It can be disorienting to see something familiar in a new light. This is a common experience for students who stumble into courses on the Hebrew Bible and discover texts that often have more to do with the ancient Near East than the Judeo-Christian world in which they typically encounter them. For scholars, such moments of surprise are rare and wonderful. Timothy Hogue’s recent monograph, The Ten Commandments: Monuments of Memory, Belief, and Interpretation, provided me with just such an opportunity to become unsettled. Reading Hogue’s eloquent prose is like witnessing the unveiling of a new discovery, except what is […]
