The “Book in Seven Parts,” for example, likely told readers about the cities that would be divided among the Israelites.Ĭardenio has been called the Holy Grail of Shakespeare enthusiasts. Some of the quotations mentioning the lost books provide clues to their content. Similarly, the First and Second Book of Kings and the First and Second Book of Chronicles names a “Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel” and a “Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah.” There are over 20 titles for which the text is missing. The Book of Numbers, for instance, mentions the “Book of the Battles of Yahweh,” for which no copy survives. We only know that they existed because they are referenced by name in other books of the Bible. But other books are lost in the true sense of the word. Sometimes the term is used to describe ancient Jewish and Christian writings that were tossed out of the biblical canon. Missing from these pages of scripture are what have become known as the “lost books” of the Bible. There are 24 books in the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh-and depending upon the denomination, between 66 and 84 more books in Christian Bibles, divided between the Old and New Testaments. In his On the Art of Poetry, he wrote, “ was the first to indicate the forms that comedy was to assume, for his Margites bears the same relationship to comedies as his Iliad and Odyssey bear to our tragedies.” It is unfortunate that no copy of Margites exists because Aristotle held it in high acclaim. “The gods taught him neither to dig nor to plough, nor any other skill he failed in every craft” (from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics). “He knew many things, but all badly” (from Plato’s Alcibiades).

But a few surviving lines, woven into other works, describe the poem’s foolish hero, Margites. Little is known about the plot of the comedic epic poem-Homer’s first work-written around 700 B.C.

Before the Iliad and the Odyssey, there was the Margites.

Smithsonian top ten books lost to time