The Murmuring Deep: A Review of The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, 2009, New York:  Schocken Books,  480 pp.

The Intersection of the Psychoanalytic Project and religion is hardly new, and can be traced back to Freud's writing desk in Vienna. The Bible and its multitude of characters—indeed its putative Author—have been the subject of countless articles and books. But few have been as challenging or rich as this one. Avivah Zornberg invites us to bring psychoanalytic sophistication of the highest order to an exploration

of this foundational text of the Jewish and Christian religious traditions. She writes from a specifically Jewish perspective, but her insights are rewarding for people of all faiths and none.

From its beginnings, Jewish tradition has understood itself, enacted its evolution, and made sense of the world through the process of commentary on its foundational text, the Hebrew Bible. Through her wide-ranging efforts as a public expositor and interpreter of the text, and her two enthusiastically received previous books, The Beginnings of Desire and The Particulars of Rapture, Avivah Zornberg has come to occupy an honored place among contemporary Biblical commentators. In her latest book, Zornberg undertakes a variation on the work for which she has already won acclaim. Its specific objective is to articulate the connections between aspects of the ancient text and facets of the psychoanalytic project.

Zornberg's approach is not historical and only minimally theological. The book focuses on the intrapsychic realities of various figures in Biblical narratives as elaborated by the Midrash—the rabbis' traditional narrative commentary—and of the Bible itself. The objective of this project is to explore the juncture of the human emotional experience with her reconfiguration of the Hebrew Bible. It discusses issues of communication (or its absence), and unconscious processes reflected in Biblical narrative. She explores such issues as the silence of Noah, the traumatic neurosis of Jonah, and psychic implications of the blindness of Isaac. It addresses such subjects as Ab