"Whatever your relationship is to your sacred tradition in the West, you have some relationship to the Bible if only through the names of the characters"
About this Quote
Even if you’ve never cracked a Bible, Diament argues, you’re still living in its linguistic afterglow. The line is slyly practical: she’s not making a piety play or claiming Christianity’s moral authority by default. She’s pointing to something more mundane and more pervasive - cultural literacy as inheritance. “Sacred tradition” lets skeptics and believers share the same frame without pretending they share the same faith. Then she narrows the claim to an almost disarming detail: names. Adam, Eve, Judas, Mary, Samson, Delilah. They function like cultural shortcuts, instantly summoning character types, cautionary tales, and emotional scripts.
The subtext is about power. Not spiritual power, but narrative dominance: the Bible as a Western reference engine that keeps running even in secular settings. You can reject the institution and still be tagged by its vocabulary. That’s why the line works - it sidesteps theology and goes straight to the infrastructure of meaning. Names are where stories become portable; they slip into art, politics, film, advertising, and everyday insult. A “Good Samaritan” law doesn’t require belief, just recognition.
Context matters, too. Diament, a Jewish novelist best known for re-centering biblical women (The Red Tent), is attentive to how texts shape who gets legible in public life. This sentence doubles as an invitation and a critique: if the Bible is the common tongue, who gets to control its translations, its heroes, its villains - and whose stories have been minimized inside the canon people think they already know.
The subtext is about power. Not spiritual power, but narrative dominance: the Bible as a Western reference engine that keeps running even in secular settings. You can reject the institution and still be tagged by its vocabulary. That’s why the line works - it sidesteps theology and goes straight to the infrastructure of meaning. Names are where stories become portable; they slip into art, politics, film, advertising, and everyday insult. A “Good Samaritan” law doesn’t require belief, just recognition.
Context matters, too. Diament, a Jewish novelist best known for re-centering biblical women (The Red Tent), is attentive to how texts shape who gets legible in public life. This sentence doubles as an invitation and a critique: if the Bible is the common tongue, who gets to control its translations, its heroes, its villains - and whose stories have been minimized inside the canon people think they already know.
Quote Details
| Topic | Bible |
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