Book excerpt: These essays cover “themes that have long occupied my thinking, and permit me to offer something of a summary of my work. The substance and action of the Old Testament (and consequently the entire Bible) consists in the reality of God, the agency of human persons, and the interaction between them amid the larger scope of all creation. Thus the first three sections of this book concern, in turn, God, the human agent, and the riddle of communication between them. . . . In the fourth and final section of the book I turn yet again to the book of Jeremiah in which I have, over time, invested much of my scholarly energy.” —from the Preface