the bible fandom
"Is it ethical to ship Jacob and Esau?" "Gomer did nothing wrong" "Please tell me you didn't like 'Strange Fire'..."
In the beginning was the fandom. And the fandom LOVED Genesis! It was a surprise hit. Savvy pre-release promotion using kitschy art that advertised character dynamics for potential shipping worked the fandom up into a lather before the book even hit shelves.
Some say that Genesis was a fanfiction before it was published. Sadly, this history has been lost. It’s been a minute.
Fans loved Joseph and his brothers. Twelve whole guys to ship! Others found themselves enraptured by Enoch, who’s barely mentioned in the original work but looms large in fanfiction. Almost everyone wanted Adam to be gay, but a few fans who care about women wrote up another wife for him, who then became lowkey canon to them.
Most of all, fans obsessed over Jacob and Esau. “The tale of Jacob and Laban and Jacob and Esau is the beginning and end of the world,” said one mega-fan. To this day, the controversy over the ethics of shipping Jacob with Esau simmers.
It’s hard to say whether Exodus really hit the shelves, it flew off them so fast. All audiences, not just the fandom, loved its new horror elements, like the ten plagues and God being hidden in darkness. Fan art of frogs proliferated. But once readers got about halfway in, they noticed that Exodus was taking the series in a new direction, one very, very focussed on rules. Some readers paused. Why do we need to know all the little things the characters are supposed to do in-universe?
Some fanfiction writers loved the systems of rules and magic that Exodus began introducing; most fans found themselves uneasy. When Leviticus was announced, everyone knew the fate of the series was on the line. And it… bombed. Aside from the characters Nadab and Abihu, who starred in the mega-popular but controversial fanfiction “Strange Fire,” Leviticus was instantly regarded as forgettable by fans and general audiences alike. (The less said about “Strange Fire,” the better.) Leviticus barely advanced the plot and it was clear the series was falling a little too in love with its world and a little out of step with its fans’ desire for, uh, plot.
Numbers debuted to less excitement, but once fans got past yet another slog through rules and worldbuilding, their excitement was reborn. Numbers was a sleeper hit. The talking donkey? So cute!!!! Balaam, Destroyer of a People? Phineas, problematic fav of many? Miriam’s and Aaron’s tragic deaths? (Fans of Miriam and Aaron quickly found themselves embroiled in controversy after what the two had to say about Moses’s wife…) All this was catnip for the fandom. They were so back. And they were so hype for the finale.
Then Deuteronomy hit like a sponge soaked in cold water. It was taken as a bizarre creative decision. A recap episode? As the finale??? C’mon. Moses fans struggled to cope with their main man’s loquaciousness. Every fan struggled to cope with the non-ending that seemed to be teasing a fantasy, a bridge to nowhere. But Joshua fans rejoiced when it was announced that the story would continue with… the Prophets. Yes, fans learned, these five books were only the first series. Let’s gooooooooooooo.
Joshua was, if you ask some people who were there, more exciting to general audiences than Genesis had been. It didn’t have as many ambiguous little insertions to puzzle over and build off, but it had sick action sequences and a generally can-do attitude about moving forward as a story. Joshua as a character quickly became a fan favourite; articles were penned about the intensity of his fanbase.
Judges perhaps leaned too heavily into what the general audience wanted, at the expense of what the fandom wanted. Fans of the first series were a little put off by stuff like the stealth assassination chapter and didn’t react well to Samson’s riddle about the bee hive. They tended to reimagine him as a himbo. However, the golden age of the fandom was only beginning. If no one book ever surpassed Genesis’s popularity, fans were getting a string of 4-6 entries usually agreed upon as ranging from solid to incredible.
Samuel, sometimes published in two volumes, went so hard, per fans and general readers alike. Everyone fell in love with Samuel and David, who quickly became everyone’s favourite problematic icon. Some fans shipped David with Saul but this was roundly condemned. Others became mad that nobody cared about the women in the books, given Samuel has Hannah at its very beginning, but fandoms tend to care more about cute boys than women, and these fans were generally viewed as shrill and annoying.
By the time Kings (sometimes two volumes) hit, fan expectations were sky high — and the new entry met these expectations. Goth fans loved Solomon because of the immediately popular idea of him as a sorcerer; fics about his foibles with demons proliferated.
But then came the Later Prophets. See, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings were just the Early Prophets, a sub-series within the Prophets series as a whole. The Later Prophets are more like character sketches and poems, and by the time the Prophets were over, the books started to be super short, sometimes only a chapter long. Fans were losing interest. This felt low-effort. Hosea was a relief: spicy. At cons one would sometimes see “Gomer did nothing wrong” shirts based on edgy Hosea memes. The horror themes of Zechariah met with some fondness. For the most part, though, fans were disappointed with the series’s direction even as the writing quality improved. Then the Prophets series ended, and a third and final series began.
The Writings opened with a straight banger, the Psalms. Every David fan swooned as they learned more about his struggles. Psalms combined the best of the Later Prophets with the crushability of David. Intoxicating. Then… Proverbs. What on earth? Solomon’s self-help advice? Okay, sure, you do you King.
Fans were sorely divided over Job. Was God in the right? Was the Accuser doing anything justifiable at all? The book felt sadistic, which was much to some readers’ taste and much against others’. Many readers felt the book was altogether too long and anticlimactic, while a few appreciated the continuation of the excellent style of writing they’d gotten used to in the Later Prophets and Psalms.
The Megillot dropped quickly, one after another. Nobody really cared about Lamentations. Ecclesiastes was too much like Proverbs or Job to get many fans excited. Song of Songs provoked controversy because one fan thought it was a direct ripoff of her own horny Kings fic. She made a compelling case. Needless to say, it was widely appreciated and taken as permission to write ever steamier fics. Straight women fans who liked being straight women rejoiced at the series’s most fleshed-out romantic drama, Ruth. Things were looking up for the fandom.
Then Esther hit. And it hit hard. It was slick and concise, sexy and compelling, violent in the extreme and nevertheless lovely. No notes, said the fans. None at all. Just a lot of fanart.
Fans continued to beat each other up over whether it was okay to like “Strange Fire.”
Daniel’s release was the third pinnacle of the fandom: after Genesis and the Early Prophets, Daniel stands out as a peak. The fandom was primed after Esther’s top-tier quality and Daniel excited them even further. There were so many cute guys in it! And there was so much tension! But a few fans were not too distracted by Daniel’s first half to forget its later parts. “One like a son of man?” What is this, sequel-bait? They hadn’t seen the like since Deuteronomy teased Joshua.
Ezra and Nehemiah were released together in one set, Ezra-Nehemiah. Experiencing some relief at various plot arcs coming together, fans were nonetheless disappointed in what they saw as more sequel-bait and frankly nobody likes lists of names.
…Which of course didn’t help Chronicles’ case, either. Fans knew things were coming to a close. The series was old; not many new fans were coming along. Chronicles, sometimes published in two volumes, felt like a nostalgia trip for Prophets fans, and many appreciated it for that.
But by the time of Chronicles’ release, most fans were back to obsessing over Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, the Early Prophets, Esther, and Daniel. Ezra-Nehemiah had taken the wind out of the series’s sails. Chronicles finished it.
Signed copies of the books were rare to begin with. Scalpers made a killing off them. Witchy fans bought them up and ground them to powder to use in spells, often with the intention of summoning a favourite character to life. None of these copies remain.
Later works were written as continuations of this “Bible” series, as the many books came to be called collectively. Some accept these books as canon; others claim they’re just glorified fics. Those who remembered Deuteronomy at all recalled the line: “You shall not add anything…” But others were hungry for more. Onlookers typically consider the fandom to have split at this point. Some of the late additions became more popular than the original series itself. That “one like a son of man” line in Daniel ended up REALLY popular.