The Grammar of God A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible

Aviya Kushner

eBook - 2015

For readers of Bruce Feiler’s Walking the Bible and Kathleen Norris’s The Cloister Walk comes a powerful exploration of the Bible in translation. Aviya Kushner grew up in a Hebrew-speaking family, reading the Bible in the original Hebrew and debating its meaning over the dinner table. She knew much of it by heart—and was therefore surprised when, while getting her MFA at the University of Iowa, she took the novelist Marilynne Robinson’s class on the Old Testament and discovered she barely recognized the text she thought she knew so well. From differences in the Ten Commandments to a less ambiguous reading of the creation story to a new emphasis on the topic of slavery, the English translation often felt like another book entirely fr...om the one she had grown up with. Kushner began discussing the experience with Robinson, who became a mentor, and her interest in the differences between the ancient language and the modern one... more