[Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends] is a strange creative achievement. At one level all he has done is collect and retell old legends. He has simply transmitted some of the many tales that the Jewish tradition has woven around the biblical figures. His book looks like an anthology of previously published material.

But at another level the words "all he has done is retell" and "simply transmitted" in the preceding paragraph are colossal understatements. For what he has really done is take the midrashim, the thousands of disparate, disorganized, disjointed commentaries on the biblical stories that are scattered all through rabbinic literature and weave them into hauntingly beautiful and coherent psycho-biographies and into models and mirrors of ourselves. Somewhere in this book Wiesel has a metaphor about what midrash does to Bible that also expresses what Wiesel has done to midrash. He says: "Midrash is to...