The Bible is, in many ways, not suited to internet study. Let me explain: this artificial world of the internet is based on searchability. To search for something, you need to have a distinctive word, a keyword, or catchphrase. As perhaps the most successful book of all time, the Bible has undermined its own uniqueness. How many books are titled The Gun Bible or the Dog Bible or substitute your favorite noun Bible? Web searches for “the Bible” bring up a large number of relevant hits, but then quickly devolve into other Bibles. Too many Bibles. Not only has the noun “Bible” been appropriated, so have many aspects of its story. Particularly the Good Book’s penchant for using short, common words for titles of individual books.
Search for Mark, or John, for example. Don’t bother adding the word “Gospel” since it too has become widely utilized to give any popular subject an air of authenticity. Not only did the four evangelists write such books—the Gospel according to Biff, Trump, the Simpsons, or Bruce Springsteen will likely pop up ahead of the original fab four. Or consider the books whose names became common nouns: genesis, exodus, numbers, judges, kings. Then there are the ambiguous titles: Job, Proverbs, Song of Songs, Acts. Sure, you can lengthen them out a bit: Acts of the Apostles, Song of Solomon, the Proverbs of Solomon, but the results you get tend to skew evangelical that way. Job is just a non-starter. Do you mean employment or enlightenment? Do I need to get a job or to get Job? At least it’s not a popular name for kids.
The other area where the Bible’s success works against it in the computer age is its success at giving names to people. In a culture so biblically based, the Bible has been treated as a name-list for newborns for centuries. Even though the Anabaptist penchant for using prophetic names has faded from popular culture, there are plenty of Isaiahs, Jeremiahs, and Ezekiels out there. Even some minor prophets, too. Amos, Micah, Zechariah. (Habakkuk, Zephaniah, and Haggai haven’t particularly caught on.) Daniel, David, Joseph, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. We live in a world of biblical nomenclature. There’s even more than one Jesus running around. (Jesus, is, of course, Greek for Joshua, so there may be even more than one might suspect.) I spend a good bit of the day searching various biblical material online. I wonder if anyone ever imagined, over two millennia ago, that a three-letter name was bound to cause problems in a world of billions? Were it submitted for publication today, the editor would’ve sent the Bible back to the author for a rewrite, along with a list of suitable keywords.
