The Bible, at least the Tanakh, is a book without an ending, and with multiple beginnings, a beginning which is beginningless, which sinks in the grammatical aporia between and ¹ It is haunted by its ending, by the consummate conclusion, by a festination infinitely protracted, a new world and a new language on the other side of catastrophe, and of a text that remains resolutely embedded in discommoding history. But it is also a text which internalizes its conclusion; at the centre of its life, at least one of its lives, is the Temple, in which eternity is realized.² There is a similar moment in Qohelet.³ The officiant in the Temple is the anointed priest, a messianic figure. The Messiah of Aaron and the Messiah of David, the priestly and the political, are in tension as well as interdependent throughout the Tanakh.⁴