Studying Torah: Commentary, Interpretation, Translation.
FRIEDMAN, RICHARD ELLIOTT
THE FIRST PORTION OF THE TORAH HAS A DOUBLE ROLE: it conveys its
own story, and it sets the context of the entire Torah. The Torah's
stories have been observed to be rich in background, as opposed to, for
example, the epic poems of Homer. In Homer each episode is
self-contained: all the information that a reader needs is provided then
and there, and all action is in the foreground. That is fine, but it is
not the way of the Torah. To read the Torah at any level beyond
"Sunday school," one must have a sense of the whole when one
reads the parts. To comprehend what happens in the exodus and in the
revelation at Sinai, you have to know what has happened in Genesis 1.
Like some films that begin with a sweeping shot that then narrows, so
the first chapter of Genesis moves gradually from a picture of the skies
and the earth down to the first man and woman. The story's focus
will continue to narrow: from the universe to the earth to humankind to
specific lands and peoples to a single family. (It will expand back out
to nations in Exodus.) But the wider concern with skies and the entire
earth that is established in the first portion will remain. When the
story narrows to a singular divine relationship with Abraham, it will
still be with the ultimate aim that this will be "a blessing to all
the families of the earth. "Every biblical scene will be
laden--artistically, theologically, psychologically, spiritually--with
all that has come before. So when we read later of a man and his son
going up a mountain to perform a fearful sacrifice, that moment in the
history of a family is set in a cosmic context of the creation of the
universe and the nature of the relationship between the creator and
humankind. You can read the account of the binding of Isaac without
being aware of the account of the creation or the account of the
covenant between God and Abraham, but you lose something. The something
that you lose-depth--is one of the essential qualities of the Torah.
The first portion initiates the historical flow of the Torah (and
of the entire Tanakh). It establishes that this is to be a related,
linear sequence of events through generations. That may seem so natural
to us now that we find this point obvious and banal. But the texts of
the Torah are the first texts on earth known to do this. The ancient
world did not write history prior to these accounts. The Torah's
accounts are the first human attempts to recount history. Whether one
believes all or part or none of its history to be true is a separate
matter. The literary point is that this had the effect of producing a
text that was rich in background: every event carries the weight of
everything that comes before it. And the historical point is that this
was a new way to conceive of time and human destiny.
There is also a theological point: this was a new way to conceive
of a God. The difference between the Torah's conception of God and
the pagan world's conception is not merely arithmetic: one versus
many. The pagan deities were known through their functions in nature:
The sun god, Shamash, was the sun. If one wanted to know the essence of
Shamash, the thing to do was to contemplate the sun. If you wanted to
know the essence of the grain deity Dagon, you contemplated wheat. To
know Yamm, contemplate the sea. But the God of the Torah was different,
creating all of nature--and therefore not knowable or identifiable
through any one element of nature. One could learn no more about this
God by contemplating the sea than by contemplating grain, sky, or
anything else. The essence of this God remains hidden. One does not know
God through nature but by the divine acts in history. One never finds
out what God is, but rather what God does--and what God says. This
conception, which informs all of biblical narrative, did n ot
necessarily have to be developed at the very beginning of the story, but
it was. Parashat Bereshit establishes this by beginning with accounts of
creation and by then flowing through the first ten generations of
humankind. (Those "begat" lists are thus more important than
people generally think.)
The Torah's theology is thus inseparable from its history and
from its literary qualities. Ultimately, there is no such thing as
"The Bible as Literature" or "The Bible as History"
or "The Bible as ... anything." There is: the Bible.
The first book to be printed on the printing press in Hebrew was
not the Bible but the Torah with the commentary of Rashi, for the Torah
is not to be read, it is to be studied. To do this, one needs a teacher.
Studying the Torah with Rashi's commentary is a joy because he
shows what questions can be asked of a text. Look here! Is this a
contradiction? Look here! This can have two opposite meanings. Which is
right? Why does the Torah not tell us this piece of information that we
need to understand the text? Why does it give us this fact that seems to
be of no significance at first glance?
Rashi wrote his commentary nine hundred years ago. Recent
commentaries for laypersons are different. They have been written as
introductory notes to help explain the text and are often composite
collections of comments from scholars of the past and from current
biblical scholars. This is different from what Commentary meant
classically. The purpose of Rashi's commentary and of Ibn
Ezra's and Ramban's was to show the readers new things in the
text, problems that they had not seen, or to address old problems that
had not been solved--and then to offer the commentator's solutions
to those problems. In this commentary, I mean to return to the classical
purpose. I shall have some basic explanatory comments of help to the new
student but, above all, I intend to try to offer explanations for old
problems and to address new ones. I aim to shed new light on the Torah
and, more important, to open windows through which it sheds its light on
us.
There are new sources that were not available to the great medieval
commentators. Through the archaeological revolution of the last two
centuries, we have new knowledge of the biblical world, both of Israel
and its neighbors. We know the languages that they spoke and wrote in
addition to Hebrew and Aramaic: Akkadian, Canaanite (Ugaritic,
Phoenician, Moabite), Egyptian, and Sumerian. We have hundreds of
archaeological sites and tens of thousands of ancient texts. We have
manuscripts of the Torah and of the entire Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh,
from Qumran (the Dead Sea Scrolls) that are a thousand years older than
those that Rashi had. We have the use of the Greek version (the
Septuagint), which, together with the Qumran texts (and Samaritan and
Aramaic and Latin texts), gives us a more precise knowledge of the
original text. And we have the great commentators themselves. Their
thinking and their conclusions are our starting point, enablingus to
learn from them and then to go farther.
There has developed a kind of Rashi fundamentalism in recent years.
Especially in orthodox communities, it is practically heresy to question
whether Rashi was ever wrong. I think that Rashi himself might have been
disappointed that it would come to that. The commentators who
immediately followed him--Ibn Ezra, Ramban, and Rashi's grandson
Rashbam--knew better. They expressed respect for Rashi, but they
disagreed with and offered alternatives to his comments.
What Rashi and the other commentators taught us to do was to look
at a text critically. They were teaching us to do philology: the art of
reading well, reading with care, and thinking about what the words of
the text mean. It is thus ironic that some people have become Rashi
fundamentalists. They have learned not to read the Torah critically but
to parrot the critical reading of Rashi. And they do not read Rash
critically. Although Ibn Ezra and Ramban questioned Rashi and pointed
out where they thought he was wrong, more recent generations of teachers
have lost faith in their own knowledge and judgment, and so they risk
failing to relate the Torah to the lives of their people. But something
has happened in the present generation. There have been great scholars,
and they have acquired new sources of information: archaeology,
knowledge of the ancient Near East, literary sensitivity, and knowledge
of the social sciences. And so it is time for new commentaries--not to
replace the classical commentators, but to jo in them.
My commentary is meant to do that: to be in the tradition of the
classical commentaries but to use this new learning. There are many
volumes of such new commentary, but they are mainly on single books of
the Bible, sometimes gathered into collections of volumes on the Torah
or on the whole Bible. There have been few that follow the tradition of
being a single scholar's commentary on the Torah as a whole. Some
take the form of introductory footnotes on a translation. I mean to do
the opposite: precisely to show how united and connected the whole Torah
is, and to try, like the commentators who are our starting point, to
relate it to life. In this respect the most useful part of my
preparation for writing this commentary was to attend study groups for
laypersons on the weekly reading of the Torah. Every week I attended one
such group led by an orthodox rabbi and another led by a reform rabbi.
And I had grown up studying with a conservative rabbi. Various
commentaries were on the table when we studied. What I fou nd was that
none of those commentaries was answering the kinds of questions that the
people at the tables were asking.
I have been attracted to synthesis. A commentary, however, seems to
be the opposite sort of human enterprise and thinking: a focus on the
small, the individual insight, shedding light on the meaning of a single
word, relating two adjacent passages. What I mean to do in this
commentary is both: to interpret and shed light on individual words and
passages--to try to find new solutions for classic problems, show cases
of beauty of wording and profundity of thought--but also to show how
intricately, how essentially connected all of it is, how logical its
progression is, how essential the early stories are to what follows
them, and how essential the later stories are to what precedes them!
The classical commentaries were a product of Europe, written before
the discovery of the New World. My commentary is a product of that New
World, coming at the end of the century in which that New World stepped
into a prominent place in world history. And, extraordinarily, it was
also the century in which Israel was reborn in its location on the tip
of Asia. The classical commentaries came at the midpoint between the end
of old Israel and the rebirth of new Israel. Rashi came about nine
hundred years after the destruction of Israel, and we have seen the
rebirth of Israel about nine hundred years after Rashi.
I stand between two poles of other kinds of commentary: midrash and
critical scholarship. For example, in the case of the near-sacrifice of
Isaac, at the end of the story it says "And Abraham returned to his
servants." It does not mention Isaac. Some midrashim suggested that
Isaac was in fact sacrificed (and later returned to life). Critical
scholarship, too, has raised the startling possibility that in the
original version of the text Isaac was actually sacrificed and that this
story was changed by someone who found such an ending inconceivable. I
am familiar with both of these interpretations. They are intriguing and
worthy of study and analysis, acceptance or rejection. But they are
simply not the kind of commentary that I am doing in this book. Here I
am doing my best to understand and to help others to understand the
meaning of the text that we have called the Torah for two and a half
thousand years. Like Rashi, I am trying to do what is known as
peshat--pursuing the straightforward meaning of the text.
The idea is to be helpful both to beginners and to experienced
students of the Torah, but not by providing standard introductory
points. Rather, the aim is to show the readers new and interesting
things: points they might miss, connections that are not readily seen,
answers to old questions, and some new questions that have not been
asked or answered before.
This commentary includes a new English translation of the Torah.
None of the existing translations was adequate for my purpose, and that
led me to the task of producing a new translation.
Translation is an art, not a science. It is the art, the skill, and
the sensitivity of the individual translator that make the difference.
He or she must make the individual decision on each and every passage:
how to capture it, how to convey what it means to someone who cannot
read it in the original. Translation of the Bible is a string of
decisions. The translator is always searching for the balance between
literal and idiomatic. To get that balance exactly right is impossible.
The closest any translation has come to it in English is the King James
Version. All English translations since then have been steps in refining
that balance, with varying degrees of success.
The translation here is my attempt at finding it. The following are
some notes on a few basic points of this translation.
1. Mixing old and new English: Many translators eliminate old
English terms--the whithers and thithers, whences and thences and
hences, thees and thys and thous--to produce a contemporary translation;
yet they still retain some archaic terms that do not have ready
counterparts in contemporary English, such as "lest" and
"in the midst." The result is unfortunately an English that no
English speaker ever wrote or spoke. And so it just does not feel fight.
I have tried to produce a translation that is consistent in the English
it employs. Sometimes there is simply no way to convey a Hebrew
phrase's meaning in contemporary English, but I have tried for this
consistency to the extent that it is possible while being true to the
original.
2. Contractions: English translators rarely use contractions, even
when translating discussions in common speech. But in normal spoken
English, one almost never speaks for as much as five minutes without
using a contraction. The result is that practically every conversation
in the Bible sounds artificial in translation. I do not use contractions
when translating narration; but, when translating conversations, I have
used contractions where they would normally be used in English
conversation.
3. Possessive case: English translators have tended to avoid the
possessive case. They would rather say "the house of Moses"
than "Moses' house"--even though the latter is the way
people express this type of phrase ninety-nine out of a hundred times in
English. The translators do this with a good intention: they are trying
to capture the Hebrew, which uses a construct form to express such
things. But this requires adding a word ("of"), which does not
appear in the Hebrew, and it often makes an unnatural English. I freely
use the possessive case. This is not an absolute rule. I still use the
"of" form if it makes better sense, as, for example, in the
case of a well-known phrase like "the children of Israel."
4. Starting verses with the word "and": The Hebrew
conjunction begins almost every verse. It usually means "and,"
but it has a wider range of meanings as well, so translators make it
"but," "since," "while," "then,"
and more. I usually leave it as "and" in English, but I do use
the other terms in cases in which the context directs us to take it
differently. Further, some recent translators simply leave it out
altogether; so, unlike the King James Version, the Revised Standard
Version, and the Jewish Publication society translation, each sentence
in these translations does not begin with the word "and." On
this point, too, I prefer to preserve the feel of the original. I retain
the word "and" where it occurs in the Hebrew.
5. Hebrew idioms: Sometimes I keep an idiom rather than translate
it away--so long as its meaning is clear--because then my translation
makes known to the reader of the translation how the Hebrew works. For
example, in Genesis 16:2 I translate the Hebrew quite literally as: And
Abraham "listened to Sarah's voice," which is unusual and
even a bit redundant in English, but I would rather have the reader of
the translation see how this is expressed in the Bible than modify it to
something like "listened to Sarah." Similarly in Genesis 19:8
and many other places, I translate the expression "good in your
eyes" literally because it is understandable in English even if it
is not the common idiom.
6. Paragraphs: Separating a text into paragraphs is a basic part of
writing and reading in English. It is now impossible to know for certain
where the paragraphs began in the original text of the Torah. Some
translations do not separate paragraphs at all. I have made decisions on
where to begin new paragraphs based on the content, logic, and emphases
of the stories. My divisions between sections likewise are based on
these factors. They do not necessarily correspond to the points at which
chapter breaks come in the text.
7. The name of God: I write it the same as it appears in the
original, with the four consonants showing, thus: YHWH. This is known as
the Tetragrammaton. In biblical times people would have read the name
aloud. In the period following the completion of the Hebrew Bible, Jews
began the practice of not saying the divine name out loud. Christians
followed this practice as well. The practice for centuries was to say
"the LORD" (Hebrew adonay) whenever one came to this word
rather than to say what the four Hebrew letters actually spelled.
Currently, some people have returned to the practice of saying the name
out loud. Readers should follow the same practice in reading this
translation that they would follow when reading the original. If they do
not pronounce the divine name aloud, then they should say "the
LORD" whenever they see the four letters.
8. The gender of God: Even though, like most people, I do not
conceive of a deity who is male or female, there is no way around the
fact that the Torah does in fact present God in consistently masculine
terms. Even the name of God is masculine. (The feminine would be THWH.)
I have therefore conveyed the masculine Hebrew conception in the
translation as well. My point is that in each case I am translating an
original work that someone else wrote, and I do not seek to impose my
theological conceptions on that person's work, nor do I want to
hide that person's views by means of a translator's power.
9. The infinitive of emphasis: Hebrew sometimes has the infinitive
of a verb placed before the verb itself in order to convey emphasis.
Thus the Hebrew mot yumat would mean literally: "dying he shall be
put to death." Most English translators use some formulation such
as "he shall surely be put to death" or "he shall be put
to death, yes, death" to convey it. Since the function of this
infinitival formulation in Hebrew is to emphasize, I think that it is
best translated by the usual mechanisms of emphasis in English. The
usual ways to convey emphasis in English are the use of either italics
or exclamation points. I therefore generally use italics to convey
Hebrew infinitival emphatics. Occasionally I use an exclamation point to
convey this emphasis. In a few cases in which neither of these English
conventions properly conveys the Hebrew meaning, I leave the infinitive
untranslated.
10. Cognate accusatives: Cognate accusatives (for example, "I
dreamed a dream," "I did a deed") are fairly common and a
hallmark of literary style in Biblical Hebrew. Cognate accusatives are
not incorrect grammatically in English but are sufficiently rare as to
be felt by English readers to be uncomfortable. And so, like nearly all
translators, I convey cognate accusatives without repeating the cognate
forms. Thus, for example, I translate halom halamti as "I had a
dream" rather than the literal "I dreamed a dream."
11. Cohortatives: Like nearly all translators, I convey the
cohortative as "let me" or "let us" or "may
I" or "may we." Unfortunately, these English forms
suggest permission, as if the person using the cohortative is asking to
be allowed to do something. The reader should note that the Hebrew does
not usually have such a connotation. It merely expresses the
person's wish or intent, without necessarily implying that action
or permission by anyone else is necessary.
12. Jussives: The same applies to the jussive, which I convey as
"let it" or "let him" or "let them" or
"let there be" or "may he" or "may they."
13. A redundant formulation: The formulation "And he said,
saying..." occurs fairly often in the Hebrew text. Although it
feels redundant and awkward in English, I still prefer to retain the
extra word--"saying"--to reflect the original.
14. Etymologies of names: Often a story is told that explains the
origin of a name of a person or place. For example, the name Isaac,
Hebrew yishaq, means "he laughs" or "let him laugh,"
and it is derived in this story from the fact that Sarah laughs at the
idea that she could give birth to a son in her old age (Genesis
18:12-15). It is difficult to convey this in an English translation
without adding a bracketed or footnoted comment. Similarly with the
names Noah, Babel, Jacob, Moses, and so on, it is usually impossible to
convey such Hebrew etymological material in translation. A note or
bracketed insertion interrupts the story for the reader, and I did not
want to do that. So, as most translators have done in the past, I have
left the text itself alone, accepting the fact that this is one of the
inherent limitations of translation, and I have explained some of the
etymologies in the comments.
15. Words with multiple translations: Hebrew terms sometimes have a
wider range of meaning than any single English counterpart. Hebrew
'abadim, for example, can be "slave" or
"servant" and therefore must be translated by different
English words in different contexts. Hebrew 'ayep can be
"tired," "exhausted," "faint," or
"famished." Hebrew gadol can be "big,"
"great," "high," or "old." Hebrew terms
for groups of animals-- flock, herd, sheep, oxen, cows, animals,
domestic animals, wild animals--do not correspond exactly to English
terms, and it is virtually impossible to translate each term
consistently through the Tanakh. Translators must make decisions in
translating such terms individually in their contexts.
16. The text: The translation follows the Hebrew text that is
beside it. That is, it is a translation of the Masoretic Text. I raise
notable differences in the Septuagint, Dead Sea Scrolls, and other
versions in my comments on the text.
We should appreciate the significance of the Jewish practice of
returning immediately to Genesis I anew after completing the reading of
Deuteronomy. It conveys the point, with each new reading of the Torah,
that the Torah (and the entire Bible, as well) is a whole, that our
concern is with the totality as well as the individual parts. That may
seem obvious, but it is easy to lose sight of because we are used to
studying the text in small units. The weekly reading is only a few
chapters. Then the rabbi is constrained by time to comment on only a
small portion of that reading. Both the Christian and the Jewish sermon
are thus limited to a small corner of the tapestry. Likewise in Bible
study groups and in Hebrew and Sunday school classes, we usually deal
with a single verse or story. We would do well to learn from Rashi, who
never lost sight of the whole while making comments on the parts. His
commentary implicitly reminds us at its outset that the word TaNaX
(Torah, Nebi'im/Prophets, Ketubim/Writings) stands f or a
whole-composed-of-parts, because in commenting on Genesis 1:1 Rashi
brings in citations from all parts of the Bible: from Torah (Genesis and
Exodus), the Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, and Amos), and the
Writings (Psalms and Proverbs). Even the seemingly obvious fact that
Jews study the weekly readings in order, rather than commenting on
whatever passage one chooses each week, reinforces the idea that, even
as we focus on the component, our concern ultimately is with the full
narrative, with continuity, with context--with Torah.
At the beginning of this commentary, I emphasized the point that
the Bible is rich in background, that the events in the first reading,
Parashat Bereshit, remain as an essential substratum in all that follows
in the Bible's story. Every biblical scene will be
laden--artistically, theologically, psychologically, spiritually--with
all that has come before. The broad concern with the earth that is
established in the first parashah remains. So when the story narrows to
the divine relationship with Abraham, it is still with the ultimate aim
that this will be "a blessing to all the families of the
earth." Now I want to add the opposite point: that one also has a
finer sense of what is happening in each biblical episode, starting with
the creation, if one reads it with consciousness of what is coming.
For example: the Sabbath is set in the very structure of the
universe, but for most readers the Sabbath draws its significance in
Genesis 2:1--3 not only from its being a feature of the creation but
from the readers' knowledge that it is to be a prime commandment later, one of the Ten Commandments, and will be identified as the sign
of the relationship between God and the Israelites (Exod 31:16--17).Just
try to read about the seventh day in Genesis 2 without thinking about
what Shabbat comes to mean later.
Some things change dramatically over the course of the Hebrew
Bible's story: from an undefined divine-human relationship in
Parashat Bereshit to a series of covenants in the books that follow;
from a depiction of all humankind in Genesis 1--11 to a focus
specifically through Israel for many books thereafter; from explicit
depiction of divine power in Genesis 1 to divine hiddenness in Ezra,
Nehemiah, and Esther; and as the face of God becomes more hidden through
the course of the narrative, humans grow up and must take ever more
responsibility for their world.
When I go to a movie or play, I prefer to know as little as
possible about its story in advance. Few of us are able to come to the
Bible that way. It is too well-known. But few of us experience our
knowledge of things that come later in the Bible as spoiling Bereshit
for us the way it might spoil a mystery story to know "who done
it." When we read the difficult account of the divine beings and
the human women in Genesis 6, which results in the deity's setting
a 120-year limit on human life (6:3), we gain rather than lose something
by knowing that the Torah will end with an announcement that Moses lives
the maximum and dies at the age of 120 (Deut 34:7).
Likewise, we can have a richer appreciation of the story of Cain
and Abel if we know that fratricide will become a recurring theme--Jacob
and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, Abimelek and his brothers, Absalom
and Amnon, the woman of Tekoa's story of two brothers--culminating
in Solomon's executing his brother Adonijah and thus establishing
the stability of the Davidic line on the throne of Israel. It is no
longer just a tale of Cain's fate; it is rather an introduction and
first installment in an ongoing, agonizing biblical treatment of the
envies, rivalries, and affections of siblings.
And we can better understand humankind's loss of the tree of
life as the price of gaining knowledge of good and bad if we know that
life and death, and good and bad, will become crucial themes in
Moses' last speech in Deuteronomy. And we understand it better
still if we know that later, in the book of Proverbs, the highest form
of knowledge of good and bad in the Bible-wisdom-will be characterized
this way: "It is a tree of life!" (Proverbs 3:18). And so jews
sing this passage from Proverbs when they return the Torah to the ark
after reading it each week. The garden of Eden and the tree of life are
not destroyed in Genesis; they are rendered inaccessible. The initial
divine-human alienation that is marked by the eviction from paradise,
therefore, is not necessarily to be understood as final. The possibility
of human return to a condition in which the creator is so close as to be
perceived as walking among humans in the breeze of the day (Genesis 3:8)
is left open. Cherubs guard the path back to the tree of li fe, but
this, too, can be understood better if one knows what is coming: golden
cherubs will spread their wings over the ark and its contents inside the
Temple. The cherubs keep watch over the path to the tree of life, and
their images symbolically keep watch over the keys to the path back:
covenant, Torah, knowledge, wisdom.
How does the end of the Torah indeed lead us back to the beginning
(as well as on to Joshua)?
At the beginning of the Torah, the tree of life is lost, and death
becomes the fate of all humans. Now the Torah ends with the death of
Moses. At the beginning, Cain worries that "I'll be hidden
from your presence" (literally, from your face). Now God tells
Moses, "Let me hide my face from them; I'll see what their
future will be." Back in Genesis, God promises a land to Abraham
for his descendants. Now God shows Moses the land that God promised. In
Genesis, Abraham "passes" through the land. Now God tells
Moses: you won't "pass" there (34:4). In Genesis,
Isaac's eyes were dim. Now we are told that Moses' eye was not
dim. Genesis ends with Jacob's blessing of twelve sons (The
Blessing of Jacob, Genesis 49). Now the Torah ends with Moses'
blessing of twelve tribes (The Blessing of Moses, Deuteronomy 33).
Genesis recounts the first merging of "spirit" and
"wisdom" in a man: Joseph (Genesis 41:38-39). Now these two
words are applied to Joshua (Deut 34:9); and Joshua, coming from the
tribe of Ephraim, is a descen dant of Joseph.
We find all of these (and many more) reminiscences and denouements
at the end of the Torah that remind us of things we found at the
beginning. But this look backward is only half of what we get--because
our custom is to start over immediately, going back to Genesis. So we
begin the Torah looking forward. Now when we go back to Genesis and read
about the 120-year limit on human life, we will think of how Moses
arrived at it. Now when we read about the divine promise of the land to
Abraham in Genesis, we may think of Moses' reminder to the people
that this promise is about to come true at the end of Deuteronomy.
And note: the promise to Abraham is not fulfilled at the end of the
Torah. It is fulfilled in Joshua. So the last chapter of the Torah
invites us to do both: to turn back to Genesis and to read on in Joshua.
The Torah thus involves a looking forward and a looking back, a
linking of past and future. It is a strange concept of time: linear and
cyclical at the same time, historical and timeless at the same time. It
is the first known work of history on earth: telling a record of events
through a progression of time on a line. Yet we read that record in a
cyclical manner, always returning to the beginning. And so Returning
becomes one of the central concepts of Judaism.
RICHARD ELLIOTT FRIEDMAN, author Who Wrote the Bible?, The Hidden
Face of God, and The Hidden Book in the Bible, is Katzin Professor of
Jewish Civilization at the University of California, San Diego.