Over the last couple of weeks, I did something I've been meaning to get round to for a while now: I sat down and read the Bible from end to end.

Not for religious reasons, I hasten to assure you; anyone who was expecting to be able to count on me as a staunch atheist can still safely do so. A minor objective was to find out a bit more about what the Christians I know believe, but primarily my motivation was literary: lots of modern writing refers or alludes to the Bible, and I've often not been entirely sure what the explicit references are talking about, and have probably missed quite a few of the subtle allusions.

So after an unusually large number of Bible references happened to go over my head during a period of three or four days the other week, I decided enough was enough and set out to actually read the thing. I allowed myself to skim-read if it got boring (the censuses, the genealogies, the endless indistinguishable psalms and proverbs and prophecies, the extensive theology and moralising in the New Testament etc), but I wanted to at least get from one end of the book to the other and be left with an understanding of its overall structure and plot.

My favourite bit of the whole book, I think, was the second half of 1 Samuel, describing the conflict between Saul and David. This is because it had actual dramatic tension and plot: Saul enthroned with access to all the resources of a king, David on the run and in hiding but with God on his side. Of course I knew how it was going to end already, and of course the writing style was standard Bible-issue stilted awkwardness, but nonetheless I found it a more gripping read than any of the rest of the book.

The most boring bit, on the other hand, would have to have been 2 Kings. That might seem like an odd choice given the wide range of completely unreadably boring bits I listed a few paragraphs ago, but the thing about all those bits is that they're clearly boring, so you can identify them in advance and skip lightly over them. 2 Kings, however, presented itself as a narrative, and so I didn't dare skip any of it because there was always the chance that something interesting and important might happen and I'd miss it; but in fact it was completely full of endless copies of the same cardboard-cutout king doing the same bad things, and because I couldn't skim it I had to suffer through them all in full.

(Some friends of mine had a phrase for that at school, I recall: ‘killer boring’, describing things that are not only boring but that you have to keep concentrating on and can't just ignore. Boredom you can't run away from, that you have to keep staring into until it strips your soul and destroys your will to live. Boredom by comparison to which merely being sent to sleep would be outright pleasant.)

The other thing that struck me as odd about the Bible was, again oddly for such a large and verbose book, its occasionally surprising brevity.

There are of course quite a few really famous Bible stories which I already knew in outline, and could have summed up the story in a few sentences. In several of these cases, the actual version of the story in the Bible turned out to be barely any longer than my summary would have been: the things that ‘everybody knows’ about the story were in fact the whole story.

Take the Tower of Babel, for example: some people tried to build a tower reaching to the heavens, and God thwarted them by confusing their language so they could no longer understand each other. I imagine everybody who knows anything about the Tower of Babel (I mean, beyond just having heard the name) knows that much. So when I got to Genesis 11 and found the actual story, I was naïvely expecting that basic outline to be fleshed out into lots more text: character development, dramatic tension, backplot and motivation, perhaps how they tried very hard to carry on using only sign language but couldn't get the details right so the rest of the tower kept falling down … But in fact, the entire incident takes place in about eight verses, in very little detail more than I gave in my initial summary above.

I mean. Suppose you hadn't read Lord of the Rings, and someone told you that Gandalf confronted a Balrog on a bridge and both of them fell into the abyss. You would naturally expect that that sentence was probably a very potted summary, and that in the real text there would be paragraphs if not pages describing what a Balrog was, why they were fighting, how the confrontation occurred, how both of them managed to fall in instead of just the loser as you might expect, what everybody else watching thought of this, etc. And, of course, you'd be right. But if that same incident came up in the Bible, it would probably actually read something along the lines of ‘19 Then Gandalf confronted the Balrog on the bridge. 20 And both of them fell into the abyss.’ (2 Fellowship 5:19-20) And I think that if your imagination had been tickled by the potted summary and you'd decided to read the real thing, you might reasonably be quite disappointed to find that that was all there was to it.