Some of these works have been important and influential, and eventually there have appeared heterodox Bible novels that reflect modern, postmodern or realist influences and themes.
Other works are regarded as heterodox simply because they dramatize the Bible stories realistically, shorn of mythical, miraculous or magical elements.
Realist Bible novels are typically semi-historical in that they develop the setting in Israel or Egypt or Rome or as the case may be—including the political and class and racial conflicts and urban and rural landscape imagery—with fidelity to known historical facts.
As Robert Graves said of his novel King Jesus (1946), "I undertake to my readers that every important element in my story is based on some tradition, however tenuous, and that I have taken more than ordinary pains to verify my historical background."
The Red Tent (1997) a novel by Anita Diamant, is a first-person narrative that tells the story of Dinah, daughter of Jacob and sister of Joseph.
The book's title refers to the tent in which women of Jacob's tribe must, as dictated by ancient law, be quarantined while menstruating or giving birth.
[1] Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks' The Secret Chord (2015) is narrated by Natan, the prophet who communicates God's directives to David.
The scriptures are her primary sources for the plot, which includes all the well-known key events: Goliath, David's facility with the harp, kingdom building, Bathsheba, and so on.
The themes or questions that the novel explores are narrative truth and fiction, feminism, loss, identity and corruption thereof, invasion of privacy, and worldly ambition.
Jacob, a former temple priest in Jerusalem who has been rendered bereft by the Jewish wars and consequent destruction of his family and culture, is inspired by his own autobiography and Paul's mythmaking to create the canonical gospels' original narrative.
The themes of the book include how we cope with a loss of faith, the terrible sacrifices we make for those we love, the transcendent meaning of Yeshua's mission, and how we go on after suffering a shattering trauma.