The Icelandic sagas have been used as a comparative literature for the narratives in the Old Testament ever since they became accessible in editions and translations towards the end of the nineteenth century. Scholars such as Hermann Gunkel, Gerhard von Rad, George Coats, Meir Sternberg and John Barton have all used the sagas to reflect on stories in the Hebrew Bible, ranging from single episodes like Jacob wrestling with an angel, to the entire span of the ‘saga’ of King David. Yet the sagas of Icelanders belong in a very different context: they were written down in the thirteenth century about Icelanders living in the tenth century and often survive in late medieval, or even early modern, manuscripts. If the characters in the sagas are sometimes pagans, the sagas themselves were written down by Christians, who may well have been familiar with the Old Testament, either in Latin or a vernacular translation. This lecture will consider the value of the Icelandic sagas for reading and understanding the Old Testament. It will look how the sagas have been used by scholars of the Hebrew Bible in the past and compare this with how the Old Testament has been used by scholars of the sagas. It will suggest not only that there is a genuine kinship between these storytelling traditions, but also that the saga authors themselves were aware of this.