For more than a century, his story has regularly exercised historical and literary imaginations alike. How could it be otherwise? Diplomat, playwright, journalist, politician, and visionary, Mordecai Manuel Noah (1785–1851) was an extraordinary individual. In the course of his life, he wrote and produced successful plays, fought a duel, established himself as a popular newspaper columnist, rescued enslaved American sailors during his tenure as U.S. consul in Tunis, published an important book on his travels in Europe and North Africa, influenced presidential elections through his editorship of major newspapers, and served as judge and port surveyor of New York City. He was easily the most prominent and influential Jew in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, he has been described as the first public figure “to demand continuous recognition as both a devoted American and as a devoted Jew.”

This is an interesting, well-written and important study, relevant to anyone interested in better understanding metaphor in the Bible, figurative language, or idolatry. David Aaron, Professor of Bible at Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, was trained in rabbinics and linguistics at Brandeis University; this training offers him a certain sensitivity to how language, especially what many would consider figurative language, functions. Thus, the book really deals with the importance of understanding semantics for interpretation.

Benjamin D. Sommer elevates the analysis of inner-biblical interpretation to the next level of sophistication and rigor in this volume, a substantially revised version of his University of Chicago doctoral dissertation written under the direction of Michael Fishbane. He focuses on the reuse of older biblical material in a specific biblical text, Isaiah 40–66. These chapters of the book of Isaiah, seen as an addition made a century and a half later to Isaiah 1–39, are assigned to an anonymous sixth-century prophet called, for the sake of convenience, Deutero-Isaiah. By treating the reuse of older biblical material in Deutero-Isaiah, Sommer is able to delineate what might be distinctive in Deutero-Isaiah's methods of inner-biblical interpretation, a desirable next step in the analysis of inner-biblical interpretation. What is impressive in Sommer's book is his ability to move to larger issues in biblical studies and to parallel issues in other academic and intellectual pursuits often ignored in biblical studies. The book also exhibits a clarity of writing and argument in what in many ways is a highly technical subject.

There is something of the ironic in the attempt to render into English the unique effects of the Hebrew poetry of Gabriel Preil. Indeed, it is hardly possible. The fact is that Preils artistic achievements, as well as his poetic charm, stem—at least in part—from his surprising mastery of the new Israeli vernacular. And surprising it is indeed, because geographically speaking, the American resident Gabriel Preil was twice removed from Israeli soil. Born in Estonia in 1911 and having spent his childhood in Lithuania, he escaped postwar Europe with his mother and migrated to the United States in 1922. New York has been his home ever since, and New England, his favorite rural landscape.