Includes bibliographical references and index.

One more mandatory introduction -- What you see is not what you get: when unity masquerades as disarray -- Abraham versus Abraham: the real Aqeda story -- Psalm 24: sense and sensibility in biblical composition -- The Song of songs, or the story of stories? -- Sex, lies, and the bible -- Rewarding aesthetic excavation in a biblical literary site -- When Job and Genesis visit Psalm 139 -- Hosea 5:1-3: between compositional rhetoric and rhetorical composition.

Description based on print version record.

Approaching the Hebrew Bible as a work of literary art, Yair Mazor examines its many genres, including historical narratives, poetic narratives, poetry, psalms, and songs. Line drawings from a late nineteenth-century Bible illustrate many of the most famous scenes in scripture, suggesting another aesthetic layer of the text. By breaking the Bible into constituent parts, Mazor traces the range of its writing styles, reconfiguring the work as a literary collage and an artistic masterpiece. He shows how the aesthetics of the texts that comprise the Bible serve its over-arching message, and he develops a literary portrait of its authors by decoding their cryptic aesthetic devices.