The lover replies: “No, my friend, I sit here toiling and moiling with a dictionary.… If you call that reading, you mock me.”3 Kierkegaard’s point is that linguistic and historical scholarship is not yet genuine reading. It is rather like examining and working on the mirror itself—looking at the mirror rather than in it. Such, he suggests, is the danger of modern biblical criticism. In the parable of the “king’s decree,” Kierkegaard asks us to imagine a country in which a royal ordinance goes out.