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Ruth Kartun-Blum. Profane Scriptures: Reflections on the Dialogue with the Bible in Modern Hebrew Poetry. Cincinnati, Hebrew Union College Press, 1999. 97 pp.

In this slim yet analytically sophisticated volume, Kartun-Blum, professor of Hebrew literature at Hebrew University, seeks to elucidate the “noisy existence” of the modern Hebrew poet who is forced to contend with the echoes of traditional texts and the multiple, diachronic registers of the revived Hebrew language. The work consists of three chapters, the first of which, “The Prophet's Tongue in Our Cheek,” serves as an introduction to the use made of the Bible in modern Hebrew poetry. Building on this framework, in the second and longest section of the book, she engages the motif of the Binding of Isaac, and in the last chapter she offers a reading of a poem by Yona Wallach. In her analysis, she incorporates the insights to be gleaned from the perspectives of intertextuality, deconstruction, and feminist criticism. This book is based on the Efroymson Lectures delivered by the author at Hebrew Union College in 1995, although the core of the thesis developed in the chapter on the Binding of Isaac motif appeared in Prooftexts (September 1988).