'A word to the wise: Don’t try to start at Genesis 1 and read on through, because you will give up in mid-Exodus.'īut the essence of good Bible-reading – as of reading any other book – is not to ‘know’ in advance what it will contain, and to be able to be surprised. The surprises can be unpleasant. We saw the same thing after the attacks of 9 September 2001, when there was also a spike in Bible sales. In crises there is a tendency to go back to such a venerable source of illumination and look for whatever will meet one’s needs. The Bible is protean, shape-shifting according to our demands. This last possibility reminds us that you can generally find in the Bible whatever you are looking for. Perhaps, as the Nielsen comments suggested, some people may want to check whether the virus is predicted in the book of Revelation.

The content matters less than the physical presence of a holy object, which can help to keep us safe – like a St Christopher necklace for some drivers.

Perhaps for some it works as a kind of talisman, as it has done since antiquity. Perhaps the Bible is another of those books we always meant to make time to read, like War and Peace or Proust, and now we have that time. In April, British online Christian bookstore Eden saw physical sales rise by 55 percent. Across the world, people have been turning to ‘The Good Book’ in noticeably larger numbers, with increases in the UK and more copies than usual selling in Ireland and the USA.įurthermore, there was a global increase in downloads of the Bible app and in March, across Google Play and App Store, the most popular English-language Bible was installed on smartphones more than two million times – the highest number ever for that month.

But one that stood out recently was that there has been a sharp rise in the online sales of Bibles during the coronavirus pandemic. We are living in a time of unlikely headlines.

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