The Bible is difficult to talk about as a work, because it’s so vast and diverse, stitched together from poetry, philosophy, prophecy, mythology, allegory, history, genealogy, and biography. And when I think about the Bible as literature, I’m mostly referring to the King James Version (KJV), which is a beautiful and strange work compiled over seven years by forty-seven scholars and holy men, and probably the single most influential book in the English language. 

(All we know of its creation is that there were endless disputes, “many a storm of gainsaying, or opposition”; imagine shouting and pounding on tables and clergymen in ruffs and gowns storming out.) A book written by committee should be terrible and compromised, but it isn’t—it’s full of drama and majesty: “In the beginning God created the Heaven, and the Earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters…”

The translators avoided common idiom, because they knew it would quickly sound dated—the antiquated language is deliberate, as are the repetitions and heavy pauses. I love its strangeness: the odd punctuation, unexpected pronouns (“Our Father, which art in heaven”), the verbs that end in “-eth” (“in the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut downe, and withereth”), the archaisms (“yea, verily” went out of fashion fifty years before it was published; “you” was being used in the singular but the writers chose to use “thee/thou”), and gratuitous use of polysyllabic Latinate words (“iniquity”, “tribulation”, “countenance”).  

Many of its idioms endure in the marrow of our common language: sour grapes and fight the good fight and through a glass darkly and how are the mighty fallen and no peace for the wicked and the salt of the earth and filthy lucre and vanity of vanities and vengeance is mine and a thief in the night. It makes uncanny ways in your mind like Shakespeare does—and, incidentally, much of it is iambic pentameter (“the flood was forty days upon the earth”). It baffles our concepts of origin and authorship; it has so many textures and voices. The Book of Job is beautiful, vast: “Is not God in the height of heaven? and behold the height of the stars, how high they are!” The Psalms speak simply, and unfold in incantatory rhythm, e.g. Psalm 139, best known as “for I am fearfully and wonderfully made”: “If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me”. The Song of Solomon is joyful and wild and erotic—“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine”—and also very strange (“thy breasts are like two young roes that are twins”). 

You hear its rhythms and arcs of language everywhere. It’s a glorious anomaly and literature is richer for it.