Books of the Bible
An English teacher I knew long ago created a course for her students called "The Bible as Literature." The objective of that course was to examine the many books of the Old and New Testaments as stories, poems, and essays in and of themselves. She demonstrated that the Bible contains essential and basic stories of creation, fall, sin, betrayal, murder, catastrophe, recovery, quests and even love, and could be examined as a piece of literature with plot, theme, characters, setting, conflict, and point of view. But the Bible has also been the inspiration for any number of pieces of literature that borrowed its ideas, names, themes, and even stories, using these elements to fashion a new story that would, as a result, seem familiar. Think of one of the most famous opening lines in a book: "Call me Ishmael." This is the first line of Herman Melville's "Moby Dick." The line establishes the narrator, for some the main character through whose observations and...
