“I’ll be in the study, working,” I told her.

“Okay.”

I accessed lesson planning for the next term. After ten minutes I gave up. I couldn’t concentrate. I was tempted to check on Abby upstairs but decided against it. She was probably reading her Bible. Or praying. Or crying. I wouldn’t have blamed her.

“Alistair, please pull up the same version of the Bible.” If I couldn’t focus on my work, at least I could get something productive done.

I read through Genesis. Through Exodus. Leviticus. Numbers. Deuteronomy. Who named these things? It had been more than twenty years since I had looked at the Bible, and I hadn’t read most of it back then. It wasn’t as I expected. I thought I remembered the Bible as similar to the Bhagavad-Gita, a Hindu text of philosophical musings on life. The Bible was nothing of the sort.

It was mainly a historical text. After some brief legends concerning creation and the origin and dispersion of humanity, it began detailing the lives and events of the forefathers of what would later be known as the Jewish nation—and, allegedly, God’s interaction with them, including the giving of the divine law. The minutiae of the laws amazed me, but as a historian, I was truly astounded by the detail of the history presented. I dismissed the divine intervention material, of course, but had any of this human history actually occurred? Surely the veracity of some of the characters and events had been ascertained.

“Alistair, visual mode.” He appeared in a chair across from my desk. “Please access information on the biblical character Abraham. Is there any outside corroboration of his existence?”

“Yes. In 1933 archaeologists led by Sir Leonard Woolley uncovered what they believed to be his residence in Ur, an ancient Chaldean city. The house was constructed of—”

“Pause.”

I was getting sidetracked. I needed to restrain my historian impulses. I wasn’t examining this material primarily for historical purposes. I was trying to ascertain the mindset of Ray Caldwell. “Alistair, discontinue answer and visual mode.”

“As you wish.”

I resumed my scan. Reading the Hebrew scriptures, I couldn’t help wondering how anyone without neural implants had ever slogged their way through. The level of detail in the historical books was truly mind numbing. Occasionally I stopped to cross-check archaeological findings and the records of nonbiblical historical sources. Much biblical detail couldn’t be proven, of course, but I did find its overall framework to be largely verifiable. The royal lineage of Israel and the surrounding nations, the places and dates of events, the outcomes of invasions, the construction of buildings and city fortifications—the biblical account was correct on these details.