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A word in the Old Testament in the inspiration of the man who wrote it, may be taken to bear only one of these interpretations, or more than one, or all. So, too, in differing respects, in other writings. William Blake's 'Tiger', for example; is it to read too much into his poem if we, see in it the tiger that ranges the forest of the night, the tiger that is the emblem of strength and ferocity, the tiger that is the exemplar of fearlessness, the tiger that is a revelation of the miracle of divine creativeness? And so, too, maybe, when Shakespeare wrote of 'what we fear of death'. But here I am venturing beyond my depth.

All this, at least, concerns the stories contained in this volume as they appear, once and for all, in the all-sufficing 'bare text' of the Old Testament itself. My own versions of them, apart from what has been literally embodied from it (and even here the frame given to that must in some degree affect its meaning), is no more than my own conception of them, which cannot but be very partial, faulty, inaccurate, and far from complete.