This volume, known as the Cervera Bible, survived multiple journeys around Spain and then Europe, against all odds. Inscriptions place it with a family from Cordoba in 1379; a century later, it was in La Coruña, Galicia, where its fanciful imagery inspired another Sephardic masterpiece, the Kennicott Bible. Then the trail goes cold—until 1804, just as Jews were being invited back to Portugal, when the secretary of the Portuguese embassy in The Hague learned that “the oldest and most rare Hebrew manuscript” was for sale. An urgent missive went out to António Ribeiro dos Santos, head librarian of Portugal’s newly created Royal Public Library. He authorized the purchase immediately—for a sum said to be 500 times his own annual salary. So, the volume that had been secreted out of Iberia three centuries earlier returned in glory as a valued national treasure.

Since then, Portugal’s National Library, as it’s now called, has exhibited the Cervera Bible only rarely. But starting this week, its distinctive artistry will be showcased as never before. In a rare loan, conservators have let it travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art—and, in a rarer move, permitted the Met’s curators to turn the pages once a week, for a total of eight times, displaying multiple facets of Hazarfati’s delightful Gothic illuminations. The Portuguese library, meanwhile, has posted a high-resolution, downloadable, online version of the entire manuscript. Now, the library’s deputy director, Maria Inês Cordeiro, told me, viewers can hunt for and zoom in on the 20 places ibn Gaon embedded his own name in the micrography, as in this fire-breathing creature’s feet.

At the Met, the Bible is starring in a special installation on the first floor. It’s surrounded by contemporaneous objects from the Met’s collection, mostly from England and France, bearing similar iconography—medallions, Christian sacred texts, a spectacular Limoges book cover plaque. The show is part of the “Medieval Jewish Art in Context” series, supported by a grant from the David Berg Foundation, which funds loans of important Judaica for display with objects from the museum’s holdings. But the curators, Melanie Holcomb and Barbara Drake Boehn, have cleverly used a different loan program to make another interesting match: A few feet away is the Micrographic Bible, made in Germany circa 1300, which they borrowed from the Jewish Theological Seminary last spring. It got its name, of course, from the exquisite miniature script that creates shapes and designs, a practice common in both Jewish and Islamic art for centuries.

For the first time, that commonality is also illustrated in permanent-collection galleries at the Met—in the new space for Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia (unofficially known as the Islamic galleries). Here, too, because the Met doesn’t own any major Judaica from these cultures, it has relied on loans: The entire section representing Jewish culture in Al Andalus, including tiles from Toledo’s El Tránsito synagogue, is comprised of objects borrowed from the Hispanic Society of America in upper Manhattan. One highlight is the stunning Hispano-Moresque Bible, finished in Seville in 1472. Unlike its counterparts in the medieval galleries, this volume features no images of people or animals: The patterns formed by its micrography are strictly floral and geometric, conforming with Islamic precepts. It closely resembles the Quranic pages strategically installed in the same vitrine.

If you’re counting, that makes three medieval Hebrew Bibles on view at one time at the Met—an apparently unprecedented circumstance, and one that curators say was not coordinated by the two departments. (A fourth Bible, a late-15th-century Spanish volume also on loan from the Hispanic Society, is standing by, waiting to be installed in the Met’s Arab-lands galleries when other objects are switched out.)

For repeat visitors of the Cervera installation, one highlight will be pages from the Sefer Mikhlol, the grammatical treatise that accompanies the sacred text, where Joseph Hazarfati did his most fantastical work. As the display changes, coming weeks will bring centaurs, unicorns, mermen, and several courtly hunting scenes—a dog chases a hare; a falconer and a crossbow-aiming figure converge on a bird perched on a crenelated tower. Do such motifs hold larger symbolism for Sephardic Jews? “Sometimes a crossbow is just a crossbow,” Boehm said. Vassar scholar Marc Michael Epstein wasn’t so sure—in other Jewish medieval iconography, he noted, such images can be read as metaphors for persecution, betrayal, or exile. “To assume that nothing is ever going on may be naive,” he said. “To assume that profundities are always going on is over-reading. The truth may lie somewhere in between.”

That’s probably also the case with the forces that brought these Bibles together at the Met. At the very least, their simultaneous presence seems to reflect a multi-departmental initiative to incorporate Judaica into the narrative that the permanent-collection galleries tell. The divergence in sources and sponsors for the loans in the two departments may also be relevant, or not. Same with outreach. The Washington Haggadah, first in the “Medieval Jewish Art in Context” series, was on view last Passover. The next loan in the series, of the Rylands Haggadah, is slated for Passover next year. The Cervera Bible, as it happens, includes one of the most famous images of a menorah in art history: the Menorah of Zechariah’s Vision, that mesmerizing candelabra, emanating from an intense azure ground, familiar from countless Jewish book covers and tallit bags. That’s the page that goes on view December 20—the day Hannukah begins.

First we learn that, like the Karp family in The Frozen Rabbi, Paltrow’s recently renovated London home has a rumpus room (stars, they’re just like us!). But the item that really caught our eye was number six, the Juxtaposed: Religion shelf. The wooden shelf has seven notches carved out: as Gwyneth explains, “Built-in slots hold holy books—including the Qur’an, Bible, and Tao Te Ching—all at the same level (which is how I like to think about religion).”

Also reserved on the shelf are spots for the Bhagavad Gita, the Analects, and, of course, the Torah.

Shortlist: Gwyneth Paltrow [Elle Decor]
Earlier: The Paltrow Children Will Be Raised Jewish

Is it really possible to ask a man whom the Washington Post compared to medieval commentator Rashi a question that doesn’t sound stupid?

But during a recent visit to New York City, Steinsaltz proved exceedingly easy to talk to. He cracked jokes frequently, his cheeks turning red beneath his white beard, as he offered opinions on everything from the number of ultrasounds a woman should have during a pregnancy to Hemingway. He showed a genuine, gentle curiosity about everyone he encountered during the time we spent together, including—as we exited the office of Aleph, his American foundation, and walked down Sixth Ave.—a man dressed in an Elmo costume.

Steinsaltz was raised by secular parents in Jerusalem and studied math, physics, and chemistry, as well as Jewish studies. Steinsaltz’s father is purported to have said, “I don’t care if you’re an apikores [heretic], but no son of mine is going to be an am ha-aretz,” an ignoramus.

In his early twenties, he built a network of yeshivas in Israel and the former Soviet Union. The Israeli schools—serving students from elementary school age to hesder—are unusual for their relatively diverse student bodies, ranging from Modern Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox. Students are taught Hasidic philosophy alongside Talmud, which is uncommon, especially for a school that also encourages army service and higher education, sports and the arts.

Last year, Steinsaltz completed his translation of the Talmud into Modern Hebrew, a 45-year undertaking. Making the Talmud readable to those not enrolled in yeshiva full-time was no small task. In the traditional Vilna format, first paginated in 1835, the Talmud is a stream of unpunctuated Aramaic. Steinsaltz turned that stream into Hebrew sentences, added vowels, explanations, and his own commentary to the margins, a space traditionally reserved for medieval greats like Rashi. Steinsaltz also oversaw the subsequent translation of his edition into five other languages.

His translation was considered sacrilege by right-wing rabbis, who banned the volumes and protested their publication; Rav Shach, a prominent rabbi in the ulta-Orthodox enclave of Bnei Brak, called for the Steinsaltz editions to be immediately sent for burial.

Steinsaltz continues to carry on at a furious clip. He’s currently working on a translation of Bible commentary, a new interpretation of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, and a book of personal anecdotes about the Lubavitcher Rebbe, among other projects. While we spoke, he sipped tea sweetened with five packets of sugar, wheezed a pipe filled with Captain Black tobacco, and nibbled rainbow cookies.

What brings you to New York City?

I must be punished by going to exile. There could be worse places to be exiled, although not so many. I am getting punished by being here.

What are you being punished for?

You don’t want my confessions. I have sinned a lot—there is a long list of sins that bring me to New York so many times over the years. I am in New York more than in Tel Aviv, and as a true Jerusalemite, I cannot stand Tel Aviv, which I think is just a smaller uglier version of New York.

Beautiful people have all kinds of blemishes, but somehow the blemishes enhance their beauty. Anne Boleyn, Henry the VIII’s second wife, was considered one of the most beautiful women of her time, and she had one green and one brown eye. In Jerusalem, it’s not easy to find a real beautiful building, but the city is beautiful. In New York there are many beautiful houses, but together it’s just New York, which is not beautiful.

Some people say that when an author translates a novel, he or she in effect creates a whole new piece of writing. Do you feel that’s the case with translating the Talmud?

Can you make a sculpture of a fountain that captures flowing water? There are very few of these. There is a very good one by Rodin. Think of almost any human conversation and put it verbatim into any language—it doesn’t make sense because you have to fill all the gaps that are in between. The whole Talmud is like this. If you wanted to translate it literally, it will mean very little. If you translate it in any way that is meaningful, it becomes different. It’s like with a play—the dialogue is a real part of the structure. When two people in the same field talk about their subject, they don’t explain everything; they jump around. It is hard to provide a very accurate report of an intimate talk. Any translation is, in a way, a part of killing it.

Did your background in physics help with the work of translating the Talmud?

On the one hand, the Talmud is very much like a stream of consciousness novel—say, Ulysses—and on the other hand it’s as precise as any book of mathematics. Sometimes it seems to be flowing in a strange way, but basically every sentence and choice of words is very accurate. The meta-language of science is very close to the meta-language of Jewish thinking.

Do you have any regrets about translating the Talmud? Has anything been lost?

Most things are lost, most things are changed. It’s a matter of making some kind of judgment of weighing different things. Teaching it in its original form means that a very small number of people will get to it, which means you create a very big population of ignorant people. It’s a matter of what’s more important. There are many areas where you have this kind of discussion. It’s a choice. I thought that the decision should be about giving people access. We don’t have a small closed group of people that are in the know. From Mt. Sinai on, we wanted everybody to participate. If you want it this way, you have to pay for it.

My understanding is there was much less resistance to Artscroll’s subsequent translation of the Gemara then there was to yours. Why is that?

The first effort is always more controversial. I don’t want to speak about lashon hara but part of the controversy was manufactured, and some people—there were interested parties—were doing it purposefully, so it was kind of an unpleasant time.

Can you tell me a bit about the new book you are working on, about the soul?

You want a fast answer? I will give you one sentence. We all believe we have a soul, and if so, we should be more interested in it.

In the 1990s, you spoke very critically about TV, calling it a force that undercut the culture of reading. I am wondering if you feel the same way about the Internet.

TV is worse because with TV you forget to read entirely. What I said in that speech is that TV—having things done in pictures—is a regressive move for human progress. The Internet, not as much. It has potential.

With the Internet, where you have all kinds of writing and other things, we are getting the malady of our age, which is too much information. It’s a different problem than TV: Too much information means you have to go into a whole new direction in order to find out what is meaningful and what is not meaningful, what is a complete lie and what has an existence.

You are writing a book about the Lubavitcher Rebbe. Can you tell me about your connection to him?

I was very connected—I visited him almost every time when I was in America. It’s a very special connection.

Why did you want to write about him?

We haven’t had many great leaders. I meet lots of people, famous people, but I’ve met very few great people—even people I respected. They had some part of greatness in them, like a peacock. They have a wonderful, beautiful tail but if they didn’t have that tail, really, what would they look like? If they had not been, for instance, a great mathematician, they would have been nothing. There are so many nothings all over the world; they have something great about them, but they were not great.

But to have a great man! So, I wanted to not to share gossip but to deal with more important subjects about him. There are already several books about the subject, but many are either hagiographic or they are just plain dirty gossip.

What do you think about the movement within Lubavitch where some people say the Rebbe is a semi-deity or is still alive?

It’s like the stories people tell about Elvis Presley. Maybe they play cards together. If they are alive, they are alive in the same realm, I am afraid.

In America today, thankfully, the ancient theological ire between Christians and Jews has been almost forgotten. But as Timothy Beal shows in his personal, accessible new book, The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25), there is still a profound difference between the ways the two faiths read their Bibles. The kind of Jewish education that most non-Orthodox American Jews receive leaves us familiar with the major biblical stories; and of course, many Jewish holidays revolve around biblical episodes, from the Exodus on Passover to the Maccabees on Hanukkah. Jews who receive a traditional Orthodox education learn the Bible much more thoroughly, but the core of their study has to do with the Talmud and commentaries—a way of thinking about Torah that treats the original divine text primarily as a subject for interpretation.

Neither of these Jewish approaches to Torah has anything in common with the fundamentalist, Bible-centered Christianity that is so potent in the United States—especially the parts where Jews do not live. Beal, a professor of religion at Case Western Reserve University, is now an academic scholar of the Bible, accustomed to thinking of it as the work of historically situated human beings. But he was raised in an evangelical Christian home, where the Bible was held to be quite literally the Word of God. He hastens to explain that this does not mean his parents were naive or uneducated: “My parents’ biblical faith … was as seriously intellectual as it was devout.” His mother, who studied Greek in college, would “sometimes … pull out her old Greek New Testament to see how else the text might be translated.”

Still, growing up in this bibliocentric culture gave Beal an early sense that the Bible was “the go-to book for any serious question we might have, from sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll to heaven, hell, and why bad things happen to good people.” The Bible was “God’s book of answers, which if opened and read rightly would speak directly to me with concrete, divinely authored advice about my life and how to live it.” In short, to use an evangelical acronym that I, for one, had never heard before, it was “B.I.B.L.E.: Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.”

The Rise and Fall of the Bible is Beal’s attempt to shatter this popular understanding of the Bible as a combination of divine instruction manual and self-help book. While there’s no denying that the Bible remains central—Beal quotes polls indicating that “65 percent of all Americans believe that the Bible ‘answers all or most of the basic questions of life,’ ”—he, at the same time, notes that Americans are surprisingly ignorant of what is actually in it. “More than 80 percent of born-again or evangelical Christians believe that ‘God helps those who help themselves’ is a Bible verse,” he writes. Less than half of all adults can name the four Gospels; only one-third can name five of the Ten Commandments. In his own experience as a college teacher, Beal says, students “come to class on the first day with more ideas about the Bible derived from … The Da Vinci Code than from actual Biblical texts.”

What explains this disparity between Americans’ absolute faith in the Bible and their evident ignorance of it? To Beal, the problem lies with the notion that the Bible is “a divine guidebook, a map for getting through the terra incognita of life.” For as soon as you open it and start reading, it becomes troublingly apparent that the Bible is no such thing. It does not offer answers to problems, especially not 21st-century problems; only in a few places does it even offer straightforward moral counsel. Depending on where you open it, the Bible might give the impression that it is mainly composed of genealogies and agricultural regulations.

The gulf between what readers expect to find in the Bible and what they are actually given produces a kind of paralysis, Beal writes. “For many Christians, this experience of feeling flummoxed by the Bible … [produces] not only frustration but also guilt for doubting the Bible’s integrity.” The Bible-publishing industry feeds on this anxiety, he argues, by endlessly repackaging the Biblical text in ever more watered-down and over-explained forms. Most Jewish readers will probably be unfamiliar with the world of Christian “Biblezines,” in which biblical texts are interspersed with magazine-style articles and quizzes: “There are Biblezines for just about everyone. Becoming targets college-age and young professional women. Explore is for preteen boys, and Refuel is for teenage boys. Blossom is for preteen girls, and Revolve is for teenage girls.”

What troubles Beal about these publications is not just the way they dumb down the Bible—Blossom is a long way from Beal’s mother reading the New Testament in Greek—but the way they translate and interpret the text according to an undeclared social and political agenda. Beal shows how the Manga Bible turns Eve into a simpering temptress (“Hee hee … girls can make guys do anything,” she titters in one panel), while the Life Application Study Bible makes Leviticus sound like an anti-gay tract.

All these quasi-Bibles are designed to eliminate what Beal regards as the Bible’s most inspiring feature—its refusal to speak with a single voice. The Bible isn’t really “a book” at all, but a library of books (the Greek word biblia, Beal points out, is a plural), written over a span of centuries, in a wide range of genres—myth, history, law codes, poems, proverbs. The middle section of The Rise and Fall of the Bible is devoted to a capsule history of the writing and editing of the Bible, designed to show readers new to the subject that the book in the hotel nightstand is not a divine artifact.

In asking “What Would Jesus Read?” Beal also ends up explaining what is still apparently unknown to many Christians—the fact that Jesus was a Jew, and Christianity initially a Jewish movement. The episode in Luke 4 where Jesus preaches in a synagogue leads Beal to discuss Torah reading and Shabbat services. Later on, he examines the Hebrew text of the Bible to demonstrate how every English translation is inevitably an interpretation—sometimes, a Christian apologetic interpretation, as when the Hebrew word almah in the Book of Isaiah is translated as “virign,” rather than “young woman,” in order to produce a Christological reading (“Behold, a virgin will conceive and bear a son …”)

By insisting on the Bible’s human making, however, Beal does not want to convince Christians to stop reading it—the way Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris would. Rather, he wants them to read the Bible with more tolerance for ambiguity, recognizing that the text cries out for interpretation. In short, as Beal puts it, Christians need to read more like Jews:

Here again we may find insight from Jewish tradition’s understanding of Torah. One legend says, ‘When the Holy One, blessed be He, gave the Torah to Israel, he gave it only in the form of wheat, for us to make flour from it, and flax, to make a garment from it.’ The idea is that God depends on the community to fulfill biblical meaning. The Torah is incomplete without its interpreters who make something new of it.

Naturally, the kind of interpretation Beal has in mind is not the kind the rabbis had in mind. Talmudic interpretation is based on the premise that, since the Torah is God’s word, every meaning that can be found in it is divine. That is how a whole legal system, and then, in Kabbalah, a whole mystical system, could be deduced from the biblical text. Beal’s reading of the Bible depends, conversely, on the premise that the Bible is not divine writ, but rather a precious human inheritance, which can be used to support and enhance contemporary moral intuitions. As he puts it, the Bible “hosts the human quest for meaning without predestining a specific conclusion.”

This is not talmudic, but it is exactly the same spirit in which liberal Jewish theologians now interpret the Bible. Like Beal, the authors of a book such as Jewish Theology in Our Time are attempting to salvage the vocabulary of faith they grew up with, while discarding the dogmas in which they can no longer believe. The Bible, read this way, is historically and emotionally primary, but not theologically primary—not, in fact, essentially different from the sacred texts of every faith, or the great works of secular literature. Perhaps it is on these ironic terms that Jew and Christian, after so many centuries, can agree to read the same Bible after all.

It isn’t a joke. As faithful Bahai are forbidden from drinking alcohol, my friend was dangling on his stool and nursing a soft drink when he was accosted by two drunken gents he knew and who decided to mock his faith. At first, my friend did nothing. He merely smiled and looked away as the lushes lashed their tongues, calling him names and disparaging his beliefs. But when they started shoving and poking, my friend didn’t stop to think. With his glass still in his fist, he smashed it into the nose of one of the offenders, cracking it. With blood gushing down his face, the man looked up, shocked. “I thought Bahais were supposed to pursue peace!” he said indignantly.

“We are,” replied my friend. “I’m a bad Bahai.”

I’ve heard that story at least a dozen times, and it amuses me still. But beyond the bravado and the catharsis, the story, I think, appeals to me because it rests on a fascinating premise. For the joke to work—my friend being the bad Bahai—we have to assume that the normative Bahai, the kind that shies away from violence, is the good Bahai, and that one is definitely preferable to the other.

But is it true? Let’s assume for a moment that the answer is yes. If one wanted to be a good Bahai, then, all one would have to do is consult the rulebook and keep to the straight and narrow. And the faith—any faith, for that matter—would become nothing more than a spell of spiritual bookkeeping, with good deeds acting as debits and each of us constantly busy with calculations of cost and benefit. In short, religion wouldn’t be much fun, nor would it hold as a system of moral justice.

This week’s haftorah makes this point elegantly, not so much by what it says as by what it keeps veiled.

Channeling God, the prophet Amos offers his listeners a brief glimpse into the future of the Jewish people:

For, behold I command, and I will scatter the house of Israel among all the nations. As it is shaken in a sieve, and not a coarse particle falls to the earth. By the sword shall all the sinful of My people perish, those who say, ‘The evil shall not soon come upon us.’ On that day, I will raise up the fallen Tabernacle of David, and I will close up their breaches, and I will raise up its ruins, and build it up as in the days of yore.

It’s one of those glorious disjointed sentences that makes the prophets so much fun to read. One moment God is talking about scattering the Israelites among the nations, and the very next He promises their resurrection and return to Zion. The one thing this paragraph lacks—the one thing modern, rational readers have every right to expect—is causality. God could just as easily have vowed to raise up the fallen Tabernacle of David only if the Israelites all obeyed His rules, repented, or otherwise proved worthy of His mercy. But God remains vague. He promises salvation but is unclear about its terms.

Reading the passage, I thought of childhood and of totalitarian regimes, two constructs that for reasons too tangled to discuss here are closely intertwined in my mind. “If you don’t know what you’ve done,” says the parent to the errant child, “I’m not going to tell you.” Panicked, the child looks inward and digs for clues, trying to ascertain which of his or her seemingly innocuous deeds so upset the parent. In the process, each deed is reevaluated, each action examined. The parent needn’t intervene any further: The child is now his or her own police state. Which, of course, makes the work of real police states that much easier; as any biography of state terror suggests, obfuscation and innuendo are the tools with which obedience is crafted, not clearly stated and eloquent accusations or demands. The tragedy of living under totalitarianism, as has often been noted before, is that one never really knows the precise nature of the state’s logic and is constantly left guessing. As today’s hero could likely be tomorrow’s pariah, and as the grand ideology of the morning could dissipate by nightfall, the best thing to do is nothing at all.

Religion works on a similar principle, but in the inverse. It, too, keeps moving the goal post. There are, of course, precise rules to follow, clearly prescribed in books and upheld by the clergy. But reading this week’s haftorah, and many other Biblical texts like it, one gets the feeling that it’s not blind adherence to the rules that is paramount, but rather some elusive spirit, some flash of enlightenment that brings us much closer to God than all the strictures in the world ever will.

What does God want? We don’t know. He wouldn’t say. Why would he punish us one moment and reward us the next? No clue. But while the cynic and the tyrant both urge us to do nothing about this natural state of uncertainty, the prophet is urging us to explore, to inquire, to figure it out for ourselves. If we do, we would become much closer to God. All redemption really means, we would learn along the way, is asking the right questions. My Bahai friend has always done just that. It’s what led him to punch his provoker in the face; more than pursuing peace, he believes, a man must pursue justice. It may not sit well with the sticklers, but it’s his own path to God. Could there be any other?

Until two years ago, I was no more familiar with the Torah than I was with Beverly Hills, 90210.

I admit that I knew both texts intimately: Growing up in Israel, I spent each Friday afternoon with one and each Saturday morning with the other. I followed closely the stories each told. I memorized the kind of negligible details only a youthful admirer might notice, like Noah’s age when he died (950) or the license plate on Steve Sanders’ Corvette (I8A4RE. Say it quickly). But I was not a thoughtful consumer of either sacred text. I read and watched, but I didn’t care much.

When I was asked to begin writing a weekly column for Tablet’s predecessor, Nextbook, commenting on the week’s parsha, or Torah portion, I approached the task with wry amusement. My mandate was to unearth any relevance the Torah may have to contemporary life, and to ascertain what, if anything, we young, secular, and not exceedingly educated Jews might learn from the Good Book. I looked forward to writing biting critiques that gently mocked the ancient book’s strange and antiquated stories. I expected to feel everything but enlightenment.

Two years into my journey—after a year of writing about the parsha, I moved on to commenting on the haftorah, the weekly reading from the Book of Prophets that supplements the Torah portion—I have changed in profound ways. I have no plans to observe the Sabbath, and I still consider my burger bereft unless veiled by a thick layer of Gruyère, but reading the Bible closely each week, and asked to grapple with its meanings, I feel more resilient than I’d ever been in my faith.

Some readers, I know, may be unwilling to free faith from the tethers of ritual and will consider my own brand of belief invalid or flawed. Without delving into details—the intricacies of the matter are too great to paint on such a modest canvass—I will say that at the core of my faith is a fervent belief in God, coupled with a strong skepticism that any one human, or any one book, could ever grasp the entirety, the enormity of his mysterious and ultimately unknowable will.

And while I don’t believe the Bible to be literally divine, I have come to see in it an astonishingly astute guide to human thought and behavior, a beacon in whose light us moderns—having ravaged with conviction every last bit of certainty, weary with knowledge and wary of truth—might do well to walk.

Of all the lessons the Torah had taught me, one stands above all: There is a God, but the rest is up to us.

Consider Sinai. If we look at the Bible as a tale, the moment at the foothill of the mount is its absolute peak. Everything we’ve read so far has been leading up to this. God chooses Noah, then Abraham, then makes Abraham into a nation, then banishes that nation into exile in Egypt. Finally, they are redeemed. Finally, God is willing to speak to the whole people. He’ll give them his living word, his law. He’ll tell them what it’s all about. But here’s what God has to say: “Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” That’s it.

Listening intently, the Israelites may be forgiven for feeling somewhat swindled. God, after all, had just told them that they were his Chosen People, but he hadn’t told them why, and, more bafflingly, he hadn’t told them what, now that he had conferred on them this most singular status, he expected them to do with it. A kingdom of priests? A holy nation? That’s hardly a blueprint for peoplehood.

At the heart of Divine Election—a chosenness that extends in time and applies not just to the particular people huddling in the desert millennia ago but to all Jews in perpetuity—is doubt. We understand, of course, that observing God’s laws is an irrevocable component of redemption, but it is not the only one. Sinai suggests something else, something spiritual. It invites us to wonder what it means, to question how we should act to prove worthy of being the Lord’s favorite sons and daughters. It puts the onus on us.

This, I believe, is one of the Bible’s most awesome tenets. Judaism shies away from heavenly arithmetic; it is not a world where the good and the bad are both calculated, measured against some divine standard, and used to determine life and fate. It’s not a religion that poses a straight and narrow path to salvation and punishes anyone who transgresses. Instead, in weekly portion after weekly portion, we get deliberate ambiguity and exhortations to take action.

Take Isaiah, for example. “This people I formed for Myself,” says the prophet, channeling the voice of God. “They shall recite My praise. But you did not call Me, O Jacob, for you wearied of Me, O Israel. You did not bring Me the lambs of your burnt offerings, nor did you honor Me with your sacrifices; neither did I overwork you with meal-offerings nor did I weary you with frankincense. Neither did you purchase cane for Me with money, nor have you sated Me with the fat of your sacrifices. But you have burdened Me with your sins; you have wearied Me with your iniquities. I, yea I, erase your transgressions for My sake, and your sins I will not remember.”

Writing about this passage a few weeks ago, I commented on its astounding lack of causality: The people sin grievously, yet God gracefully forgives. In Judaism, unlike its sister monotheistic religions, salvation doesn’t necessarily depend on prior action. Salvation comes first; what you choose to do with it is the whole point.

That is the message of Isaiah, the message of Sinai, the message of Moses and numerous others of our spiritual founding fathers. It’s a message of responsibility and of purposefulness. It’s also a message of freedom: Rather than a painting-by-numbers approach to morality and mortality—follow the rules and go straight to heaven—Judaism revolves around that chief faculty that distinguishes us from God’s other creations, namely free will. The rules are all set, but we’re free to rebel.

Which, needless to remind, we do. Forty days after receiving the Word of God, the Israelites make themselves a golden calf. For 40 years in the desert, they gripe and moan. They’re such incurable complainers that God himself calls them a stiff-necked people. And yet he seldom punishes them and never abandons them. He knows they’re human and that the only way they can be redeemed is not by accepting him unconditionally, or subjecting themselves to his every word, but by slowly overcoming their own weaknesses and learning to be a little bit more divine each day.

At its center, then, Judaism places Man. Blessed in his confusion, holy in his errors, searching. The search is the thing; the goal is less important. Not for us all this eschatology: Time and again, the rabbis remind us that there is no difference between this world and the days of the Messiah except for removing the yoke of foreign bondage. Our Messiah is not only ordinary, he’s a paradox: As Michael Walzer astutely noted, the Jewish Messiah can only come when the entire people are worthy of him, by which point the Messiah is no longer needed. If it’s salvation we want, Judaism teaches us, we’re going to have to do it ourselves.

These are some of the lessons I’ve learned from reading the Bible. I’d like to think that they’ve made me more observant, not in practice but in thought. Like those trembling Hebrews at Sinai, I’m overwhelmed by the peerless heights; I look up and can’t see the sky. And like them, too, I suspect that there’s a good 40-year-trek lying ahead, most likely with no Promised Land on the other side. Never mind; I’ve got one hell of a guidebook.

At the same time, however, the 17th century is also known, especially in England, as a time of intense religious passion and a new fascination with the Bible. As Nelson remarks, historians have called that period “the Biblical century,” and Hobbes and Locke both discuss the Bible in detail. The major reason for this new interest was, of course, the rise of Protestant Christianity, which taught that God’s will could be known only through the Bible and not through any church or priest. It became crucial, then, to read the Bible in its original form, undistorted by commentary and translation—that is, to read it in Hebrew.

As Nelson shows, it was not unheard of for Christians to study Hebrew before the 17th century. In particular, missionaries would “use Hebrew texts in order to refute Judaism and advance the cause of Jewish conversion.” But the 17th century saw what Nelson calls the “great flowering” of “Christian Hebraism,” as non-Jewish scholars began to study the Tanakh, and even the Talmud and rabbinic commentaries, at universities in Holland and England. The invention of printing, too, played an important role by giving non-Jews access to rabbinical texts for the first time. (The first printed Talmud was produced in 1520-23 by a Christian printer in Italy.)

Nelson argues that it was not a coincidence that Englishmen began to show an interest in republican government, redistribution of wealth, and religious toleration at just the same moment that they were learning more about Judaism than ever before. Rather, they were led to these new, seemingly secular ideas by their research into the laws and government of ancient Israel, as documented in the Bible and interpreted by the rabbis over centuries. “Christians began to regard the Hebrew Bible,” Nelson writes, “as a political constitution, designed by God himself for the children of Israel.” In a sense, then, traditional Jewish ideas—as interpreted, and misinterpreted, by Christian scholars—lie at the very origin of modern politics.

The Hebrew Republic traces a biblical and rabbinic genealogy for several important political concepts that, on their face, would seem to be strictly modern and secular. The first is what Nelson calls “republican exclusivism”—the idea that a republic, in which the people govern themselves, is the only valid form of government. Greek and Roman political theory always treated the republic as just one of several possible options for good government, alongside the equally legitimate monarchy and aristocracy. Why, in the 17th century, did Englishmen begin to argue that kings could never be acceptable rulers, that all sovereignty had to flow from the people?

The standard, secular explanation would turn to Hobbes and Locke, who thought of the state as the product of a social contract in which the people delegate their powers to a ruler for the common good. Nelson shows, however, that the debate on this subject in the 17th century revolved around the example of ancient Israel—in particular, on the passage in I Samuel when the Israelites demand that Samuel give them a king, “to judge us like all the nations.” When Samuel tells God about this, God is clearly displeased: “They have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.” Samuel goes on to list all the abuses a king will commit—from conscripting men into his army to seizing land and cattle for taxes—before giving in to the people’s request and anointing Saul.

Of course, Christian readers had always known about this passage. What changed during the “Hebrew Renaissance,” Nelson shows, was that they now had access to the debates about kingship in the Talmud and the commentaries. Particularly influential was the discussion of monarchy in Devarim Rabbah, a collection of midrashic commentaries on Deuteronomy translated into Latin in 1625. “The Rabbis say: God said unto Israel: ‘I planned that you should be free from kings,’ ” the midrash begins, going on to cite a wide variety of verses and commentators:

Rabbi Simon said in the name of Rabbi Joshua ben Levi: Whosoever puts his trust in the Holy One, blessed be He, is privileged to become like unto Him. Whence this? As it is said, “Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose trust the Lord is” (Jeremiah 17:7). But whosoever puts his trust in idolatry condemns himself to become like [the idols]. Whence this? As it is written, “They that make them shall be like unto them” (Psalms 115:8).

This midrash, Nelson shows through some impressive textual analysis (in Hebrew, Latin, and English), helped inspire English republicans to the radical new claim that kingship was inherently sinful, because it was a form of idolatry. It was cited by John Milton in his attack on the English monarchy, and it influenced several passages of Paradise Lost. Republican theorists like James Harrington and Algernon Sidney drew on the same rabbinic sources. Even Thomas Paine, defending the American Revolution in Common Sense, was echoing Devarim Rabbah.

Another key text in this debate was Deuteronomy 17:14, where Moses, looking forward to the time when the Israelites have conquered the land of Canaan, says: “When thou art come unto the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee … and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me.” This, at least, is how the King James Bible translated it. But the Talmud records a debate about whether the Hebrew word “ve-amarta” should be understood as a description—“you will say”—or an imperative: “you shall say.” If the former, then Moses is simply predicting that the Israelites will demand a king; if the latter, he is ordering them to demand a king. Amazingly, Nelson shows, this Talmudic dispute became very well-known among English Christians, to the point that Harrington could refer to it knowingly in an anti-monarchist tract: “The one party will have the law to be positive, the other contingent and with a mark of detestation upon it.” Harrington even cites Gersonides and Maimonides in his discussion.

Nelson’s second and third chapters pursue a similar strategy, showing how Christian readings of Hebrew texts influenced other major political debates. Until the 17th century, even political thinkers who supported a republic had been absolutely opposed to the redistribution of wealth by the government. They were influenced in this, Nelson shows in another passage of wonderful scholarship, by their understanding of Roman history. According to ancient historians, the downfall of the Roman Republic had been caused by the introduction of a law that redistributed lands from wealthy aristocrats to the poor. The lex agraria, as the law was known, stood as a warning to future generations that the state must not be allowed to interfere with private property.

But the Hebraists, turning from Rome to Israel, noticed that the Biblical Jubilee—which held that every 50 years all land must be returned to its original owner—was itself a kind of lex agraria, designed to prevent any one person from amassing too much land. They pored over the minute explanations of the property code in the Talmud, especially in Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah. And they concluded that if the laws of Israel were given by God himself, then they must trump even the example of Rome; redistribution of wealth must be God’s will.

So, Harrington, in the imaginary model society he called Oceana, called for all estates beyond a certain size to be confiscated by the state. His reason, he explained, was that he was following “the fabric of the commonwealth of ancient Israel,” which was “made by an infallible legislator, even God himself.” As late as 1795, Nelson finds an American minister (Perez Fobes of Boston) sermonizing on “the wisdom of God in the appointment of a jubilee, as an essential article in the Jewish policy. This, it is probable, was the great palladium of liberty to that people.” Once again, a seemingly modern principle—redistribution of wealth by the government in the name of social equality—is shown to have Jewish roots.

It is possible that Nelson somewhat overstates the influence that these Jewish sources and examples had on 17th-century thinkers. Did modern thought about government really come from the Bible, or—as seems more plausible—did reformers like Harrington look to ancient Jewish sources to justify their modern ideas, borne of their experiences in war and revolution? As Nelson himself acknowledges, “the encounter between Protestant theorists and Hebrew sources did not take place in a vacuum.” No doubt specialists will be debating the arguments of The Hebrew Republic for some time to come—which is a testimony to Eric Nelson’s profound and original book.

The whole thing seemed inexplicable, especially considering that an Israeli leader looking for more important topics of discussion shouldn’t exactly need to strain himself. Inexplicable, that is, until it’s connected to another bit of news: the winner of the Jerusalem Public School District’s Bible Quiz—held Tuesday, the day before Bibi spoke—was a 15-year-old named Avner Netanyahu. Yup, the First Son (and mazel tov to him!). The Hebrew University High School student scored 98 out of 100 to win the competition, which his father and mother, Sara, attended, earning him the right to compete in the national Quiz.

According to Arutz Sheva, “The organizers state that the objective of the quiz is to encourage interest and study among youth in the Bible as the cultural basis of the Nation of Israel.” Funny: that was also the objective of Netanyahu’s odd speech.

Herzliya Diary [Tablet Magazine]
Jewish Pride: Prime Minister’s Son Wins Bible Contest [Arutz Sheva]

So where did the whole Jews-built-the-pyramids idea originate? (C’mon, you thought so, admit it!) Exodus refers to the Jews’ “backbreaking labor,” but does not specify what that labor was. You can blame Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who in 1977 said the Jews built the pyramids. Blame it on Orientalism, if that is your thing. But most of all, say experts? Blame it on Hollywood. Sure, why not!

Egypt Says Jewish Slaves Didn’t Build Pyramids [Christian Science Monitor]

The irony of the whole project, it seems to us, is that Schlafly is far from the first to politically reframe the Bible or other sacred texts—but that’s usually the province of liberals, because they’re not religious fundamentalists. It’s one thing to update a man-made text you believe is both valuable and problematic; changing the literal word of God to suit your political ends is quite a different story.

The Bible: Lost in Conservative Translation [Guardian]

But might some of Stewart’s other Daily Show antics reflect parables from the Hebrew Bible? Herewith, three examples to boost Wallis’ case.

Eye for an Eye, Tooth for a Tooth
In response to guest Will Ferrel’s spontaneous presenting of his teeth for an extreme closeup, Stewart quickly rises and offers his own chompers for inspection, luckily stopping just short of demonstrating the biblical homily’s lesser known third line, “a testicle for a testicle.”

The Tower of Babel
Daily Show correspondent Jason Jones attends a speech by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without a translator, leading him to conclude incorrectly (one hopes) that the Iranian president was simply stating and restating that he hates Jews.

Jonah and the Whale
And if the signs aren’t clear enough at this point, go back to 2005, when a whale swam up the Delaware River to Trenton, New Jersey, the capital of Stewart’s home state. Jon writes it off as the creature looking for a good time via “champale and condoms,” but we know better: it was waiting for the inevitable moment when Stewart would flee to the ocean, ala Jonah, to avoid his mammoth prophetic responsibilities.

This week, Fox Studios are releasing the third installment in the popular “Ice Age” franchise, this one titled Dawn of the Dinosaurs. So desperate were the besuited dudes at Fox to squeeze a few more sizable piles of cash out of the adventures of a woolly mammoth, a saber-toothed tiger and a ground sloth, that they happily hatched a plot to introduce a clan of subterranean dinosaurs for the otherwise glacial gang to befriend, throwing in at least two or three additional funky, furry sidekicks for good measure.

Never ones to be out-cuted by the competition, Walt Disney Studios will introduce their own anthropomorphic adventure later this month. Entitled G-Force, the film follows a team of highly trained, fully armed guinea pigs serving as secret agents of the United States government. Their leader is named Darwin. I’m not making any of this stuff up.

But studio executives, always on the lookout for inspiration (how else to explain the fact that two of the summer’s biggest movies are based on children’s toys from the 1980s?), would do well to crack open their Bibles. This week, the Good Book gives us the mother of all animated animals, a talking she-donkey who’s got mad spiritual skills.

The asinine heroine, it should be noted, is the second of only two talking animals in the Bible. If the previous chatty beast—a highly convincing serpent with a penchant for apples—is any example, when the scripture puts words in the mouths of the usually speechless, we better listen.

The she-donkey, to be sure, doesn’t deliver anything nearly as dramatic and disastrous as her slithering predecessor. But her message is one that we all, not just harried studio execs, would be wise to heed.

As the eventful parasha unfurls, the Israelites, every day getting closer to the Promised Land, meet with resistance from the local peoples whose territories they must traverse en route to redemption. God, of course, delivers, and pretty soon both the Amorites and the Bashanites are felled. Which, as you may imagine, makes the Moabites, the next in line on the Chosen People’s warpath, a tad nervous. Realizing that he could not best God’s people, Balak, their shrewd king, decides to fight holy with holy, and sends emissaries to summon Balaam, a prophet of sorts, to cast his spells in Moab’s aide.

At first, Balaam refuses to go with Balak’s men. He can only do, he says, as the Lord commands him. But the Lord, in a sporting mood, pops up in a dream and tells Balaam to go with the emissaries. Balaam sets out to do just that, but God, for some inexplicable reason, changes his mind and sends an angel to prevent Balaam from reaching his destination. Just to make things more interesting, God makes sure His cherub is invisible.

And so, riding his favorite she-donkey—the one, we’re told, he’s had his entire life—Balaam trots up the road to meet Balak. But the donkey, being the only one who sees the menacing angel, refuses to proceed and runs off to a nearby field. Her master, impatient, beats her up, forcing her back on the path. But the angel is still there, and the beast is still spooked, so she bucks and presses her master’s leg against a nearby fence. Balaam, annoyed, thrashes her again, and again drags her back to the road. But the donkey, as is the way of her species, does not relent; she lodges herself in a narrow nook, making Balaam so furious that he beats her vigorously, this time with a stick. And then, for the second and last time in the Bible, the Lord bestows on an animal the gift of speech.

And what a speech the poor donkey delivers! It’s doubtful that most of Hollywood’s contemporary screenwriters could come up with such touching lines for a human actor, let alone one with long ears and a rough coat.

“What have I done to you that you have struck me these three times?” she asks.  “Am I not your she-donkey on which you have ridden since you first started until now? Have I been accustomed to do this to you?”

Balaam, ashamed, concedes the point. And, just then, God opens the Moabite prophet’s eyes, and the newly visible angel speaks to Balaam angrily.

“When the she-donkey saw me,” says the seraph, “it turned aside these three times. Had she not turned aside before me, now also I would also have killed you and spared her.”

The story, like most summer movies and Biblical tales involving God’s will, has a happy ending: Balaam confronts Balak, and instead of cursing the Israelites he blesses them. But it’s in the words of the talking donkey that contemporary readers might find some fascinating morsels of meaning.

Unlike Hollywood’s animals, who are constantly given permission to speak but who rarely deliver more than shtick and schlock, Balaam’s donkey’s plea is touching and timeless. As soon as she can talk, she doesn’t say, “Hey, quit yer’ beating!” or “Look out! There’s an angry angel about to kill you!” She speaks softly. She is hurt. She wants to know why her master, to whom she’d been nothing but faithful, is being so cruel.

Those of us who have pets will have no trouble recognizing this plaintive tone. We detect it in the eyes of our dogs and cats, often for committing far less grievous transgressions against them such as failing to share our hamburger with Fluffy or leaving Whiskers home alone for many long hours.

Even if, unlike me, you stir clear clear of that primal Hollywoodian sin of assigning to animals human qualities they probably do not possess—as much as I’d like to believe otherwise, my floppy-eared mutt, Molly, probably doesn’t spend her days contemplating malicious little retributions and thinking up new, inventive ways to be bad—Balaam’s donkey nonetheless provides a very convincing argument for animal consciousness. Animal magic, even: the donkey sees God’s angel when her owner remains blind.

If we seek to learn anything from animals, then, let us ignore the belligerent guinea pigs and hilarious sloths and listen to this biblical donkey instead. Let us believe that animals, like us, are God’s creatures, and that, like us, they are not without their spiritual stirrings. And let us do whatever we can to speak on their behalf. Myself, I support several animal rights organizations, including Safe Haven For Donkeys in the Holy Land—which saves battered brayers, a particularly brutalized animal in Israel and the Palestinian Territories—and the ASPCA. You, of course, could choose other organizations. But I hope that this weekend, instead of simply relaxing at the multiplex, you listen to the beasts, look heavenward, and see the angel.

You’ve obviously taken a lot from the Book of Samuel, right down to clever allusions to the biblical text. But while there’s plenty of talk of God in Kings, there’s really no Judaism in the show. The story of David reads like a Jewish Sopranos, yet it’s impossible to imagine the HBO show divorced of its emphasis on the Italian-Catholic experience. What motivated you to keep tribe and religion as open-ended as they are on Kings?

The idea was to tell—or rather retell—the King David story. But also to tell it cleanly, without any barfy/cute self-awareness on the part of the characters that they were living out a classic narrative. Rather to play it straight and let the story unfold as if for the first time. The distraction here was always that we also played it all in a modern setting. This led some people watching to feel the show was muddy that way, that it hadn’t decided on its sci-fi rulebook. We may have had our muddy bits, but we were definitely set on our rules: we were telling the King David story in an alternate version of our earth in which the biblical tales simply hadn’t occurred yet. There had been an Industrial Revolution—and a lot the same cultural inevitabilities—like classical music, say—certain personalities being irrepressible in any universe. So the invented world shared a lot in common with our own. But it was never completely ours because all these divine dramas hadn’t finished their work yet. So much of what we are requires those milestones, which were still in process, present, alive and happening there in Shiloh. Whether you believe that the biblical events ever actually occurred or not doesn’t matter—to get to where we are you need the idea of those events having occurred. So in the world of Kings, no, there aren’t yet Jews, per se—or Christians. There are suggestions of religious factions, and a very clear line of monotheism, but it hadn’t yet become the world as we know it today. By extension, they’d be Israelites, still fighting their own tribalism under Saul.

That’s the basic cipher code we used in the writers’ room. It was meant to be a closely-guarded trade secret—sort of like the final placement of the Battlestar Galactica drama in our own human history. But with the show having run its course there’s no more need to be cagey. There it is.

You’ve added an interesting twist on the David vs. Goliath fable by making David something of a fraud. He destroys the Goliath tank, but it’s not an act of unbridled bravery—he was in fact surrendering to it and got a lucky shot off when it stalled. It’s true that David was one of the most flawed characters of Jewish history. But doesn’t this plot twist compromise his entitlement to rule? Some might say you’re play with postmodern fire with one of the oldest stories known to man.

The mistake of that question is in the assumption that playing with fire is a bad thing. To tell any version of a story that beloved or revered or what have you, you have to be unafraid to make it your own. Otherwise all you’re doing is a school play. So yes, we made choices. In characterization of people, of moments, names, everything.

As for why that particular choice for David, I just wanted to give him a starting point that came in contrast to the assumptions anyone familiar with the text might have about him. If he waltzed on to the scene already ready to put on his leader shoes and be the solution to the country’s every problem there’s no growth, nothing except silly circumstance in his way—and we would have missed the best bits. I wanted the series to be about the creation of a leader whose actions would be felt and remembered through time. About how he became, through time and experience, the expected David. See the lessons learned, the personality formed, and the flaws manifest.

There’s been plenty of commentary about David’s relationship to Jonathan in the Bible. Jonathan at one point strips naked and gives his clothes and armor to David, who professes to love him more than he could love any woman. Your decision to make Jonathan a closet case but not necessarily a true friend and ally of David—that seems a setup for a future power struggle that isn’t in the Old Testament.

Fair assessment. Here, you’re staring down the barrel of television. The measures of creative success in a pilot episode is its ability to draw characters you want to know more about. The suggestions of future story. It’s arguable that whatever story actually told in a pilot is just a vehicle for that. You are devising and stuffing the can of worms, then setting it on the lunch table. Jack and David’s friendship—any liberties taken there—was engineered to create opportunities for story.

You’ve introduced a compelling character who isn’t in the original text—Queen Benjamin. Equal parts Lady Macbeth and Queen Esther, she seems the most astute inhabitant of Silas’s court, knowing where all the forks should go, and where all the tension lies. She also gets the best lines. Did you feel the absence of a front-and-center queen in Saul’s reign made him less a interesting monarch? Is she a composite of all the strong women that occur in David’s life, particularly Bathsheba?

Bathsheba was a card left on the board for another day that sadly will never come. Rose was a character that took on a life of her own, particularly once inhabited by Susanna Thompson, who invented something with her far beyond my own expectations. She was a true gift. I knew I wanted to people David’s world with strong women—for a lot of reasons, mostly because women figure so heavily in his later destiny, and for the role strong women play in the biographies of so many great leaders. The early David narrative is weak on that point. So along came Rose. And David’s mother—our Jessie.

Rose also gave us a lot to play with in terms of Silas’s story. Her silent hand pushing the chess pieces around, all for the propagation of her kind. She might have begun seeming like a superficial schemer, with more shallow goals, but the plan was always to reveal Rose as far more formidable than that. The episode that just aired this last Saturday, “The Sabbath Queen” reveals in flashback her role in declaring the very war that killed David’s father. Where Silas fails, there is always Rose to be the better king in his place. He needs her. And knows it.

A cynical and never-ending war with Gath, which is a stand-in for all the lands of the Philistines, is the overriding political theme in Kings. But you’ve also given us a seedy and all-powerful corporation controlling the kingdom’s media, emptying its coffers, and undercutting its sovereign. Is your biblical dramatization is purposefully rooted in the Bush era?

As a writer you always take the path that yields better story. And those particular tropes from our times put a lot of worms in the can. The audience can interpret any way they’d like. So long as they enjoy watching.

Illustrations from The Golden Haggadah, courtesy British Library.

Goldstein is a regular contributor to the public radio program <i>This American Life</i>, and the host of his own CBC show, <i>WireTap</i>. He speaks with host Sara Ivry about what prompted this literary undertaking, how Bible-versed he is, and why he left Abraham out of the story.

Olah

This “ascending offering” is “burned whole” at the altar as an offering to “God.” While some consider it “a terrible waste,” suggesting that “God” has no “corporeal body” and that therefore the entire ceremony is “a waste of a perfectly good bull,” most realize the “symbolic” meaning of this act, adding that “some smiting” might follow unless “God” gets His “meaty nosh.” Everyone, however, can agree that the “awesome barbecue smell” makes Olah a perennial favorite.

Minchah

“Fine flour,” “olive oil” and “frankincense” may not sound like the ingredients for “a perfect pancake,” but this “meal offering” still emits a “pleasing fragrance for the Lord” when set up in flames. This “no frills” kind of offering is “the poor man’s ritual sacrifice,” a good and affordable way to worship while traveling for “forty years” in “the desert.” Make sure you offer a portion of the Minchah to “the Cohens” if you want to get “a good table” in “the next world.”

Shelamim

Although forbidden to eat “any fat or any blood,” Israelites still find this sacrifice very popular because of its “personal meaning“ and “direct relation” to their “lives.” Meant as a ”peace offering” to “God,” a “bull, a sheep or a goat” are burnt at the altar, giving thanks for “good things that happened” as well as “good things that haven’t happened yet but we hope would happen soon.” Some say this system of “paying in advance” for “divine beneficence” is “stupid,” and want to “slaughter innocent animals” only after “God” has delivered “triumph,” but most Israelites agree that giving thanks “certainly can’t hurt ya.”

Chatat

A favorite with “transgressors” everywhere, this offering is designed to atone for “erroneously committed sins.” The elaborate menu offers options for “ordinary individuals,” as well as “priests” and even “the entirety of Israel,” and insists that no matter “how personal” the misdeed, “repentance” is still “a very public affair.” While you may be “super embarrassed” to share “your dirty little secrets” with “the entire freakin’ nation,” at least there’s a “delicious” meal waiting for you in the end. Even the harshest critics agree that Chatat is “much yummier than confession.”

Asham

Fans of “robberies” and “withholding funds” swear by this “guilt offering,” although “trespass” and “betrayal” may also get you in. With a few of “the right words” recited by the “Cohen,” you may even be “forgiven” and spared “a strange and horrible death from above.” Although no one is especially “fond” of giving Asham, “sweaty, nervous” Jews all agree it’s “far better than the alternative.” Some merciful ones even recommend it to “Bernie Madoff.”

Aboard Noah’s ark, some of God’s creatures won’t get with the program.

Written by Stephen Levinson and Joel Moss Levinson. Animation by Ed Mundy. Illustration by Mike Herrod. Music by Craig Hillelson. Sound engineering by Jesse Novak. Featuring the voices of Bob Balaban, Aaron Bleyaert, Jonathan Katz, Jess Lane, Jesse Novak, and Tami Sagher.

After forty years in the desert, Moses has had enough.

Coming in December: Episode IV.

Written by Stephen Levinson and Joel Moss Levinson. Animation by Ed Mundy. Illustration by Mike Herrod. Music by Craig Hillelson. Sound engineering by Jesse Novak. Featuring the voices of Shek Baker, Todd Barry, Joe DeRosa, Jonathan Katz, and Livia Scott.

As soon as the visitors arrive in the city, they are instantly ringed by more than one hundred police officers, who buffer them from local Jewish settlers harassing the group.

“The gay pride parade isn’t here,” shouts a boy in a tee shirt, yarmulke, and tzitzit.

“You say you are humanists, but you’re fascists,” a bearded man screams into a megaphone.

Manekin and Shaul don’t answer; instead, Shaul keeps talking to his small group, his voice barely rising above the crowd of settlers heckling him.

The West Bank city of Hebron has long been notorious for the brutality between Jews and Palestinians, numbering 1,000 and 166,000 respectively. But lately the city has become a battleground between two groups of Israelis led by Orthodox Jews, waging what each sees as an epic struggle over the physical and moral borders of the future Jewish state. Instead of truncheons and guns, the weapons are tour buses and megaphones.

“Our state has to decide to be here or not,” say Shaul, who is twenty-five. “But one of the things we think can’t happen is this injustice.” He’s talking about the restrictions on Palestinian life, the focus of the eleven-dollar tours of Hebron, which depart from Jerusalem once a week, led by Shovrim Shtika.

After a walk down the main avenue of Jewish Hebron, a silent street that was once the commercial center of the city, Manekin and Shaul take groups to visit a Palestinian family, and then to the grave of Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli-American settler who, in 1994, shot twenty-nine Muslims in the city’s Tomb of the Patriarchs before being killed by a mob.

Mikhael Manekin of Shovrim Shtika in Hebron

I met Manekin in a café in Jerusalem’s Talpiyot neighborhood, where he lives with his wife and infant daughter. Earnest and quick to smile, Manekin, who is twenty-nine, wears a yarmulke over closely trimmed black hair and a neat, short beard. He grew up in Maryland, with an American father and Israeli mother, and moved to Israel in time to be drafted in 1998. He began to question Israel’s treatment of Palestinians during his four years as a soldier.

“You can’t be a benevolent occupier,” says Manekin. “Most of [Shovrim Shtika's] soldiers were the people who came in to do things differently, who had moral qualms. And all of them failed. We are not [in Hebron] to make the situation more calm, we’re in there to make it known.”

Manekin says his group tries to reach Israeli teenagers who will soon be drafted. The organization also caters to other Israelis – journalists, parliamentarians, and ordinary citizens, with additional days for foreign media and politicians. In 2007, Shovrim Shtika brought three thousand visitors to the city. “We target the Jewish audiences because we think they have a stake in this conflict,” he says.

Yet, to the settlers who choose to live in Hebron, these activists are putting sympathy for the Palestinians above the plight of the city’s Jews, past and present.

On a warm Wednesday in May, New York transplant Simcha Hochbaum speaks to a group of twenty-four tourists beside a yellow plastic jungle gym in Jewish Hebron.

“Let’s forget about politics,” Hochbaum, who is forty-one, tells the group, as behind him a settler leaves a caravan clutching a small boy, two bike helmets, and a machine gun. “Let’s talk about Abraham.” He speaks rapidly, peppering his spiel with jokes about Ruth collecting food stamps and young King David taking Ritalin.

Hochbaum guides these tours through the settlement’s fundraising body, the Hebron Fund. Tours cost forty dollars and depart from a Jerusalem hotel once a week during the year and twice a week in summer. But those aren’t the only differences from the tours led by Shovrim Shtika.

Hochbaum paints Hebron as a place where Jews have always lived, were brutally evicted, and finally bravely replanted themselves. His itinerary includes the Tomb of the Patriarchs, built on land Abraham bought in the Bible and said to contain the remains of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their wives. The group also visits a memorial room for the 1929 massacre of Hebron, in which the city’s Arabs slaughtered their Jewish neighbors. And Hochbaum visits a wall dedicated to Shalhevet Pass, an infant shot by a Palestinian sniper in 2001, and says he named his daughter after the slain child.

Hebron is the only Palestinian city with an Israeli settlement inside it. In addition to being Abraham’s first purchase in Biblical Israel, Hebron also served briefly as King David’s capital, and Jews are said to have lived there peacefully since. However, after sixty-seven Jews perished in the 1929 massacre, the rest of the community left and in 1948, Hebron passed to Jordan.

When Israel won the Six-Day War, and with it Hebron, religious Israeli nationalists saw a chance to renew the Jewish community. They moved first to the adjacent town of Kiryat Arba, and eventually into the historic Jewish quarter of the city in 1979.

Noam Arnon, spokesperson of the Hebron settlers, protesting the Shovrim Shtika tour

Hebron Spokesperson Noam Arnon is a prime example of the pull of the city. As a twelve-year-old in a secular suburb of Raanana, Arnon was captivated by Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War and the many religious artifacts dotting the newly-conquered West Bank. Six years later, he moved to Kiryat Arba, and finally settled in Hebron, where today he lives with his wife and eight children.

“We came here to Palestine only because of the history,” says Arnon, who is fifty-three and has a master’s in Jewish history from Hebrew University. “And history begins in Hebron.”

“All the Jewish sites were destroyed. The Jewish quarter was a dump and public toilet and a cattle path,” says Arnon, who led excavations in the synagogue. “Everything stank. The Jewish cemetery was destroyed, and on it was a garden for trees, and grapes and vegetables.”

The settlers of Hebron rededicated the synagogue and moved into formerly Jewish buildings. But the animosity from 1929 never wore off, and Jews and Arabs continued to inflict such brutal casualties on each other that in 1997, Israel and the Palestinians divided the city, assigning eighty percent to Palestinians, twenty percent to Israel, and forbidding each side from entering the other.

But this plan has a serious catch: the Jewish section’s borders included thirty-five thousand Palestinian residents. Since 2000, the IDF has declared parts of this area “sterile,” meaning Palestinians cannot drive, open shops, or sometimes even walk on sections of the main road”known to Jews as King David Street and to Arabs as the Street of the Martyrs”in the place where they live.

Although he has seen it hundreds of times, Manekin says the Street of the Martyrs still shocks him. It’s a long, dusty road, lined on either side by old stone two-story apartment buildings, where rusting green steel awnings hang over shuttered green steel doors that are spray-painted with Jewish stars and the Hebrew word for revenge. Up above, Palestinians sit on second-story balconies enclosed with metal netting, which Manekin explains is defense from settlers who throw rocks their way. Because the IDF welded their front doors shut, these families must clamber out their windows and walk across rooftops until they reach the section of the street where their feet may touch the ground.

“There’s something about that Star of David on that door which is very sickening,” says Manekin. “The idea that [Jewish] people walk around freely and other people are caged up on their second floor and that’s being upheld by the Star of David . . . That’s the point where no excuse can excuse it.”

Arnon doesn’t see things that way.

“The rebuilding of Hebron is the most right and just idea in the world,” Arnon says, and mentions that he regularly gets stones thrown at his house and car, including one that shattered his living room window three months ago. For him, evacuating Hebron is not option.

Anyone who tries to evacuate Jews from the city “will not get out alive,” Arnon says. “And they don’t have the right to do it. The Jewish community of Hebron had existed here before the state of Israel. Jews lived here under Herod and under the Crusaders and under Mamluks and under Byzantines, and Jews will live here anyhow and anyway under any condition.”

Street of the Martyrs/King David Street, Hebron

On his tours, Hochbaum refers to Palestinian Hebron as “the eighty percent unfortunately given away,” and laments that Jews must share the other twenty percent with thousands of Arabs. Manekin and Shaul, for their part, speak of Hebron’s slain Jews, but mostly on the bus ride in.

The target audience for the settler tour is North Americans who are sympathetic to the Jews of Hebron. One Christian minister says she is outraged by large Palestinian homes within a stone’s throw of cramped Jewish caravans. A Jewish father and daughter are regulars to the city’s annual Passover celebrations; the family’s thirteen-year-old girl recently asked Bat Mitzvah guests to contribute to Hebron. Hochbaum’s tour is in English, and emphasizes this fundraising aspect.

“We are here every day putting ourselves on the line as messengers and emissaries and it’s not easy,” he says to his group.

The Shovrim Shtika trip, by contrast, is in Hebrew. Although there are a few Americans, the majority of participants are young Israelis from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, mostly well-dressed and erudite. Several Israelis are home on vacation from European universities.

“You can’t help being shocked and disgusted by the violence that is present in every sentence [the settlers say],” says Itay Snir, 33, a high school philosophy teacher from Tel Aviv. “It’s racism all the time toward the Palestinian residents.”

Hebron is just one part of the rift between Israel’s right and left, who are carrying out a modern-day incarnation of a decades-old debate about how to be a Jew.

The first Zionists who moved to Israel were eager to shed their weak and pale personas in favor of a strong New Jew, embodied by the charismatic, fictional Ari Ben Canaan in the film Exodus. Ben Canaan helps defeat Arab enemies and shepherds Holocaust survivors to safety in the new land, operating in a world of clear right and wrong. Arnon sees the world in a similar way.

“To make propaganda against the Jewish people and against the Jewish community in Hebron, and against the army, which is the Jewish state, and to make this propaganda and to bring here foreign journalists and diplomats, this is anti Jewish,” he says of Shovrim Shtika.

“I know the Jewish history from the beginning, and I know that every generation is writing a new page in this very old book,” Arnon adds. “I try to do my best that the page our generation writes will be a page of continuing the heritage and not a page of betrayal and abandonment of our roots and nationhood and history.”

But Manekin, who refuses to give his ideas for how to solve the problems of Hebron, sees a world with fewer clear answers.

“I don’t feel like what bothers me is nationalist questions,” he says. “Religion is very much a part of my life, and being a Jew is very much part of my life. And it bugs me. It bothers me that Judaism is used to promote hate, forcefulness, and callousness. The Judaism of my family is one of being gentle.”

And the fact that he and Yehuda Shaul are Orthodox only exacerbates the conflict between them and the settlers. “We’re all religious zealots,” he says. “We all think that we know what’s right.”

Egypt wants the Hebrews to finish building the pyramids, but it’s time to move on.

Coming in October: Episode III, “Getting There Is Half the Fun.”

Written by Stephen Levinson and Joel Moss Levinson. Animation by Ed Mundy. Illustration by Mike Herrod. Music by Craig Hillelson. Featuring the voices of Julie Klausner and Sean Modica.

The call came when I was cooking dinner, which surprised me. Bad news usually comes in the middle of the night. My good friend Drorit’s daughter, Tal—one of my youngest son’s best friends—had been in a car accident. By early morning, she was dead.

The next day, an hour before Tal’s funeral, I rode my bicycle to the cemetery of our village on the Mediterranean shore in the Western Galilee. Everything was gloomy and gray: the sky, the sea, and the dismal task that lay before me. I’m a member of our village’s chevra kadisha, the burial society (the literal translation is “sacred society”). We perform the tahara, the washing and dressing of a dead woman for burial. About two hundred families live here, so I usually know the deceased. Most of the time the women are elderly, and while I feel somber doing their tahara, I sense that the women are at peace, surrendering to their fate. But now I faced performing this rite on a 17-year-old girl.

I began to wonder why I even agreed to this difficult volunteer job in the first place. I guess it began because of my own search for a meaningful Jewish life and because of a woman I’ll call Michal. A former ballet dancer, she had lived with James Taylor, hung out with the Beatles, and soared through the 1960s until she landed as a born-again Jew. I met her in the Long Island suburb where I lived for two years beginning in 1989. My parents, first-generation Americans, had raised me in that suburb—in fact, in that very same house. And while they had given me a sense of Jewish pride, they had passed on the idea that Jewish rituals and traditions were old-world superstitions. Now I found myself spiritually hungry. My father had passed away a few years before; I had three small children and a fourth on the way. I wanted to give my children a deeper sense of Judaism than the one I grew up with. I decided to check out a modern Orthodox synagogue nearby and I was struck by how warm and welcoming its members were. Then I met Michal, who began to serve as my spiritual mentor, proving that you could be hip and savvy and also a Sabbath observer. When she told me she was a member of the local chevra kadisha, I was intrigued. Michal explained that performing a tahara for a dead woman was the greatest mitzvah, the holiest deed one could ever do.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because the dead can never thank you.”

A tahara, then, was hesed shel emet, a one-way act of true kindness. The rite appealed to me, but living in the suburbs did not. I had wanted to live in Israel since visiting the country on a tour when I was 16, and so I moved here with my family in 1991, before I had the chance to join Michal’s chevra kadisha group.

Jewish tradition has stressed the importance of a proper burial since the Biblical account of Abraham’s purchase of the Cave of Machpela to bury his wife Sarah. How Sarah and the other matriarchs and patriarchs were buried is a mystery. In Genesis, when Jacob summoned his son Joseph to his deathbed, he requested, “Deal with me in kindness and faithfulness. Please do not bury me in Egypt.” Joseph heeded the second part of his request and did not bury Jacob in Egypt; he did, however, embalm his father, an Egyptian practice that never caught on among later generations of Jews. Ironically, one of the first clear-cut references to what the ancient Jews did with their dead comes from the Gospel of John, who described how Joseph of Arimathea took Jesus’ body and “wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury.” (The spices were a mixture of myrrh and aloe, but John doesn’t elaborate on their use.)

By the 16th century, the Shulchan Aruch, or Code of Jewish law, contained instructions on how to properly treat the dead. According to Rabbi Maurice Lamm, author of The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning, membership in the chevra kadisha was always considered a privilege. Rabbi Elchonon Zohn, director of the National Association of Chevros Kadisha, says that in pre-World War II Europe membership in the chevra kadisha was passed on from father to son as well as from mother to daughter. So many people coveted membership that when new members were needed, they were chosen by lot or by secret vote. But in America, Zohn says, by the 1950s, non-Orthodox American Jews had begun to leave the care of their dead to funeral parlors, most without tahara options. “It became a very unpopular hesed,” Zohn says, “with only a few older people performing the service.”

In the 1970s, a Conservative congregation in Minneapolis created a stir when it started a chevra kadisha. (Rabbi Arnold M. Goodman, part of that group, describes the experience in his 1981 book A Plain Pine Box: A Return to Simple Jewish Funerals and Eternal Traditions.) There are no statistics on how many chevra kadisha groups now exist in the United States, but Rabbi Zohn says that in the past twenty years “there’s been a real movement toward being involved with chevra kadisha work, even among Reform and Conservative Jews, young people, and professionals.” The 10-year-old website Jewish-funerals.org, which features guidance for those starting a chevra kadisha as well as information about funeral traditions and organ donation, is visited by more than 120,000 people a year, according to its editor, David Zinner, executive director of Tifereth Israel Congregation, a Conservative synagogue in Washington, D.C. Interest has sparked an annual North American Chevra Kadisha Conference that is now in its sixth year.

A few years after I moved to Israel, my friend Michal suddenly died. That same year the rabbi of our village asked me to join the chevra kadisha. By then, living in Israel had chipped away at my enchantment with religious fundamentalism. I still attended Sabbath morning services, kept kosher, and made traditional Friday night dinners, but I had begun driving on Saturday because, given a six-day work week, it was my family’s only day to visit friends in other places. Volunteering in the chevra kadisha was a way to honor Michal’s memory for all she had taught me. I also wanted to give something back to the residents of the seaside community I now called home.

I performed my first tahara on a woman I never knew. Throughout the ritual, I felt jittery and uneasy. I worried I’d do the wrong thing, move her body the wrong way. I took shallow breaths, partly out of fear and partly because I was wary of inhaling the stale, sour odor of the dead. As soon as the tahara ended, I stepped outside the burial house and breathed in deep. I was standing in the cemetery but I was still flooded with a sense of relief. I had returned to the realm of the living. The following morning, I went to the village synagogue and sat—randomly, I supposed—in another section, in a seat I had never sat in before. I looked down and saw the dead woman’s name: it had been her seat. It seemed like a divine act of synchronicity, a sign that being part of a chevra kadisha was something I should continue to do.

When a woman dies, the rabbi contacts one of the chevra kadisha members. She, in turn, calls the other women. As soon as I find out I have to do a tahara, I feel humbled. Whatever I was going through during the day—standing too long on line at the bank or celebrating a just-published short story—suddenly loses significance in the face of death. I change out of my usual pair of jeans and put on a patchwork skirt and a plain black shirt that I’ve set aside as my chevra kadisha clothes. I could wear any clothes to do a tahara, but I wore this skirt and shirt during my first tahara and after that, they seemed charged with a different purpose. My friend Ann, another American immigrant and chevra kadisha volunteer, says that she also has a set of chevra kadisha clothes. “That outfit is like a uniform,” she says. “It represents what I’m about to do. And it’s important that I can take it off afterwards and go on with my life.”

The village’s one-room burial house sits in a corner of the cemetery. It is a simple stone house, built in the 1950s. The cement walls are barren but for a small sink and faucet. The tiles on the floor have faded so much over the years that nobody can tell what color they once were. Several empty coffins stand upright in one corner, empty and ominously ready. When the chevra kadisha members arrive—a minimum of four women is required by Talmudic law—we greet each other quietly. Even if I’ve been in the midst of a spectacular day, I feel thoughtful, somber, focused. We don disposable latex gloves and white cotton lab coats—donated by a nearby hospital—that are kept in the burial house. And although only one or two of the chevra kadisha members are religious, we all wear scarves or hats as a sign of respect.

The dead woman lies on a marble slab in the middle of the room, covered with a sheet. Her feet face the door, as is the custom. First, we gather in a circle around the deceased and one of us says a prayer, asking God to help us perform our task with “loving kindness and with truth.” Then we get to work. With the sheet still over the dead woman to preserve her dignity, we carefully inspect the body, removing all bandages, hospital tags, and jewelry (I once gently plucked a gold Star of David necklace out of a dead woman’s closed hand).

As at a Seder, the order of the tahara is precise. We are required to use nine kavim of water (twenty-four quarts) and, beginning on the right side, we pour water on her head, her neck, arm, the upper half of her body, the lower half. We do the same on her left side, then her back. The tahara is really a woman’s last mikva, her final ritual bath. To borrow a Christian term—which was borrowed from the Jewish idea—this is her ultimate kosher baptism.

After patting her dry, we take off her nail polish, trim her fingernails, and brush her hair. We don’t add any makeup. Finally, we dress her in the tachrichim, the linen burial shrouds, which are grayish beige. There are no buttons, zippers, or pockets.

In other parts of the world, dirt is imported from Israel in recognition of the idea from Genesis that “dust you are and to dust you will return.” In our village, one of us simply scoops up some dirt from outside and sprinkles it on the deceased’s closed eyes. Then we cover her with the head shroud, followed by the pants, bunching them up at the bottom as if they were a pair of loose linen stockings. When I slide my hand into the sleeve of the shroud-shirt to pull the woman’s arm through, I’m reminded of dressing my newborn babies. But a dead woman’s skin is stiff and cold. I’ve never gotten over my discomfort at touching a dead woman’s skin, maybe because it represents all of death’s mystery. We loosely tie three sashes without knots to hold the shrouds in place and say a prayer, asking the dead for forgiveness if we unintentionally disrespected her in any way.

This is the ritual if a woman dies peacefully. But Tal, my son Ari’s friend, had been in an accident and her body was splattered with blood. Since blood is holy, a part of the body, it must not be washed away. We couldn’t do a tahara for Tal. It was terrible not being able to do this last rite and give her some kind of closure, so we stood in a silent circle, not sure what to do next. Tal was a vibrant, lovely teenager. She had been Ari’s close friend since nursery school. Her little sister was Ann’s daughter’s best friend. All of our lives were intertwined and losing her so senselessly, so young, felt unbearable. We stood there, speechless, in tears. Seeing Tal like that was more than I had bargained for when I joined the chevra kadisha.

“Her mom just asked us to cut some of her hair,” I said. My voice sounded ripped apart, like a shirt collar that has been torn right before a funeral, as a traditional sign of mourning.

Carefully lifting the sheet, Ann cut off some of Tal’s long, earthy-blond curls.

“Is that enough?” I asked.

“It will never be enough,” Ann whispered.

We unfurled a crisp burial sheet and let it float down around Tal. Yet we lingered, not ready to say good-bye. Then we lifted her into the coffin. Tal had studied dance, she had been graceful and lithe, but it took all our strength to raise her. I remembered Michal’s husband telling me the same thing after Michal died in their home. He said, “The dead are always heavy because the soul has gone and it’s the soul that carries the body.”

I believe that the soul carries the body. As the Lubavitcher Rebbe explained, you can hold a wooden chair in your hands and feel that it exists. But if the chair is burning, you can’t hold the heat and energy that is created from the fire. No substance really disappears, he said, it is transformed, and the same holds true for our souls. I might have drifted away from an Orthodox way of life, but the Rebbe’s concept is proven to me again and again during a tahara. The work fills me with a sense of the inexplicable and the divinely mysterious. A sense that what we do in our lives reverberates, somehow, even after our deaths; and that what we do for the dead has power and resonance. A sense of my place in the chain of Jewish history. And a sense of being gratefully, utterly, miraculously alive.

God holds Abraham to his word. Isaac goes along for the ride.

Written by Jonathan Katz, Stephen Levinson, and Joel Moss Levinson. Animation by Ed Mundy. Illustration by Mike Herrod. Music by Craig Hillelson.

A.J. Jacobs seems unusually attracted to projects requiring a level of compulsiveness that might scare off other writers. A few years ago, he spent a year reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and wrote The Know-It-All, his account of the undertaking. Now, he’s at it again, with The Year of Living Biblically, which chronicles his effort to follow the laws of the Bible as literally as possible.

Over the course of 12 months, Jacobs grew his beard long, prayed often, and stoned adulterers. In the process, he came to appreciate certain wisdoms of the ancient texts. He speaks with Nextbook about his process and its results.

How did the early modern republicans use Jewish sources?

Many major thinkers in the 17th century considered the ancient Hebrew polity to be the first community that exercised the rule of law as an overarching principle of government. You have the English jurist John Selden [1584-1654] devoting all his scholarship to legal Hebraism. To him, the Torah was the ancient Israelite constitution—namely, a very detailed legal mechanism that was the first and best example of natural law, divinely ordained but also a functioning human legal code. He viewed the Torah as a constitution, a moral code of law which could be used to resist any attempts by a king or other strongman to place himself above the law. This is what the Germans would many years later call a Rechtstaat—a state of law, a rule of law. Which is, of course, one of the mainstays of republican government. Selden was able to read Hebrew and studied not only the Torah but also the Talmud, which he used to support his argument about the sophistication of the ancient Jewish legal system. Selden’s reputation ranged far and wide; his works on the ancient Israelite code were known both in England and on the continent.

What about a Biblical foundation for the notion of the republic, which is generally seen as the legacy of Greece or Rome?

Many of the republican thinkers considered the fine balancing act between the Twelve Tribes to be a deeply republican achievement. They also paid attention to the laws giving roughly equal social and economic power to the various tribes and to the families within each tribe. According to ancient Jewish law, every 50 years you have to make an assessment of everybody’s property; if somebody has gained very much over the others, they have to give it back. It’s distributive justice; the idea is that the various families within each tribe have to be on a similar standing in their economic and social status. Here is a critical mainstay of a good republic: as many citizens as possible are economically able to take part in political life.

In Holland, the political philosopher known as Cunaeus [1568-1638] wrote an effective book called The Commonwealth of the Hebrews, which invoked both the notion of federalism and the notion of social justice. James Harrington, John Milton, and other members of the generation of the English revolution also found the Old Testament a convenient source of inspiration. They interpreted the laws of equity—whether rightly or wrongly, that’s another question—as creating the best economic model for a republic in which as many people as possible have property and therefore can participate in political life.

How did these theorists decide to turn to the Hebrew Bible?

Thanks to Protestantism, the Old Testament, translated into vernacular language, appeared on kitchen tables in many Northern European homes during the 16th century. Thanks to humanist scholarship, Hebrew was elevated to the status of a lingua sacra, and taught in theology faculties in Germany, Switzerland, and elsewhere. Hebraism became a central part of late humanist scholarship. Political Hebraism, which I am interested in, was a natural outgrowth: The Bible had so much to offer political theorists by way of social and political experience.

Did these theorists have any contact with Jewish scholars?

Someone like John Selden probably never met a Jew in his life: Jews had been expelled from England in 1290, and were not readmitted until after Selden’s death. But other English jurists of his time traveled to Geneva and Amsterdam, where they took part in the wonderful though brief period of scholarly and social interaction between Jewish rabbis, primarily exiles from Spain, and Christian scholars, particularly the Calvinists.

John Locke, you claim, was influenced by Biblical ideas about economic equity. How do you square this vision with his reputation as an unadulterated capitalist?

He’s not part of the Chicago School, though the Chicago School would be happy to take Locke on board. He actually cared a great deal for social solidarity. He wrote a beautiful sentence in an early essay saying that material possessions “are never so much ours that they cease to be God’s.” The idea that everything we have is, first and foremost, the property of God underlies Locke’s insistence that charity is a duty, not a question of individual decision. John Locke is a Christian deeply influenced by the Old Testament, and not a modern free-market figure.

How would you distinguish this conception of social solidarity from the Christian notion of charity?

In the Jewish tradition, charity is embedded in a legal system. The ancient agricultural laws insist that you give away some of your product. These are very impressive laws enforcing on the rich and on landowners a whole set of charity norms: They have to give away a certain part of their agricultural product for the use of the poorest members of society, whom the Bible calls by the token names of widow, orphan, and foreigner. That is different from the Christian notion of charity, which leaves good deeds to voluntary goodwill alone.

How did you notice these Jewish sources of European political thought?

By accident. Like many other students at Tel Aviv University in the 1980s, I steered clear of Jewish history and opted for what we called “general history”—which amounts to everything but Jewish history. At Oxford, I specialized in early modern European political theory in the British Isles. But as my research began to encompass early modern republican thought in Europe, I began to note the profound influence of Jewish texts and ideas on mainstream European political thought. What amazed me was the extent to which the Jewish contribution went unnoticed and underresearched.

Why do you think what you find to be such an obvious and important influence would have been overlooked?

When we talk about Jewish contributions to European history, we do not think of political theory. The dominant approach to the history of political thought for the last 25 years has treated their frequent biblical references—to both Old and New Testaments—as quaint remnants of the theological past. Though they acknowledged that political philosophers like James Harrington and John Locke knew the Bible and quoted from it, the Bible itself was never acknowledged as a genuine source of inspiration for political theory.

Part of the problem lies with the modern understanding of the Bible as a solely religious text detached from modern socio-political theory—unless you are a Christian fundamentalist or its Jewish equivalent, an ultra-Orthodox nationalist who thinks modern Israel should be replaced by a Torah state. Otherwise, I think modern thinkers overlook the secular legacy of the scripture, whereas the 17th-century thinkers themselves took the ancient Israelite political society to be a valid historical model equal to—and perhaps better than—the Greek polis or Roman republic. They took the Torah to be a viable ancient constitution. You could be a great contributor to secular political thought, like Thomas Hobbes, and nevertheless treat the Bible with great respect as a model for modern theory.

Why is teasing out the Jewish roots of 17th-century democratic theory relevant today?

For two reasons this line of thinking might provide a useful path. The first has to do with a debate over the idea that Israel can only be a Jewish or a democratic state, but not both. If we notice that modern liberal democracy has quite a few “Jewish genes,” we see that this is not a dichotomy at all. Democracy is not alien to Judaism. Liberal democracy is partly made of early modern republican thought, and Jewish sources contributed to that early modern European political discourse.

The second reason has to do with the current state of dialogue between the European Union and the Jewish world. Europeans must become more aware of the Jewish fingerprints on their own culture. Jews were not just the victims of Europe. They were the co-architects of modern European political thinking. This could be a good basis for reconstructing a dialogue—which is now in deep trouble. I think this dialogue must be cultural and historical before it becomes political.