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Israel Drazin

Author of Maimonides: The Exceptional Mind

27 Works 259 Members 82 Reviews 1 Favorited

About the Author

Image credit: Book Jacket - The Tragedies of King David

Series

Works by Israel Drazin

The Tragedies of King David (2018) 15 copies
TARGUM ONKELOS TO LEVITICUS (1993) 12 copies

Tagged

Common Knowledge

Members

Reviews

This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
This is a strange book for several reasons. First, it is not laid out in a normal format. Each chapter is bullet-pointed or numbered and there are no normal paragraph breaks (aside from chapter 21). It feels more like an outline of a book than an actual book.
I think what the author is trying to do is bring up questions that will help you dive into the text for yourself and reason through what it says and doesn’t say in a way that gives you a better understanding of Scripture. But for the most part, this doesn’t land well for me for several reasons:
1) Many of the questions are leading… they only have 1 "correct answer" often indicated by the way the follow-up question is worded. However, the author doesn’t explore what those answers are or why he worded the question in such a way to indicate there’s only one correct answer.
2) Sometimes the author does answer the questions, but probably only about 10% of the time. If the goal is to make the reader think and ask questions, why did he choose to answer these questions while leaving other more consequential questions unanswered?
3) The author asks questions and appears to have done little to no research to find the answer. For example:
"The Torah does not say the name of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Why? What prompted many people to say that the fruit was an apple? Why an apple and not a pear? Isn’t it ironic that they say the forbidden fruit was an apple while today we say the opposite that an apple is a healthy fruit that people should eat: “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”? "
A two-second Google search will tell you that when the Bible was translated into Latin this confusion began. The Latin word for “apple” is mālum, while the Latin word for “evil” is mălum. Only after the Bible was translated into Latin do we start to see apples in depictions of the garden.
4) Some chapters (like chapters 20-22) contain no questions at all. If the point of this book is to provide you with questions to help you dive into the text of Genesis, chapters, and sections like this do little to help in that effort. Instead they prove that he could have done more to flesh out the possible answers to his questions earlier in the book.

Some of the questions in the book are very thought-provoking and good (see chapter 7). But many of the questions are not helpful and diving deeper into the text and will leave the reader wondering why this question is an issue or why this question came up at all.
There are a few other issues I take with the book like on page 13 the where author incorrectly transliterates a passage from Hebrew to English as (aher instead of asher) which is a very different meaning. Luckily he translates it into English correctly, but I think this misspelling is more important than an English typo. Because when working with translations there’s a natural desire to be more thorough, aware, and cognizant of what you’re doing.
The last 3 chapters are not on the topic of the book and feel out of place. Chapter 20 is about how we got verses and chapters, and then the last seven pages of the book (chapters 21-22) constitute a second part of the book on the "Mistaken Idea about Jewish Ethic (sic) and Behavior" which has nothing to do with "What we don’t know about God and People in the Bible."
All in all this book feels like it doesn’t know what it wants to be.

I was given this book as an advance reader’s copy by my request in exchange for an honest review.
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FieldsLibrary | 3 other reviews | Jan 7, 2024 |
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
The interest in the title of book did not hold for me as I saw it as and endless series of questions about what many see as the mystery of the Bible. So much has been placed on the this the most important book and open to endless analysis and explanation, certainly in a right and wrong way. But who is to judge. Some of this is reflected in the theme of the book. Simply there is so much we do not know behind what the Bible is, what it all means, and the whys that are largely left unanswered.

Though it was educational and thought provoking at times. I found myself wanting more explanation as to more in the way of possible answers to the many questions raised. This was not there only wonder as to what this meant or why was this not clear. That is much of the Bible and the mystery endures. Many opinions are derived but driven often by individualized motive. That is the real challenge and this book adds something but not to me in a signifcant way.
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knightlight777 | 3 other reviews | Sep 2, 2023 |
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
I received this book to review as part of the Early Reviewers. It is nice to get a better and clearer understanding and description of the Bible, where in some part topics are brushed over or ignored/not explained completely.
 
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8tlhoffman | 3 other reviews | Jul 6, 2023 |
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
This was a short and extremely interesting book that basically asks questions about scripture and tradition to which we don’t have any specific answer (and may only speculate and/or presume). There are a few sections where the author provides some context, such as the etymology of some of the words substituted for the name God; however, the majority was simply questions without much exposition. An example from Chapter 2: “If the two trees were dangerous, why did God place then in the garden?” This continues for 22 chapters over nearly 100 pages (so the chapters are obviously very short). For the most part, I found the questions to be good and very thought provoking … and therein lies the primary appeal to this book … many religious communities force conformity to the point that questions are not tolerated where here not only as questions welcome, but it is also okay to be unable to answer them (or by extension tolerate the diversity of speculations born out of our own imaginations). It was a fun book and highly recommended. I was given this free advance reader copy (ARC) ebook at my request and have voluntarily left this review. #WhatWeDontKnowAboutGod #LibraryThing… (more)
 
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Kris.Larson | 3 other reviews | Jun 30, 2023 |

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Works
27
Members
259
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#88,671
Rating
½ 3.7
Reviews
82
ISBNs
35
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