The novelist Marilynne Robinson, who always writes eloquently, writes eloquently of the innumerable connections between the Bible and other works of literature. Her writing appeared in the Christmas Day edition of the venerable New York Times Sunday Book Review.

It is a must read for anyone interested in the ways art and literature—consciously or not—take up biblical visions of life and reality, putting flesh on its bones, "the deepest impulse of our literature."

Or for anyone interested in the ways art and literature come to mean anything at all.

In reflecting on texts like Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Melville's Moby Dick, Robinson writes:

Each of these works reflects a profound knowledge of Scripture and tradition on the part of the writer, the kind of knowledge found only among those who take them seriously enough to probe the deepest questions in their terms. These texts are not allegories, because in each case the writer has posed a problem within a universe of thought that is fully open to his questioning once its terms are granted. Here the use of biblical allusion is not symbolism or metaphor, which are both rhetorical techniques for enriching a narrative whose primary interest does not rest with the larger resonances of the Bible. In fact these great texts resemble Socratic dialogues in that each venture presupposes that meaning can indeed be addressed within the constraints of the form and in its language, while the meaning to be discovered through this argument cannot be presupposed. Like paintings, they render meaning as beauty.

I love that last line. Of course, Dante, Milton, and Melville are obvious choices. What about the less obvious? What Robinson ultimately points us to is the "intertextuality" of art and literature, of all the ways texts "talk" to each other in an endless conversation.

Intertextuality refers to the reality that any given text's meaning is always understood in reference to other texts. And we form our own sense of a meaning of what we read within an ever-expanding web of textual (inter)relationships, within a dynamic spider's web of words.

And the Bible occupies such a centering role in the making of meaning because it has been read by so many, its marvelous ubiquity making it "the model for and subject of more art and thought than those of us who live within its influence...will ever know" (Robinson again).

And this is how the Bible is made and remade in culture, again and again. Which perhaps means that the Bible is not only a sacred text of literature but also its sacred inter-text, not only a "book of books" but a book in books.