With this issue of the AJS Review, I bring my editorship to a close. I am proud to present this special issue to the Review's readership. It marks a change from the normal patterns of the Review, in that this issue consists entirely of articles solicited by the editors, revolving around the broad theme of the reverberations of the Bible in modern Hebrew literature and culture.

In the articles gathered here, scholars of Hebrew revisit modern literary works and cultural documents through the prism of their continuing discourse with the Hebraic master narrative, the Bible. These scholars identify twin patterns in modern Hebrew texts: one is of embedding biblical prototypes, dramatic or semantic, in modern writings, while often questioning, challenging, and reversing the ancient models; the other is recreating and foregrounding specific biblical characters, scenes, or images, yet endowing them with a contemporary consciousness or placing them within the current cultural attitudes or mindset. Several contemporary scholars understand this two-pronged pattern, revolutionary and deconstructive as it might seem, within the time-hallowed tradition of midrash. Some find the midrashic mode helpful in interpreting such texts as well as in providing a methodological framework to the critical discourse. Thus, Gershon Shaked suggests in his article that all modern texts displaying this pattern may be viewed as modern midrashim.

ldquo;In our two thousand years of exile, we have not totally lost our creativity, but the sheen of the Bible dulled in exile, as did the sheen of the Jewish people. Only with the renewal of the homeland and Hebrew independence have we been able to reassess the Bible in its true, full light,” Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1953. This statement illustrates several core attitudes of the Jewish national renaissance movement towards the Bible. Ben-Gurion depicted a direct relationship between the state of the Jewish people and the status of the Bible: The two rose and fell together. His words are reminiscent of philosopher Martin Buber, Revisionist leader Zeءev Jabotinsky, and others, all of whom postulated a symbiotic relationship between the Jewish people and the land of Israel: “Just as the Jewish people need the land to live a full life, so the land needs the Jewish people to be complete” wrote Buber. The Bible, according to Ben-Gurion, was the third component of the Jewish “holy trinity” of people, land, and book. It served as testimony of Jewish national life in the land of Israel in former times, as a blueprint for reestablishing this way of life, as proof of a glorious past and promise for the future. It nurtured a national romanticism and both inspired and buttressed universal ideas; it was the bedrock of myth and epos, of earthliness and valor, and also of a system of ethics and faith that rein in and restrain muscle and brawn. It was paradoxical proof of both Jewish uniqueness and Jewish similitude, “like all the nations” (I Samuel 8:5); “materialism” and “spirituality”; historical continuity and historical severance between the people and the land.

Canonization of the Bible resulted from a consensus of those to whom it was addressed and a ruling group of religious elites that established its sanctity. They declared that “Torah was given to Moses at Sinai” and valued it above and beyond its literary value. The process of canonization was not a simple one. Several books were included only after struggles among various pressure groups. For example: “At first, Proverbs, Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes were considered non-canonical because they consisted of parables, but later the men of the Great Assembly interpreted them.” (ءAvot dءRabbi Natan, 1). Further: “The sages wished to exclude Ecclesiastes because it contained inconsistencies, but they included it because it begins and ends with teachings of Torah” (Shabbat, 30:b).

Drama is the most neglected genre within Hebrew cultural development. In fact, until shortly before the foundation of the State of Israel, few plays in Hebrew had been staged. Although a large number of works in dramatic form had been written, particularly in the nineteenth century, few of them were viable theatrical dramas. They fell into the categories of rhetoric and allegory, devoid of believable dramatis personae. There were some milestones along the way, such as Somi's Zahut Bedihuta de-Kiddushin (An Eloquent Marriage Farce, c. 1600), Luzzatto's Leyesharim tehilla (Praise for the Righteous, 1743), and some modern plays, but these were not sufficiently feasible for the establishment of a dramatic tradition. An important factor qualifying the late development of Hebrew drama was the language, for within the communities' diglossia throughout the ages, Hebrew was reserved for more elevated discourse than playacting. Moreover, Hebrew, the language of the sacred texts, was inadequate for the expression of everyday life. Nowhere in the diaspora was there a Hebrew-speaking audience; there was no folk life in Hebrew as there was in Yiddish. Also, the potential playwrights were faced with the problem of the divine imperative in Jewish history, which precludes anything like the theodicy that gave rise to classical tragedy. Other religious restrictions against certain forms of representation, together with the small value Jewish religious authorities traditionally placed on theatre for its own sake, were also crucial factors mitigating against the drama's development.

No Hebrew reader, at least no reader with some Hebraic literacy, would be able to ignore the strong national resonance of the biblical phrases that Amalia Kahana-Carmon—one of Israel's foremost writers, the recipient of the 2000 Israel Prize—inserted into the masterful opening of the title novella of her 1984 triptych, Up on Montifer. Indeed, the evocative power of these intertexts is inescapable. “עAm levadad yishkon,” a verbatim quote from Balaam's prophecy (Numbers 23:9), is one of the sources for the construction of the Israelite and Jewish national identity, connoting uniqueness, exclusivity, and chosenness. The slightly veiled phrases “עover(et) lifnei hamaḥaneh” and “hanshei ḥalutz kovshim” add allusions to the foundational myth of the conquest of Canaan. In fact, they invoke the story of the tribes Gad and Reuben (Numbers 32), whose role as vanguard, crossing the Jordan before the rest of the Israelites (actually, “before the Lord,” as the biblical text insists), no doubt stands behind the modern Zionist use of the biblical term ḥalutz (vanguard) as “pioneer.”

The conclusion of Tmol shilshom is as satisfying as the climax of a Wagnerian opera or a Cecil B. De Mille movie. There is human sacrifice and there are claps of thunder and torrents of rain and cosmic evidence of divine wrath expended and placated. Nor does the novel's melodramatic end fail to satisfy its hyberbolic beginning: Isaac Kumer the naif, whose inflated dream of Zion carried the seeds of its own destruction, is bitten by a mad dog and sacrificed on the altar of the most primitive version of Jewish theodicy.

Each of the three childhood stories, S. Y. Agnon's “Bayaעar ūvaעir” [In the Forest and in the Town] (1939), Amos Oz's Panter bamartef [Panther in the Basement] (1995), and Aharon Appelfeld's Layish (1994), offers a child protagonist who inhabits two parallel landscapes: his own environment and the biblical universe. These child protagonists relive a biblical experience, but the degree to which the respective writers make them participants in evoking the biblical sphere is different in each story. These stories exhibit distinctly different paradigms of the art of embedding the biblical text in a modern, secular narrative and of the status it is given within it. In Agnon's tale, the scriptural intertext is inseparable from a dense network of Judaic master texts, discoursing with and commenting on each other. In Oz's novella, the biblical arena is the ancient parallel of present-day reality, the admired yet challenged national epic that mirrors and informs current political and territorial aspirations. In Appelfeld's novella, the biblical pattern is a remote, foreboding myth, not fully recognized by the actors in the modern tale yet powerful enough to hover over them and determine their destiny.

From its inception in the Enlightenment to this day, modern Hebrew poetry conveys a deep connection to the Bible that manifests itself in a variety of ways. An in-depth understanding of this connection—including its various expressions in content and language, its causes, its purposes, and its manifestations in all the literary genres, in each generation and for each individual writer—would require extensive research that could profitably occupy a large number of scholars. Nonetheless, even with the limited research that I have conducted, focusing on the place of the Bible in Hebrew poetry from the generation of national renaissance to the present time, the substantial anthology of poems that I am preparing for this purpose demonstrate clearly that modern Hebrew poetry constantly returns to the Bible, and that the Bible's oft-lamented decline in stature in Israeli society is nowhere to be seen.

The life story of Jacob, one of the longest and most complex of the Bible narratives, is a mine for the imagination of modern writers. Hebrew writers of poetry and prose have been drawn to Jacob's biblical tale and have made it the overt or latent intertext in their work.

Hebrew authors of the 1960s and 1970s used the biblical context to hint at their protagonists' religious yearnings, to invest their texts with additional levels of meaning, and to amplify the significance of their plots. In the Hebrew “postmodernist” fiction of the late 1980s and the 1990s, however, biblical allusions are less commonly found, and their functions have fundamentally changed. To examine these different functions, let us first juxtapose two novels, Avram Heffner's Allelim [Alleles], a typical example of the “postmodernist” trend, and Amos Oz's Menuha Nekhona [A Perfect Peace], a representative novel of the Israeli “modernist” school.

If we were to unravel the foundation of Jewish identity into its primary components, we would discover that beyond the religious commandments, beyond the various national sentiments, beyond the sense of belonging and connection to the Land of Israel and the Hebrew language, beyond certain historical and family memories that uniquely determine the Jewish identity of each individual, the common basis of all Jewish identities, in their various dosages and strengths, comprises several fundamental stories—stories that have shed any clear indicia of historical time and place and have become myths, metastories, which can no longer be changed, only interpreted. These myths, such as the binding of Isaac (the akedah), the story of the exodus and other bible stories, the stories of the destruction of the Temple (and recently, in a certain sense, the Holocaust), have become the infrastructural components of Jewish consciousness and identity, both religious and secular. They have served for millennia as effective ingredients in the preservation of the identity of many Jews, scattered among various lands and continents, in the midst of various peoples and religions and assorted civilizations, and for centuries without being specifically dependent on the clear historical context of a defined territory or language. These myths are the most primary basis for the existence of diaspora Jewish identity, which makes possible the preservation of Jewish identity “outside history,” in the famous phrase of Gershon Scholem, notwithstanding the terrible toll that this existence has taken on the Jewish people in the end. The power of these myths lies in the fact that one's connection to them can be immediate, in all places and at all times, and beyond their original linguistic form; this connection finds succinct expression in the sentence, “In every generation, a person is obligated to regard himself as if he himself left Egypt.”

A typographic error appears on page 295 of “The Maskil, the Convert, and the עAgunah: Joseph Perl as a Historian of Jewish Divorce Law,” by Nancy Sinkoff, in the November 2003 issue of AJS Review [2003:27(2), pp. 281–299]. In the indented paragraph from Joseph Perl's manuscript, the original Hebrew phrase “vekhatav”—which is noted in footnote 61 as appearing in the text itself—was elided, leaving an underline with no text. The passage containing the missing Hebrew phrase follows in its entirety: