Roots of the Bible
An Ancient View for a New Outlook
Publisher Angelico Press, 540 páginas
Friedrich Weinreb (1910–1988) was an exceptional figure in twentieth-century Judaism. His path-breaking book Roots of the Bible: An Ancient View For a New Vision opens the depths of the “word-hoard” of Jewish wisdom. He taps, as a source of inspiration for our present world, “the sacred oral teaching” preserved for millennia in scholarly redoubts remote from the ways of the world. He left behind an extensive body of work, in which often astonishing connections can be found between the Biblical worldview and that of today. When it first appeared in Dutch in 1963, this book heralded the veritable rediscovery of a foundational stratum of the Old Testament. For the first time, those keen to penetrate what the Bible has to say but confused by what on the surface often seems an impenetrable narrative, were offered a key to unlocking the mystery of its way of telling stories (from narrative, to word, to letter, to “number”) in a cosmologically-expanded “gematria” suited also to those unfamiliar with the original Hebrew. Weinreb communicates so vivid and profound a knowledge of Hebrew that through his work the reader quickly comes to experience the spirit and richness of the original text.
