"Year after year, the Bible tops best-seller lists. Polls show that it is the runaway favorite book for Americans of all kinds, and it is considered holy by a full 84 percent of the U.S. population. It comes in every imaginable form. Leather-bound and embossed, in raggedy paperback, pink poofy cover, audio, multimedia, or clutched in the perfectly manicured fingers of Paris Hilton en route to jail. People swear on it in courtrooms. Families record births, marriages, divorces, and deaths in its pages. Soldiers take it into battle, and peaceniks wave it in demonstrations of opposition. The Bible is a singular document of inestimable influence; but all evidence to the contrary, it can be really hard to understand. For one thing, it isn't just one thing.

"The Bible didn't fall out of the sky in King James English. Neither was it etched into stone tablets during a thunderstorm and handed to a tunic-clad Charlton Heston. The Bible grew up over a long period of time, and like anything that takes its own sweet time to mature, it has depth and richness and a few wrinkles, too. Actually, the word 'Bible' means something like 'little library.' In this case, not only is the whole Bible a collection of books, but most of those books are themselves collections — the product of long development and many hands. In other words, the Bible and its individual books are more like a Wikipedia entry growing out of the contributions of various people of faith than a Hemingway short story composed in one mojito-fueled evening.

"Plus, those biblical books don't all work in the same way. Just as we read the lyrics of a Neil Young song differently than we do directions for setting up a stereo or the arguments of Galileo's opponents, so the devotional poetry of Psalms should be read differently from Leviticus's logistical instructions for consecrating a sacrifice and differently from the early Christian missionaries' letters of encouragement to new congregations.

"The Bible's present form — pages bound between two covers just like other books — masks its spectacular complexity and its radical difference from anything else you might find on Amazon.com. Although some of what became biblical was composed by a single author and designed for general consumption, much of what's in the Bible developed before books even existed — before most people could read, for that matter. For the most part, those prebiblical texts were disparate documents (many reflecting ancient oral traditions), coproduced, redacted, and exchanged among the elite few who could read and write. Yet one can pick up a Bible today and read it just like any modern book, from cover to cover. Doing so is problematic at best, though, because a careful reader will quickly discover that the Bible's 'voice' is really a (sometimes dissonant) chorus.

"Think about how many times you've heard someone say, 'Well, the Bible says . . .' Then another person retorts, 'But the Bible also says . . . ,' and proceeds to give the opposite argument. For example, the Bible both condemns and commands killing, divorce, religious ritual, and putting family first. Unless you understand the social situation out of which those texts come and something about the peculiarities of ancient Near Eastern literature, the Bible could seem to say everything and nothing. Without knowing something about the Bible's development, a reader would be understandably flummoxed trying to figure out exactly how many animals were supposed to be on Noah's ark, based on God's command first to take a pair and then to take seven pairs of clean and one pair of unclean animals — let alone how big such a boat would have to be, Evan Almighty notwithstanding. The Bible is all around us, yet as alien as E.T."