When three distinguished literary figures are impelled to write about the Bible, it is clear that this strange library of books has lost nothing of its perennial fascination. All three grapple with the conundrum forcefully posed by Frye: 'Why does this huge, sprawling, tactless book sit there inscrutably in the middle of our cultural heritage like the "great Boyg" or sphinx in Peer Gynt, frustrating all our efforts to walk around it?' All three agree that it is fiction, but when we ask what they mean, we receive radically different answers.

LRB 4 November 1982 | PDF Download