God wasn’t thinking of search engine optimization (SEO) when he was writing the Bible. First of all, he doesn’t seem to have considered that all the nice, short names he used would soon become the most common in the western world. And he didn’t give all the characters last names. Job is particularly egregious because you could be searching for employment and not a complaining old man (you can always find one of the latter here!). Perhaps he wasn’t aware at the time just how popular his book would become so that just about everything in it appears on some twenty-million webpages and you need some distinctive keywords for SEO. And this unfortunate high profile has also led to knock-on search problems.
I quite often have to search for bits of the Good Book together. “Pentateuch” isn’t so bad because it’s a bigger word that most people don’t use every day. But what about “historical books”? It’s two words and search engines begin scouring the web for pages that have both words. And there are plenty of historical books outside the Bible. Writings? Poetry? Even Gospels is used all over the place. I had to find something about the Catholic Epistles the other day. My search engine found plenty of places with both words, but not linked together. (I know the quotation mark trick, but bear with me here as I’m trying to make a point that will perhaps lead to divine intervention.) I tried again with Pastoral Epistles but the same problem arose. This is the burden of being so important that everyone copies you.
It’s the price of success. God surely must’ve foreseen that. The problem is that Holy Writ predates the internet by so many centuries. Those who’ve determined how searching works have redefined our lives—have given us new commandments. Thou shalt not put commas in titles, for example. Thou shalt use distinctive keywords. Pity the fool who must find information on a biblical character with only one name. Perhaps that name is John. Or David. Or Mary. Sure, you can add qualifiers but they’re all common words as well. The Good Book is a victim of its own success. And for containing all the prophecy that it does it is truly amazing that not even the creator of the universe didn’t see this coming. We live in a world driven by tech and although the Bible had a direct role leading to that world, you wouldn’t know it by your standard Google search.
