Editor Reviews:

Product Description:

Rating : - Easy Overview of a Difficult Topic
If you already know a lot about the Bible i.e., the real historical Bible, not the imaginary version that dwells in the fantasy lizard-brain of the average lay believer,) you won't necessarily find a lot to get excited about in this book. You could just as well read Bart Ehrmann or any other qualified commentator, or quite a lot of Karen Armstrong's excellent previous work, for that matter, of which this outing is largely a rehash. That said, it's worth noting that this book doesn't pretend to be much more than that, a liesurely overview of what is knowable or worth knowing about the whole etiology, over the centuries, of how such a strange, and strangely important, work as The Bible came to be, and to survive down to the present era.
The Bible, as we have it today, is the compiled and redacted work of many hands over many centuries, most of whom had no idea that they were writing a Bible, or even a holy book of any kind, for that matter, at the times they wrote what they wrote. Karen Armstrong covers the whole historical process as smoothly and evenly as she needs to without burying the reader under a mountain of unnecessary detail, and with no pretension to revealing any earthshakingly new insights about it all. Which is not to say it's a dull read; Karen Armstrong is never dull. To myself, what makes this book interesting is the occasional obscure minor fact she offhandedly churns up and brings to light along the way on some arcane aspect or topic of the evolutionary process, such as you might not find out about anywhere else, simply because she knows such a tremendously lot about her subject. On the one hand, this is not her best work. On the other, it's hard to imagine anything Karen Armstrong might have to say about a subject whose staggering complexities she has so thoroughly and uniquely mastered that wouldn't still be worth paying attention to.