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Luria in notes 26-28. In some late sources a monster called Rahav shel Yam is still to be found, rising out of the sea to side with the Egyptians and needing to be slain again. See Midrash va-Yosha’ in Adolph Jellinek's Bet ha-Midrash 1:46f. That monster lives on in the imagination of medieval Kabbalists, the great serpent of sin, waiting to be aroused. Stirred to life by the waywardness of human passions, the cosmic powers that opposed the emergence of the universe are now dressed in the garb of moral “evil” and lead the wicked into rebellion against the rule of God. See Zohar 1:52a; 2:34a-b; etc. See also discussion by Isaiah Tishby in Wisdom of the Zohar (Oxford: Littman Library, 1989), pp. 464-474; 529-532.

7. This lies at the basis of Tishby's understanding of tsimtsum in Lurianic Kabbalah, a view that has more recently been subject to some questioning. See his Torat ha-Ra’ veha-Qelippah be-Torat ha-ARI (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1952).

8. Some of these reflections on the figure of God in Biblical Israel are based on thoughts expressed by my teacher Yochanan Muffs. See especially his recent book The Personhood of God (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2005). I have learned much from Muffs, both in his classroom nearly a half century ago and again by reading and teaching his books.

9. The reacceptance of “myth” and its presence within Judaism characterize the thought of several leading scholars in our era. In particular I have in mind the writings of Michael Fishbane, Jon Levinson, and Yehuda Liebes.

10. Pirkey Rabbi Eliezer 19-20.

11. This claim is made by Franz Kafka in his Parables and Paradoxes (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), p. 29. On the parallel between Kafka and the Kabbalistic sources, see Nahum N. Glatzer, “Franz Kafka and the Tree of Knowledge,” in his Essays in Jewish Thought (University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1978), 184-191. The text to which Glatzer refers, “The Secret of the Tree of Knowledge,” attributed to Rabbi Ezra of Gerona (Spain, mid-thirteenth century), has been translated in Gershom Scholem's On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), pp. 65ff. We of the Western university know a great deal about that disjuncture, about the pursuit of knowledge unlinked from the love and unity of life, that which leads the tree quickly to reveal its potentially “evil” potency, even becoming, as the Zohar calls it, “the tree of death.” Torah, the new Tree of Life, is intended precisely as an antidote to it. See chapter 3.

12. See sources quoted (around Gen. 4:26) in Louis Ginzburg, Legends of the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1947), vol. 5, p. 151.

13. Hence the sages note on Gen. 6:9: be-dorotaw: Noah is considered righteous in his generation, but would not be thought so had he lived in the generation of Abraham or Moses. See especially Zohar 1:67b.

14. Thus the rabbis’ reading (Bereshit Rabbah 12:9) of be-hibare'am in Gen. 2:4 as be-Avraham is not entirely unfaithful to the larger text.

15. Such a theologian, for example, is Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel of Apt (Opatow; 1748-1825, the ancestor of my teacher A. J. Heschel), who taught that God is envisioned by the prophet as seated on the throne (or the chariot of Ezekiel) because we have placed him there. That which “God asks of you” (Deut. 10:12) is that you depict God in human form (Adam =MaH=45)! The “Adam” is adam ‘al ha-kise’, the enthroned vision of God. See the passage quoted by Zvi Hirsch of Zydaczow, ‘Ateret Zevi, aharey mot (Lvov, 1871, 25a-b). There are earlier sources for this view as well, though not articulated quite so sharply.

16. I have discussed this Midrash in “The Children in Egypt and the Theophany at the Sea,” Judaism 25 (1975): 446-466.

17. William Hallo, “Text, Statues, and the Cult of the Divine King,” in Congress Volume, Vetus Testamentum supplement 40 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), pp. 59f.

18. Understand here, as throughout, that I see this statement fully translatable into my own post-Darwinian religious language: the One delights in being briefly manifest