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I have rarely encountered an exegetical voice like this. This kind of contemporizing finds its place, more often, within the confines and vocabularies of sectarian religious circles, for whom the Bible (or some comparable text) always speaks as if it were addressed right to us, albeit in the oddly anachronistic voice of the speaker of Yiddish or Ladino and so on. But this voice of Friedman's, while clearly the voice of an academic scholar, speaks as if directly to our contemporary American English-speaking heart.

1. The holistic character of the biblical narrative, or what he calls "the historical flow of the Torah." Friedman introduces each one of the five books of the Torah with a brief but lovely introduction that identifies the theme and style that he believes gathers that book. As he stresses in his general introduction, every narrative, and often each verse, of the Torah should also be read as anticipating and remembering every other narrative and verse: "to read the Torah at any level beyond 'Sunday School,' one must have a sense of the whole when one reads the parts. To comprehend what happens in the exodus and in the revelation at Sinai, you have to know what happened in Genesis 1."

Genesis, he suggests, sets the context of the entire Torah. It teaches that the purpose of the covenant between God and Israel, and thereby the broader setting of the commandments that define that covenant, is God's relation to all of humanity and all of creation. When focused on the Exodus narrative of Israel's own liberation, therefore, Friedman wants his reader always to remember the universal and cosmic backdrop and purpose of those events. Sometimes a link between two narratives will illustrate the Torah's movement from universal to particular: "the story of the Tower of Babylon (and the dispersal of humanity) prepares the way for a shift … away from dealing with the fate of the species, and, instead dealing with individuals." The focal individual, of course, will be Abraham and the individual people he sires. At the same time, the last words of Moses, and the last words of Deuteronomy—"happy are you, Israel"—"are an assurance that Israel will survive to fulfill the destiny that was the first promise to Abraham to be a source of blessing to all the earth's families."

Friedman's holistic reading also discloses the theodicies that might otherwise remain hidden in the details of the Torah. On Genesis 16:6, for example, he comments that "Sarai's treatment of the Egyptian Hagar foreshadows (or is reversed in, or governs) Israel's experience in Egypt." (In 16:6, "Sarai degraded her"; and in Exodus 1:12, "Egypt degraded them.") Introducing the Book of Exodus, Friedman writes that while "Genesis involves a continuous narrowing of attention from the universe to the earth to humanity to a particular family; Exodus begins to broaden the circumference of attention again as the family grows into a nation … [and as] it introduces a theme of YHWH's becoming known to the world."

2. Enough critical, academic scholarship that the reader may learn not to read the text fundamentalistically. Commenting on God's command to Abraham, "Go forth from your father's birthplace" (Gen. 12:1), Friedman offers one of his few explicitly historical-critical analyses. Abraham, he notes, is in Haran, and Ur of the Chaldees was his birthplace! Friedman samples the explanations of medieval Jewish commentators: stretching the grammar, Ibn Ezra suggests that the text should read, "God had said, … go forth"; Nahmanides suggests that Haran and not Ur was Abraham's birthplace. But Friedman sees no alternative in this case to a text-critical conclusion: "This is a case in which the contradiction is a result of the fact that the Torah was composed from several [contradictory] sources."

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