A library, not a single book
Almost every story in this grid comes from the Hebrew Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament. It is a collection rather than one book: 39 books in the Protestant arrangement, written and edited over roughly a thousand years, mostly in Hebrew with some passages in Aramaic. It holds history, law, poetry, proverbs and prophecy side by side.
The same stories are sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims. GENESIS, meaning beginning, opens with the CREATION, ADAM and EVE in the garden of EDEN, and the tower of BABEL, told to explain why people speak so many languages. NOAH and his ARK follow — Nuh in the Quran — and a strikingly similar flood story from ancient Iraq is told on our Mesopotamian mythology page.
Goliath's height depends on which manuscript you read
In most English Bibles GOLIATH stands six cubits and a span — about three metres. The oldest surviving copy of the passage, among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the ancient Greek translation both say four cubits and a span, a little over two metres: very tall, but a human height. Comparing old copies like this is how scholars work out how a text changed as it was copied by hand.
Either way, DAVID was the shepherd boy who beat him with a sling and a stone, and later became king. The story gave the language a phrase for any contest between a small side and a far bigger one. His son SOLOMON, famous for his wisdom, built the first Temple in Jerusalem.
Escape from Egypt
JOSEPH, sold into slavery by jealous brothers, rises to run Egypt for the PHARAOH. Generations later his people are enslaved there, and MOSES leads them out — the EXODUS, remembered by Jews every year at Passover. In the desert they eat MANNA, which the story says fell from heaven each morning; the name is often explained as coming from the Hebrew for what is it?
JOSHUA then leads them into Canaan, and the walls of JERICHO fall after the people march around the city and blow trumpets. SAMSON, whose strength lay in his uncut hair, and DANIEL, thrown into a den of lions and left unharmed, come from later in the same long history.
Jonah's fish, and a book without God in it
JONAH, who tries to run away from God's instructions and is swallowed at sea, spends three days inside a great fish. The text never says whale — that came later, from translation and from pictures. It is also one of the shortest books, and ends with a question rather than a conclusion.
The book of ESTHER, about a Jewish queen of Persia who saves her people, is one of only two books in the Hebrew Bible, with the Song of Songs, that never mention God by name; it is read aloud at the festival of Purim. RUTH, a foreign widow who chooses to stay with her mother-in-law, becomes the great-grandmother of King David. ABRAHAM, whom Jews, Christians and Muslims all look back to as their ancestor in faith, stands at the start of the whole family line.