With engaging wit and straightforward information, Bible Babel: Making Sense of the Most Talked About Book of All Time addresses the biggest questions, misconceptions, and general curiosity that people have about the Bible — what it is, what's in it, where it came from, and how people use it. This book provides biblical literacy without simply summarizing the Bible or using religious belief to explain the Good Book. Written by a public university professor, Bible Babel is not encumbered by scholarly jargon or technicalities; but it is based on the best biblical scholarship. Bible Babel is for the religious and non-religious alike. It doesn't try either to convert readers or to wreck their beliefs. Rather, this book gives people what they don't get in church or school so that they can understand arguments about the Bible, answer vexing questions, appreciate artistic and literary references, and simply interpret the all-time bestseller for themselves.

Here's a 30 second video in which Kristin describes Bible Babel. It was taken during the 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book, by Rick Sincere (rickreviewsbooks).

Several different things conspired to lead me to write this book. For one, even after years of studying the Bible as an academic of rather sketchy faith, I'm still totally amazed by it — by its beauty, humor, crudities, and lofty erudition, its inspiring poetry and gritty family dramas, by its ability to endure through so many centuries and nevertheless maintain an immediacy and relevance like nothing else.

At the same time, I've been surprised to find so few resources about the Bible that don't come from a particular faith perspective, try to retell the Bible, or provide such detailed academic information that readers wander off without ever gaining the nuggets buried in the jargon. So I began to think about putting together a book of my own that would try to meet people where they are, give what they want to know, and provide the tools for people to understand the Bible and references to it for themselves.

Reading Stephen Prothero's award-winning Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — and Doesn't convinced me to go ahead with the project. Prothero makes a strong case for improving biblical literacy among the general population, but he stops short of providing it. I knew that I wanted to share basic (sometimes startling or intriguing) information about the Bible so that people could know what the Bible is, what's in it, understand debates in which people use the Bible to argue both sides, and simply make sense for themselves out of biblical references in contemporary culture.

Over the years, many people have told me that they wish they knew more about the Bible but are suspicious of or turned off by sources claiming to help. While some people say that they don't want to be preached to, others say that they don't want to hear disparaging remarks about belief. They know that the Bible has been enormously influential in the Western world for millennia and continues to be so today. But there are few opportunities to learn about it. As a result, secular and religious alike, most people are remarkably ignorant about the Bible, which can be frustrating. The religious are poorly equipped to appreciate and mine the richness of their sacred text, and others are bewildered by how anyone could believe the Bible in the first place. It's impossible to appreciate biblical references in music, literature, and art, or to understand (much less critique) the Bible's role in politics, popular culture, and social controversy without some basic information about it.

So, I wrote this book for my dear friends and family in the pews of a Minnesota Lutheran church, and for my colleagues in Art and Lit departments across the country. It's for my fish biologist friend in Kansas and for the military families I've come to know in Florida. I wrote it for secular Jews, born-again teens, Manhattan journalists, a middle-aged mega-church member, and the farmers that I buy my eggs from. I hope that each reader will find this book useful, sometimes entertaining and thought-provoking, or that it simply satisfies an itch to know more about the world's perennial best-seller.

From Chapter 1: In Which the Intrepid Reader Asks, "What is the Bible, anyway?"

"The familiar is not the thing it reminds of." —Jane Hirshfield

Year after year, the Bible tops best-seller lists. Polls show it is the run-away favorite book for Americans of all kinds, and it is considered holy by a full 84% of the U.S. population (footnote: The Harris Poll^® #38, April 8, 2008). It comes in every imaginable form. Leather-bound and embossed, in raggedy paperback, pink poofy cover, audio, multi-media, 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, 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 also 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. (Footnote: I see that A. J. Jacobs used the very same Wikipedia analogy, with a bit more description, in The Year of Living Biblically. Even a couple thousand years ago, it was possible to say, "there is nothing new under the sun." That, from our very own biblical Ecclesiastes.)

And those 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 the Psalms should be read differently than Leviticus' logistical instructions for consecrating a sacrifice and differently from the early Christian missionaries' letters of encouragement to new congregations found in the New Testament.

"Kristin Swenson's Bible Babel is wide-ranging, objectively factual and written for the common reader. ... Swenson's book possesses a singularly breezy tone, a kind of 'Jesus Christ Superstar' approach to the sacred. ... this is a solid, readable work that doesn't shy away from the tough issues."
—Michael Dirda, Washington Post (read the full review here)

"Hats off to Kristin Swenson: She has done what I really thought was impossible... Ms. Swenson combines meticulous scholarship with an original eye and a sense of fun. She has succeeded in presenting the Bible anew in a highly accessible way for an audience that either knows nothing about it, or that has been jaded by generations of cliches piled upon the numinous biblical texts. It's a most welcome achievement."
—Martin Sieff, Washington Times (read the full review here)

"Finally, a book on the Bible for the rest of us! In a world where almost all of our conversation about religion seems to spill out of ideologues on the far reaches of the secular left or the religious right, this broadside against our collective biblical illiteracy hits the sweetspot between blind belief and angry atheism. Who said a book on the Good Book can't be brave, smart, and fun?"
—Stephen Prothero, author of Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know — and Doesn't

“Swenson successfully shows why, in spite of all its difficulties, the Bible remains a thought-provoking and infinite source of inspiration and debate for all kinds of people.”
—Publishers Weekly