SOURCE: Aschkenasy, Nehama. “Deconstructing the Metanarrative: Amos Oz's Evolving Discourse with the Bible.” Symposium 55, no. 3 (fall 2001): 123-39.

In the following essay, Aschkenasy examines the evolution of Oz's perspective on the Bible in relation to modern Israeli politics, as expressed in his fiction.

Amos Oz's dialogue with the bible, polemical, dialectical, comical, and ultimately conciliatory, began with his early publications in the 1960s, in such stories as “The Way of the Wind” (1962) and “Upon This Evil Earth” (1966), and continued throughout his literary career. In some ways this dialogue reflects changing attitudes in Israeli culture toward the Bible as a pedagogic tool for inspiring patriotic loyalty, and in other ways it anticipates, or even influences, cultural perceptions and processes.

The sheer presence of modernized biblical language and geographical sites in practically all of Oz's works, as in most Hebrew fiction and poetry, evokes manifold biblical echoes, either by the author's...