Appealing to academic and nonscholarly readers alike, Dov Weiss's Pious Irreverence: Confronting God in Rabbinic Judaism unearths the roots of the Jewish idea of challenging God in late antiquity. A highly accessible read, Pious Irreverence traces the growth of competing rabbinic responses to the possibility of confronting God in light of alternative Christian reactions to potentially problematic divine actions. Throughout his work, Weiss primarily highlights the development of the proprotest camp over the course of the fourth through seventh centuries, but his nuanced narrative never loses sight of the accompanying antiprotest countervoice. Arguing for an increasing propensity to confront God, Weiss's analysis culminates in the depiction of a corresponding theology of divine imperfection.

Weiss's work advances contemporary research in rabbinics on multiple fronts. First, his in-depth study of the Tanḥuma-Yelammedenu traditions treats this significant but much neglected group of texts that bridge the fields of rabbinics and medieval Jewish literature. These frequently overlooked midrashim offer us an important witness to late rabbinic culture. Second, Weiss provides us with both synchronic and diachronic perspectives for understanding the practice of divine protest. His analysis of temporally shifting rabbinic attitudes is enhanced through his comparison of Jewish and Christian theologies and practices. In addition, he contextualizes the practice of protest by setting it in relation to the Greco-Roman idea of parrhesia, “frank speech.” Finally, Weiss refrains from reducing the explanation for this phenomenon of protest to a single factor, instead suggesting an array of lenses for understanding it, from the literary to the phenomenological. On the whole, Pious Irreverence displays a clear and well-organized argument that draws on diverse hermeneutics without losing sight of the complexity of the practice of protest.

Weiss's opening two chapters, grounded in historical and textual analysis, document the shift from a predominately dismissive rabbinic attitude toward protesting against God to a highly charged dichotomy between the pro- and antiprotest camps. Mapping this development against the backdrop of a consistent lack or complete rejection of legitimate protest in the work of Christian thinkers from this era, Weiss produces a plethora of possible rationales for understanding why the Jewish and Christian traditions reflect their respective positions. From here, Weiss immediately turns to the murky middle position between complete embrace and absolute rejection of protest within rabbinic literature. Within this realm of more moderate reactions we find that a speaker's tone, relationship to God, and insider status mark the boundary between acceptable and problematic acts of protest. Surveying both the content of ancient Jewish protest literature as well as their literary form, Weiss paints a highly nuanced picture of the range of rabbinic views on protest, shunning oversimplification.

The second half of Weiss's book shifts from the rabbinic attitudes toward protest to specific examples of protest and their theological ramifications. Chapter 4 narrows in on the question of why protest is typically inserted into the mouth of biblical figures rather than appearing as an explicitly rabbinic charge. Suggesting that this “ventriloquism” allows for a displacement of anxieties about problematic divine behavior, Weiss situates Jewish protest between Christian “anti-YHWH” rhetoric (19–20, 81) and the defense of God's perfection in the writings of many early church fathers. This characterization paves the way for the final two chapters, which address the humanizing of, and the attribution of moral fallibility to, God. In these concluding sections Weiss pushes the envelope by articulating how late rabbinic texts narrow the gap between the human and the divine, culminating in a rejection of the axiom of God's moral perfection embraced by the rationalist strand of medieval Judaism.

With the notable exception of the efforts of Marc Bregman, the discrete works and portions of longer collections that make up Tanḥuma-Yelammedenu literature have received limited scholarly attention. Weiss's emphasis on developments in this scattered corpus thus constitutes an important step in responding to this desideratum. Although perhaps he could have gone to greater lengths to demonstrate how each example he uses from this literary family actually dates from a late time period (as these traditions integrate early, middle, and late strata), such a discussion may have been overly technical for the average reader. Regardless, Weiss's panoramic view perforates the boundary between the classic rabbinic era and the early Middle Ages, broadening our perspective for framing and tracing shifts in rabbinic literature.

In addition to a sustained correlation with early Christian works, Weiss also offers his readers another avenue of comparison in the Greco-Roman idea of parrhesia, “frank speech.” Famously treated in a Christian setting by Peter Brown in his Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity and in the later works of Foucault, Weiss brings this concept to bear on rabbinic attitudes toward protest. Although this is a relatively minor element of the broader project, Weiss's analysis could perhaps have been enhanced through reference to Tali Artman-Partock's Hebrew dissertation on parrhesia in rabbinic and Christian literature (Hebrew University, 2010) as well as to G. J. M. Bartelink's Quelques observations sur parrēsia dans la littérature paléo-chrétienne (Dekker & van de Vegt, 1970), which specifically discusses the use of parrhesia toward God. The absence of reference to these works notwithstanding, Weiss's discussion of parrhesia is helpful for fleshing out the late antique backdrop behind the rabbinic conversation surrounding protest.

Challenging contemporary assumptions about the infallibility of God, Weiss's work pushes us to reconsider how the rabbis voiced and masked their developing theological protests. A worthwhile read, Pious Irreverence exemplifies a complex and well-balanced presentation with an erudite integration of primary Jewish and Christian sources as well as a number of diverse theoretical lenses.