Drawing on the theory of language developed by the Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin, this book argues that the historically diverse writings of the Bible have been organized according to a concept of dialogue. The overriding concern with an ongoing communication between God and his people has been formally embodied, Reed shows, in the continuous conversation between one part of the Bible and another. Reed looks beyond the close readings of recent accounts of the Bible as literature to larger paradigms of communication in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament. He considers the Bible in its different canonical states, distinguishing the genres of law, prophecy, and wisdom in the Hebrew Bible and describing how these earlier forms of divine and human communication are appropriated and answered by the New Testament genre of gospel. The dialogic character of the Bible is also discovered within individual books: patriarchal answers to primeval failures in Genesis, cross-talk between justice and providence in Job, and orchestration of judgment and worship in Revelation. Throughout this wide-ranging study, Reed demonstrates the surprising relevance of Bakhtin's ideas of literature and language to the biblical writings as they assume formal coherence within the canon.

In a book of essays published in 1920 entitled The Art of Reading, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch offers an ironic image of "the Bible as literature," one that exposes the frequent cross-purposes of literary and historical study. "Imagine a volume including the great books of our own literature," he invites his readers, "all bound together in some such order as this":

Paradise Lost, Darwin Descent of Man, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Walter Map,Mill On Liberty, Hooker Ecclesiastical Polity, The Annual Register, Froissart,Adam Smith Wealth of Nations, Domesday Book, Le Morte d'Arthur, Campbell Lives of the Lord Chancellors, Boswell Johnson, Barbour The Bruce, Hakluyt Voyages, Clarendon, Macaulay, the plays of Shakespeare, Shelley Prometheus Unbound, The Faerie Queene, Palgrave Golden Treasury, Bacon Essays, Swinburne Poems and Ballads, FitzGerald Omar Khayyam, Wordsworth,Browning, Sartor Resartus, Burton Anatomy of Melancholy, Burke Letters on a Regicide Peace, Ossian, Piers Plowman, Burke Thoughts on the Present Discontents, Quarles,Newman Apologia, Donne Sermons, Ruskin,Blake, The Deserted Village, Manfred, Blair Grave, The Complaint of Deor, Bailey Festus, Thompson Hound of Heaven.