Who made you God to say what a 'serious student' of literature should or should not read? Does your rule apply to Indian students? In practice you are wrong, of course, even for Western students. Very few institutions demand that their literature students should read the bible cover-to-cover. Or do you have some other definition of 'serious student'? Perhaps: "Those who follow Lokasenna's rules."?
St Luke - I think the Bible has many more boring parts than the other classics you mention. I've spent the last year reading, or trying to read, the major classics. I'm reading the Divine Comedy (Mandelbaum translation), at the moment, and am finding it very interesting. There are some boring bits, but not that many. The descriptions of Hell more than make up for the (thankfully short!) lists of Italian nobodies that Dante dwells upon, here and there. It's *much* more interesting than the Bible. Shakespeare is even more interesting. There is hardly a boring paragraph in his masterpieces. I recently read Rieu's translation of the Odyssey, and that was very interesting. The Iliad was more problematic, but I did manage to complete it. The Bible is the only work I stopped reading because it was just too boring/hard/dry/painful.
Then again, the great poets make parts of the Bible sound very interesting, so one always starts thinking, "I should read the Bible". So I sought out abridgements -- but even they became too boring to suffer. I've now given up, and read works I actually find interesting. If they mention biblical stories then I make sure they have good footnotes. I sometimes use 'the net', but there's a lot of tedious stuff out there to wade through, on this subject in partuicular. I keep on meaning to buy a Bible dictionary. Could anyone recommend a good one? The Penguin looks a possibility...
To answer St Luke's question
-- one should read Shakespeare, the Greeks and Dante if, perhaps after some considerable effort, you find them to be of overwhelming aesthetic value. I gave up reading the complete Bible even after putting much more effort into trying to read it than into reading Shakespeare, Homer and Dante, It is of insufficient aesthetic value, for me. I now view it as being a bit like Holinshed -- a nice source book for Shakespeare and others, but why on Earth would anyone read it now?