Vol. 30:1

A poem on the first chapter: creation as a statement of faith rather than a scientific account, the law of opposites running through the days, and reason, creativity, free will and imagination as the image of God. Dominion makes the human being God's partner in the material dimension — hence responsibility for air, water and the ecology of the earth, a burden that cannot be escaped.

All of you stand this day before the Lord your God — but what would it mean to stand before God? A New Yorker cartoon has a man read "Prepare to Meet Thy God" on a billboard and comb his hair. Gathers ways of perceiving what ordinary looking and listening miss: Reik's third ear, a meditation manual that would leave you still on the preliminary psalms at Alenu, and lines from The Fantasticks and Joyce Cary on seeing with the ears.

Sophie Lafont concludes that the Old Testament nowhere expressly condemns paternal incest, and the list in Leviticus 18 does indeed omit the daughter — the prohibition comes by rabbinic inference. Sets that beside two other omissions: the wife among the relatives a priest may defile himself for, and the wife in the Fourth Commandment. Argues the very closeness of the relation is the reason none of the three needed saying.

Both were renamed by their employers, both rose on a royal dream, and Daniel had the harder task since Nebuchadnezzar would not disclose the dream's contents. But the careers run opposite ways: Joseph begins as a dreamer naive enough to tell his brothers about the sheaves and ends as an interpreter, while Daniel begins as an interpreter and ends a visionary. Mordecai is set aside — he has no truck with dreams at all.

Bernhard Lazarus of Durban proposes that in His image be read as resembling Him — copying what we ascribe to Him — since God has no form. Henry Skirball corrects the arithmetic of Kiddush Hahamah, recalling the ritual in the fields of Kibbutz Sdei Eliyahu in 1953. Josh Backon lines up the Ipuwer papyrus against the Ten Plagues, verse by verse: blood, pestilence, hail, locusts, darkness.

The king's mowings in Amos 7:1 rest on a royal right to the first spring grass that the Bible never attests, and on a verb the Bible reserves for shearing sheep. Reads the second lekesh with the Septuagint as yelek — the wingless locust larva — and emends to a vision of the plague in its successive stages, so that a line about the agricultural calendar becomes an event. Continues the cruxes of Parts I-IV.

Questions test, probe, stimulate and inform — and they also rebuke, which takes a triple transformation to hear: interrogative into declarative, valence flipped, tone restored. Isolates a subtype nobody has named, the vindication question, by which a speaker clears himself of an accusation. Six examples lead to the prime one, the question God puts to Jonah in the book's last verse.

Moses is the prototypical prophet, David the prototypical king. Can they hold the same theology? David proposes a house of cedar for God; Nathan approves, and God overrules him, having lived in a tent since Egypt. Reads that refusal as a question about whether a newly crowned king is trying to tie God down to one nation — and notes that God calls David His servant, a title given before only to Abraham and Moses.

Prophecy is everywhere in the Hebrew Bible and defined nowhere; navi, roeh and hozeh are as ambiguous in Hebrew as messenger, seer and visionary are in English. The lying-prophet story of I Kings 13 raises every hard question at once, and Deuteronomy answers none of them, ruling out accurate prediction as a test. Compares Maimonides, for whom prophecy is a graded mental process, with Spinoza and with Aryeh Kaplan.

Judaism is the religion of one people whose God was never less than the Creator of all — which is why Abraham can bargain for Sodom, and why Isaiah welcomes proselytes in the same breath as the return from exile. The balance is visible even in the Alenu, whose first paragraph is uncompromisingly particular and whose second is universal. To some readers this looks like a contradiction; both halves have nonetheless survived millennia.

Twelve psalms carry Asaph's name; eleven sit together as 73-83, and one stands alone at 50. Accident, or placement? Psalm 50 contains none of the usual elements of prayer — no praise, no supplication — but a theophany, then God in the first person deriding the notion that He needs bullocks, with a force comparable to Isaiah 1 and Amos 5. Connects that unusual content to the historical Asaph and to the book's second division, which ends at 72.