26 Elsie Stern
that asserts that because God loves Israel and because God is the master
of history, God will necessarily use God’s power to save Israel sometime
in the future. In the meantime, though, the sequence asserts that the love
relationship between God and Israel endures. As was the case with the
lectionary texts for Yom Kippur, the constituent parts of this theology of
consolation are certainly present in the biblical texts. Th e authors of Isa-
iah 40 – 66 deploy romantic metaphors and use these romantic metaphors
as a rationale for his prophecies of redemption and restoration. “For your
Maker is your husband, the lord of hosts is his name; the Holy One of
Israel is your Redeemer, the God of the whole earth he is called” (Isaiah
54:5). In addition, this Isaianic corpus certainly includes references to Is-
rael’s ongoing misery and its resistance to consolation (Isaiah 49:14, Isaiah
54:11). However, the creators of the lectionary concentrate and crystallize
these themes and tropes to a degree that is not expressed by the texts in
their canonical context. Th rough the strategies of selection and arrange-
ment, the shapers of the lectionary transform the biblical texts into texts
that are culturally bilingual. While the lectionary texts are still verbatim
biblical texts, they are shaped by strategies of selection and arrangement
to articulate or at least to resonate with central rabbinic ideologies that are
not always prominent in the biblical texts themselves.
Th us far, I have discussed the synagogue Bible as a text that diff ers in its
content and arrangement from the canonical Tanakh. In the fi nal section
of this chapter, I discuss how the discursive boundaries of synagogue scrip-
ture distinguish it from scripture in other contexts. In Judaism (as well as
in Christianity and Islam), scripture is characterized by two diff erent, and
somewhat contrastive, ideological convictions. On the one hand, scripture
is identifi ed as a discrete body of revealed discourse. At some point in the
history of each of these traditions, the canon of scripture was delineated,
and, as a consequence, it was possible to identify which instances of dis-
course were scripture and which were not. At the same time, each of these
traditions asserts, both explicitly and implicitly, that the words of scripture
do not fully express the totality of the revelation that they encode. If they
did, interpretation and commentary would be unnecessary. Th e rabbinic
doctrine of the dual Torah expresses this dynamic succinctly.16 Th e total-
ity of the revealed torah consists of two parts: the Written Torah (scrip-
ture) and the Oral Torah (the authoritative teachings of the rabbinic sages,
which are now also preserved and transmitted in writing). Within the doc-
trine of the dual torah, the Written Torah (scripture) is not the whole to-
rah, yet it is a discrete and defi ned element of it. In settings where scripture