Scripture and Modern Israeli Literature 295her back, that she has unknowingly marked her son as an off ering by nam-
ing him Ofer (Hebrew for “Bambi” but also a homonym for the verb “to
off er”) (331).
In summation, I believe that the publication date of Grossman’s novel
(2008) obviates, or at least complicates, the laments sounded recently by
scholars over the erosion of the status of the Bible in Hebrew culture and
literature. True, the Bible came under severe scrutiny in the aft ermath of
the 1967 and 1973 wars that engendered a new Israeli geopolitical map of
extreme internal polarization. Divided along ideological, political, reli-
gious, and territorial lines, contemporary Israel is also split over its cultural
and biblical heritage. While right-wing religious nationalists see them-
selves as the rightful contemporary heirs of divine authority embodied in
the “sacred” canon, left -wing “liberals” of both religious and secular con-
victions contest their opponents’ claim for exclusively holding the “correct”
interpretation of the Bible and reject the latter’s view of the Bible as an ab-
solute moral authority.
Th e erosion in the Bible’s status has manifested itself in the wars fought
in the Israeli education system (e.g., how much Bible should be taught to
grammar- and high-school students?),45 as well as in the academic study
of biblical archeology. However, the furor and public attention lavished
on these “wars” in Israel (as these lines are being written, a four-page ar-
ticle on the latest biblical dig appears in the holiday magazine of the daily
newspaper Ha’aretz) raise doubts about this alleged erosion.46 Apparently,
despite nominal appearances, the Hebrew Bible still carries weight, and its
moral authority still counts, even for secular Israelis. Otherwise, why all
the sound and the fury?
Notes- Max Brod, H.ayei Meriva, trans. from the 1960 German ed. by Y. Sal‘ee (Jeru-
salem: Hasifriya hatzionit, 1967), 282. - Anita Shapira, “Th e Bible and Israeli Identity,” in “Recreating the Canon: Th e
Biblical Presence in Modern Hebrew Literature and Culture,” guest ed. Nehama
Aschkenasy, special issue, AJS Review 28, no. 1 (2004): 23. - Robert Alter, Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of
Scripture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 21. - Ibid., 21.
- Ibid., 32, 35, 39.
- Ibid., 48 – 49.