The original plan for the Landmarks of World Literature series envisaged separate volumes for the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. The present authors have persuaded the series editor to accept instead a single volume on the whole Bible. In doing this they are not trying to make any case for the Christian Bible of Old and New Testaments as against the Jewish or Hebrew Bible. They do, however, believe that it is the ‘whole’ Bible which has become the ‘landmark of world literature’; and that the New Testament is in essential literary continuity with the Hebrew Bible, without being its inevitable completion, or sole interpretative key.

This book is not intended as a critical introduction to the Bible, covering all the questions which such a title would imply; and for that reason, while it does suggest some general directions of modern biblical scholarship, it does not usually document them (several such introductions, with extensive documentation, are listed in the ‘Guide to further reading’). It does try to place the Bible briefly in its original literary setting; it indicates its general contents and literary forms, and some of its themes; and it gives a very selective history of its interpretation and of its place in later literature.