Wherever you're coming from

Almost nobody arrives at a book like this empty handed. You bring a church, or a mosque, or a firm intention to believe none of it — and usually a few things you were told about Jews that you have never had reason to examine. These pages deal with that first, so the reading can be honest.

If you come from a Christian background
This is the book Jesus read
Not a preface to the real thing. The whole of it — the scriptures he quoted, argued from, and assumed his listeners knew by heart.
Read this one
If you have no religious background at all
You do not have to believe anything
It is the most argued-over book in the world and one of the strangest. That is reason enough to read it.
Read this one

What this house is for. To teach the Hebrew Bible and the life built on it, clearly, to anyone who wants to learn — and to do it without asking you to stop being whatever you already are. Nothing here is trying to convert you. Judaism does not recruit.

If you came in carrying contempt for Jewish people, you are still welcome. Read the books. Meet the arguments. Contempt has a hard time surviving contact with a text this self critical, and with a tradition that preserved the psalm accusing God of abandonment right beside the one about the shepherd.