“The Bible was my first text. Its language is my language. It fed me and later it nourished all my work. I have decided to give a few examples here of how I have used it during the past four decades. The present work is thus a journey through my earlier books that allude to the Bible. The order I have followed here is the biblical one.
“I have tried to clarify the symbolic difficulties of this vast book, which illustrates my thoughts about the various religions — i.e. that they managed and exploited the symbolic realm (when there was no one else to do it), but that today the issues that they dealt with, elaborated, and shrouded in various beliefs are being taken over by other factors, other experiences. And the result is that the symbolic and religious spheres have come unstuck,” writes Daniel Sibony.

This is a highly personal reading, by an erudite psychoanalyst, of some great biblical passages: Genesis, the Exodus from Egypt, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses and the Ten Commandments, Jonas, Job.

Testifying to Sibony’s life-long intimacy with the Bible, this book is an introduction to his original thinking and methods and an initiation to a meditative reading of the Bible.

Daniel Sibony is a psychoanalyst and the author of Don de soi ou partage de soi? (2000).