Review: The Dark History of the Bible: Untold Scandals, Biblical Myths, and Ancient Religious Controversies

Skriuwer, The Dark History of the Bible: Untold Scandals, Biblical Myths, and Ancient Religious Controversies, (2026)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/246026958-the-dark-history-of-the-bible

A basic intro to the darker side of the Bible’s history

How did a bunch of tribal myths evolve into a tool for conquest and oppression?

The chronologically organised four parts to this book show where it’s going: 1. 2000–586 BCE: the origins of the myths and texts; 2. 538 BCE–70 CE: the formation of the canon; 3. 50–400 CE: politics and orthodoxy; 4. 400 CE–present: weaponisation.

The prologue is a list of surprising did-you-knows. You may know that the original story about ‘the empty tomb’ did not feature any resurrections (Mark 16 was added later), but did you know the Battle of Jericho never happened? Matt 27:52-53 says that at Jesus’ death, the dead came out of their tombs like zombies. It was perfectly ok for ancient Hebrews to sell your daughter into slavery as long as you didn’t sell her to foreigners. The Hebrew Hell (Sheol) was not fiery.

It’s difficult to summarise this chock-full book. From Asherah and Baal to the Council of Nicaea, I can’t think of any other historical topic that is this interesting. It’s structured logically, by theme as well as by chronology. It mainly deals with the New Testament, but Yahweh’s pagan past enters the story in Chapter 6, showing the Israelites’ evolution to monotheism as a ‘winding trail of tribal bargains’.

For a serious study of this subject, you should start with this book, then move to further study on each topic. The topics are not examined in great depth; it’s more a couple of bullet points on a wide range of topics. Each chapter could be a book or two in itself. It’s useful in the sense that it summarises the basic gist of the topic. But round about Chapter 16 the writing begins to suffer, the style become more note-taking than exposition, in places looking as if it wasn’t even edited. We breeze quickly through misogyny, slavery, the Crusades, European colonialism and Zionism, with just a few bullet points each.

It ends, depressingly, with ‘how the Bible’s darkness still shapes our world’, Donald Trump, LGBTQ oppression, the climate crisis, religious extremism and the modern triumph of racism. Are we living in the End Times?

Includes numerous lush, beautiful colour illustrations.

An interesting side-factoid about this book is that the royalties are going toward promoting the Frisian language.