This collection of six essays by noted literary critics and biblical scholars--including Harold Bloom, Hans Frei, Frank Kermode, James Robinson, Donald Foster, and Herbert Schneidau--explores the Bible as poetry, rhetoric, and narrative. The authors treat such issues involved in biblical narrative as its genesis, its revisionist dynamic, its fictional character, its interpretive nature, and its contradictions, prejudices, and claims. McConnell's introduction elucidates and unifies the book's themes.