Begrebet Angest was characterized by Walter Lowrie, its first English translator, as a ‘tormenting’ book and it continues to intrigue, puzzle and frustrate readers from a wide variety of academic disciplines. Of these, the study of the Hebrew Bible might not seem the one most likely to shed light on its riddles, although any student of the Hebrew Bible can offer long experience of bafflement in the face of impenetrable texts whose background and authorship is a matter of speculation and which have been argued over vehemently.

Yet, whatever else he was, Kierkegaard was an engaged reader of the Bible, struggling throughout his life with the recalcitrant texts of the Scriptures. The more I read his works, the more it seems to me that much of what is most original in his writings arises from his wrestling with biblical texts and his attempts to see the sense in what seem to be contradictory or simply incoherent passages of the Scriptures. The sacrifice of Isaac, the odd ending of Job, the problem that Jesus says of Lazarus that his sickness is ‘not unto death’, the logical absurdity of issuing a commandment to love one's neighbour: each of these exegetical cruces is the seed and backbone, to mix my metaphors, of a major work. This is in addition to his copious production of avowedly exegetical Upbuilding Discourses and the explicit discussions of biblical exegesis which form major portions of several works.