The title page to the 1611 first edition of the King James Bible
(1) BIBLE
The Hebrew dreaming and the great messianic ghost dance.
The holy book of smiting and begetting.
Chosen people and only son.
This is the big one – genesis and apocalypse, alpha and omega, allelujah and amen!
Readers of my top tens will be familiar with me playfully classifying the highest tier (or god-tier) entries as my Old Testament or New Testament – a tribute to the influence of the Bible. I do that in a few ways with my Top 10 Mythology Books (or Top 10 Mythologies), but of course at a fundamental level the Bible is itself my Old Testament and New Testament.
Of course, the Bible is helped into top spot in that for many people it is not just mythology but religion, in contrast to classical mythology or other ‘pagan’ mythologies it largely replaced . The Bible is also the heart, still beating in many ways, of ‘Judeo-Christian’ culture that is one of the two predominant cultural influences in what is often termed as Western civilization, along with the ‘Greco-Roman’ culture that vies with it as the other predominant cultural influence – sometimes in alignment and sometimes as rivals. Athens versus Jerusalem and all that – filtered through Rome. It is as the source for religion rather than mythology that most people come to it, as I did, even if I have lapsed from any religious belief in it.
However, it is the book that doesn’t stop giving, even after you stop believing. That is because of its enduring mythic resonance or narratives and language that in its best passages has an enduring lyrical or poetic quality.
In other words, I read the Bible as mythology rather than religion or in short, as poetry rather than history. Don’t get me wrong – my own hot take, to antagonize both believers and skeptics, is that the Bible is of course a lot less historical than fundamentalist believers usually maintain, but has more history than skeptics usually credit. This is a view influenced by Manfred Barthel’s What The Bible Really Says, which among other things proposes more naturalistic explanations of apparently supernatural miracles – even such things as the burning bush, and not in terms of what Moses was smoking. And also don’t get me wrong as to its literary quality – the Bible is an anthology after all, and one of uneven quality. It may be described by believers as the word of God but he could have used an editor. Or for that matter, better writers of a more modern novelistic style even for its better narrative parts, which tend to resonate more when adapted into more modern style – or screenplays.
I mean seriously, the Bible is the original Game of Thrones – people are often surprised just how much sex and violence is in it (or just how much sheer pagan enjoyment it can provide). It is the book of smiting and begetting after all. And as opposed to Game of Thrones, it finishes with a bang rather than a whimper with a much more sensational, if much trippier, finale, at least in the New Testament and the Book of Apocalypse, my personal favorite book in the Bible.
RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER – WHAT ELSE?)