the torah of moses: judaism in the bible 73
those whose devotion to God might be questioned: ‘Then he showed me
the high priest Joshua standing before the angel of the Lord, and Satan
standing at his right hand to accuse him. And the Lord said to Satan,
“The Lord rebuke you, O Satan!” ’ In the book of Job, Satan’s role,
while still clearly subservient to that of God, is widened into a thorough
test of Job’s piety, to see if he will retain his faith in God’s justice despite
the undeserved depths of agony and despair into which he is plunged.
But the whole experiment takes place only with the permission of God:
‘The Lord said to Satan, “Very well, he is in your power; only spare his
life.” Then Satan went out from the presence of the Lord, and inflicted
loathsome sores on Job.’ Rather different, in the biblical conception,
from these denizens of the divine court is the personification of divine
attributes, most notably Wisdom. Wisdom is imagined in the book of
Proverbs as a female human figure begotten by the Lord before the cre-
ation: ‘The Lord created me at the beginning of his work ... when he
marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a
master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.’^4
Much of the Bible is concerned with the relation of this omnipotent
God to humankind. Less is said about relations to the rest of the cre-
ation, beyond insistence that everything, including natural bodies like
the sun which were worshipped by the less discerning, was entirely
under God’s control, so that he could order the sun not to rise, or to
stand still, or to move backwards. God is portrayed as majestic and just
in his treatment of humankind, transcendent so that in his eyes the
earth’s inhabitants are ‘like grasshoppers’. But he is also kind, compas-
sionate and quick to forgive. These different attributes are hard to
combine into a coherent depiction, even in the brief proclamation of his
own qualities attributed in Exodus to the Lord himself as he passed
before Moses:
The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abound-
ing in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the
thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by
no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the
children and the children’s children, to the third and fourth generation.^5In the Psalms, God is frequently described as a fount of loving kindness –
in the words of Psalm 136, ‘his kindness endures forever’ – but he is also
the warrior Lord who ‘crushed the heads of Leviathan’ (a mythical sea
monster) and who ‘goes forth like a soldier, like a warrior he stirs up his