If one thing has become clear, it is the rich diversity of Judaism's received traditions. Women fare very differently in the sundry traditions and, as we have seen, even from one revelation to another. The recognition of this fact holds great promise – not the feckless promise of open season, but the tried and tested promise of Torah displaying its complexities uninhibited. In the past, people were often deterred from descrying Torah's kaleidoscopic panoply. Some laboured under the premise that to be God-given, Torah must of necessity be monolithic. Therefore, inconsistency and contradiction had to be camouflaged.

In 1632, Manasseh ben Israel's Conciliador was published at Frankfort-on-the-Main. Faithful to its title, this work sets out to reconcile Scripture's apparent disparities because “the Bible being in the highest degree true, it cannot contain any text really contradictory of another”. Manasseh was obviously disconcerted enough by the contradictions to grind away, amassing his arsenal of conciliations both old and new. His effort makes sense when one ponders Manasseh's axiom, that for the Bible to be true, it must be free of contradiction; indeed it takes on formidable proportions. After all, the Bible's reputation hung upon it.

Manasseh was no trailblazer in the art of harmonizing, any more than he was the first to be riled by Scripture's contrariety. That distinction belongs to the Chronicler whose ‘blending and homogenizing’ of Pentateuchal texts is outlined by Michael Fishbane: