 In one sense, this hermeneutic serves Leibowitz well, allowing him to bypass textual objections to his anti-providential reading of the Torah by claiming that the apparent references to God’s role in nature or history are no longer to be understood factually, but rather as expressing something about the nature of our obligation to God. Similarly, stories of individuals are not to be mined for their historical content but for what they teach regarding the nature of religious obligation. At the same time, it demands a far from intuitive reading of much of Scripture, especially the stories of individuals that are certainly presented as if they are in some sense historical, and that in the later books of the Prophets that are also part of Holy Scripture surely are historical in part. Yet Leibowitz insists that in attempting the impossible – speaking of God – the Torah necessarily uses various literary forms amenable to human comprehension, but that nonetheless “from the standpoint of religious faith, the Torah and the entirety of Holy Scripture must be conceived as a demand which transcends the range of human cognition … a demand conveyed in various forms of human expression: prescriptions, vision, poetry, prayer, thought, and narrative” (Judaism, 140).