There are good reasons to be familiar with religious texts, at the very least you can make allusions to the text. Religious texts are incredibly powerful in terms of the imagery they contain, which in turn has permeated the psyche of most of the population from cultures that follow said religious tradition. The Bible is the holy text of the religion that has the strongest representation in the western world, which means it ought to be the very top of any author's reading list for the sake of making allusions to it in their writing.
On the other extreme, it's also equally good to study the holy texts of the most powerful dead religions. The top list would be Norse, Greek, Mesopotamian, and Mayan holy traditions. I do hesitate in actually recommending Norse and Greek though. True, they ARE pretty powerful in terms of social dissemination, but they have been popularly caricaturized WAY too much to the extent where lazy writers often use them very ineffectively. If you are going to use Greek or Norse mythology, you're going to have to study into it a little further than they typical lazy author we are seeing nowadays.
Personally, I like to use a combination of old-testament bible and Mesopotamian imagery in my writing. The main reason for my isolating the bible to the old testament is because the old testament and Mesopotamian lore have far more cross-overs than anyone who has failed to REALLY study both would ever realize, to the point where the book of Jobe has a line where it almost sounds like God has confused himself with Marduk (the head god in Mesopotamian lore.) The Cherub is another interesting point between the two. In Christian lore it's pronounced "chair-ebb" and describes the 2nd from the top tier of angels, and it has the head of a lion, the torso and arms of a man, the wings of an eagle, and the lower body of an ox. In Mesopotamian lore, it's pronounced "care-ub" and it describes a composite creature similar to the griffin in other cultures, and it has the head of a man, the front body of a lion, the hind body of an ox, and the wings of an eagle. (same 4 creatures, just swaps the position of the head and upper body.)
Really, if you're going to combine any 2 bits of religious lore, these two are the most compatible in existence. Seriously, the relationship between the bible's mentions of "the leviathan" and "the dragon" potentially referring to Tiamat from the Mesopotamian lore is something that once seen cannot be un-seen, and it's God's speech to Jobe that really makes that possibility difficult if not impossible to ignore.