The writers of the exodus story imagine a god who dwells on Mount Sinai and transforms its terrifying divine thundering into the time-worn, tamed linearity of writing. The rumblings in the desert stun the people as a formidable presence, if only a distant, untranslatable echo, while writing affords another kind of being, a shift to a more easily reachable text, however irremediable in it the memory of an absent voice.

We are at the foot of the mountain in the desert, freshly liberated. We depend on manna. We are landless. Yet we manage to think of ourselves as proud, limned autochthones. What text engages us to speak of land as an uninhabited Ur-possession? Aren’t we all allochthones and heirs to the conditional promise of the land?