KAREN ARMSTRONG'S LATEST: THE BIBLE, A BIOGRAPHY--A LOW-COST MUST READ PAPERBACK

Do you know the name Karen Armstrong? You should. Now 65, she was a nun before leaving her sisterhood and turning into one of the most clear-headed, valuable scholars--popularizers, some may call her--of the world's religions. From the early 1980s, she has been turning out quality studies which can enrich all of us, regardless of our own religious persuasions. My favourites are Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet (1991), A History of God (1993), The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2000), and, in 2007, The Bible: A Biography. It is the latter which I come to praise this month, although I eagerly await to read, if not review, The Case for God, published only last year.

How much can a person, no matter how brilliant, write a successful, meaningful "biography" of a "holy" text either praised, cursed, followed or ignored by pretty well all 6 billion-plus people on this planet? And in less than 230 pages! (With 70 pages more in notes and bibliography). If that person is Karen Armstrong, very well.

What the author does is quite astonishing: she gives us, in pedestrian but clear prose, a precise history of how and when the Bible was written and put together, and how Judaism and Christianity have used (and abused) it for the past two millennia. It's not perfect nor complete, of course, and I longed to see her comment on how The Bible has impacted Islam, which is seen as one of the three Abrahamic faiths.

This brief but scholarly and fascinating book is filled with little nuggets which make mockery of what many in the 21st century try to make of this grand anthology of writings. For instance, "Until the nineteenth century, very few people imagined that the first chapter of Genesis was a factual account of the origins of life." (Take that, you silly rejectors of Darwin.) Yet, Ms. Armstrong respects the power which the Bible (both Hebrew and Christian Testaments, of course) can affect: "When people read the Bible receptively and intuitively, they found that it gave them intimations of transcendence." Not that the author's work here will satisfy True Believers of either Judaism or Christianity, as when she declares flatly, "The scholarly consensus is that the story of the Exodus is not historical," since Israeli archaeologists have found "nothing to indicate a large-scale change of population" from when the Hebrew slaves purportedly left Egypt en masse.

Armstrong gives us a clear, well-defined understanding of classic Biblical criticism, pointing out, for instance, that the fifth book of the Chumash, Deuteronomy, "was an entirely new scripture" and written many centuries after the previous four books. She works her way through many portions of the Hebrew Bible, looking at when each was written, by whom, and why they were canonized. And her chapters on the rise of the Jewish Christians, the many men who were considered messiahs at the time of the millennium, the way that so many of this new faith struggled to find hints of the coming of Jesus in the Hebrew Bible, and more, will not thrill many religious Christian readers. Nor will this: "A thread of hatred runs through the New Testament. It is inaccurate to call the Christian scriptures anti-Semitic, as the authors were themselves Jewish, but many of them had become disenchanted with Jewish religion. . . ."

The chapters of this slim volume on Midrash and Charity are worth the price of this low-cost paperback alone, and it is touching to read Armstrong's epilogue, in which she expresses sadness at how the Bible "is being distorted by claims for its literal infallibility; it is derided--often unfairly--by secular fundamentalists; it is also becoming a toxic arsenal that fuels hatred and sterile polemic." But as my beloved, late teacher and hero Northrop Frye brilliantly taught, the Bible is the very basis, the Great Code, as he called it, of most of the great literature written over the past two millennia, and must never be ignored, for that reason alone. If you have ever wanted to understand such words and concepts as "exegesis" "hermeneutics" and "Biblical criticism," this book is a fine place to start. And a good reason for returning to the Bible itself, with fresh eyes and deeper understanding.