1. Your book covers literally all the people in the Bible, and while there are informative articles on the familiar characters, there are also many entries that expand our knowledge of lesser-known characters. Of these, who did you find the most interesting?

Two of my favorite lesser characters were both quite young. One is Mephibosheth, the son of Saul's son Jonathan. It was customary when a king ascended the throne for him to kill all other claimants to the throne. Mephibosheth was an infant when Saul and Jonathan were killed in battle, making him the heir to the kingdom. His rivals intended to kill him, and a nursemaid, trying to save him, dropped him and crippled him, although they both escaped. When Mephibosheth was twelve David, who had assumed Saul's throne, located him and had him brought to the palace. The child was terrified as he limped into David's throne room, expecting to be taken to his death. Instead of killing him, however, David restored to him all his lands and made him an honored guest in his palace in fulfillment of the promise he had made to Jonathan.

The other character is a teenager named Eutychus. He was with his family in a hot, smoky, crowded upper room listening to Paul preach. He preached well into the night, and Eutychus was probably not very interested. He sat in a window to get a breath of fresh air, fell asleep, and fell out the window to his death. Paul immediately ran outside and revived him and sent him home with his family. I think it is the simple humanity of both these tales that particularly appeals to me.

2. What experience led you to believe there was a need for a book like this?

For many years I have been troubled by the fact that so many people knew about only the most basic characters in the Bible, and for the most part categorized them neatly as “white-hats” and “black-hats” — either the good guys or the villains. In their minds David was a holy man who made one little slip-up with Bathsheba; Solomon was the wisest and best of kings; and Herod and Judas were hateful slouching churls who glowered, snarled, and drooled their way through life.

David was, in fact, a petty warlord, a liar, a cheat, an adulterer, a murderer, a terrible husband, and a worse father. Solomon, for all his judicial wisdom, was a despotic tyrant who enslaved 20,000 of his own people, showed unconscionable favoritism to his own tribe, and at the end of his life practiced idolatry. Notwithstanding, God developed David into the greatest king in Israel's history and led Solomon to solidify and enrich the kingdom and to build the Temple that would be the focus of Jewish faith for a thousand years.

Herod, on the other hand, was, from a worldly point of view, an extremely effective king and was no worse than any Eastern potentate of his time. Judas started out a dedicated disciple of Jesus, but because of insufficient faith and understanding became disillusioned and ended up betraying his master. The fact that God could take such as David and Solomon and countless others and turn them into spiritual powerhouses gives me great encouragement as to what he can also do with the likes of me. The Herods and Judases may have been unwilling to let him develop them, but the Davids and Pauls, who let God change them from scoundrels to saints, stand as examples to all of us of the redeeming love of God. People need to know about these characters, in order to understand what God could do with them if they only would allow it.

3. Who was the hardest character to write about?

That is an easy question to answer. Writing about God (who is, after all, one of the personalities in the Bible), is a daunting task at best. When one considers the thousands of volumes that have been written about God, what more can be said, especially in a few hundred words? It is rather like “Describe the universe in 100 words or less.”

Likewise, writing about Jesus of Nazareth as a historic character and Jesus Christ the Son of God is equally daunting. As I was writing, I was constantly reminded of the ancient Greek warning that was inscribed on every temple and shrine, “Know thyself.” This was not some New Age admonition to get in touch with your inner being; it was a grim warning to know your place. Arrogance before the gods was called hubris, and its punishment was too horrible to contemplate. It is easy — and dangerous — to become self-satisfied or intellectually complacent in writing about God.

4. Did your research cause you to reevaluate your understanding of any character in the Bible?

It cast a new light on most of them, especially the major ones. Like most people who read the Bible, I developed very early an image of many of the characters, and that image often became so solidly fixed that on re-reading I failed to see the many clues that could show that my image might not have been at all accurate. When I started looking at the characters specifically as human beings instead of simply accepting them as part of the “cast,” all sorts of things began to pop out of the text, and many of them really began to come to life.

Biblical saints and scoundrels alike are fascinating. One thing that particularly struck me is that showing our heroes with all their warts validates them. If they were mythological fabrications, they would approach perfection, and not be shown in all their humanity. If the story of David were a King Arthur type of myth, probably the only major flaw that would have been told would be his adultery with Bathsheba, and that would be told only in order to demonstrate God's forgiveness. In reality, however, David was not golden with a bit of dross; he was pure lead whom God turned into gold.

5. Can you think of an example of a popular reference to a Biblical character that previous generations would have found obvious but might be missed today?

A century and a half ago the “curse of Canaan” was commonly used to justify the enslavement of the blacks, but today there are few people who even know who Canaan was. (He was Noah’s grandson, whom Noah cursed.)

Similar examples are countless. From the Renaissance until the early 20th century, a basic component of a decent education was a thorough knowledge of the Bible. In Shakespeare's time, even the common folk in his audience would have recognized most of his biblical and mythological references. The founding fathers of the United States, even though many of them were Deists or Enlightenment agnostics, knew the Bible backwards and forwards. If someone referred to the Tower of Siloam or to Manasseh and Ephraim, they would have known immediately what was meant.

Today, the majority of regular church-goers cannot name the three sons of Noah or list more than four of the Ten Commandments. This is particularly sad because the Bible, no matter how much (or little) one may believe what it says from a religious point of view, is a primary foundation stone of Western literature and culture.

6. Biblical names are always popular. Do you have any examples of ones that aren’t a good choice?

There are quite a few biblical characters whose names I would not care to bear. One of the most obvious, of course, is Judas, even though it was a common and respected name in ancient times. Even among the Jews it lost favor as the reputation of Judas Iscariot came to be known to them.

In the 19th century people would often open their Bible at random and blindly point, then name their child according to the name nearest where their finger landed. It is said that this is how Abraham Lincoln got his name (he was one of the fortunate ones). Some popular 19th century biblical names are regaining popularity — such as Zedekiah, Elijah, and Matthias — but the majority of biblical names simply do not roll off the tongue very well (like Mnason or Syntyche) or were the names of scoundrels such as Gehazi or Jezebel. I think I would hesitate to name my child after Isaiah’s son Mahershalalhashbaz — he might have a bit of a hard time with the other children once he got to school.

7.Why include the Apocrypha and some people not even mentioned by name in the Bible?

While the Protestant churches for the most part ignore the Apocrypha except as interesting literature, many apocryphal books are part of the canonical Bible of the Roman Catholic Church; and although the Apocrypha is not considered a direct part of the Bible in the Anglican and Eastern Orthodox Churches, it is nonetheless treated as part of the body of Holy Scripture. Also, most of the books of the Apocrypha were a part of the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures, and the closest thing the Jews in Jesus' time had to a Bible. The Septuagint is one of the primary documents that led up to the final decisions as to what would constitute both the Christian and Jewish Bibles. Also, the Apocrypha reveals a huge amount of the history and culture of the Jews during the period from the return from the Exile until the advent of Roman power (6th to 1st centuries BCE).

As for people not mentioned in the Bible, I felt that it was necessary to present some who, although not identified by name, are either clearly referred to (such as Nero) or had such an influence on biblical knowledge or events that they could not be ignored (such as the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus).