In the United States, Bible education is seen as indistinguishable from religious coercion: These are religious texts, the logic goes, so to teach public school students anything about them is to violate the separation of church and state upon which the secular public square, and freedom of religion more broadly, is based.

In Israel, however, the picture is very different. The Jewish state was created on the belief that the Bible is not just the province of religious people and groups, but of the country as a whole: that Israeli secularism would benefit greatly from its own, purely secular adoption of ancient Hebrew texts. As a result, the Old Testament is today a crucial part of the curriculum in non-religious schools. Its stories are taught not by rabbis, but usually by non-religious teachers who see it as central to the student’s literary and historical heritage. Nor do most Israelis have a problem with this: Though the great majority of Israelis are secular, there is no major political effort to get the Bible out of the curriculum.

The result is a constant creative effort to make the Bible interesting and relevant to secular life. Haaretz’s website reports on a new part of this effort, the recently-premiered TV series “100 in Bible” which is a “Beverly Hills 90210-style drama” aimed at translating biblical stories into modern idiom. Lessons include studying about moral decline from ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ and about arrogance and aspiration from Joseph’s dreams. All from a non-theological, non-prostelytizing, explicitly secular perspective. In their insistence on seeing the Bible is an exclusively religious text, could Americans be missing out?