In this beguiling, challenging, often ­moving, occasionally frustrating book, ­A. N. Wilson laments that so few people now read the Bible or get to know it by other means. Many of those who do read it, moreover, read it wrongly, to the great impoverishment of modern society. We cannot understand the Bible, Wilson argues, by trying to assess objectively how truthful it is. We must read it as poetry, metaphor and ­summons, attending to what others have made of it and recognising how it has changed those who have taken it seriously. Wilson approaches the Bible through a fictionalised history of his own relationship with it and with a friend whom he identifies only as “L.”. On a visit to Nablus in ancient Samaria, for example, made at L.’s urging, Wilson is remin