JOANNE JACOBS: From Jonah to Job, the Bible belongs in public schools.

You can’t really get Moby Dick (or Pinocchio) if you’ve never heard of Jonah and the Whale, writes Adam Kirsch in The Atlantic. You won’t understand why Harriet Tubman was called “Moses,” if you’re not familiar with the Exodus story. Bible stories belong in public school classrooms, he argues. Americans who don’t know about David and Goliath, Job, the parting of the Red Sea, the Sermon on the Mount and the Good Samaritan will not be prepared to understand America’s history or literature.

The new required-reading list in Texas has angered many liberals, who see it as “an attack on civil liberties and cultural diversity,” Kirsch writes. The state school board has framed the Bible stories as part of a “common literary canon,” not as religious instruction, but many are unpersuaded. A Dallas Morning News editorial called for including the Quran and the Bhagavad Gita, he writes.

Whether or not you’re a believer, the Bible is a foundational text of Western Civilization. The Quran isn’t, to say the very least.