The subject of this chapter, addressing what perhaps are the most fundamental questions of all, is encountered for many of us in the context of the standing of the Scriptures in coming to know “God's Will.” For that reason, we begin with some half-dozen responses to the question, What does the avowal of “divine inspiration” mean in that context? The final paragraphs of George Steiner's “Preface to the Hebrew Bible” briefly and powerfully describe the dichotomous choice that the assertion of divine inspiration typically presents, but immediately goes on to question that dichotomy in words as eloquent as they are succinct. I know of no better introduction to this subject.

However, one cannot long consider the question of the Scriptures without coming to grips with the underlying questions, how do religious traditions understand “God” and our relation to God? The remainder of the chapter attempts to open both questions, by illustrating the variety of responses within and between different traditions.

A PREFACE TO THE HEBREW BIBLE GEORGE STEINER

No Passion Spent: Essays 1978–1995 (1996)

Our poetry, drama, fiction would be unrecognizable if we omitted the continuous presence of the Bible. The centrality of the biblical is most obvious in English-language literatures. [I]n the literatures of English, at home and as a global medium, the kinship with the biblical, as it began with the Anglo-Saxons and with Chaucer, as it informed Donne, Milton, Blake, Melville, T. S. Eliot and so many others, continues.

But is the Bible literature? However rudimentary one's preface to a reading of Scripture, this vexing question cannot be avoided. Two antithetical answers have been declared.