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Bewilderments : reflections on the Book of Numbers / Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg.

by Zornberg, Avivah Gottlieb, author.

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New York : Schocken Books, c2015.

Bible. Numbers -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.

9780805243048 (hard cover : alk. paper) :

0805243046 (hard cover : alk. paper)

xxxv, 359 pages ; 25 cm

Flags in the wilderness -- Madness and civilization -- Desire in the wilderness -- "Sing--now!--to God": Miriam and Moses -- Bewilderments -- Black sun: Moses and Job -- "From another shore": Moses and Korach -- Heart of stone, heart of flesh -- "Wherefore could not I pronounce 'Amen'?": Balaam and Moses -- To be or not to be: a tale of five sisters -- "Let me see that good land": the story of a human life.

"From one of the most acclaimed biblical commentators at work today, the third book in her award-winning series of commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. The Book of Numbers is the narrative of a great failure. What should have been for the Israelites a brief journey from Mount Sinai to the Holy Land becomes a forty-year death march. Both before and after the devastating report of the spies, the narrative centers on the people's desire to return to Egypt, to undo the miraculous work of the Exodus. This view of the wilderness history invites us to a different kind of listening to the many cries of distrust, lament, resentment that issue from the Israelites throughout the Book of Numbers. Is there a way to integrate this narrative of dark murmurings, of obsessive fantasies of return to Egypt, with the celebration of a love-intoxicated wilderness discourse? The question touches not only on the language the Israelites speak but also on the very nature of human utterance. Who are these people? Who are we who listen to them? What effect does the cumulative trauma of slavery, the miracles of Exodus, the revelation at Sinai have on a nation that is beginning to speak? In Bewilderments, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg posits fascinating answers to these questions through the magnificent literary, scholarly, and psychological analysis of the text that is her trademark"--

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