The 100-Minute Bible and 10-Second Genesis

From the land that brought us the Digested Read, an English vicar announced today the publication of a 57-page Bible "designed to be read in 100 (or fewer) minutes by people who haven't the time or inclination to read the whole book." The anticipated best-seller will presumably be marketed to the rapidly expanding class of subliterates and ill-educated but also to the corporate elite who demand executive summaries for just the right spiritual bulletpoint.

"We have sacrificed poetry to clarity," the author of the ultra-condensed holy book said. His publisher at the appropriately named 100-Minute Press added that it was written in such a way as to encourage page-turning "but without resorting to literary gimmicks."

Literary gimmicks? Isn't the entire project one big literary gimmick? But then again, why not resort to literary gimmicks if your only goal is to get the uninclined to digest the good news. What better mnemonic device, after all, than such literary gimmicks as popular rhyme and meter?

One could imagine, for example, a Bible composed entirely of limericks, to be chanted again and again and so committed to memory. It might begin as follows:

There once was a God who from nowhere
Made Heaven and Earth and all out there;
From Adam, here's Eve;
"Fruit eaten? Now leave!"
And hence the travail that we all bear.