Milton read Scripture with a commitment to its themes, genres, and style. He read its two Testaments thematically as forming one body of saving truth, consistent but gradually becoming clearer to the understanding. He read it genetically as consisting of law, story, prophets, and poetry, the poetry divisible into further genres. He read the poetry as composed, stylistically, with greater skill and purity than any other ancient national poetry. These three modes of reading influenced his own poems from the beginning to the end of his career, as he took scriptural themes, events, or doctrines for them, adapted scriptural genres to them, and echoed biblical style in them.

The earliest of his poems Milton thought worth saving were English paraphrases of Psalms 114 and 136, the first carrying the headnote 'This and the following Psalm were done by the Author at fifteen years old' (Poems 6). The last of his poems, Paradise Regained, published when he was sixty-three, was a debate poem like Job, with a plot taken from Luke, expounding an interpretation of Christ's redemptive work drawn from Hebrews, framed by angelic hymns, and foregrounded by human laments modelled on Psalms. That last poem is a particularly good place to see what reading the Bible meant to Milton, since it engages with Jesus at the moment when by his own reading of Scripture he understands his messiahship and holds to it throughout Satan's temptations. At that moment, the New Testament interprets the Old, changing, for Milton, the way the Hebrew Bible should thereafter be understood.