Another of her expressed intentions is to challenge the “moralizing authoritarianism” the Bible has come to represent, approaching “the most unconventional and outrageous portions” of it “both personally and analytically.” According to her preface, if not taken personally, the Bible “becomes meaningless; if not taken analytically, it becomes dogma.” She makes her priorities explicit in the afterword. With reference to living in a “world in crisis” she speaks out against simplifying reality, against using the “sacred texts as a security blanket or a blindfold, much less a weapon,” and against allowing the Bible to be “the property of people who cannot imagine a connection between spirituality and sex, or skepticism and joy, or Us and Them.”

Keeping it Open

You know you’re in good hands as soon as you read the opening sentences of the introduction, which simply and eloquently echo the subtitle: “When we awaken, we open our eyes. When we love, we open our hearts and arms. When we think, we open our minds. Most of us like to feel that we are open to life, that we do not want to leave it before we have lived it.”

For the Love of God was written in the aftershock of September 11 and under the deepening shadow of fundamentalist tyranny subverting American politics from the evangelical forces on the Far Right. Which is not to say that Ostriker wastes her time making political statements. It isn’t until the afterword that she directly confronts the “tide of fundamentalism flooding the world.” In any case, it’s hard to resist a book so effectively opposed to ists and isms.

The Song Is You

The Song of Solomon is an obvious choice to begin with since it offers a sense of the “holy” at odds with what is usually understood as “religious.” Ostriker gives her reading a personal immediacy by describing the impact of the Song when she was in her teens and the words “seemed to come not from outside but from inside myself,” blending “the natural and spiritual” because she was in love with a boy two years older who “appeared to contain and enclose the stars, and the spaces between the stars.”

The chapter “Psalm and Anti-Psalm: A Personal Interlude” was written, as the introduction points out, in response to the destruction of the World Trade Center. As she does throughout the book, Ostriker challenges facile citings of the text like that of the then-poet laureate who suggested that post-9/11 solace could be found by reading the Psalms. As she points out, the Psalms are all over the place, the glory mixed with terror, beauty with violence, doubt with joy. In the vindictive last line of Psalm 137 (“Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones”) she finds fertile ground for “the justification of every blood feud,” including “occupying forces, terrorist suicide bombers, Arab and Jew, Serb and Bosnian, Hutu and Tutsi.” She then achieves an associative tour de force by comparing the mixture of violence and devotion, faith and fury in certain of the Psalms with the “chillingly familiar” rhetoric used by Osama Bin Laden in his statement praising the September 11 attack against those “who champion falsehood, support the butcher against the victim, the oppressor against the innocent child.”

A Postmodern Ecclesiastes

Ostriker’s talent for giving her subject a contemporary luster comes through especially well in the chapter, “ Ecclesiastes as Witness.” Following For the Love of God into the “open book,” I found some of the terms and issues (the labyrinth again) almost as elusive as the quantum mechanics I tried to make sense of when reviewing biographies of Oppenheimer and Einstein. But then it’s Ostriker’s determined pursuit of biblical ambiguities that draws you in and holds your interest. Discussing the “author” of Ecclesiastes, she even brings the physicist into her argument: “Like Einstein, he likes to point out how little we know of the laws of the universe.” This is only the penultimate in a series of “disagreements.” The text is both “pious and skeptical,” was “composed by a single, or two, or plural authors, or it was a patchwork cobbled together by an editor.” The author is also compared to Lao Tse and a Buddhist on the way to being described as the first empiricist, the first pragmatist, the first existentialist, and the first postmodern writer. In addition to the melange of associations, it’s suggested that the author invents “the autobiographical ‘I’ of western literature, glamorizes it, and ridicules it, all at the same time,” as well as inventing “for western civilization the thrill of disillusion.” Such lively claims are guaranteed to send readers to the text (at least it did in my case). No less intriguing is Ostriker’s reading of the concept of “vanity” and the text’s comparison of “all works done under the sun” to “a striving after wind,” wherein she gives the “statement of frustration” a comic turn (“something like the idea of herding cats”) that she finds “less accusatory” and “more poignant, more absurd” than “vanity.” It’s no surprise, then, that the path she’s guiding us down leads to “a door that, when passed through, opens straight into the existentialism of Camus.”