The Project Gutenberg eBook, Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature,
by Various, Edited by Richard Green Moulton

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Title: Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature

Author: Various

Editor: Richard Green Moulton

Release Date: December 12, 2008 [eBook #27510]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SELECT MASTERPIECES OF BIBLICAL
LITERATURE***

E-text prepared by Stephen Hope, Fox in the Stars, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

Transcriber's note.

Text enclosed by underscores was italicized in the original
book (_italics_), and text enclosed by forward slashes was
in bold face (/bold face/).

A minor printing error was corrected (Gen. xliv 29).

The Modern Reader's Bible

A Series of Works from the Sacred Scriptures Presented
in Modern Literary Form

SELECT MASTERPIECES OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE

Edited, with an Introduction and Notes by

RICHARD G. MOULTON, M.A. (CAMB.), Ph.D. (PENN.)

Professor of Literature in English in the University of Chicago

New York
The MacMillan Company
London: MacMillan & Co., Ltd.
1902

Copyright, 1897,
By THe MacMillan Company.

Set up and electrotyped September, 1897. Reprinted December, 1897;
August, 1898; February, 1899; August, 1900; July, 1901; April, 1902.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

INTRODUCTION

That which we call 'The Bible' has the outward appearance of a book: in
reality it is--what the word 'bible' implies in the original Greek--a
whole library. More than fifty books, the production of a large number
of different authors, representing periods of time extending over many
centuries, are all comprehended between the covers of a single volume.
There is no greater monument of the power of printing to diffuse thought
than this fact, that the whole classic literature of one of the world's
greatest peoples can be carried about in the hand or the pocket.

But there is another side to the matter. A high price has been paid for
this feat of manufacturing a portable literature: no les