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The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious
From one of the most innovative and acclaimed biblical commentators at work today, here is a revolutionary analysis of the intersection between religion and psychoanalysis in the stories of the men and women of the Bible. For centuries scholars and rabbis have wrestled with the biblical narrative, attempting to answer the questions that arise from a plain reading of the text. In The Murmuring Deep, Avivah Zornberg informs her literary analysis of the text with concepts drawn from Freud, Winnicott, Laplanche, and other psychoanalytic thinkers to give us a new understanding of the desires and motivations of the men and women whose stories form the basis of the Bible. Through close readings of the biblical and midrashic texts, Zornberg makes a powerful argument for the idea that the creators of the midrashic commentary, the medieval rabbinic commentators, and the Hassidic commentators were themselves on some level aware of the complex interplay between conscious and unconscious levels of experience and used this knowledge in their interpretations. In her analysis of the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, Jonah, Abraham, Rebecca, Isaac, Joseph and his brothers, Ruth, and Esther–how they communicated with the world around them, with God, and with the various parts of their selves–Zornberg offers fascinating insights into the interaction between consciousness and unconsciousness. In discussing why God has to “seduce” Adam into entering the Garden of Eden or why Jonah thinks he can hide from God by getting on a ship, Zornberg enhances our appreciation of the Bible as the foundational text in our quest to understand what it means to be human.
482 pages, Kindle Edition
First published March 31, 2009
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302 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
January 11, 2015
Begun around November 2011 and finished on January 11, 2015:
“Shoot for something you can barely control” – it's a line from Barry Hannah that I cling to in writing, but I’m also beginning to cling to it in reading. It took me over 3 years to read Zornberg – often I could wrestle through only a few pages in one sitting, constantly flipping to the “Notes” section to puzzle over her millions of sources. This book is really explosive in terms of its focus on departure from the ordered world—it’s high brow but pulses really with the nature of life lived in the lap of brokenness—even though it’s highly academic it’s also warm and wondrous and a companion, it seems to me, to a reader whose life is in upheaval.
It’s a very difficult book to sum up – she explores midrashic texts, the undercurrents and murmurs in biblical narratives. The cumulative effect, the world the book creates, the level of thinking and processing it requires in its integration of literary criticism, semiotics, poetry, psychoanalysis, biblical exegesis are all beyond me intellectually, yet, during some sittings with this book, Zornberg created a kind of “rough ground” for my creative work. It’s as if she invites you to write and imagine *into* the fractures of the chapters themselves, much like the way midrashic narratives operate maybe.
Zornberg encourages a stumbling in the mind (she writes, or quotes, somewhere in these 379 pages: “One cannot comprehend [stand upon] words of Torah unless one has stumbled over them”). She pushes you toward becoming nothing (in my favorite chapter on Esther), toward learning from the “unchosen bride” in Leah, toward seeing fire/loss as transfigurative in the Isaac & Abraham narrative, and always toward what is foreign inside us that resists easy closure of a messy narrative (esp. in the wonderful last chapter on the Book of Ruth).
PP 238-9: She discusses midrash as plough: a plough “turns over the sods of earth to create a newly fertile surface. The …plough tears open, enters darkness to bring to light something that had been buried…" 238: She writes: “The turning plough offers Osip Mandelstam a metaphor for the way poetry can penetrate the past:'Poetry is the plough tearing open and turning over time so that the deep layers of it, its rich black undersoil, ends up on the surface…Mankind…craves, like a ploughman, for the virgin soil of time.'"
I found the whole reading process with this book generative for my thinking and writing because of how she keeps turning and turning the familiar biblical narratives.
During some of these 3 years of dipping into this book, I was working on a piece exploring the biblical character Rizpah, a concubine of Saul who stood guard for 7 months by the bodies of her executed sons, fending off buzzard & beast. Zornberg led me into imagery of rain and dew that I tried to explore in my piece on Rizpah, which is really a meditation on grief & renewal – I am still trying to unpack her wonderful imagery and synthesis. This imagery serves as a great example of what she does throughout the book, again and again, offering genuine surprise, for me at least:
She quotes Shem Mi-Shmuel, a 19th century Hasidic master, on the image of dew: “dew rests for a moment on the grass and vanishes, evaporates. In that moment, however, it ‘arouses the inner moisture of the grass’—unlike rain, for instance, which moistens the earth and remains absorbed by it. The contrast between dew and rain he finds in the Talmud:
…“And let us know, eagerly strive to know God. His going forth is sure as the morning; and He shall come to us as the rain” (Hosea 6.3)…
“I will be as dew to Israel” (Hosea 14.6).
One verse in Hosea gives the human request for God-as-rain; another gives God’s offer of God-as-dew. God models a different sensibility of relationship. In the reading of Shem Mi-Shmuel, rain penetrates, implants itself; if God relates to Israel in this way, nothing will emerge machamat atzmam—from them, spontaneously. Dew, on the other hand, delicately touches, awakens inner vitality, and disappears. To know God as dew is to respond to a hint, like perfume; a word or two is sometimes enough. It is to respond unconsciously.”
I also pulled out a kind of scaffold of epigraphs for my work with Rizpah, and it was also a scaffold for those few years of extreme transition in my life; most of the lines are works quoted by Zornberg and they give a sense of the interdisciplinarity of the book; of course you're missing the wonderful webbing she provides around the quotations in her work, but, even so, I will share them here:
“In this spiritual process, writes William James, ‘something must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy.’”
Buber in Zornberg 130: “calls the prophetic moment the one when ‘the customary soul enlarges and transfigures itself into the surprise soul…the unique being, man, is created to be a center of surprise in the universe.’”
“If you know too well how to do something, you will be less likely to fall into originality.” – Adam Phillips
“Back to the rough ground! Look and see!” – Wittgenstein
Zornberg 120, speaking of Esther, speaking of Mordecai’s sensitivity to hints: “a hint is sufficient for the wise. A word is sometimes sufficient basis for a castle in the air…one experiences [a hint] as an intimate call, its very subtlety inspiring imagination.”
And Zornberg quotes Henry James on the artist: “A kind of huge spider web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue…it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.”
Zornberg 127, quoting José Ortega: “And this is the simple truth—that to live is to feel oneself lost—he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order to the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked.”
“Shoot for something you can barely control” – it's a line from Barry Hannah that I cling to in writing, but I’m also beginning to cling to it in reading. It took me over 3 years to read Zornberg – often I could wrestle through only a few pages in one sitting, constantly flipping to the “Notes” section to puzzle over her millions of sources. This book is really explosive in terms of its focus on departure from the ordered world—it’s high brow but pulses really with the nature of life lived in the lap of brokenness—even though it’s highly academic it’s also warm and wondrous and a companion, it seems to me, to a reader whose life is in upheaval.
It’s a very difficult book to sum up – she explores midrashic texts, the undercurrents and murmurs in biblical narratives. The cumulative effect, the world the book creates, the level of thinking and processing it requires in its integration of literary criticism, semiotics, poetry, psychoanalysis, biblical exegesis are all beyond me intellectually, yet, during some sittings with this book, Zornberg created a kind of “rough ground” for my creative work. It’s as if she invites you to write and imagine *into* the fractures of the chapters themselves, much like the way midrashic narratives operate maybe.
Zornberg encourages a stumbling in the mind (she writes, or quotes, somewhere in these 379 pages: “One cannot comprehend [stand upon] words of Torah unless one has stumbled over them”). She pushes you toward becoming nothing (in my favorite chapter on Esther), toward learning from the “unchosen bride” in Leah, toward seeing fire/loss as transfigurative in the Isaac & Abraham narrative, and always toward what is foreign inside us that resists easy closure of a messy narrative (esp. in the wonderful last chapter on the Book of Ruth).
PP 238-9: She discusses midrash as plough: a plough “turns over the sods of earth to create a newly fertile surface. The …plough tears open, enters darkness to bring to light something that had been buried…" 238: She writes: “The turning plough offers Osip Mandelstam a metaphor for the way poetry can penetrate the past:'Poetry is the plough tearing open and turning over time so that the deep layers of it, its rich black undersoil, ends up on the surface…Mankind…craves, like a ploughman, for the virgin soil of time.'"
I found the whole reading process with this book generative for my thinking and writing because of how she keeps turning and turning the familiar biblical narratives.
During some of these 3 years of dipping into this book, I was working on a piece exploring the biblical character Rizpah, a concubine of Saul who stood guard for 7 months by the bodies of her executed sons, fending off buzzard & beast. Zornberg led me into imagery of rain and dew that I tried to explore in my piece on Rizpah, which is really a meditation on grief & renewal – I am still trying to unpack her wonderful imagery and synthesis. This imagery serves as a great example of what she does throughout the book, again and again, offering genuine surprise, for me at least:
She quotes Shem Mi-Shmuel, a 19th century Hasidic master, on the image of dew: “dew rests for a moment on the grass and vanishes, evaporates. In that moment, however, it ‘arouses the inner moisture of the grass’—unlike rain, for instance, which moistens the earth and remains absorbed by it. The contrast between dew and rain he finds in the Talmud:
…“And let us know, eagerly strive to know God. His going forth is sure as the morning; and He shall come to us as the rain” (Hosea 6.3)…
“I will be as dew to Israel” (Hosea 14.6).
One verse in Hosea gives the human request for God-as-rain; another gives God’s offer of God-as-dew. God models a different sensibility of relationship. In the reading of Shem Mi-Shmuel, rain penetrates, implants itself; if God relates to Israel in this way, nothing will emerge machamat atzmam—from them, spontaneously. Dew, on the other hand, delicately touches, awakens inner vitality, and disappears. To know God as dew is to respond to a hint, like perfume; a word or two is sometimes enough. It is to respond unconsciously.”
I also pulled out a kind of scaffold of epigraphs for my work with Rizpah, and it was also a scaffold for those few years of extreme transition in my life; most of the lines are works quoted by Zornberg and they give a sense of the interdisciplinarity of the book; of course you're missing the wonderful webbing she provides around the quotations in her work, but, even so, I will share them here:
“In this spiritual process, writes William James, ‘something must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy.’”
Buber in Zornberg 130: “calls the prophetic moment the one when ‘the customary soul enlarges and transfigures itself into the surprise soul…the unique being, man, is created to be a center of surprise in the universe.’”
“If you know too well how to do something, you will be less likely to fall into originality.” – Adam Phillips
“Back to the rough ground! Look and see!” – Wittgenstein
Zornberg 120, speaking of Esther, speaking of Mordecai’s sensitivity to hints: “a hint is sufficient for the wise. A word is sometimes sufficient basis for a castle in the air…one experiences [a hint] as an intimate call, its very subtlety inspiring imagination.”
And Zornberg quotes Henry James on the artist: “A kind of huge spider web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue…it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.”
Zornberg 127, quoting José Ortega: “And this is the simple truth—that to live is to feel oneself lost—he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order to the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked.”
October 25, 2017
Like her earlier books, Gottlieb Zornberg draws on English literature, Freudian psychology, and midrash (Jewish traditional interpretation) to make novel and insightful Biblical connections. However, it is not the tour de force that was The Beginning of Desire. That book was much more coherent and the interpretations seemed far less strained.
Want to read
August 26, 2021I think it's time to admit that this book is just too academic in tone for me, but I feel like I *should* go back to it at some point.
July 19, 2022
When I first spent 6 months working my way slowly through this book I noted that I would miss it, especially given that the paper copy wasn't mine... I have subsequently purchased an electronic copy which I have once again plunged into for another 8 month swim. It is a "Murmuring Deep" in its own right - a profound commentary on various parts of the Hebrew scriptures and their associated midrashes. In it Zornberg draws on, not only the creative discourse between rabbis down through the centuries but also the insights of literature, art and crucially psychology and psychoanalysis. It has been an eye-opening and mind-stretching journey. It is an approach to the Biblical text that is almost entirely absent in Christian commentary, both from the conservative and liberal end of the spectrum. It is academically rigorous. It respects the text as a "holy" entity in its own right. Yet approaches it, spurred on by millennia of rabbinic commentary, with a creative imagination and an inspiring understanding of the human mind. As such it has personally sparked a fresh engagement with scripture and prompted my own poetic endeavours. I suspect that this will not be my last return this deep well...
December 12, 2014
This is by far my favorite of her books- so deep, so thoughtful, pulling on classical commentary Plus, with a whole new way of looking at things
June 23, 2016
The Beginnings of Desire is great, but Zornberg's commentary on Genesis in The Murmuring Deep changed my life! This is my favorite book by her.
July 25, 2022
i want to make a hadran on this not because i finished it but because of how much i’m already looking forward to rereading
Want to read
September 8, 2025This one lands directly in your wheelhouse. It’s less about national trauma in the desert (Bewilderments) and more about the psychic undercurrents of Genesis and Exodus—the fractures, the silences, the unspoken desires.
1. Voice, silence, and fractured speech
You’re obsessed with language: where it fails, where it betrays. Zornberg turns Moses’ stammer into a lens on all biblical speech—language as rupture rather than clarity.
The “murmur” = the unconscious voice that slips through the cracks. You’d like how she treats biblical dialogue like dream material: repetitions, half-said things, what’s left unsaid.
2. Trauma, exile, and beginnings that never begin
Noah emerging into a devastated world, drunk and broken—trauma theory meets Torah. You’ll see clear parallels to your own post-sepsis reflections on survival that doesn’t restore wholeness.
Cain and Abel: the primal sibling wound, envy, violence. You’d read this as family trauma text par excellence, tied to your own childhood dynamics.
Abraham and Isaac: not “blind faith” but the abyss opened when the father is silent and the son’s subjectivity is suspended. Exactly the kind of contradiction you lean toward: metaphysical, terrifying, unresolved.
3. Disguise, doubling, identity fractures
Jacob in disguise before Isaac, stealing blessing through performance: speaks to your interest in masks, doubling, and unstable identity (legal training, writing voice, illness vs. self).
She reads these disguises psychoanalytically: desire and deception intertwined. For you, it resonates with the way you write about oscillations—between authenticity and performance, between trauma-forged truth and masks.
4. Biblical unconscious = Jewish unconscious
Zornberg doesn’t give you “Torah lessons.” She gives you Torah as uncanny, as haunted by repressed trauma and desire. This ties directly to your own idea of Jewishness as wrestling, not as stable inheritance.
The murmur in the text = the murmur in the Jewish psyche, the historical unconscious. This is where your interest in post-Holocaust intellectual Judaism, Grossman, and Babel fits perfectly.
5. Style and density
She writes like you want to: literary, psychoanalytic, Jewish-intellectual, thick with citations. It’s as close as you’ll get to a rabbinic text that feels like Nabokov crossed with Levinas.
It refuses clean resolution. She will not hand you a moral—she’ll hand you bewilderment, estrangement, and layered echoes. Exactly the kind of thing you value over “sentimental” or “cheesy” writing.
In short: Bewilderments is national trauma in the wilderness. The Murmuring Deep is private, psychic trauma—the subterranean unconscious of Genesis and Exodus. If you want the book that speaks most to your own themes (voice vs. silence, family trauma, exile, disguise, fragmentation, post-trauma survival), The Murmuring Deep is the sharper mirror.
1. Voice, silence, and fractured speech
You’re obsessed with language: where it fails, where it betrays. Zornberg turns Moses’ stammer into a lens on all biblical speech—language as rupture rather than clarity.
The “murmur” = the unconscious voice that slips through the cracks. You’d like how she treats biblical dialogue like dream material: repetitions, half-said things, what’s left unsaid.
2. Trauma, exile, and beginnings that never begin
Noah emerging into a devastated world, drunk and broken—trauma theory meets Torah. You’ll see clear parallels to your own post-sepsis reflections on survival that doesn’t restore wholeness.
Cain and Abel: the primal sibling wound, envy, violence. You’d read this as family trauma text par excellence, tied to your own childhood dynamics.
Abraham and Isaac: not “blind faith” but the abyss opened when the father is silent and the son’s subjectivity is suspended. Exactly the kind of contradiction you lean toward: metaphysical, terrifying, unresolved.
3. Disguise, doubling, identity fractures
Jacob in disguise before Isaac, stealing blessing through performance: speaks to your interest in masks, doubling, and unstable identity (legal training, writing voice, illness vs. self).
She reads these disguises psychoanalytically: desire and deception intertwined. For you, it resonates with the way you write about oscillations—between authenticity and performance, between trauma-forged truth and masks.
4. Biblical unconscious = Jewish unconscious
Zornberg doesn’t give you “Torah lessons.” She gives you Torah as uncanny, as haunted by repressed trauma and desire. This ties directly to your own idea of Jewishness as wrestling, not as stable inheritance.
The murmur in the text = the murmur in the Jewish psyche, the historical unconscious. This is where your interest in post-Holocaust intellectual Judaism, Grossman, and Babel fits perfectly.
5. Style and density
She writes like you want to: literary, psychoanalytic, Jewish-intellectual, thick with citations. It’s as close as you’ll get to a rabbinic text that feels like Nabokov crossed with Levinas.
It refuses clean resolution. She will not hand you a moral—she’ll hand you bewilderment, estrangement, and layered echoes. Exactly the kind of thing you value over “sentimental” or “cheesy” writing.
In short: Bewilderments is national trauma in the wilderness. The Murmuring Deep is private, psychic trauma—the subterranean unconscious of Genesis and Exodus. If you want the book that speaks most to your own themes (voice vs. silence, family trauma, exile, disguise, fragmentation, post-trauma survival), The Murmuring Deep is the sharper mirror.
July 19, 2017
Classic Zornberg, this book offers twelve different inquiries into such central Biblical stories as the binding of Isaac, the dissension between Joseph and his brothers, and the dilemmas facing the Biblical heroines Esther and Ruth. The stories could be read separately, although best read in order because some stories hark back to earlier insights. My favorite chapters concerned Zornberg's uncovering of Abraham's trauma with a fiery furnace (intimated but not described in Genesis) and her explanation of how Joseph cut off resolution of his dispute with his brothers. A couple chapters--notably on Jonah, Esther, and Jacob-- were less revelatory than Zornberg's best work, circling around themes I've seen elsewhere. Her later books, stretching across entire books of the Bible, are more breath-taking. This on is still an important acquisition for those seeking an understanding of religious thought or just of human existence.
July 29, 2019
AVG’s biblical scholarship, mastery on English, huge range of sources and comprehensive analysis of the meaning of ancient texts is stunning. This work is to be read over and over again. The vast sources cited combined with an analaytical framework which resonates in a booming way to a modern reader simply amazes.
AVG’s biblical scholarship, mastery on English, huge range of sources and comprehensive analysis of the meaning of ancient texts is stunning. This work is to be read over and over again. The vast sources cited combined with an analaytical framework which resonates in a booming way to a modern reader simply amazes. If nothing other than giving a simple roadmap to understand the relationship between Torah, Midrash and a huge variety of authors of Modernity, this is a truly essential work.
AVG’s biblical scholarship, mastery on English, huge range of sources and comprehensive analysis of the meaning of ancient texts is stunning. This work is to be read over and over again. The vast sources cited combined with an analaytical framework which resonates in a booming way to a modern reader simply amazes. If nothing other than giving a simple roadmap to understand the relationship between Torah, Midrash and a huge variety of authors of Modernity, this is a truly essential work.
September 30, 2023
Very stimulating!
June 14, 2020
Edit: A slightly reworked review with a few extra quotes etc, now on my blog.
https://www.consideringlilies.nl/bibl...
Wonderful book. Opens up the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, Jonah, Esther, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Joseph and Ruth like I've never read before.
Such depth of character is brought out, by looking closely to hidden puns in the original Hebrew wording of the stories, and by all the midrashic tales that supply a colorful background. Most of these I'd never heard before. I very much enjoyed the way they were brought in to help suggest a meaning, even if it was entirely unclear to me what the status is of such texts, how much they can be believed as original or authentic or inspired.
The book deals with the biblical unconscious, also with the unconscious motivations of all the biblical persons, and made me think very much about my own unconscious.
I was most moved by the chapter on Abraham where she led us to see how much God guided Abraham to grow, and face more and more his hidden fears. Especially that chapter helped me a lot in trusting God when he leads us through difficult times.
The chapter about Esther is also a jewel, about the times when God's face is hidden. (This is apparently also the meaning of the name Esther, and God is not mentioned in that book, and other such details). On the importance of finding God precisely in his hiddenness.
The last chapter is about Ruth, my namesake. Much food for pondering there, too. Her being a Moabite stretched the boundaries, and helped inform what the law truly meant, and what charity is. I like that, wish to take that as inspiring example. But according to Dr. Avivah, she stretched the boundaries so much, that in the happy ending she could no longer be named.. All of a sudden her child becomes Noomi's child. And Ruth disappeared from the story.
Thankfully, there is an interesting midrash that supplies some more history for Ruth. However that may be, it is a wonderful chapter about doing good, in great and small things. Even taking a step back, if necessary.
https://www.consideringlilies.nl/bibl...
Wonderful book. Opens up the stories of Adam and Eve, Noah, Jonah, Esther, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Joseph and Ruth like I've never read before.
Such depth of character is brought out, by looking closely to hidden puns in the original Hebrew wording of the stories, and by all the midrashic tales that supply a colorful background. Most of these I'd never heard before. I very much enjoyed the way they were brought in to help suggest a meaning, even if it was entirely unclear to me what the status is of such texts, how much they can be believed as original or authentic or inspired.
The book deals with the biblical unconscious, also with the unconscious motivations of all the biblical persons, and made me think very much about my own unconscious.
I was most moved by the chapter on Abraham where she led us to see how much God guided Abraham to grow, and face more and more his hidden fears. Especially that chapter helped me a lot in trusting God when he leads us through difficult times.
The chapter about Esther is also a jewel, about the times when God's face is hidden. (This is apparently also the meaning of the name Esther, and God is not mentioned in that book, and other such details). On the importance of finding God precisely in his hiddenness.
The last chapter is about Ruth, my namesake. Much food for pondering there, too. Her being a Moabite stretched the boundaries, and helped inform what the law truly meant, and what charity is. I like that, wish to take that as inspiring example. But according to Dr. Avivah, she stretched the boundaries so much, that in the happy ending she could no longer be named.. All of a sudden her child becomes Noomi's child. And Ruth disappeared from the story.
Thankfully, there is an interesting midrash that supplies some more history for Ruth. However that may be, it is a wonderful chapter about doing good, in great and small things. Even taking a step back, if necessary.
July 3, 2009
Zornberg is a giant!
Read
May 27, 2011Great book!!!!!
February 16, 2013
I was staggered again and again by the author's insights.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews