The main cultural touchstones are disproportionately concentrated in a few books too, you can get a lot of them with just a dozen or two hours of reading.
Genesis specifically is packed with common references, can be read in a few hours, and is fairly engaging and accessible as a coherent piece of literature in its own right.
Ecclesiastes is like five pages and possibly the most quoted thing across european cultures. So many literary references and even common idioms come from there.
After that any one synoptic gospel + john + acts will set you up to catch a lot of christianity-specific cultural references. And then revelation imagery comes up a ton in pop culture, music, film & tv.
All of what I mentioned is about the length of a medium-short novel and would set you up to catch probably the majority of allusions to the bible. You'd be missing some major stuff like moses, david & solomon, plus a bunch of misc but influential stories like jonah & the whale, samson etc. But for bang for your buck it would get you pretty far.
Genesis specifically is packed with common references, can be read in a few hours, and is fairly engaging and accessible as a coherent piece of literature in its own right.
Ecclesiastes is like five pages and possibly the most quoted thing across european cultures. So many literary references and even common idioms come from there.
After that any one synoptic gospel + john + acts will set you up to catch a lot of christianity-specific cultural references. And then revelation imagery comes up a ton in pop culture, music, film & tv.
All of what I mentioned is about the length of a medium-short novel and would set you up to catch probably the majority of allusions to the bible. You'd be missing some major stuff like moses, david & solomon, plus a bunch of misc but influential stories like jonah & the whale, samson etc. But for bang for your buck it would get you pretty far.