Josipovici is currently Professor of English at the School of European Studies, University of Sussex. In the preface to his book [The Book of God], he explains that he never mastered the Bible in the way he had mastered Chaucer and Proust, even though he was aware that the Bible contained narratives “far fresher and more ‘modern’ than any of the prize-winning novels rolling off the presses” (p.x). To rectify this deficiency, Josipovici learned Hebrew and Greek and digested nearly a hundred books and articles dealing with biblical studies.

At the beginning of his book, Josipovici raises the related questions of how the Bible constitutes “a sacred book” and how its many books (in terms of topic and style) can have a canonical unity. Then, so as to answer these questions, Josipovici skillfully brings his readers into fresh encounter with the rhetoric and pathos of the biblical narratives themselves. For example, using the story of the patriarch Joseph, Josipovici shows how a fairy tale beginning is artfully used to lure the reader into an identification with a hero who, in the course of the drama, encounters the cruel realities of jealousy and suffering. When a story of this nature is made to work again and again (e.g., as in the stories of Samson, of David, and of Jesus) then, in the end, the reader is ever more inclined to allow his or her own life to become an extension of this series. It is at this “end point” that the fundamental unity and the sacredness of the Bible emerges—not as a creedal proposition or scientific certainty but as the transformation of the reader through encountering the text.

Josipovici's study provides an exemplary text for students who are exploring the Bible as literature. Illusions to classical and current literature abound. But even beyond this, Josipovici offers an informed, sensitive, and balanced legitimation as to how Jews and Christians (and, to a lesser degree, Protestants and Catholics) are routinely led to interpret the same biblical texts quite differently.

Josipovici's book also has much to offer biblical scholars concerned with issues of methodology. Experts will discover that Josipovici is uninformed or misinformed on numerous technical points; yet, he deeply understands the impact of modernism on the Bible and, from a fresh vantage point, offers a trenchant assessment of how and why current methodologies fail precisely because they insulate the reader from that electrifying contact with the Bible whereby it can be known as The Book of God.