THE PARTICULARS OF RAPTURE

A masterly volume of biblical interpretation from a virtuoso of exegesis.

Zornberg follows her prize-winning Genesis: The Beginning of Desire (1995) with this series of reflections on the second book of the Pentateuch. As before, she brings a profound learning in the traditions of Jewish hermeneutics and a wide and engaged reading in modern and postmodern writers and theorists from Kierkegaard to Lacan to bear on the biblical narrative. What ensues is a rich and challenging exploration in which the scriptural text is explained, interrogated, constructed, and deconstructed by an interpretive tradition that takes the Torah so seriously as God’s book that even the seams in the text, the repetition or variation of stories or phrases, the absences and lacunae, must be made to yield a meaning. And, drawing on the midrashic literature, the meanings she finds are sometimes startling—from the hidden meaning of the mirrors the women of Israel bring to Moses at the end of Exodus to the presence-through-absence of God enacted at Sinai and in the Tabernacle. Throughout, the author stresses the remarkable parallels between her project and psychoanalysis: both “represent a dissatisfaction with surface meanings,” and the midrash stands to the biblical text in somewhat the same relation as the unconscious does to the conscious (bearing “encrypted traces of more complex meaning”).

All students of the Bible will be grateful for the opportunity to study this most central of texts from a perspective at once old and new, with a teacher of such dazzling intelligence.