It is hard to imagine lying down with “The Good Book” and not inviting Google into bed, too.

At first, “The Good Book: A Humanist Bible” (Walker & Company, $35) looks like the Bible that Christians believe in, politicians take oaths on and the Gideons put in hotel rooms. It is divided into books like Genesis, Lamentations and Proverbs. Each book is organized into chapters and verses. It is written in the stately cadences that signal the presence of important, godly matters.

Begin to read, however, and you immediately see that God is not present. Instead, there are uncredited quotations from Aristotle, Darwin, Swift, Voltaire and hundreds more pre-Christian, anti-Christian or indifferent-to-Christian thinkers, assembled into an alternative genealogy of nature, human origins and ethics. Here are history and wisdom, without the divine attribution. Without any attribution, actually, which is why the Internet is a required study aid.

Is this book an odd joke? A parody of the Bible?

Hardly, says the English philosopher A. C. Grayling, who spent 30 years compiling “The Good Book.” Rather, it is a kind of tribute to the Hebrew Bible’s editors, who took the legends of their Jewish forebears and wove them into one compelling, if digressive, narrative.

“The Good Book” is just such a collage, but of irreligious, rather than religious, wisdom.

Mr. Grayling, 62, was raised without religion. He formerly taught at Oxford, and now teaches at the University of London. His many books include an ethical study of World War II bombing and a life of Descartes.