Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again

Rachel Held Evans opens Inspired with an allegory about a girl who loved a "magic book" full of stories about kings, warriors, giants, and sea monsters. The girl meets Jesus in its pages and promises to follow him forever, but as she matures, she notices troubling elements: a God who commands slaughter at Jericho, drowns the world in a flood, and rewards Abraham for his willingness to sacrifice his own son. Her questions meet resistance, yet the story's hold on her remains unbroken.

Evans roots this allegory in her own life. Raised in Birmingham, Alabama, and later in Dayton, Tennessee, home of the Scopes Monkey Trial, she describes the Bible functioning as a storybook in childhood, a handbook in adolescence, and an answer book at a conservative Christian college where she learned to treat Scripture as a position paper supporting specific political and social views. As a young adult, those certainties collapsed. She noticed inconsistencies in how her church applied biblical texts and grew troubled by passages endorsing genocide, slavery, and the subjugation of women. A pastor friend suggested her doubts stemmed from sexual immorality. She cycled through leaving and returning to faith, joined the Episcopal Church, and eventually discovered Jewish interpretive traditions, liberation theology (reading Scripture from the perspective of the oppressed), and feminist biblical scholarship. The book is organized around biblical genres, alternating between creative retellings and in-depth explorations, and Evans defines biblical inspiration not as divine dictation but as a collaborative "holy give-and-take" between Creator and creator.

The first genre Evans examines is origin stories. She explains that most of Hebrew Scripture was compiled during and after the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BC, when King Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and its temple. Stripped of king, land, and place of worship, the Jewish people preserved their identity through stories, songs, and laws. Evans argues these origin stories address ancient theological questions about God's nature, not modern scientific ones. She introduces midrash, the Jewish tradition of imaginative engagement with Scripture, as a model for approaching the Bible with curiosity rather than anxiety. She recounts the story of Jacob wrestling a mysterious stranger at the river Jabbok, receiving both a limp and a new name, Israel, meaning "He struggles with God," and argues this identity should inform how all readers engage Scripture: not seeking easy answers but expecting to be changed.

Evans turns to deliverance stories, centering the exodus narrative. She describes the Passover seder, the ritual meal in which Jewish families retell the story of Israel's escape from Egypt, and traces how this narrative reached enslaved African Americans, who found in Scripture what biblical scholar Allen Dwight Callahan called both "healing balm and poison book." She discusses how Delores Williams, a womanist theologian working within a Black feminist tradition, connected the biblical Hagar to the experiences of African American women, and warns that slave traders and colonizers also used the Bible to justify violence. Evans weaves in her own pregnancy as a deliverance story, describing the anxiety following a miscarriage and the forty-week wait that paralleled biblical wilderness wandering. She reframes the Old Testament Law not as the opposite of liberation but as its extension, while acknowledging its limitations, including its accommodation of slavery and patriarchal norms.

The chapter on war stories confronts the Bible's accounts of divinely sanctioned violence. Evans summarizes the conquest of Canaan in the book of Joshua and describes how these texts were used to justify atrocities, from the 1637 massacre of the Pequot people to modern military violence. She notes that the language of total destruction likely reflects ancient rhetorical conventions rather than literal events. She highlights women within the texts who resist the violence and argues that if Jesus is the fullest revelation of God, then the cross shows God would rather die by violence than commit it. She concedes she has not found a completely satisfying explanation for these stories.

Evans examines wisdom literature through the book of Job, a blameless man who loses everything and whose friends insist he must have sinned. She argues that Job challenges the prevailing biblical principle that righteousness brings prosperity and that the wisdom literature does not speak with a single voice on suffering. She describes discovering what Catholic sociologist Christian Smith termed "pervasive interpretive pluralism," the reality that devout Christians interpret the same texts very differently. Evans argues the Bible is not an answer book but "a diverse library of ancient texts, spanning multiple centuries, genres, and cultures." The Psalms, which range from praise to lament to cursing, function as "God's way of holding space" for the full range of human experience.

The chapter on resistance stories frames much of Scripture as literature written by oppressed minorities to defy empire. Evans opens with Bree Newsome, a young Black woman who in 2015 scaled the flagpole outside the South Carolina state capitol and removed the Confederate flag ten days after the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. She identifies the prophets as truth-tellers who challenged their own communities' greed and injustice, not fortune-tellers predicting the future, and retells the story of Esther, the Jewish orphan forced into a Persian king's harem who risked her life to expose a plot to exterminate her people. Evans argues that Purim, the Jewish festival commemorating Esther's story, sanctifies satire as a weapon of resistance. She explains that apocalyptic texts like Revelation were written not as coded prophecy but as symbolic encouragement to communities under Roman oppression, and challenges American Christians to recognize that the sins Israel's prophets condemned remain potent in American culture.

Evans explores the Gospels as stories of "good news" that cannot be reduced to a formula. She surveys how different New Testament writers describe it: for John, God becoming flesh; for Luke, liberation for the poor; for Paul, Gentiles (non-Jews) being welcomed into Israel's story. She challenges the reductive view that "Jesus came to die," arguing instead that Jesus came to live, to teach, heal, and reveal what God's kingdom looks like through parables that provoke and surprise.

In her chapter on miracle stories, Evans argues that the Bible's accounts of healing carry theological significance beyond questions of factuality. The healing stories center on Jesus touching people the law deemed unclean, overturning social and religious barriers. She quotes theologian Dallas Willard: "We don't believe something by merely saying we believe it . . . We believe something when we act as if it were true."

Evans examines the New Testament Epistles as letters to specific communities that must be read in context. She recontextualizes the apostle Paul as a multicultural Jew whose mission was to break down every barrier obstructing an inclusive gospel, highlights women vital to his ministry, including Junia, Priscilla, and Phoebe, and argues that the household codes (Greco-Roman conventions governing relationships within households) reflect engagement with existing cultural norms rather than timeless divine mandates.

In the epilogue, Evans reflects on the unfinished nature of the biblical story, connecting the Hebrew waw consecutive, a syntactic device meaning "and then," to the way Christians live inside an ongoing story between Jesus' resurrection and his return. She closes with her toddler son crawling into her lap, his questions quieted, simply wanting to hear her voice: "We may wish for answers, but God rarely gives us answers. Instead, God gathers us up into soft, familiar arms and says, 'Let me tell you a story.'"