The Bible

Summary

The Bible is the sacred scripture of Judaism and Christianity, and the reference edition presents the King James Version of 1611, the most influential translation in English. It is a library rather than a single book. The Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures, begins with Genesis: the creation of the world, Adam and Eve's disobedience and expulsion from Eden, Cain's murder of Abel, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and the stories of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, ending with Israel's family in Egypt. Exodus tells of slavery in Egypt, Moses, the plagues and the escape through the Red Sea, the covenant and the law given at Sinai. Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy set out ritual and moral law, including laws of purity, diet and skin disease, and Israel's wandering in the wilderness. The historical books, Joshua through Kings and Chronicles, recount the conquest of Canaan, the judges, the monarchy of Saul, David and Solomon, the division of the kingdom, and the conquest of Israel by Assyria and of Judah by Babylon; Ezra and Nehemiah describe the return from exile. The wisdom and poetic books include Job, in which a righteous man loses everything and argues with God about undeserved suffering; the Psalms, songs of praise, lament and trust; Proverbs; Ecclesiastes, whose Preacher meditates on the vanity of human striving; and the Song of Songs, a sequence of love poems. The prophets, from Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel to the twelve minor prophets, denounce injustice and idolatry and announce judgement and restoration; Daniel adds court tales and apocalyptic visions. The New Testament opens with the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which tell the life of Jesus of Nazareth: his birth, baptism, teaching in parables and the Sermon on the Mount, his many healings and exorcisms, his conflict with authorities, his crucifixion under Pontius Pilate and his resurrection. The Acts of the Apostles follows the early church from Jerusalem to Rome, centring on Peter and then Paul. The Epistles, letters by Paul and others to early communities, develop Christian doctrine and ethics, including Paul's hymn to charity in First Corinthians. The book of Revelation closes the canon with a visionary apocalypse of cosmic conflict, judgement and a new heaven and earth. The King James text's cadences have shaped the English language and its literature more deeply than any other book.

Top Lessons

• The problem of suffering

  Job refuses the comforters' claim that suffering is always punishment. The book honours protest and leaves the question of innocent suffering open.

• Healing as social restoration

  Gospel healings often restore outcasts, lepers, the unclean, the possessed, to community. Illness in the Bible is social and religious as well as bodily.

• Wisdom about limits

  Ecclesiastes and the Psalms confront mortality and the fragility of human effort, offering not escape but a way to live within limits.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The Bible is foundational for the history of Western ideas of illness, impurity and healing. Leviticus 13–14 prescribes priestly inspection, quarantine and purification for 'leprosy' (tzara'at), a skin condition not identical with Hansen's disease, which later shaped medieval leper policy. Saul's 'evil spirit' soothed by music, Nebuchadnezzar's madness, and David feigning madness are key early accounts of mental disturbance. The Gospels contain many healings and exorcisms, including the Gadarene demoniac living among tombs and the boy whose symptoms (falling, foaming, gnashing teeth) the KJV describes as 'lunatick' and which are often read as epilepsy; these readings are retrospective. Other passages include the woman who 'suffered many things of many physicians', Asa who sought physicians rather than God, Hezekiah's boil treated with a fig poultice, Elisha's revival of the Shunammite's son, plague narratives, childbirth deaths, and abundant material on wine and drunkenness. The KJV's own word choices ('lunatick', 'leprosy') carry later medical connotations into English.

• Leviticus 13–14

  Laws for priestly diagnosis, isolation outside the camp and purification of 'leprosy' in people, garments and houses.

• 1 Samuel 16:14–23; 18:10–11

  Saul's evil spirit, David's harp, and Saul's later violent episodes.

• Daniel 4

  Nebuchadnezzar is driven from men and eats grass like oxen until his reason returns.

• 2 Kings 4:18–37

  Elisha restores the Shunammite woman's dead son by lying upon him, mouth to mouth.

• 2 Kings 20:1–7 / Isaiah 38

  Hezekiah's mortal illness and the lump of figs laid on his boil.

• Mark 5:1–20

  The Gadarene demoniac, bound with chains among the tombs, healed by Jesus.

• Mark 5:25–34

  The woman with an issue of blood for twelve years who had spent all she had on physicians and grew worse.

• Matthew 17:14–18; Mark 9:17–29

  The boy described as 'lunatick' who falls into fire and water, foams and is rigid, often read as epilepsy.

• Genesis 35:16–20

  Rachel dies in hard labour giving birth to Benjamin.

• 2 Samuel 24

  A pestilence kills seventy thousand after David's census.