This is a book about law and religion. It opens with a study of prophetic intercession as a response to the tensions inherent in monotheism, the struggles between love and Justice that seem to take place within Israel's God. The final chapters concern the rich legal vocabulary in which Israelites expressed ideas of freedom and spontaneity. The intervening essays also deal with legal language and concepts in religious contexts.
Law is a synthesis of form and content, yet it is formal only on the surface.
I have attempted to spell out some of the primal feelings underlying the law. I came to the study of law by a rather paradoxical road. Then, suddenly, I realized that ancient legal documents were telling a story, and that they told this story by a series of interrelated metaphorical clauses, clauses that had about them a poetic quality. If one would understand the document, one would have to decipher the code. I was shocked to realize that in the supposedly rigid and prosaic context of a sale document, one regularly found such metaphorical terms.