Sentient Dogs, Liberated Rams, and Talking Asses: Agnon's Biblical Zoo: or Rereading Tmol shilshomThis essay is dedicated to the students in my graduate seminars on Agnon at the Hebrew University in 2001 and 2002, whose wonderful insights punctuate these pages; and especially to my student and research assistant, Natasha Gordinsky, who gave unstintingly of her detective skills, her indomitable curiosity and the delicacy and integrity of her mind and soul

The conclusion of Tmol shilshom is as satisfying as the climax of a Wagnerian opera or a Cecil B. De Mille movie. There is human sacrifice and there are claps of thunder and torrents of rain and cosmic evidence of divine wrath expended and placated. Nor does the novel's melodramatic end fail to satisfy its hyberbolic beginning: Isaac Kumer the naif , whose inflated dream of Zion carried the seeds of its own destruction, is bitten by a mad dog and sacrificed on the altar of the most primitive version of Jewish theodicy.