Alicia Ostriker, poet and writer of For the Love of God:The Bible as an Open Book, points out that, “An extraordinary wealth of alternative ideas and possibilities exists, scattered throughout the biblical texts — ideas and possibilities that either question divine authority, or re-define it, or ignore it altogether…If we remember that the Hebrew Bible was composed by multiple (mostly anonymous) authors during a period of about one thousand years — something like the time between Beowulf and T.S. Eliot — and compiled and edited during another four hundred or so, it is not surprising that scripture is a wildly composite set of documents, and arena of mysteries, gaps, and inconsistencies. We can find in it dogma and resistance to dogma, faith and submission but also doubt and challenge, law and subversion of law, promises of safety and meaning but also assurances of utter chaos. Sublimity, but also comedy. The abstract and the deliciously sensuous. A Father God, certainly, but also hints, here and there, of the Divine Mother who was edited out of historical memory.
We like to capture God and keep in within the pages of a book when in fact the Divine cannot be so easily tamed.