[In the following review, Donoghue offers a positive assessment of The Book of God, calling the work both scholarly and accessible.]

Gabriel Josipovici describes the Bible as “that most complex yet most reticent of books,” and his response to it observes both of the qualities he attributes to it. He will not let go of its complexity till it has blessed his account of it. Nor is he gruff in granting to it the right to be reticent.

In “Religion and Literature” (1935), T. S. Eliot denounced men of letters who go into ecstasies over “the Bible as literature,” the Bible as “the noblest monument of English prose,” and insisted that such men “are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.” The Bible, he maintained, “has had a literary influence upon English literature not because it has been considered as literature, but because it has been considered as the report of the Word of God.” The fact that men of letters discuss it as “literature,” he said, probably indicates “the end of its ‘literary’ influence.” Josipovici quotes this passage from Eliot's essay, and similar ones from writings by C. S. Lewis, James Kugel and James Barr, but he elects, while recognizing that the question of authority is inescapable, to go ahead without resolving it: he proposes to “trust the book itself and see where it will take us.” In that spirit he enters upon a context diversely prepared by such notable interpreters of the Bible as Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye, John Drury, Harold Fisch, Graham Hughes, Stephen Prickett, Paul Ricoeur, Amos Wilder, Meir Sternberg, Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. I don't know whether or not Josipovici accepts the Bible as the report of the Word of God, but he says nothing that would affront a reader who does. Even if he reads it as literature, he doesn't accept that the phrase “as literature” has limiting force, or that it confines him to a celebration of the sonorousness of biblical prose.

Josipovici raises four main questions about the Bible. Is it a book, or a ragbag? Should we read it as if it contained secrets to be deciphered, or with a quite different expectation? In what respects do the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible differ? What are the assumptions under which a reader of the Bible ought to proceed?

The Book of God is not a detective story, so I feel free to indicate the main direction of Josipovici's answers to these questions without giving the holy show away. The Bible is indeed one book, he thinks; it exhibits “the unity of disjunction, at the same time as it is an assertion of conjunction.” The disjunctions are not dark patches in our understanding: “they are the very fabric of this book.” No, we should not read the Bible as if it held secrets behind the words, waiting to be deciphered. We should read it as stories to be listened to, featuring people we encounter; as “narratives which engage our interest but about which we are not asked to hold particular views.” The main differences between the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible arise in a consideration of eschatology:

The Christian Bible leads to the end of time, to the fulfilment of time. When time is fulfilled everything will have been revealed. In Hebrew apocalyptic too there is an urgent desire for this, but by and large the Hebrew Bible chose a different path. It chose to stay not with the fulfilment of man's desires but with the reality of what happens to us in this life. We all long in our daily lives for an end to uncertainty, to the need for decisions and choices, with the concomitant feeling that the choices, we have made may have been the wrong ones. Yet we also know that life will not provide such an end, that we will always be enmeshed in uncertainty. What is extraordinary is that a sacred book should dramatize this, rather than be the one place where we are given what we desire. But that is precisely what the Hebrew Bible does.

The Hebrew Bible merely claims that there is a meaning in history; the New Testament claims to know what the meaning is. Not that the meaning is clear. Indeed, Josipovici backs off from the certitude he ascribes to the Christian Bible. “There is,” he says, “a strong tendency in Christianity, already evident in the New Testament, to search for the single story that will give shape to the world: but that tendency exists in tension with the sense, present in the Gospels as well as in much of the Hebrew Bible, that if there is such a story it is not one we will ever be able to know or tell.” The best analogy for reading the Bible, he finally says, is that of coming to know a friend. “Let us turn to it,” he urges, “not as to an object, but as to a person.” So ends a book he began by acknowledging indebtedness to Martin Buber and to Auerbach's account of figura.

The several chapters of The Book of God deal with these matters: the first words of Genesis, as variously translated by the Authorized Version, Jerome's Latin, the New English Bible, and several modern scholars; the episode of Joseph and his brothers (Genesis 45); the instructions for building the Tabernacle (Exodus 25); the Book of Judges; the question of prose-and-verse, or of formal and informal utterance; the significance of dialogue; Saul and David; Jesus, the different images of him in Mark, Matthew and John; St Paul and the question of subjectivity; the Epistle to the Hebrews, in its bearing on the meaning of history; the man whom Joseph meets in the field at Shechem (Genesis 37).

In each chapter, Josipovici raises a question of interpretation, shows why it matters, disputes with his predecessors and defends his own reading. In the chapter about the man in the field at Shechem, for instance, he glances at the corresponding passage in Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, before engaging in well-mannered dispute with Frank Kermode, whose reading of the similar episode in Mark 14 forms a vivid chapter in The Genesis of Secrecy (1979).

These several chapters in The Book of God are full of interest, indeed edifying in their selfless concern to enter into the implied spirit of the narration. Josipovici is especially perceptive on the significance of the Sabbath, the rhythm of renewal, St Paul's projection of himself in the likeness of the Prodigal Son, the gruesome character of Judges, the emphasis, in Exodus 25, on the making—the weaving and joining—of the Tabernacle even more than on the thing made. He is also splendidly helpful on the crucial themes which inevitably arise from his reading of particular episodes: considerations of faith, conversion, autobiography, memory, speaking-and-listening, father-and-son, authority, prayer and silence. He would not claim that his account of each of these is decisive: glancing blows he strikes, for the most part. Sometimes he shows how our understanding of a certain motif or a certain capacity is enlivened by thinking of something in Augustine, or in Bunyan, Kierkegaard, Proust, Kafka, Mann or Beckett. But these glances are always tactful; he is never vulgar or intrusive.

The Book of God could only have been written by a scholar, but it is not addressed, in the first instance, to scholars: it is for the common reader. Occasionally, Josipovici makes a quick reference which, I think, will send such a reader to the bigger dictionaries. “Usually in the Bible the parataxis of the syntax is matched by narrative parataxis,” he writes, adding “as we have seen,” as if to make the reader bite his lip and flick back the pages to see what precisely he is deemed to have seen. In The Book of God, as in Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, it is assumed that the reader is familiar with the difference between parataxis and hypotaxis. In fact, I could have done with another chapter in which that distinction, and its bearing on the Hebrew Bible, was clarified even beyond the gratifying clarity provided by Mimesis.

But the complaint is a minor one. For the most part, Josipovici's response to the Bible is not only highly intelligent but considerate. His “personalism” is at every point honourable, thoughtful, decent and exacting in an entirely justified cause. Perhaps it could be argued that the analogy of meeting a person, or coming to know someone, doesn't solve every crux in reading the Bible. It is one thing to acknowledge that even one's most intimate friend is entitled to his or her mystery; and another to come upon a passage in Judges, for instance, and feel outraged or merely stumped. But Josipovici's general approach to the Bible is admirable, and in most of the instances he has studied his interpretation is convincing. Not that he really wants to “convince”; he is persuasive, mainly, to the degree of his candour. If he is stumped, he doesn't pretend that he isn't.