The Cambridge Companion to the Bible and Literature

Examines the varied, enormously sophisticated contents of the Bible and sees how certain Western authors were inspired by them.

This Companion volume offers a sweeping survey of the Bible as a work of literature and its impact on Western writing. Individual essays explore topics which unravel the complex and subtle character of biblical stories, ethical injunctions, and legal texts, and examine how Western authors such as Milton and Shelley were inspired by them.This Companion volume offers a sweeping survey of the Bible as a work of literature and its impact on Western writing. Underscoring the sophistication of the biblical writers' thinking in diverse areas of thought, it demonstrates how the Bible relates to many types of knowledge and its immense contribution to education through the ages. The volume emphasizes selected texts chosen from different books of the Bible and from later Western writers inspired by it. Individual essays, each written specially for this book, examine topics such as the gruesome wonders of apocalyptic texts, the erotic content of the Song of Songs, and Jesus' and Paul's language and reasoning, as well as Shakespeare's reflections on repentance in King Lear, Milton's genius in writing Paradise Lost, the social necessity of individual virtue in Shelley's poetry, and the mythic status of Melville's Moby Dick in the United States and the Western world in general.