Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow:

If you search for books on leaders in history, you find a recurring cast of characters staring at you from the covers: Winston Churchill. Napoleon. Abraham Lincoln. Genghis Khan. Mao Zedong. They will often be military or imperial leaders, on horses or in uniform or armour, who triumphed in big wars or led their nation through crisis. Keep browsing, and you will encounter another variant of works on leadership, featuring prominent figures from the business world. With varying degrees of sophistication, these men (and, sometimes, women) are treated as heroes, role models and inspirations – or, alternatively, as menaces. Business leaders such as Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos are portrayed, whether positively or negatively, as uniquely powerful individuals – able, through sheer force of will or ruthless intelligence, to overcome any obstacles life put in their way.
Such books are celebrations of individualism. Their primary effect is to promote an individualist perspective on the world. They are popular because their political appeal is so wide: liberals can love this perspective on leadership, and so will conservatives and libertarians. Almost everyone, it seems, enjoys a good success story. But you will usually read little in them about all the things that provided the basis for the success stories but which had nothing to do with the protagonists personally, like being born to wealthy parents in a socially and economically stable country with myriad educational and commercial opportunities. The message from this literary cottage industry is that where there’s a will, there’s a way. ‘Leaders’ are ‘winners’. They built themselves up and achieved greatness through their extraordinary qualities. They made their own history.
It is hard to escape this view of leaders and leadership. It is all around us. We still tend to teach, study, and celebrate ‘Great Men’. All over the world, people are in search of larger-than-life figures who can lead them past crises and catastrophes and into a bright future. Perhaps that is why leaders from a supposedly glorious past loom so large in the gloomy present. But how did we get to this dominant view on leadership, with its focus on all-powerful individualism? To answer this question, we must go all the way back to antiquity, where mythology holds the key. We need to revisit the earliest written works in human history and see what kinds of ideas about leadership they implanted in us. And then, we have to see how these early ideas were countered by a new and compelling vision of leadership that remains with us today.
For hundreds of millions of people, the Bible is not just a book, or even just a sacred book, but the source of how to think about the world. It teaches us about kings, gods, wars, human nature and our origins. Its influence can be direct or indirect, depending on whether one is a religious or secular person. But its profound impact on world civilisations – and on us as individuals – is undeniable. This means that, even if you have never read any of it, you have imbibed many of its teachings and values. So how has it shaped us? What lessons on leadership are we meant to draw from it?