From Kate Lucky, senior editor of engagement and culture: When it comes to pop culture, CT isn’t usually in the biblical fact-checking business. Idioms and images from Scripture are so ubiquitous—think a pop song about heaven and hell, or actors stretching their arms into a cross shape in a movie scene—that it usually doesn’t make sense to compare them to the original text.

But with Amazon Prime’s House of David, which wraps up its first season today, we thought a compare-and-contrast made sense. The show isn’t just making vague references to Christian symbols or ideas; it’s explicitly drawing from a few Old Testament passages, as well as other parts of the Bible and later Jewish traditions. 

It’s interesting to see where the show’s creators embellished or edited in order to fill in their plot or flesh out characters—not just for the Bible nerds among us, but especially for anyone unfamiliar with the story who wants to know how much of it is “gospel.”