It's What's Behind

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Background of the Bible

A world controlled by God, not fate,
impervious to contingencies,
with revelations while you wait,
and angels in the wings to please,
and action that's illogical,
to laws of physics in defiance,
and aims eschatological
ignoring what is taught by science,
the incidence of chance near zero,
and, as prophetically predicted,
high expectations from a hero
deterministically depicted,
and miracles from time to time,
resolving problems mainly tribal,
requiting catalogues of crimes,
such is the background of the bible.

Richard Bernstein reviews "Selected Nonfictions," by Jorge Luis Borges (Weinberger) ("So Close, Borges's Worlds of Reality and Invention," The New York Times, October 6, 1999). In "A Defense of the Kabbalah" Borges depicts the kabbalists' belief in a divine "astral intelligence" that manifested itself in a book, Genesis, "where the collaboration of chance is calculated at zero". He describes it as "a book impervious to contingencies, a mechanism of infinite purposes, of infallible variations, of revelations lying in wait, of superimpositions of light".