So the Bible becomes the medium through which Jeanette expresses her own strength of mind. She reads it aloud as she and her daughter eat bacon and eggs ("nice in a way"). Whenever she leaves home she takes "the travel size one" with her. "We had a lot of Bible quizzes at church and my mother liked me to win." Her mother always has a Bible at the ready.
The narrator can hardly help using the Bible for her own story. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet". "It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. In Joshua, where her "Unnatural Passion" for Melanie is discovered, she rebels against her mother's tyranny. She, however, is led out of bondage without any guide. "When the children of Israel left Egypt, they were guided by the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night". After an official letter commands her mother to send her daughter to school ("the Breeding Ground"), Jeanette describes her confusing experiences in "Exodus". She herself looks to these Scriptural chapters for significance. These make sense of the different phases of Jeanette's life, from the age of seven to that of 16 or so.
The novel is divided into eight sections, with the titles of the first eight books of the Bible, from Genesis to Ruth. (When she goes to school she duly terrifies the other children by explaining the fiery judgment that will soon be visited upon them.) Yet, though this is a story of the heroine's escape from her Scripture-obsessed mother and the Christian sect to which she belongs, the Bible gives shape and meaning to that story. The young Jeanette knows the Bible as a work of warning, prohibition and eschatological fear. The Bible is the all-controlling authority to which the narrator's fundamentalist mother makes her defer, yet it is also the book on which the novel is based. N arratively, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is built on a particular irony - a contradiction in which it takes some sly delight.
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