Readers Reply

Bias and The Book

To the editor:

The review of The Book in the Summer 1986 volume stressed the importance of keeping the Old Testament and New Testament scriptures as close as possible to their original phrases (see Should “The Book” Be Panned? BR 02:02). I found it very interesting that an advertisement shown at the end of the article was for some tapes to “decode Bible riddles.” Also Kyle McCarter’s review of The Hebrew Bible—A Socio-Literary Introduction by Norman Gottwald (“A Major New Introduction to the Bible,” BR 02:02) seems to praise a book that claims that “something quite different actually happened than what the Bible describes.” I, too, find The Book extremely misleading, but its approach is really no different from any other author whose bias interprets scripture through translation or analysis.