And All the Animals

religion, spirituality, christianity · EN-US

And All the Animals is a walk through the whole Bible — start to finish, in order, one story at a time. There are two voices. A narrator tells the story. A raven supplies the facts: what a cubit works out to, how big Nineveh actually was, which museum the tablet is sitting in. The raven was, by its own account, present for some of this, and has not entirely gotten over how that turned out. The stories are told straight, which means the people in them come off exactly as badly as the text says they do. Jacob is a con man. Noah gets off the boat and plants a vineyard. The prophet in episode one would rather die than watch his enemies be forgiven. The Bible's own narrator is unsparing about all of it — we just say it out loud. Where a passage has been read two ways for a thousand years, we say so, lay both out as well as we can, and leave it with you. Where the archaeology is contested, you get the dates, the findspots, and an honest shrug. Episodes end on a questi