Religion is on the rise, even among the secular. In Dani Shapiro’s Devotion: A Memoir (HarperCollins, February), for example, a 40-something mother who had long before abandoned the traditions of Orthodox Judaism with which she was raised, seeks better answers to her son’s questions about God than her laissez-faire secularism provides. Being a novelist and memoirist, she does what professional writers do: she reaches out to religious authorities from various faiths who become her “guides through a spiritual crisis” and writes it all up as a journey to self-discovery.

Asking similar questions, Daniel F. Polish has sought out considerably more impressive, but long dead, gurus. His 2007 book, newly available in a paperback edition—Talking about God: Exploring the Meaning of Religious Life with Kierkegaard, Buber, Tillich and Heschel (SkyLight Paths, February)—engages the thought of four profound modern theologians, each of whom attended thoughtfully to the representations of divinity in Genesis. Polish, a Harvard Ph.D. in religious history who has participated in interfaith dialogues with the Pope and with Muslim religious leaders in South Asia, preaches what he practices: he also serves as a rabbi of a Reform synagogue housed in a Presbyterian church.

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In Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition (Yale, March), Rabbi Arthur Green, a stalwart of the Jewish Renewal movement, seeks to articulate a religious faith that does not just accommodate the arguments of Darwinian evolution and Biblical criticism, but folds these notions into the transcendent wonder of God. Calling himself alternatively a “seeker,” a “religious humanist” and a “mystical panentheist” (as distinct from a pantheist), Green acknowledges that “We people of faith have nothing we can prove…. Our strength lies in grandeur of vision, in an ability to transport the conversation about existence and origins to a deeper plane of thinking.”

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Ian Buruma, a Dutch-English-Jewish scholar of East Asia, dismayed some of his sharpest readers in 2007 with a sympathetic profile of Tariq Ramadan and skepticism of Ayaan Hirsi Ali; indeed, Paul Berman devoted 28,000 words in The New Republic to what Mark Oppenheimer called “a demolition of Ian Buruma.”. Buruma’s latest book, Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents (Princeton, February), argues that the intrusion of religion into politics threatens democracy in the U.S., in Europe, and—more surprisingly—in China and Japan. (It’s not the first time, by the way, that Buruma has pointed out that a phenomenon typically associated with the West can occur even in the Far East: he has also noted the odd resilience of East Asian anti-Semitism.) Will the new book redeem Buruma in the eyes of his former admirers, or simply confirm their sense of his descent into “ideological glaucoma”?

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Precedent for reining in the reach of religious authorities, as Buruma proposes, exists very far back in the Jewish legal tradition, or so argues Indiana University’s Chaya T. Halberstam in Law and Truth in Biblical and Rabbinic Literature (Indiana, February). The Torah may posit religious law that can be applied to human conduct, but the earliest rabbis, in Halberstam’s readings, weren’t so sure that humans could interpret, gather evidence, and administer justice with anything like divine precision.

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David Rosenberg, a frequent translator of the Bible who served a short tenure as editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society in the 1980s, suggests in An Educated Man: A Dual Biography of Moses and Jesus (Counterpoint, January) that the common distinguishing feature of his two subjects—last seen together visiting St. Patrick’s Cathedral in a Lenny Bruce bit—was not their connection to God, but the depth of their learning. One can’t help but wonder how Rosenberg’s respect for the erudition of these figures squares with his dismissal of contemporary scholar and translator Robert Alter as “pretty deaf to what real poetry is.”.

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Given the fundamental irreverence of so much literature, it is remarkable that Haim Sabato manages to weave together two careers as an Israeli rosh yeshiva and a preeminent Hebrew-language novelist. Sabato’s latest autobiographical novel to reach English, From the Four Winds (Toby, February), concerns a Mizrahi boy’s experience in an immigrant transit camp in the early years of statehood.

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Here’s something that beggars belief: publishers continue to shell out for premature Madoff exposés. The latest entry comes from England, where the literature on perfidiously greedy Jews stretches back to Marlowe’s Barabas and Shakespeare’s Shylock through to Dickens’ Fagin and Trollope’s Melmotte. In the rather condescendingly subtitled The Believers: How America Fell for Bernard Madoff’s $65 Billion Investment Scam (Orion, January)—were the Americans who invested with Madoff somehow more credulous than his Spanish or Austrian victims?—British journalist Adam LeBor emphasizes the scoundrel’s effectiveness in gaining the trust of the American Jewish community, as if that aspect of the case had not already received more than adequate press coverage.

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Not all Jewish frauds cause so much anguish; some even bring comfort to the bereaved. Take Rebecca Rosen. Raised as a Conservative Jew in Omaha, Nebraska, Rosen was studying for a B.A. in marketing at the University of Florida and struggling with an eating disorder when she realized she could channel messages from the dead, starting with her beloved bubbe. Having refined her shtick, the young medium now charges celebrities like Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox Arquette, as well as less famous gullible souls, upwards of $200 an hour to deliver messages from their deceased loved ones. For those who can’t afford her rates, but are still intrigued by her ability to peddle bobbe-mayses for top dollar, Rosen’s memoir-cum-self-help guide, Spirited: Connect to the Guides All Around You (Harper, February), explains how she discovered her gift and how she adroitly markets it.

At most, prophet was Jeremiah’s day job, the conventional mask he put on in order to voice his poetry more effectively. “It is hardly different today when it comes to the profession of the poet,” Rosenberg writes. “Sometimes he or she is a college professor, but we still call him or her a poet, not even a poet-professor.” He draws a comparison with the contemporary American poet John Ashbery, who has been a professor and an art critic. Still, “Ashbery wasn’t called an art critic-poet, and neither were the poets of Jeremiah called prophet-poets, as far as we know.”

To almost any reader—Jewish or non-Jewish, pious or skeptical—this redescription of Jeremiah cannot help sounding like a demotion. John Ashbery may or may not be, as Rosenberg writes, “the most eminent English-language poet alive,” but such eminence looks rather meager when compared to the distinction Jeremiah claims for himself (in the words of the New JPS translation):

The LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth, and the LORD said to me: Herewith I put My words into your mouth.
See, I appoint you this day
Over nations and kingdoms;
To uproot and to pull down,
To destroy and to overthrow,
To build and to plant.

For almost all readers until modern times, reading these lines meant taking their claim at face value. Jews, and Christians, listened to Jeremiah not because he was a good writer, but because he was chosen by God to deliver a message of the utmost urgency.

David Rosenberg knows, however, that we are living in a period when the Bible’s only claims on the attention of many readers is literary. That is why, in titling his book A Literary Bible, he is performing a clever dialectical maneuver. Yes, the title tells us, this Bible is literature, and not even canonical literature: it is a highly selective anthology of stories and verses, rendered into deliberately anachronistic, 21st-century English. Yet Rosenberg believes that literature can and should possess the same kind of moral force and spiritual insight once reserved for Scripture. For him, poetry is the only really sacred speech. It follows that to call Jeremiah a poet is actually a promotion, replacing the doubtful miracle of divine inspiration with the genuine miracle of poetic inspiration.

Here is how Rosenberg renders the famous passage from Chapter 31 of Jeremiah, in which the Lord comforts Rachel:

…these are the Lord’s words:
your voice will cease its weeping

your eyes brighten behind the tears
that dissolve into crystal-clear vision
of the children alive

returning home
from the lands of enemies
from beyond anguish to hope revived

vision is your reward
there is new life for your labor, remembrance
in the presence of children, eyes wide open

turning to the future
that is also yours
within the borders of a reality

and beyond them your descendants
are walking freely
by the strength of an unfailing imagination

an unbroken integrity
a listening dedicated
to the words that bade them live.

When Rosenberg translates Jeremiah, it is plain, he is not just translating Hebrew into English, or biblical idiom into contemporary concepts like “reality” and “imagination.” More profoundly, he is translating the concrete and pragmatic faith of the Hebrew Bible into the abstract and metaphorical faith that is all he, like many of us, can really believe in.

Rosenberg’s God promises to give Rachel, the mourning mother, a “vision” of her children, a “remembrance” of them, a future vaguely “within the borders of a reality.” It is all a little wordy and elusive, and at bottom it feels like a description of closure—a contemporary, secular understanding of renewal within the harsh limits of loss and grief. That is all Jeremiah the poet can conscientiously offer. It is different with Jeremiah the prophet, as we hear him in the new JPS transaltion:

Thus saith the LORD:
Restrain your voice from weeping,
Your eyes from shedding tears;
For there is a reward for your labor.

—declares the LORD:
They shall return from the enemy’s land.
And there is hope for your future
—declares the LORD:
Your children shall return to their country.

This is what a grieving mother would want to hear, a simple promise—your children are still alive and they are coming back. Jeremiah can make this promise because he believes in an actual God who is all-powerful. What we meet with in the best, most moving passages of A Literary Bible, on other hand, is a literary God, who has both the power of literature—since poetry can move, inspire, provoke—and the weakness of literature—since poetry is always hypothetical, a matter of thought and feeling rather than history and covenant.

Rosenberg, in his fervor for the power and privileges of poetry, does not always make this distinction as clear as it should be. In his notes and his afterword, Rosenberg is oddly abusive towards biblical scholars like Robert Alter and James Kugel, whom he casts as dullards and pedants, deaf to the Bible’s poetic genius. As a poet himself, he claims a privileged access to the biblical writers’ minds, which allows him to make sweeping and unsubstantiated claims about their intentions—for instance, that “the writers of the Hebrew Bible did not consider themselves divine.” This kind of certainty is characteristic of poets like Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell, whose translations of foreign poetry were imperially bold, and Rosenberg places himself in their tradition: “My apprenticeship in reclaiming biblical authors began, at nineteen, when I was Robert Lowell’s student in New York,” he writes.

But translating Rilke, or even Aeschylus, as Lowell did, is fundamentally different from translating the Bible. A text that claims to be the Word of God makes existential demands on us that a human text, even an ancient and prestigious one, does not. Robert Alter’s translations (which Rosenberg insults) respect the absolute and alien nature of the sacred imagination; Rosenberg, in his very passion to make the Bible communicate, turns it into something more domesticated and acceptable.

In part this is simply a matter of omission. To Rosenberg, the God we meet in the book of Job is “a caricature of God as a representation for conventional religion…. He lacks a human range of emotions.” For this reason, A Literary Bible only gives us Job’s long speech of complaint, which Rosenberg renders with convincing empathy:

why should someone have to walk around
blinded by the daylight
he can’t wave off

that God throws on him
waiting at every exit
in front of me…

every horror I imagined
walks right up to me
no privacy no solitude

and my pain
with my mind
pushes rest aside.

Rosenberg’s translation ends with chapter 31 of Job: “and here for now is ended/the poem/Job speaks.” The beginning of the next chapter, in the JPS edition, reads: “These three men ceased replying to Job, for he considered himself right”; and by restricting himself to Job’s complaining voice, Rosenberg compels the reader to share that conviction of self-righteousness. But the Book of Job ends in just the opposite spirit, as God himself replies to Job “out of the tempest” and brutally, majestically sweeps aside all his protests:

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations?
Speak if you have understanding.
Do you know who fixed its dimensions
Or who measured it with a line?
Onto what were its bases sunk?
Who set its cornerstone
When the morning stars sang together
And all the divine beings shouted for joy?

Here, as so often in the Bible, we are reminded that we do not “have understanding” of God, which is why his actions so often appear evil and inexplicable to us. It is precisely because God is God that he lacks “a human range of emotions”—and that is what makes him ungraspable in the terms of literature, which is a humane art. Perhaps it takes a prophet, rather than a poet, to make us see God face to face.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.