The Septateuch

Put this entry next to the Orange Catholic Bible and the pairing does something neither does alone. Herbert’s scripture is a merger — an attempt to end religious war by negotiating the faiths into one volume, which the Bene Gesserit then weaponise. Pratchett’s is a fossil — a scripture that kept all its institutional machinery running for centuries after the belief inside it evaporated.

The theology in Small Gods is genuinely sharp and Pratchett does not hedge it. Gods on the Discworld run on belief, literally; a god with a million adherents and no believers is a tortoise. So the Septateuch is not merely inaccurate about Om, it is actively fatal to him — every year of ceremony, exegesis and Quisition converts sincere faith into administration, and administration does not feed anything.

Brutha is the joke’s other half. The Church’s most accurate vessel of scripture is a novice too stupid, by their measure, to be taught letters. He remembers everything and interprets nothing, which makes him the only uncorrupted copy in existence. Pratchett’s point is not subtle and does not need to be: the damage was never done by people who misremembered the book.

On the readability rating. Quoted and paraphrased frequently, and its theology is argued over at length. Several of the most-cited lines in the novel come from philosophers around the scripture rather than from it — worth checking before any of them are set down as quotations from the Septateuch itself.