Book Shelf. - Review - book review

National Review, April 2, 2001 by Michael Potemra

'Turn it over, and turn it over, because everything is in it." The rabbi at Richard Elliott Friedman's bar mitzvah inscribed these words in the young man's Torah, and they represent the challenge of three millennia to scholars and lay people alike. Friedman himself has just weighed in with a fascinating Commentary on the Torah (HarperSanFrancisco, 681 pp., $50), which provides a new translation of the first five books of the Bible along with the original Hebrew text.

Scholars, Friedman included, have long debated the authorship of the Torah: Which passage came from which (hypothetical) source? But in this work, Friedman is more concerned with understanding the text of the Torah as a whole, a complex literary and religious work whose underlying unity must not be splintered into a mere patchwork of texts and influences. And he does an excellent job of explaining how the text molds itself into a five-book unity, and a broader unity with the succeeding books of the Bible, through complex echoes and foreshadowings. He points out, for example, that the mysterious Nephilim-the giants who seem so out of place and mythological in Genesis 6-will resurface to be defeated by Joshua (military conqueror of Palestine), and to confront David (ideal monarch of the eventual Jewish state) in the person of his most famous opponent, Goliath.

Friedman notes at the end of his commentary that Deuteronomy closes with a restatement of God's promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but not the actual fulfillment of the promises. This, he writes, is "a message to the reader that [the Torah] is not meant to be just a story of the past. . . . It always points beyond itself, to the destiny of Israel and humankind" in the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures and beyond. It points not just forward, but backward as well, because-in the cycle of Jewish liturgical readings-the end of Deuteronomy is always followed immediately by a return to the beginning of Genesis. "The Torah thus involves a looking forward and a looking back, a linking of past and future," writes Friedman. "It is a strange concept of time: linear and cyclical at the same time, historical and timeless at the same time."

Friedman is also interesting in his analysis of individual passages. For example, one of the most mystifying events in the Bible occurs in Exodus 4:24. Having just given Moses instructions to confront Pharaoh, God appears to have a rather inexplicable change of heart. In the 1962 Jewish Publication Society translation: "At a night encampment on the way, the lord encountered him and sought to kill him." Why would God suddenly decide to kill Moses? Friedman modestly confesses that "no one knows" the true meaning of this incident, but offers his own suggestion. He translates the passage as follows: "And he was on the way, at a lodging place, and YHWH met him, and he asked to kill him." Friedman says the "he" and the "him" in this passage might both refer to Moses-who is therefore himself asking God to take his life, to spare him from the immense burden of being the prophet who must confront Pharaoh. This may or may not be an accurate interpretation, but it seems as plausible as the others, and certainly makes sense in the context of Moses' earlier reluctance to accept God's mission.

Friedman's is only the latest in an impressive line of one-volume Torah commentaries. The best for the lay reader is The Torah: A Modern Commentary (Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1,787 pp., $45) edited by W. Gunther Plaut. This massive volume contains not just the Hebrew text, the 1962 JPS translation, and intelligent essays of commentary, but also an amazing array of quotations from both Jewish and non-Jewish authors on the themes suggested by Torah passages. The book is a spiritual encyclopedia.

Another recent work is Everett Fox's The Five Books of Moses (Schocken, 1,056 pp., $35 hardcover, $25 paperback), a translator's attempt to recapture the sound, and not just the sense, of the Hebrew original. Fox forgoes some of the traditional felicities of translations, but what's truly remarkable about his version is its basic similarity to the others. Here's Numbers 16:17, in his version: "And take, each-man, his pan, / place on them smoking-incense, / and bring-it-near, before the presence of Yhwh, / each-man his pan, / fifty and two hundred pans, / and (also) you and Aharon, each-man his pan." Here's the King James Version, from four centuries ago: "And take every man his censer, and put incense in them, and bring ye before the lord every man his censer, two hundred and fifty censers; thou also, and Aaron, each of you his censer."

The literary styles are very different, but the sense is virtually identical. In comparing translations in this way, the reader can strengthen his assurance that in general-whatever translation he uses- he is getting a basically faithful version of the original; an English version that stands in analogy to the Hebrew much as the Hebrew itself stands to the truths that lie beyond words.