Book Shelf.(Review)

'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 ...