1:3)

How do we reach this blessing? As I’ve grown as a reader of Revelation, I’ve found the seven suggestions below invaluable.

1. Consider the Original Audience.

The Apostle John wrote Revelation to encourage the embattled first-century church. That means that when Revelation was read aloud to the churches (1:3), everyday believers—without advanced theology degrees or fancy interpretations—were expected to understand and apply the message as God intended. If they could hear and keep that message back then, so can we today.

2. Make Good Observations.

A mistake we make in Bible study is jumping to questions or curiosities or applications without first reading the text carefully. Here are a few pointers to keep you focused on the text:

• Ask yourself, What is the text actually saying? Fight the urge to turn to study notes or a commentary before reading and thinking carefully.
• Note key repetitions. The repetitions of blessing, patient endurance, the throne of God (that refers to God’s sovereignty over history), repentance, and “the one who conquers” are all central to the message of Revelation. Consider underlining or highlighting these key repetitions to help yourself in future readings of the book.
• Note contrasts. To name a few, Revelation contrasts heaven and earth, good and evil spiritual beings, God’s people and the rebellious world. As you notice contrasts, ask yourself What is their intended effect?

As I’ve grown in my observation skills, I’ve found that re-reading books of Scripture helps me see what the text is actually saying.

3. Understand the Basics of Apocalyptic Literature.

Revelation is an amalgam of genres: in addition to being a book of prophecy (1:3) and an epistle (1:4), Revelation is apocalyptic. Some even call the book “The Apocalypse of John.” The word ‘Apocalypse’ simply means ‘a revealing’ in Greek. Revelation’s message is not intentionally veiled from readers, as if God wanted to trick us. Look at the first words of the book: “The revelation [or apocalypse] of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place. He made it known …” (1:1, emphasis mine). This revelation serves a special purpose: to give a “heavenly perspective on our earthly circumstances so that every generation of God’s people can be challenged, comforted, and given hope for the future.”[2]

Apocalyptic literature isn’t concerned about giving an exact chronological timeline and often will repeat the same events from different angles. (Because of that, I’d encourage you to make what’s clear in the text your focus, not figuring out a timeline.)

Apocalyptic literature is filled with symbols and images. Revelation mentions many like seals, trumpets, bowls, beasts, women, seven hills, the mark of the beast, and more. When John gives us the meaning of a symbol (see Revelation 1:12, 20 and Revelation 12:9 for example), pay attention, that makes our job of interpretation easier!

Clues for interpreting symbols may come from other parts of Scripture. Many of Revelation’s beasts, colors, and numbers find their meaning first in other portions of Scripture.[3] (A Bible with a cross-reference system or a study Bible can help you here.) Other clues may come from a good understanding of the original audience. For instance, original readers would likely read the reference to “seven hills” in Revelation 17:9 and immediately think of the seven hills of ancient Rome. (A study Bible can help you on this point.)

If your head is spinning… don’t worry! The next point will encourage you.

4. Focus on the Main Message and Don’t Get Bogged Down in Details.

Part of the challenge of Revelation is the myriad of confusing details. Why does the first beast in Revelation 13 have ten horns and seven heads? When will the bowls of judgment be poured out? Who is the anti-Christ? Did I accept the mark of the beast by failing to read terms and conditions on that one website? We easily lose the forest for the trees with such questions. Keeping the book’s main idea always in mind will keep us focused on what’s most important.

Here’s a suggested main idea: The risen Christ calls His people to faithful endurance amidst fiery trials as He judges His enemies and brings His everlasting Kingdom to fruition. That’s a mouthful, so consider this two word alternative: Jesus wins.

As you read each section of the book, do your best to answer the questions How does this relate to/develop the main idea? And What is Christ calling me to?

5. Appreciate the Old Testament’s influence on Revelation.

Revelation brings the story of the Bible to a close.[4] Just like the end of any epic story, key threads get resolved and come to fulfillment. (If you’re a movie buff, you may compare this to the last movie of an epic series that shares Easter eggs to previous episodes along the way.)

By some counts, Revelation alludes to the Old Testament over 500 times.[5] That means to understand Revelation as it was written, we’ll do better by putting down the newspaper and picking up the Old Testament!

You’re never going to plumb the depth of Revelation’s use of the Old Testament, but recognizing references to will can sweeten your experience in reading the book and your overall appreciation for the glorious unity of the Bible.

Here’s a starter pack of Old Testament passages to add depth to your reading:

• Genesis 1–3 – To understand any story well, you need to know how it starts and how it ends. Read Genesis 1–3 and then Revelation 21–22, noting similarities and differences between them. For example, in Genesis 1 we see God creating the heavens and earth in Genesis, while Revelation 21 ushers in a new heaven and new earth. We see the curse of sin enter God’s perfect creation in Genesis 3, and we see no more curse in Revelation 22:3. Grasp the threads that connect the bookends of the Bible and you’ll have a good idea what the 1,184 chapters between them are about. You’ll also have a greater appreciation for the person and work of Jesus Christ who is the focus of the Scriptures (Luke 24:44).
• Exodus 7–13 – Revelation has echoes of the plagues on Egypt throughout the book (for an example, see the Bowl Judgments of chapter 16). In Revelation, Jesus is repeatedly called “the lamb that was slain” (Revelation 5:12), an image that originated in the Passover meal of Exodus 12 . In Exodus, God flexed His sovereign muscles in dramatic fashion when He judged His enemies and saved His people by the blood of the lamb. He’s doing the exact same thing in Revelation.
• Psalm 2 – The image of Christ dashing the nations to pieces with a rod of iron comes up several times in Revelation (2:27, 12:5, 19:15) and reminds readers of who is really in charge when the nations rage against God and His anointed Christ.
• Daniel 7 – John draws heavily from the prophetic portion of the Old Testament, specifically the books of Daniel, Zechariah, Ezekiel. Perhaps no chapter from this portion of Scripture stands at the backdrop of Revelation more than Daniel 7. In the chapter, Daniel sees a night vision of four beasts and also “one like a son of man” (Daniel 7:13) who was given dominion and an eternal kingdom “that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him” (Daniel 7:14). Sound familiar? 🙂

6. Savor the Power and Glory of Jesus Christ.

From beginning to end, Revelation presents a glorious picture of the Lord Jesus Christ. In chapter one, Jesus is “one like a son of man”, a majestic figure holding the keys to death and Hades (Revelation 1:18). He has eyes like flames of fire, feet like polished bronze, and a voice like rushing waters, emphasizing His divine authority and glorious presence. In chapter five, He is the conquering Lamb who was slain and the only One worthy to open the scroll and break its seals. The rest of the book calls Jesus the conqueror of sin and death, the Alpha and Omega, the King of kings and Lord of lords, the Bright and Morning Star of a new and glorious era, the judge of the living and the dead, and the Rider on the white horse who will return in glory to reign forever.

As you grasp who Jesus is and apply His Lordship to your life and struggles in this world, you’ll be able to join the great multitude of heaven crying out,

“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” (Revelation 5:12)

7. Set Your Hope in God and Your Glorious Future.

If you’ve ever faced discouragement thinking about wars, famines, pandemics, and the increasing evil in our world, Revelation is for you. Revelation lifts our eyes from our troubled world to the God who sovereignly rules everything and who will one day rid the world of all evil and pain, bringing us to our heavenly home forever.

Far from being a confusing or scary book, Revelation is a profoundly comforting one. It unveils our glorious future that is free from the presence of sin, pain, and death, and blessed in the presence of Jesus Christ.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:3-4)

The Most Difficult (and Blessed) Part of Revelation

While this article should give you practical help for reading Revelation, you’ll still have lots of questions. I know I still do! But remember, according to Revelation 1:3, the true challenge of Revelation is not in what we don’t understand, but in keeping what we do understand.

As we live and suffer for Christ in our world, have we “loved not [our] lives even unto death” like the conquering saints (Revelation 12:11)? Are we holding fast to Christ even when the world tells us to reject Him and trust people, possessions, pleasure, or politicians?

Whatever our answer, we have the presence and power of our risen Savior by our side. He can help us hear and keep the message of Revelation until He calls us home or returns in glory. Until then, let’s keep our eyes fixed on Him, and let’s keep reading Revelation.

[1] G.K. Chesterton once said: “And though St. John saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.”

[2] From the Bible Project video “How to Read the Bible: Apocalyptic Literature” accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNDX4tUdj1Y .

[3] To learn more, read “Numerical Symbolism in the Book of Revelation” by Michael Kuykendall. https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/numerical-symbolism-in-the-book-of-revelation/

[4] Dr. Brian Tabb calls Revelation a “Canonical Capstone” in the title of his book All Things New: Revelation as Canonical Capstone (New Studies in Biblical Theology).

[5] John seeped his writing in Old Testament language and images for a few reasons: one being the Old Testament shaped his worldview and gave him language, a second being that he had visions of the same things that Old Testament prophets saw, so it makes sense he’d describe everything similarly.

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If you read the Bible literally, everything becomes understandable and plain because the biblical authors did not feel the need, as we do, to advocate for a precise monotheistic theological perspective or a moral authority of religious order. Through the pages of this book “God” will show himself in a light entirely unsuspected to most readers. The final portrait that will emerge will reveal the image of a character very different from what many of our readers are accustomed to. The Bible, falsifications and mistranslations From the necessity of harmonizing the biblical text with the theological and monotheistic conception of God of Western culture arises a whole series of falsifications and mistranslations, in view of which that first innocent printing typo I had discovered twenty-five years ago really seems like a “speck in the eye of the brother.” Instead, here we talk about massive logs that have remained in our eyes for hundreds and thousands of years, so long that we even ignore our blindness. God or Gods? In this book, I focus on the identity and character of Yahweh and the meaning of the term “Elohim.” When we read the term “God” in the Bible, this usually comes from the Hebrew term “Elohim.” However, at least when I worked for Edizioni San Paolo, the term “Elohim” was left untranslated into the interlinear edition of the Bible that we prepared for scholars and academia. In the Bibles available to the public, the same term was translated as “God.” Therefore, where people read “God” and believe that the biblical authors wrote the equivalent of the word “God,” scholars read the term “Elohim.” This was to alert them that this word is problematic, to say the least, for the unbiased translator. "My reading will result in most passages being unorthodox to a religious perspective. Some would say even heretical. For this reason, for all passages that indicate an unconventional, unexpected, and non-heterodox reading, we reproduce the original Hebrew text with the literal translation verbatim, word for word."

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