Participating in a corrective movement which seeks to reinstate a religious and theological dimension in criticism of Elizabethan culture and of canonical literary texts, this dissertation explores 16th-century reception of two particularly provocative scriptural narratives, the Jacob-Esau saga in Genesis and the Parable of the Prodigal in Luke 1S. The parable can itself be heard as Jesus’ retelling of the story of father, sons, and brothers in conflicts over inheritance. This study describes ways these stories figured in the multifarious forms of commentary, interpretation, allusion, and re-enactment that constituted the life of the Bible in 16th-century English culture. The specific secular dramas discussed are Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and Shakespeare’s second English history tetralogy, Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V.