Books like Asimov's Guide to the Bible: Two Volumes in One - The Old and New Testaments

What I gained from this book was a level of Biblical literacy that I had been sorely lacking.As a lifelong atheist with a wholly secular upbringing, I feel I have enjoyed much good fortune relative to those indoctrinated by religion from a young age; on the other hand, many literary and cultural references, and even a few jokes, have passed me by. Since elementary school I have been better versed in Greek, Norse, and Egyptian mythology than I have been in modern religion. Even in a secular society that is something of a handicap.Having been aware of this title for many years, but knowing that I have a strong bias in favor of an Asimov-penned treatment of most any subject and wanting to broaden my horizons a bit in reaction, I searched high and low for a book that would fulfill my needs, but kept failing to find something written from an unabashed secular--and scientifically rationalist--viewpoint which was also written with character and not with such brevity as to be contemptuously dismissed as a "Cliffs' Notes" summary of the Bible.Well, in my view, here it is--despite my efforts, I ended up with Asimov after all. It should go without saying that this title is not for everyone, but for people who share the void in their cultural literacy that I had, I must regard Asimov's work as essential. Asimov is not what some folks call a "militant" atheist, and his Guide to the Bible has practically no overlap with recent provocative titles like Dawkins's \ The God Delusion\ and Hitchens's \ God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything\ . Foremost, his book does what it says on the tin--it's a guide to the Bible rather than a critique of Judaism, Christianity, or religion generally. Asimov's approach to these scriptures is simply that of a thoroughgoing empiricist. He therefore disregards miracles and creation stories as myths. Then too, many mainstream Christians and Jews share that assessment, and thus they stand to gain from Asimov's approach as well.Another of Asimov's goals (as candidly set forth in his Introduction) is to place the historical events set forth in the Bible within their broader contexts. In contemporary histories of the ancient world, the events that were of all-consuming importance to the Israelite tribes, the Jews, and the early Christians are usually beneath notice, being irrelevant to the larger turning wheels in the rest of the Near East. Asimov is unrelenting in using secular historical sources to tie Biblical events in with the doings of the great ancient empires such as the Mittanians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Mycenaeans, Babylonians, Greeks, Parthians, and Romans. In some cases, particularly in the books of Genesis and Exodus, Asimov has to speculate or ground his conjectures on extra-Biblical scholarship, and often can only establish rough contemporaneity. But as the historical records become less murky (and as the Jews became more concerned with posterity once they had enjoyed, and then lost, a kingdom of their own), matters firm up considerably.A further benefit is that Asimov is nearly as careful as the editors of \ The New Oxford Annotated Bible\ in covering apocryphal materials and documenting their status as such. For example, 1 Maccabees is an invaluable record of a crucial period in ancient Jewish history. Its utter lack of both miracles and canonical status in the Protestant tradition is a correlation I will leave to other cynical minds. The Maccabean period also presents us with the interesting spectacle of ancient Jews making converts to their religion by the sword (under the kings John Hyrcanus I and Aristobulus I)--not exactly the picture of Judaism that folks like Elie Weisel paint. I find all of this invaluable.It is worth noting that Asimov wrote his Guide to the Bible in two volumes, published in 1967 and 1969 respectively, and that, while he appears to have done his best to use then-contemporary critical sources, he was not a Biblical scholar, as he candidly admits in the front matter. His work likely does not reflect absolute cutting-edge Biblical scholarship of the time, let alone could it treat developments of the forty years since its publication. With that in mind, I would still urge anyone in Asimov's target audience to turn to this book--I know of no resource that is both as comprehensive and as readable.Asimov's chapters vary greatly in length, as do the books of the Bible. These two data series roughly correlate.Despite its accessibility and Asimov's renowned clarity of expression, simply to due to its length this work is a bit of a beast and will demand discipline to undertake, if you plan to read it cover to cover as I did. While it's certainly usable as a reference guide, I think the direct approach yields great benefits; first of all, Asimov uses forward and (especially) backward references extensively. While in practically all cases, a page number is offered to help you jog your memory, you will have no memory to jog if you haven't already read that material (or are already pretty familiar with the entire Bible). Secondly, those portions of the Bible which document historical events are for the most part already arranged in chronological order (in the Christian canons). Asimov offers a little push in that direction for Apocryphal materials, covering 1 Esdras at the end of Nehemiah in the Old Testament and 2 Esdras after Jude in the New Testament. I will not further elaborate here why that makes sense, nor why the various books of Maccabees have little to do with each other. Asimov makes all of this clear.In my comments, I propose a reading plan for this work to help you tackle it, if you're interested.I experienced a sense of accomplishment in completing this book, and now feel well-prepared not just to explore the Bible itself, but to better understand religious allusions made by Christians and Jews, and, perhaps best of all, to be able to much more richly appreciate the works of William Blake and John Milton (among many, many others). If you're at all like me, I hope you will undertake the same effort and find it similarly rewarding.