In the first chapter of the Book of Genesis—in just thirty-one short verses—the world is given form, light is summoned into being, Day and Night are named, Heaven hatched, the stars invoked, and Earth fashioned into land and sea, seeded with plants and populated with creatures. All in less than eight hundred words. That the authority of the language in the most majestic English translation, the King James Version of 1611, seems commensurate with what it describes is astonishing. But what’s it like to read the Bible? Not puzzle over its provenance nor interpret its meaning, not make peace with its traditions nor argue with the inheritances they inform, not evangelize its teachings nor submit to its commandments, but simply read the narratives, poetry, historical chronicles, legends, observances, and revelations it encompasses? In short, reading the Bible is eerie, dramatic, beautiful, equivocal, infuriating, strange, for it is filled with knowledge that is inspired, practical, mystical, and sometimes unintelligible. In its chapters and verses we discover a fathomless universe of character and circumstance rendered in literary modes that are varied and surprising, and often cryptic and oblique. The meanings of what we read in the Bible seem to change their color, if not their substance, depending on the context in which we consider them; this is by no means to say biblical truths are malleable, but rather that life is.