The greatest irony of the Bible is that it stands for the opposite of irony — certitude, transcendence, holiness — yet it is filled with nothing but irony. A truly bizarre anthology of contradictory texts is regarded as inerrant. The text is wrapped in traditions that at once venerate and contradict it. It is the preeminent cultural possession of the Jewish people, yet has only tenuous connections with Jewish religious practice.
A study of the Jews’ peculiar relationships with the Bible, Jean-Christophe Attias’s “The Jews and the Bible” is an excellent companion to the recent crop of books on the Bible’s construction, such as those by Michael Satlow, Joel Baden, and Timothy Lim, reviewed last year in these pages. These scholars tell us how the Bible came to be; Attias focuses on how it came to be regarded. Its subject is not what the Bible is, but what it is said to be.
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