conviction. Luther’s reading of Moses’ ancient history is inextricably a product of Luther’s own religious crusade. At this point the tone of the commentary changes abruptly. The scholar observes that the word ‘to know’ has no equivalent in Latin or Greek. It means, he says, not only abstract knowledge, but feeling and experience. Thus Adam knew Eve, his wife, ‘not objectively or speculatively, but he actually experienced his Eve as a woman’. Attention to details of the language takes him further.