"In this story you don't escape the words, the writing." Chapter 2, The Words, sets this out most clearly. The book called in Greek Deuteronomy ("Second Law") has the Hebrew title Devarim, "The Words". (Actually  devarim can just as well be translated "The Things": it is revealing that Hebrew makes no difference between words and things.)  The genius of the ancient priests and scribes "was to sacralise movable writing, in standardised alphabetic Hebrew, as the exclusive carrier of YHWH's law and historic vision for his people". At the heart of Judaism is a book, the Torah, which is "compact, transferable history, law, wisdom, poetic chant, prophecy, consolation and self-strengthening counsel". 

All this is spot-on, and Schama is right to devote six early pages to the Hebrew language and alphabet. Hebrew has come to be uniquely associated with the Jewish people, and there is a persistent claim that it was the original language of humankind, the language in which God spoke to Adam. The letters were used, throughout the Middle Ages, to write a plethora of languages. The biblical God himself writes Hebrew letters, on the tablets of the revelation to Moses and on the wall of Belshazzar's feast. The Jewish shrine contains no statue, no cult object, just a "sacred emptiness"; in the synagogue this will become what Schama calls "the hallmark of Judaism: a vacuum filled only by the scroll of revealed words". This theme, of the revealed words, persists throughout the book, generating interesting insights. The encounter with Hellenism is encapsulated in the question "the nude or the word?" The wars of the Hellenistic period pit the scroll against the sword. Rabbinic Judaism created an edifice built of words not stones. And so on.

This emphasis on the divine word as an Ariadne's thread through the maze of Jewish history is an inspired and fruitful way of tackling what can seem a hopeless task. Schama is not a theologian, but he reveals a fine sense of some of the ways that theology impacts on history. It is all the more surprising then that he misses some of the most promising opportunities. I shall mention just three key instances of the impact of   theology on history. 

The first is the theology of the Word (logos in Greek). This complex of ideas emerged in late Second-Temple Judaism, and its traces can be found all over the literature, from the biblical Wisdom writings to the copious treatises of the philosopher Philo (who hardly gets a mention in Schama's story) to the New Testament and the early Rabbis. It is a sophisticated development of the idea that God created the world and revealed Himself through the word; it is one of the most fruitful products of the encounter between Jews and Greeks, and a very important element in the Jewish contribution to nascent Christianity. I should have loved to see what Simon Schama, with his flair for such things, could have made of it.