The Love of God is Jon D. Levenson's second entry in the Library of Jewish Ideas series, cosponsored by the Tikvah Fund (his first was Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam [also from Princeton UP, 2012]). The mission statement of the series seeks “engaging and authoritative treatments of core Jewish concepts in a form appealing to general readers who are curious about Jewish treatments of key areas of human thought and experience.” Consistent with this mission, The Love of God presents a focused and accessible treatment of its core subject, which will be of use to those who teach Jewish thought to undergraduates as well as to a wide audience of nonspecialists.

The book is divided into five chapters, although the first three represent close to 75 percent of the content. These initiate the discussion of the concept of “love of God” in the Hebrew Bible and its ancient Near Eastern context (chapter 1), continuing on to its elaboration in rabbinic literature (chapter 2). Chapter 3 is devoted to a special consideration of the erotic dimension of love in both biblical and rabbinic texts. Chapters 4 and 5 then round out the book by moving forward chronologically, dealing first with medieval Jewish philosophy (represented here primarily by Bahya Ibn Pakuda and Maimonides, though including a coda on Ḥasdai Crescas and Joseph Albo) and then with modern Jewish thought (taking up the debate between Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig on Halakhah).

Although in one sense, the love of God is a narrow and specialized focus, Levenson structures his discussion so that it very quickly becomes clear that what is at issue is the broad and central concept of “covenant,” and that “love” is simply a very old Jewish way of talking about the covenant between God and the people Israel. Levenson addresses the topic from as many angles as possible, including both the objective and subjective senses of the titular genitive (i.e., the love that Israel is commanded to show towards God, as well as the love that God is said to have for Israel). For Levenson, this “love” both is and is not a “feeling” (a subjective individual emotional state), and in line with this approach he explores the appropriateness of comparing it to the love between parent and child and between lovers. Levenson explores the ramifications of these different conceptions, finding bases for them in classical texts and explicating each of their theological implications before turning the prism one more time; he especially excels when examining dimensions unfamiliar to moderns, i.e. the servant-king relationship.

In the early chapters, Levenson is concerned to overcome boundaries that are drawn too sharply, leading to misunderstandings. So, for example, the idea that “love” must consist either of a subjective affect (making it difficult to understand how it can be commanded) or of a fixed, objective set of actions (an understanding that seems too far removed from the common understanding of love today) is forcefully rejected through an erudite consideration of the suzerain-vassal relationship in the ancient Near East that provided the model for the biblical covenant. Levenson is at home and in command here, and the text has an easy flow that comes from decades of teaching undergraduates how to think about these questions. (“As a Hindu student once asked me, ‘Why is God so jealous?’ The answer is that God's jealousy is a response to baseless and fraudulent claims by others upon things that belong to him alone. It is analogous to the response of the victim of identity theft or adultery” [10].) There is a classic Judaic apologetic here, as well, in defense of the possible imbrication of law and love with each other against arguments for their necessary separation. Levenson writes primarily as a scholar, clarifying ideas from other times and places for contemporary audiences, but he also has a stake in them; his constructive theological voice comes through in these moments of passionate defense.

While covenant and mitzvah are central topics, I don't want to obscure the richness of the book's meditations on a wide range of questions related to the love of God: the role of gift and gratitude; the question of what happens to love when one lover feels betrayed; the obligation to suffer or even die to prove one's love; the ideal of the undivided life; the relations between love and fear, and between love and intellect. All these ideas are explored through nuanced and sensitive presentations of midrashic and philosophical sources (with translation details frequently addressed in the notes).

Like other books in the Tikvah series, this one has a subtle but singular “Judaism” in the subtitle. While other corners of the academy struggle to come to terms with the irreducible messiness of the construction and transmission of religious traditions, proposing, for example, to think of “Judaisms” or “Christianities” in response to the difficulties posed by the vast diversity contained under these names across time, these books continue to ask, in a somewhat old-fashioned way, about what “Judaism” has to say on this or that issue. Without litigating the meta-issue of methodology in religious studies (something that would stray too far from the intelligent layman's terms in which The Love of God is written), Levenson argues for a clear through line connecting the biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and modern sources he writes about. To be sure, he is conscientious about attending to the ways in which rabbinic sources rework biblical texts, and the ways in which Islamic philosophy and Sufism inform medieval Jewish philosophy. He does want to emphasize, however, that although his sources vary greatly in terms of languages (Aramaic, Arabic, German), political and cultural circumstances, and intellectual premises, they nonetheless wrestle with many of the same questions, and offer answers that try to be true to the same texts, albeit in different ways. Concluding with a few theological reflections of his own, Levenson implicitly places himself and potentially his reader into the chain of tradition he has constructed.