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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
THE BIBLE Updated Edition
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University
Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: The Bible, Updated Edition Copyright © 2006 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2006 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Bible / Harold Bloom, editor. — Updated ed. p. cm. — (Bloom’s modern critical views) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7910-8137-0 (hardcover) 1. Bible as literature. 2. Bible—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Series. BS535.B47 2006 220.6’6—dc22 2006011659 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Janyce Marson Cover design by Keith Trego Cover © Hulton Archive Printed in the United States of America Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.
Contents Editor’s Note
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THE HEBREW BIBLE Introduction 1 Harold Bloom The First Three Chapters of Genesis Kenneth Burke The Representations of Reality in Homer and The Old Testament Erich Auerbach The Poetics of Prophecy Geoffrey Hartman
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Wrestling Sigmund: Three Paradigms for Poetic Originality Harold Bloom Job
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91 Martin Buber
The Heart Determines: Psalm 73 Martin Buber
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The Relationship of the Lovers Francis Landy
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Has the Narrator Come to Praise Solomon or to Bury Him?: Narrative Subtlety in 1 Kings 1–11 J. Daniel Hays
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T H E N E W T E S TA M E N T Apocalypse 171 D.H. Lawrence The Man in the Macintosh, the Boy in the Shirt Frank Kermode Pauline Typology and Revisionary Criticism Herbert Marks John’s Use of Matthew: Beyond Tweaking Benedict T. Viviano, O.P. Myth and Symbolic Resistance in Revelation 13 Steven J. Friesen Afterthought Harold Bloom
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Chronology
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Contributors
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Bibliography
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Acknowledgments Index
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Editor’s Note
My Introduction concerns the uncanny sublimity of the Yahwist or J Writer, the original author of the oldest layer in the palimpsest we now call Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers. The great critic Kenneth Burke gives an exuberant analysis of the first three chapters of Genesis, after which Erich Auerbach contrasts the representation of reality in the Hebrew Bible and in Homer. Geoffrey Hartman expounds the prophetic poetics of Jeremiah, while I give a reading, unconventionally Freudian, of Jacob’s all-night wrestling match with the Angel of Death. Martin Buber, theologian of visionary dialogue, memorably interprets first the Book of Job, and then Psalm 73. The Song of Songs receives an expert exegesis from Francis Landy, after which J. Daniel Hays investigates narrative skill in I Kings 1-11, the story of Solomon. The great poet-novelist D.H. Lawrence contributes an apocalyptic critique of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, while the major critic Frank Kermode splendidly analyzes a crucial episode in the Gospel of Mark. In a shrewd defense of Pauline typology, Herbert Marks presents St. Paul himself as a revisionary critic, after which Benedict T. Viviano starkly contrasts the Gospel of John to one of its sources, the Gospel of Matthew. Revelation returns in Steven J. Friesen’s account of the symbolism of Chapter 13, which employs myth in order to separate out his audience from a hostile society. My Afterword casts doubt as to the recoverable historicity of Jesus, relying upon the very different arguments of two recent books, my own Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, and Christ is the Question by Wayne Meeks.
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Introduction To my best knowledge, it was the Harvard historian of religion George Foot Moore who first called the religion of the rabbis of the second century of the Common Era “normative Judaism.” Let me simplify by centering on one of those rabbis, surely the grandest: normative Judaism is the religion of Akiba. That vigorous scholar, patriot, and martyr may be regarded as the standard by which any other Jewish religious figure must be judged. If your faith and praxis share enough with Akiba’s, then you too are a representative of normative Judaism. If not, then probably not. There is a charming legend in which Moses attends Akiba’s seminar, and goes away baffled by the sage’s interpretation—of Moses! But the deepest implication of the legend, as I read it, is that Akiba’s strong misreading of Moses was in no way weakened by the Mosaic bafflement. The Great Original of the literary and oral traditions that merged into normative Judaism was the writer scholarly convention rather wonderfully chose to call “J.” Since Kafka is the most legitimate descendant of one aspect of the antithetical J (Tolstoy and the early, pre-Coleridgean Wordsworth are the most authentic descendants of J’s other side), I find it useful to adopt the formula “from J to K,” in order to describe the uncanny or antithetical elements in J’s narratives. The J who could have written Hadji Murad or The Tale of Margaret was the inevitable fountainhead of what eventually became normative Judaism. But this first, strongest, and still somehow most Jewish of all our writers also could have written “The Hunter Gracchus” or even “Josephine the Singer and the Mouse Folk.” Indeed she wrote uncannier stories than Kafka lived to write. How those stories ever could have been acceptable or even comprehensible to the P authors or the Deuteronomist, to the Academy of Ezra or the Pharisees, let alone to Akiba and his
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colleagues, is a mystery that I have been trying to clarify by developing a critical concept of what I call “facticity,” a kind of brute contingency by which an author’s strength blinds and incarcerates a tradition of belated readership. But here I primarily want to describe the uncanniness of J’s work, so as to break out of facticity, insofar as I am able to do so. By “the uncanny” I mean Freud’s concept, since that appears to be the authentic modern version of what once was called the Sublime. Freud defines “the uncanny” as being “in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression.” Since I myself, as a critic, am obsessed with the Sublime or Freud’s “uncanny,” I realize that my reading of any Sublime work or fragment is always dependent upon an estrangement, in which the repressed returns upon me to end that estrangement, but only momentarily. The uncanniness of the Yahwist exceeds that of all other writers, because in him both the estrangement and the return achieve maximum force. Of course J herself is considered to be a fiction, variously referred to by scholars as a school, a tradition, a document, and a hypothesis. Well, Homer is perhaps a fiction too, and these days the slaves of critical fashion do not weary of proclaiming the death of the author, or at least the reduction of every author to the status of a Nietzschean fiction. But J is pragmatically the author-of-authors, in that her authority and originality constitute a difference that has made a difference. The teller of the tales of Jacob and of Joseph, of Moses and the Exodus, is a writer more inescapable than Shakespeare and more pervasive in our consciousness than Freud. J’s only cultural rival would be an unlikely compound of Homer and Plato. Plato’s contest with Homer seems to me to mark one of the largest differences between the ancient Greeks and the Hebrews. The agon for the mind of Athens found no equivalent in Jerusalem, and so the Yahwist still remains the mind of Jerusalem, everywhere that Jerusalem happens to be. I do not believe that J was a fiction, and indeed J troubles me because her uncanniness calls into question my own conviction that every writer is belated, and so is always an inter-poet. J’s freedom from belatedness rivals Shakespeare’s, which is to say that J’s originality is as intense as Shakespeare’s. But J wrote twenty-five hundred years before Shakespeare, and that timespan bewilders comparison. I am going to sketch J’s possible circumstances and purposes, in order to hazard a description of J’s tone or of the uncanniness of her stance as a writer. Not much in my sketch will flout received scholarship, but necessarily I will have to go beyond the present state of biblical scholarship, since it cannot even decide precisely which texts are J’s, or even revised by others from J. My attempt at transcending
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scholarship is simply a literary critic’s final reliance upon her or his own sense of a text, or what I have called the necessity of misreading. No critic, whatever her or his moldiness or skepticism, can evade a Nietzschean will to power over a text, because interpretation is at last nothing else. The text, even if it was written that morning, and shown by its poet to the critic at high noon, is already lost in time, as lost as the Yahwist. Time says, “It was,” and authentic criticism, as Nietzsche implied, is necessarily pervaded by a will for revenge against time’s “it was.” No interpreter can suspend the will to relational knowledge for more than an isolated moment, and since all narrative and all poetry are also interpretation, all writing manifests such a will. Solomon the King, nowhere of course overtly mentioned by J, is the dominant contemporary force in the context of J’s writing. I would go further, and as a pious Stevensian would say that Solomon is J’s motive for metaphor. The reign of Solomon ended in the year 922 before the Common Era, and J quite possibly wrote either in Solomon’s last years, or—more likely, I think—shortly thereafter. One can venture that Solomon was to J what Elizabeth was to Shakespeare, an idea of order, as crucial in J’s Jerusalem as it was in Shakespeare’s London. The Imperial Theme is J’s countersong, though J’s main burden is a heroic and agonistic past represented by David the King, while her implied judgment upon the imperial present is at best skeptical, since she implies also an agonistic future. J’s vision of agon centers her uncanny stance, accounting for her nearly unique mode of irony. How much of J’s actual text we have lost to the replacement tactics of redactors we cannot know, but biblical scholarship has not persuaded me that either the so-called Elohistic or the Priestly redactors provide fully coherent visions of their own, except perhaps for the Priestly first chapter of Genesis, which is so startling a contrast to J’s account of how we all got started. But let me sketch the main contours of J’s narrative, as we appear to have it. Yahweh begins his Creation in the first harsh Judean spring, before the first rain comes down. Water wells up from the earth, and Yahweh molds Adam out of the red clay, breathing into the earthling’s nostrils a breath of the divine life. Then come the stories we think we know: Eve, the serpent, Cain and Abel, Seth, Noah and the Flood, the tower of Babel, and something utterly new with Abraham. From Abraham on, the main sequence again belongs to J: the Covenant, Ishmael, Yahweh at Mamre and on the road to Sodom, Lot, Isaac and the Akedah, Rebecca, Esau and Jacob, the tales of Jacob, Tamar, the story of Joseph and his brothers, and then the Mosaic account. Moses, so far as I can tell, meant much less to J than he did to the
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normative redactors, and so the J strand in Exodus and Numbers is even more laconic than J tended to be earlier. In J’s Exodus we find the oppression of the Jews, the birth of Moses, his escape to Midian, the burning bush and the instruction, the weird murderous attack by Yahweh upon Moses, the audiences with Pharaoh, the plagues, and the departure, flight, and crossing. Matters become sparser with Israel in the wilderness, at the Sinai covenant, and then with the dissensions and the battles in Numbers. J flares up finally on a grand scale in the seriocomic Balaam and Balak episode, but that is not the end of J’s work, even as we have it. The Deuteronomist memorably incorporates J in his chapters 31 and 34 dealing with the death of Moses. I give here in sequence the opening and the closing of what we hear J’s Yahweh speaking aloud, first to Adam and last to Moses: “Of every tree in the garden you are free to eat; but as for the tree of knowledge of good and bad, you must not eat of it; for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die.” “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, ‘I will give it to your offspring.’ I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you shall not cross there.” Rhetorically, the two speeches share the same cruel pattern of power: “Here it is; it is yours and yet it is not yours.” Akin to J’s counterpointing of Yahweh’s first and last speeches is her counterparting of Yahweh’s first and last actions: “Yahweh formed man from the dust of the earth,” and “Yahweh buried him, Moses, in the valley in the land of Moab, near Beth-peor; and no one knows his burial place to this day.” From Adam to Moses is from earth to earth; Yahweh molds us and he buries us, and both actions are done with his own hands. As it was with Adam and Moses, so it was with David and with Solomon, and with those who come and will come after Solomon. J is the harshest and most monitory of writers, and her Yahweh is an uncanny god, who takes away much of what he gives, and who is beyond any standard of measurement. And yet what I have said about J so far is not even part of the truth; isolated, all by itself, it is not true at all, for J is a writer who exalts man, and who has most peculiar relations with God. Gorky once said of Tolstoy that Tolstoy’s relation to God reminded him of the Russian proverb “Two bears in one den.” J’s relation to her uncanny Yahweh frequently reminds me of my favorite Yiddish apothegm: “Sleep faster, we need the pillows.” J barely can keep up with Yahweh, though J’s Jacob almost can, while J’s Moses cannot keep up at all. Since what is most problematic about J’s writing is Yahweh, I suggest we take a closer look at J’s Yahweh than the entire normative and modern scholarly tradition has been willing or able to take. Homer and Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, hardly lacked audacity in representing what may be beyond representation, but J was both bolder and shrewder than any other writer at
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inventing speeches and actions for God Himself. Only J convinces us that she knows precisely how and when Yahweh speaks; Isaiah compares poorly to J in this, while the Milton of Paradise Lost, book 3, hardly rates even as an involuntary parodist of J. I am moved to ask a question which the normative tradition—Judaic, Christian, and even secular—cannot ask: What is J’s stance toward Yahweh? I can begin an answer by listing all that it is not: creating Yahweh, J’s primary emotions do not include awe, fear, wonder, much surprise, or even love. J sounds rather matter-of-fact, but that is part of J’s unique mode of irony. By turns, J’s stance toward Yahweh is appreciative, wryly apprehensive, intensely interested, and above all attentive and alert. Toward Yahweh, J is perhaps a touch wary; J is always prepared to be surprised. What J knows is that Yahweh is Sublime or “uncanny,” incommensurate yet rather agonistic, curious and lively, humorous yet irascible, and all too capable of suddenly violent action. But J’s Yahweh is rather heimlich also; he sensibly avoids walking about in the Near Eastern heat, preferring the cool of the evening, and he likes to sit under the terebinths at Mamre, devouring roast calf and curds. J would have laughed at her normative descendants—Christian, Jewish, secular, scholarly—who go on calling her representations of Yahweh “anthropomorphic,” when they should be calling her representations of Jacob “theomorphic.” “The anthropomorphic” always has been a misleading concept, and probably was the largest single element affecting the long history of the redaction of J that evolved into normative Judaism. Most modern scholars, Jewish and Gentile alike, cannot seem to accept the fact that there was no Jewish theology before Philo. “Jewish theology,” despite its long history from Philo to Franz Rosenzweig, is therefore an oxymoron, particularly when applied to Biblical texts, and most particularly when applied to J. J’s Yahweh is an uncanny personality, and not at all a concept. Yahweh sometimes seems to behave like us, but because Yahweh and his sculpted creature, Adam, are incommensurate, this remains a mere seeming. Sometimes, and always within limits, we behave like Yahweh, and not necessarily because we will to do so. There is a true sense in which John Calvin was as strong a reader of J as he more clearly was of Job, a sense displayed in the paradox of the Protestant Yahweh who entraps his believers by an impossible double injunction, which might be phrased: “Be like me, but don’t you dare to be too like me!” In J, the paradox emerges only gradually, and does not reach its climax until the theophany on Sinai. Until Sinai, J’s Yahweh addresses himself only to a handful, to his elite: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, and, by profound implication, David. But at Sinai, we encounter the crisis of J’s writing, as we will see.
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What is theomorphic about Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph? I think the question should be rephrased: What is Davidic about them? About Joseph, everything, and indeed J’s Joseph I read as a fictive representation of David, rather in the way Virgil’s Divine Child represents Augustus, except that J is working on a grand scale with Joseph, bringing to perfection what may have been an old mode of romance. I have called Solomon J’s motive for metaphor, but that calling resounds with Nietzsche’s motive for all trope: the desire to be different, the desire to be elsewhere. For J, the difference, the elsewhere, is David. J’s agonistic elitism, the struggle for the blessing, is represented by Abraham, above all by Jacob, and by Tamar also. But the bearer of the blessing is David, and I have ventured the surmise that J’s Joseph is a portrait of David. Though this surmise is, I think, original, the centering of J’s humanism upon the implied figure of David is not, of course, original with me. It is a fundamental postulate of the school of Gerhard von Rad, worked out in detail by theologians like Hans Walter Wolff and Walter Brueggemann. Still, a phrase like Wolff ’s “the Kerygma of the Yahwist” makes me rather uneasy, since J is no more a theologian than she is a priest or prophet. Freud, like St. Paul, has a message, but J, like Shakespeare, does not. J is literature and not “confession,” which of course is not true of her redactors. They were on the road to Akiba, but J, always in excess of the normative, was no quester. I find no traces of cult in J, and I am puzzled that so many read as kerygmatic Yahweh’s words to Abram in Gen. 12:3: “So, then, all the families of the earth can gain a blessing in you.” The blessing, in J, simply does not mean what it came to mean in his redactors and in the subsequent normative tradition. To gain a blessing, particularly through the blessing that becomes Abraham’s, is in J to join oneself to that elitest agon which culminated in the figure of the agonistic hero, David. To be blessed means ultimately that one’s name will not be scattered, and the remembered name will retain life into a time without boundaries. The blessing then is temporal, and not spatial, as it was in Homer and in the Greeks after him, who like his heroes struggled for the foremost place. And a temporal blessing, like the kingdom in Shakespeare, finds its problematic aspect in the vicissitudes of descendants. Jacob is J’s central man, whose fruition, deferred in the beloved Joseph, because given to Judah, has come just before J’s time in the triumph of David. I think that Brueggemann is imaginatively accurate in his hypothesis that David represented, for J, a new kind of man, almost a new Adam, the man whom Yahweh (in 2 Sam. 7) had decided to trust. Doubtless we cannot exclude from our considerations the Messianic tradition that the normative, Jewish and Christian, were to draw out from those two great
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contemporary writers, J and the author of 2 Samuel. But J does not have any such Messianic consciousness about David. Quite the reverse: for her, we can surmise, David had been and was the elite image; not a harbinger of a greater vision to come, but a fully human being who already had exhausted the full range and vitality of man’s possibilities. If, as Brueggemann speculates, J’s tropes of exile (Gen. 3:24, 4:12, 11:8) represent the true images of the Solomonic present, then I would find J’s prime Davidic trope in Jacob’s return to Canaan, marked by the all-night, all-in wrestling match that concentrates Jacob’s name forever as Israel. The Davidic glory then is felt most strongly in Jacob’s theomorphic triumph, rendered so much the more poignant by his permanent crippling: “The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping on his hip.” If Jacob is Israel as the father, then David, through the trope of Joseph, is Jacob’s or Israel’s truest son. What then is Davidic about J’s Jacob? I like the late E. A. Speiser’s surmise that J personally knew her great contemporary, the writer who gave us, in 2 Samuel, the history of David and his immediate successors. J’s Joseph reads to me like a lovingly ironic parody of the David of the court historian. What matters most about David, as that model narrative presents him, is not only his charismatic intensity, but the marvelous gratuity of Yahweh’s hesed, his Election-love for this most heroic of his favorites. To no one in J’s text does Yahweh speak so undialectically as he does through Nathan to David in 2 Samuel 7:12–16: When your days are done and you lie with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, one of your own issue, and I will establish his kingship. He shall build a house for My name, and I will establish his royal throne forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to Me. When he does wrong, I will chastise him with the rod of men and the affliction of mortals; but I will never withdraw My favor from him as I withdrew it from Saul, whom I removed to make room for you. Your house and your kingship shall ever be secure before you; your throne shall be established forever. The blessing in J, as I have written elsewhere, is always agonistic, and Jacob is J’s supreme agonist. But J makes a single exception for Joseph, and clearly with the reader’s eye centered upon David. From the womb on to the ford of the Jabbok, Jacob is an agonist, and until that night encounter at Penuel by no means a heroic one. His agon, as I’ve said, is for the temporal blessing that will prevail into a time without boundaries; and so it never
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resembles the Homeric or the Athenian contest for the foremost place, a kind of topological or spatial blessing. In J, the struggle is for the uncanny gift of life, for the breath of Yahweh that transforms adamah into Adam. True, David struggles, and suffers, but J’s Joseph serenely voyages through all vicissitudes, as though J were intimating that David’s agon had been of a new kind, one in which the obligation was wholly and voluntarily on Yahweh’s side in the Covenant. Jacob the father wrestles lifelong, and is permanently crippled by the climactic match with a nameless one among the Elohim whom I interpret as the baffled angel of death, who learns that Israel lives, and always will survive. Joseph the son charms reality, even as David seems to have charmed Yahweh. But Jacob, I surmise, was J’s signature, and while the portrait of the Davidic Joseph manifests J’s wistfulness, the representation of Jacob may well be J’s self-portrait as the great writer of Israel. My earlier question would then become: What is Davidic about J herself, not as a person perhaps, but certainly as an author? My first observation here would have to be this apparent paradox: J is anything but a religious writer, unlike all her revisionists and interpreters, and David is anything but a religious personality, despite having become the paradigm for all Messianic speculation, both Jewish and Christian. Again I am in the wake of von Rad and his school, but with this crucial Bloomian swerve: J and David are not religious, just as Freud, for all his avowedly antireligious polemic, is finally nothing but religious. Freud’s overdetermination of meaning, his emphasis upon primal repression or a flight from representation—before, indeed, there was anything to represent—establishes Freud as normatively Jewish despite himself. Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it, the sage ben Bag Bag said of Torah, and Freud says the same of the psyche. If there is sense in everything, then everything that is going to happen has happened already, and so reality is already in the past and there never can be anything new. Freud’s stance toward psychic history is the normative rabbinical stance toward Jewish history, and if Akiba is the paradigm for what it is to be religious, then the professedly scientistic Freud is as religious as Akiba, if we are speaking of the Jewish religion. But J, like the court historian’s David of 2 Samuel, is quite Jewish without being at all religious, in the belated normative sense. For the uncanny J, and for the path-breaking David, everything that matters most is perpetually new. But this is true of J’s Jacob also, as it is of Abraham, even Isaac, and certainly Tamar—all live at the edge of life rushing onwards, never in a static present but always in the dynamism of J’s Yahweh, whose incessant temporality generates anxious expectations in nearly every fresh sentence of
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certain passages. This is again the Kafkan aspect of J, though it is offset by J’s strong sense of human freedom, a sense surpassing its Homeric parallels. What becomes theodicy in J’s revisionists down to Milton is for J not at all a perplexity. Since J has no concept of Yahweh but rather a sense of Yahweh’s peculiar personality, the interventions of Yahweh in primal family history do not impinge upon his elite’s individual freedom. So we have the memorable and grimly funny argument between Yahweh and Abraham as they walk together down the road to Sodom. Abraham wears Yahweh down until Yahweh quite properly begins to get exasperated. The shrewd courage and humanity of Abraham convince me that in the Akedah the redactors simply eliminated J’s text almost completely. As I read the Hebrew, there is an extraordinary gap between the Elohistic language and the sublime invention of the story. J’s Abraham would have argued far more tenaciously with Yahweh for his son’s life than he did in defense of the inhabitants of the sinful cities of the plain, and here the revisionists may have defrauded us of J’s uncanny greatness at its height. But how much they have left us which the normative tradition has been incapable of assimilating! I think the best way of seeing this is to juxtapose with J the Pharisaic Book of Jubilees, oddly called also “the Little Genesis,” though it is prolix and redundant in every tiresome way. Written about one hundred years before the Common Era, Jubilees is a normative travesty of Genesis, far more severely, say, than Chronicles is a normative reduction of 2 Samuel. But though he writes so boringly, what is wonderfully illuminating about the author of Jubilees is that he totally eradicates J’s text. Had he set out deliberately to remove everything idiosyncratic about J’s share in Torah, he could have done no more thorough a job. Gone altogether is J’s creation story of Yahweh molding the red clay into Adam and then breathing life into his own image. Gone as well is Yahweh at Mamre, where only angels now appear to Abraham and Sarah, and there is no dispute on the road to Sodom. And the Satanic prince of angels, Mastema, instigates Yahweh’s trial of Abraham in the Akedah. Jacob and Esau do not wrestle in the womb, and Abraham prefers Jacob, though even the author of Jubilees does not go so far as to deny Isaac’s greater love for Esau. Gone, alas totally gone, is J’s sublime invention of the night wrestling at Penuel. Joseph lacks all charm and mischief, necessarily, and the agony of Jacob, and the subsequent grandeur of the reunion, are vanished away. Most revealingly, the uncanniest moment in J, Yahweh’s attempt to murder Moses en route to Egypt, becomes Mastema’s act. And wholly absent is J’s most enigmatic vision, the Sinai theophany, which is replaced by the safe removal of J’s too-lively Yahweh back to a sedate dwelling in the high heavens.
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J’s originality was too radical to be absorbed, and yet abides even now as the originality of a Yahweh who will not dwindle down into the normative Godhead of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Because J cared more for personality than for morality, and cared not at all for cult, her legacy is a disturbing sense that, as Blake phrased it, forms of worship have been chosen from poetic tales. J was no theologian and yet not a maker of saga or epic, and again not a historian, and not even a storyteller as such. We have no description of J that will fit, just as we have no idea of God that will contain his irrepressible Yahweh. I want to test these observations by a careful account of J’s Sinai theophany, where her Yahweh is more problematic than scholarship has been willing to perceive. Despite the truncation, indeed the possible mutilation of J’s account of the Sinai theophany, more than enough remains to mark it as the crisis or crossing-point of her work. For the first time, her Yahweh is overwhelmingly self-contradictory, rather than dialectical, ironic, or even crafty. The moment of crisis turns upon Yahweh’s confrontation with the Israelite host. Is he to allow himself to be seen by them? How direct is his self-representation to be? Mamre and the road to Sodom suddenly seem estranged, or as though they never were. It is not that here Yahweh is presented less anthropomorphically, but that J’s Moses (let alone those he leads) is far less theomorphic or Davidic than J’s Abraham and J’s Jacob, and certainly less theomorphic or Davidic than J’s Joseph. Confronting his agonistic and theomorphic elite, from Abraham to the implied presence of David, Yahweh is both canny and uncanny. But Moses is neither theomorphic nor agonistic. J’s Sinai theophany marks the moment of the blessings transition from the elite to the entire Israelite host, and in that transition a true anxiety of representation breaks forth in J’s work for the first time. I follow Martin Noth’s lead, in the main, as to those passages in Exodus 19 and 24 that are clearly J’s, though my ear accepts as likely certain moments he considers only probable or at least quite possible. Here are Exod. 19:9–15, 18, 20–25, literally rendered: Yahweh said to Moses: “I will come to you in a thick cloud, that the people may hear that I speak with you and that they may trust you forever afterwards.” Moses then reported the people’s words to Yahweh, and Yahweh said to Moses: “Go to the people and warn them to be continent today and tomorrow. Let them wash their clothes. Let them be prepared for the third day, for on the third day Yahweh will descend upon Mount Sinai, in the sight of all the people. You shall set limits for the people all around,
Introduction
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saying: ‘Beware of climbing the mountain or touching the border of it. Whoever touches the mountain shall be put to death; no hand shall touch him, but either he shall be stoned or shot; whether beast or man, he shall not live.’ When there is a loud blast of the ram’s horn, then they may ascend the mountain.” Moses came down from the mountain unto the people and warned them to remain pure, and they washed their clothes. And Moses said to the people: “Prepare for the third day; do not approach a woman.” Yahweh will come at first in a thick cloud, that the people may hear yet presumably not see him; nevertheless, on the third day he will come down upon Sinai “in the sight of all the people.” Sinai will be taboo, but is this only a taboo of touch? What about seeing Yahweh? I suspect that an ellipsis, wholly characteristic of J’s rhetorical strength, then intervened, again characteristically filled in by the E redactors as verses 16 and 17, and again as verse 19; but in verse 18 clearly we hear J’s grand tone: Now Mount Sinai was all in smoke, for the Lord had come down upon it in fire; the smoke rose like the smoke of a kiln, and all the people trembled violently. Whether people or mountain tremble hardly matters in this great trope of immanent power. Yahweh, as we know, is neither the fire nor in the fire, for the ultimate trope is the makom: Yahweh is the place of the world, but the world is not his place, and so Yahweh is also the place of the fire, but the fire is not his place. And so J touches the heights of her own Sublime, though herself troubled by an anxiety of representation previously unknown to her, an anxiety of touch and, for the first time, of sight: Yahweh came down upon Mount Sinai, on the mountain top, and Yahweh called Moses to the mountain top, and Moses went up. Yahweh said to Moses: “Go down, warn the people not to break through to gaze at Yahweh, lest many of them die. And the priests who come near Yahweh must purify themselves, lest Yahweh break forth against them.” But Moses said to Yahweh: “The people cannot come up to Mount Sinai, for You warned us when You said: ‘Set limits about the mountain and render it holy.’” So Yahweh said to Moses: “Go down and come back with Aaron, but do not allow the priests or the people to break through to come
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up to Yahweh, lest Yahweh break out against them.” And Moses descended to the people and spoke to them. However much we have grown accustomed to J, she has not prepared us for this. Never before has Yahweh, bent upon Covenant, been a potential catastrophe as well as a potential blessing. But then, certainly the difference is in the movement from an elite to a whole people. If, as I suspect, the pragmatic covenant for J was the Davidic or humanistic or theomorphic covenant, then the most salient poetic meaning here was contemporary, whether Solomonic or just after. The true covenant, without anxiety or the problematic of representation, was agonistic: with Abraham, with Jacob, with Joseph, with David, but neither with Moses nor with Solomon, and so never with the mass of the people, whether at Sinai or at J’s own moment of writing. J is as elitist as Shakespeare, or as Freud; none of the three was exactly a writer on the left. Yahweh himself, in J’s vision, becomes dangerously confused in the anxious expectations of at once favoring and threatening the host of the people, rather than the individuals, that he has chosen. When Moses reminds Yahweh that Sinai is off limits anyway, Yahweh evidently is too preoccupied and too little taken with Moses even to listen, and merely repeats his warning that he may be uncontrollable, even by himself. As our text now stands, the revisionists take over, and the Commandments are promulgated. I surmise that in J’s original text the Commandments, however phrased, came after some fragments of J that we still have in what is now Exodus 24: Then Yahweh said to Moses: “Come up to Yahweh, with Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy elders of Israel, and bow low but from afar. And only Moses shall come near Yahweh. The others shall not come near, and the people shall not come up with him at all. Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy elders of Israel went up, and they saw the God of Israel; under His feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity. Yet He did not raise His hand against the leaders of the Israelites; they beheld God, and they ate and drank. This is again J at his uncanniest, the true Western Sublime, and so the truest challenge to a belated Longinian critic like myself. We are at Mamre again, in a sense, except that here the seventy-four who constitute an elite (of
Introduction
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sorts) eat and drink, as did the Elohim and Yahweh at Mamre, while now Yahweh watches enigmatically, and (rather wonderfully) is watched. And again, J is proudly self-contradictory, or perhaps even dialectical, her irony being beyond my interpretive ken, whereas her Yahweh is so outrageously self-contradictory that I do not know where precisely to begin in reading the phases of this difference. But rather than entering that labyrinth—of who may or may not see Yahweh, or how, or when—I choose instead to test the one marvelous visual detail against the Second Commandment. Alas, we evidently do not have J’s phrasing here, but there is a strength in the diction that may reflect an origin in J: You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. Surely we are to remember J’s Yahweh, who formed the adam from the dust of the adamah and blew into his sculptured image’s nostrils the breath of life. The zelem is forbidden to us, as our creation. But had it been forbidden to J, at least until now? And even now, does not J make for herself, and so also for us, a likeness of what is in the heavens above? The seventy-four eaters and drinkers saw with their own eyes the God of Israel, and they saw another likeness also: “under His feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity.” Why precisely this visual image, from this greatest of writers who gives us so very few visual images, as compared to images that are auditory, dynamic, motor urgencies? I take it that J, and not the Hebrew language, inaugurated the extraordinary process of describing any object primarily by telling us not how it looked, but how it was made, wonderfully and fearfully made. But here J describes what is seen, not indeed Yahweh in whole or in part, but what we may call Yahweh’s chosen stance. Stance in writing is also tone, and the tone of this passage is crucial but perhaps beyond our determination. Martin Buber, as an eloquent rhetorician, described it with great vividness but with rather too much interpretive confidence in his book, Moses. The seventy-four representatives of Israel are personalized by this theorist of dialogical personalism: They have presumably wandered through clinging, hanging mist before dawn; and at the very moment they reach their goal, the swaying darkness tears asunder (as I myself happened to witness once) and dissolves except for one cloud already transparent with
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the hue of the still unrisen sun. The sapphire proximity of the heavens overwhelms the aged shepherds of the Delta, who have never before tasted, who have never been given the slightest idea, of what is shown in the play of early light over the summits of the mountains. And this precisely is perceived by the representatives of the liberated tribes as that which lies under the feet of their enthroned Melek. Always ingenious and here refreshingly naturalistic, Buber nevertheless neglects what he sometimes recognized: J’s uncanniness. Buber’s motive, as he says, is to combat two opposed yet equally reductive views of Biblical theophanies: that they are either supernatural miracles or else impressive fantasies. But had J wanted us to believe that the seventyfour elders of Israel saw only a natural radiance, she would have written rather differently. The commentary of Brevard Childs is very precise: “The text is remarkable for its bluntness: ‘They saw the God of Israel.’” Childs adds that from the Septuagint on to Maimonides there is a consistent toning down of the statement’s directness. Surely the directness is realized yet more acutely if we recall that this is Yahweh’s only appearance in the Hebrew Bible where he says absolutely nothing. J’s emphasis is clear: the seventy-four are on Sinai to eat and drink in Yahweh’s presence, while they stare at him, and he presumably stares right back. But that confronts us with the one visual detail J provides: “under His feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity.” J gives us a great trope, which all commentary down to the scholarly present weakly misreads by literalization. J, herself a strong misreader of tradition, demands strong misreadings, and so I venture one here. Let us forget all such notions as Yahweh standing so high up that he seems to stand on the sky, or the old fellows never having seen early light in the mountains before. J is elliptical always; that is crucial to her rhetorical stance. She is too wily to say what you would see, if you sat there in awe, eating and drinking while you saw Yahweh. Indeed, we must assume that Yahweh is sitting, but nothing whatsoever is said about a throne, and J after all is not Isaiah or Micaiah ben Imlah or Ezekiel or John Milton. As at Mamre, Yahweh sits upon the ground, and yet it is as though the sky were beneath his feet. May not this drastic reversal of perspective represent a vertigo of vision on the part of the seventy-four? To see the God of Israel is to see as though the world had been turned upside down. And that indeed Yahweh is seen, contra Buber, we can know through J’s monitory comment: “Yet He did not raise His hand against the leaders of the Israelites; they beheld
Introduction
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God, and they ate and drank.” The sublimity is balanced not by a Covenant meal, as all the scholars solemnly assert, but by a picnic on Sinai. That this uncanny festivity contradicts Yahweh’s earlier warnings is not J’s confusion, nor something produced by her redactors, but is a dramatic confusion that J’s Yahweh had to manifest if his blessing was to be extended from elite individuals to an entire people. Being incommensurate, Yahweh cannot be said to have thus touched his limits, but in the little more that J wrote Yahweh is rather less lively than he had been. His heart, as J hints, was not with Moses but with David, who was to come. J’s heart, I venture as I close, was also not with Moses, nor even with Joseph, as David’s surrogate, and not really with Yahweh either. It was with Jacob at the Jabbok, obdurately confronting death in the shape of a time-obsessed nameless one from among the Elohim. Wrestling heroically to win the temporal blessing of a new name, Israel—that is uniquely J’s own agon.
KENNETH BURKE
The First Three Chapters of Genesis
IV P R I N C I P L E S
OF
G O V E R N A N C E S TAT E D N A R R AT I V E LY
I
magine that you wanted to say, “The world can be divided into six major classifications.” That is, you wanted to deal with “the principles of Order,” beginning with the natural order, and placing man’s socio-political order with reference to it. But you wanted to treat of these matters in narrative terms, which necessarily involve temporal sequence (in contrast with the cycle of terms for “Order,” that merely cluster about one another, variously implying one another, but in no one fixed sequence). Stated narratively (in the style of Genesis, Bereshith, Beginning), such an idea of principles, or “firsts” would not be stated simply in terms of classification, as were we to say “The first of six primary classes would be such-and-such, the second such-and-such” and so on. Rather, a completely narrative style would properly translate the idea of six classes or categories into terms of time, as were we to assign each of the classes to a separate “day.” Thus, instead of saying “And that completes the first broad division, or classification, of our subject-matter,” we’d say: “And the evening and the morning were the first day” (or, more accurately, the “One” Day). And so on, through the six broad classes, ending “last but not least,” on the category of man and his dominion.1
From The Rhetoric of Religion. © 1961 by Kenneth Burke
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Further, a completely narrative style would personalize the principle of classification. This role is performed by the references to God’s creative fiat, which from the very start infuses the sheerly natural order with the verbal principle (the makings of that “reason” which we take to be so essential an aspect of human personality). Logologically, the statement that God made man in his image would be translated as: The principle of personality implicit in the idea of the first creative fiats, whereby all things are approached in terms of the word, applies also to the feeling for symbol-systems on the part of the human animal, who would come to read nature as if it were a book. Insofar as God’s words infused the natural order with their genius, and insofar as God is represented as speaking words to the first man and woman, the principle of human personality (which is at the very start identified with dominion) has its analogue in the notion of God as a super-person, and of nature as the act of such a super-agent. (That is, we take symbol-using to be a distinctive ingredient of “personality.”) Though technically there is a kind of “proto-fall” implicit in the principle of divisiveness that characterizes the Bible’s view of the Creation, and though the principle of subjection is already present (in the general outlines of a government with God at its head, and mankind as subject to His authority while in turn having dominion over all else in the natural realm), the Covenant (as first announced in the first chapter) is necessarily Edenic, in a state of “innocence,” since no negative command has yet been pronounced. From the dialectical point of view (in line with the Order–Disorder pair) we may note that there is a possibility of “evil” implicit in the reference to all six primary classifications as “good.” But in all three points (the divisiveness, the order of dominion, and the universal goodness) the explicit negative is lacking. In fact, the nearest approach to an outright negative (and that not of a moralistic, hortatory sort) is in the reference to the “void” (bohu) which preceded God’s classificatory acts. Rashi says that the word translated as “formless” (tohu) “has the meaning of astonishment and amazement.” Incidentally, in connection with Genesis 1:29, The Interpreter’s Bible suggests another implicit negative, in that the explicit permitting of a vegetarian diet implies that Adam may not eat flesh. In the first chapter of Genesis, the stress is upon the creative fiat as a means of classification. It says in effect, “What hath God wrought (by his Word)?” The second chapter’s revised account of the Creation shifts the emphasis to matters of dominion, saying in effect, “What hath God ordained (by his words)?” The seventh “day” (or category), which is placed at the
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beginning of the second chapter, has a special dialectical interest in its role as a transition between the two emphases. In one sense, the idea of the Sabbath is implicitly a negative, being conceived as antithetical to all the six foregoing categories, which are classifiable together under the single head of “work,” in contrast with this seventh category, of “rest.” That is, work and rest are “polar” terms, dialectical opposites. (In his Politics, Aristotle’s terms bring out this negative relation explicitly, since his word for business activity is ascholein, that is, “not to be at leisure,” though we should tend rather to use the negative the other way round, defining “rest” as “not to be at work.”) This seventh category (of rest after toil) obviously serves well as transition between Order (of God as principle of origination) and Order (of God as principle of sovereignty). Leisure arises as an “institution” only when conditions of dominion have regularized the patterns of work. And fittingly, just after this transitional passage, the very name of God undergoes a change (the quality of which is well indicated in our translations by a shift from “God” to “Lord God”).2 Here, whereas in 1:29, God tells the man and woman that the fruit of “every tree” is permitted them, the Lord God (2:17) notably revises thus: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Here, with the stress upon governance, enters the negative of command. When, later, the serpent tempts “the woman” (3:4), saying that “Ye shall not surely die,” his statement is proved partially correct, to the extent that they did not die on the day on which they ate of the forbidden fruit. In any case, 3:19 pronounces the formula that has been theologically interpreted as deriving mankind’s physical death from our first parents’ first disobedience: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” The Interpreter’s Bible (p. 512) denies there is any suggestion that man would have lived forever had he not eaten of the forbidden fruit. Chapter 3, verse 20 is taken to imply simply that man would have regarded death as his natural end, rather than as “the last fearful frustration.” Thus, the fear of death is said to be “the consequence of the disorder in man’s relationships,” when they are characterized “by domination” (along with the fear that the subject will break free of their subjection). This seems to be at odds with the position taken by the Scofield Bible which, in the light of Paul’s statements in Romans 5:12–21 (“by one man sin entered the world, and death by sin”— and “by one man’s offence death reigned by one”) interprets the passage as
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meaning that “physical death” is due to a “universal sinful state, or nature” which is “our heritance from Adam.” It is within neither our present purpose nor our competency to interpret this verse theologically. But here’s how it would look logologically: First, we would note that in referring to “disorder” and “domination,” The Interpreter’s Bible is but referring to “Order” and “Dominion,” as seen from another angle. For a mode of domination is a mode of dominion; and a socio-political order is by nature a ziggurat-like structure which, as the story of the Tower makes obvious, can stand for the principle of Disorder. If we are right in our notion that the idea of Mortification is integral to the idea of Dominion (as the scrupulous subject must seek to “slay” within himself whatever impulses run counter to the authoritative demands of sovereignty), then all about a story of the “first” dominion and the “first” disobedience there should hover the theme of the “first” mortification. But “mortification” is a weak term, as compared with “death.” And thus, in the essentializing ways proper to the narrative style, this stronger, more dramatic term replaces the weaker, more “philosophic” one. “Death” would be the proper narrative-dramatic way of saying “Mortification.” By this arrangement, the natural order is once again seen through the eyes of the socio-political order, as the idea of mortification in the toil and subjection of Governance is replaced by the image of death in nature. From the standpoint sheerly of imagery (once the idea of mortification has been reduced to the idea of death, and the idea of death has been reduced to the image of a dead body rotting back into the ground), we now note a kind of “imagistic proto-fall,” in the pun of 2:7, where the Lord God is shown creating man (adham) out of the ground (adhamah). Here would be an imagistic way of saying that man in his physical nature is essentially but earth, the sort of thing a body becomes when it decays; or that man is first of all but earth, as regards his place in the sheerly natural order. You’d define in narrative or temporal terms by showing what he came from. But insofar as he is what he came from, then such a definition would be completed in narrative terms by the image of his return to his origins. In this sense, the account of man’s forming (in 2:7) ambiguously lays the conditions for his “return” to such origins, as the Lord God makes explicit in 3:19, when again the subject is the relation between adham and the adhamah: “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Here would be a matter of sheer imagistic consistency, for making the stages of a narrative be all of one piece. But the death motif here is explicitly related to another aspect of Order or Dominion: the sweat of toil. And looking back a bit further, we find that this severe second Covenant (the “Adamic”) also subjected woman to the rule
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of the husband—another aspect of Dominion. And there is to be an eternal enmity between man and the serpent (the image, or narrative personification, of the principle of Temptation, which we have also found to be intrinsic to the motives clustering about the idea of Order). Logologically, then, the narrative would seem to be saying something like this: Even if you begin by thinking of death as a merely natural phenomenon, once you come to approach it in terms of conscience-laden mortification you get anew slant on it. For death then becomes seen, in terms of the socio-political order, as a kind of capital punishment. But something of so eschatological a nature is essentially a “first” (since “ends,” too, are principles—and here is a place at which firsts and lasts meet, so far as narrative terms for the defining of essences are concerned). Accordingly death in the natural order becomes conceived as the fulfillment or completion of mortification in the socio-political order, but with the difference that, as with capital punishment in the sentencing of transgressions against sovereignty, it is not in itself deemed wholly “redemptive,” since it needs further modifications, along the lines of placement in an undying Heavenly Kingdom after death. And this completes the pattern of Order: the symmetry of the socio-political (cum verbal), the natural, and the supernatural. V R E S TAT E M E N T,
ON
D E AT H
AND
M O RT I F I C AT I O N
If the point about the relation between Death and Mortification is already clear, the reader should skip this section. But in case the point is not yet clear, we should make one more try, in the effort to show how the step from conscience-laden guiltiness to a regimen of mortification can be narratively translated into terms of the step from “sin” to “death.” It is important because the principle of mortification is integral to the idea of redemptive sacrifice which we have associated with the idea of Order. The secular variants of mortification, we might say, lie on the “suicidal” slope of human motivation, while the secular variants of redemption by sacrifice of a chosen victim are on the slope of homicide. Conscience-laden repression is the symbol-using animal’s response to conditions in the socio-political order. The physical symptoms that go with it seem like a kind of death. Thus, though the word for the attitude called “mortification” is borrowed from the natural order, the feeling itself is a response to various situations of dominion in the socio-political order. This terministic bridge leading from the natural order to the socio-political order thus can serve in reverse as a route from the socio-political order to the
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natural order. Then, instead of saying that “conscience-laden repression is like death,” we turn the equation into a quasi-temporal sequence, saying that death “comes from” sin. We shall revert to the matter later, when considering formally how terms that are logically synonymous or that tautologically imply one another can be treated narratively as proceeding from one to the other, like cause to effect. Logologically, one would identify the principle of personality with the ability to master symbol-systems. Intrinsic to such a personality is the “moral sense,” that is, the sense of “yes and no” that goes with the thou-shalt-not’s of Order. Grounded in language (as the makings of “reason”) such conscience gets its high development from the commands and ordinances of governance. A corresponding logological analogue of personal immortality could be derived from the nature of a personal name, that can be said to survive the physical death of the particular person who bore it, as the idea of Napoleon’s essence (the character summed up in his name) can be verbally distinguished from the idea of his “existence.” So long as we can “recall” a departed ancestor by name in recalling the quality of the personality associated with his name, he can be said to “still be with us in spirit.” And from the strictly logological point of view, the proposition that man necessarily conceives of God in accordance with the personal principle of the verbal would be statable in narrative style as the statement that God is an order-giving super-person who created man in His image. This is how the proposition should be put narratively, regardless of whether or not it is believed theologically. Similarly, like St. Paul, we may choose to interpret the Biblical account of the Creation and Fall as saying literally that, whereas other animals die naturally (even without being subject to the kind of covenant that, by verbally defining sin, makes “sin” possible), all members of the human species die not as the result of a natural process but because the first member of the species “sinned.” That is, death in man’s case is primarily associated with the principle of personality (or “conscience”), such as the Bible explicitly relates to a verbal Covenant made by the first and foremost exponent of the creative verbal principle, in its relation to the idea of Order. Otherwise put: When death is viewed “personally,” in moralistic terms colored by conditions of governance (the moral order), it is conceived not just as a natural process, but as a kind of “capital punishment.” But a strictly logological analysis of the mythic idiom (of the style natural to narrative) suggests a possibility of this sort: Even if one did not believe in Paul’s theological interpretation of the story, even if one did not literally believe that all men’s physical death is the result of the first man’s
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disobedience, the Biblical narrative’s way of associating “sin” with “death” would be the correct way of telling this story. Suppose you wanted to say merely: “Order gives rise to a sense of guilt, and insofar as one conscientiously seeks to obey the law by policing his impulses from within, he has the feel of killing these impulses.” Then, within the resources proper to narrative, your proper course would be to look for the strongest possible way of saying, “It is as though even physical death were a kind of capital punishment laid upon the human conscience.” And that’s what the story does, as starkly as can be. And that’s how it should be stated narratively in either case, whether you give it the literal theological interpretation that Paul did, or interpret it metaphorically. Theology is under the sign of what Coleridge would call the “Greek philosopheme.” The narrative style of Genesis is under the sign of what Coleridge would call “Hebrew archaeology.” Each style is concerned with “principles,” after its fashion, Genesis appropriately using the “mythic” language of temporal firsts. (Coleridge’s special use of the word “archaeology” is particularly apt here, inasmuch as archai are either philosophic first principles or beginnings in time.) I discussed this ambiguity in the section of “The Temporizing of Motives” in my A Grammar of Motives. But now we are attempting to bring out a slightly different aspect of the question. We are suggesting that, as regards the logological approach to the relation between Order and Guilt, the Biblical narrative as it now is would be “correctly” couched, whether you agree with Paul’s theological interpretation of “original sin,” or whether you view the narrative simply as a narrative, mythic way of describing a purely secular experience: the sense of “mortification” that goes with any scrupulous (“essential”) attempt at the voluntary suppression of unruly appetites. Such a speculation would suggest that the “archaeological” mode of expression allows naturally for a wider range of interpretation than does the “philosopheme” and its equivalents in formal theology. The narrative is naturally more “liberal.” Yet this very liberality may in the end goad to theological controversy, insofar as theological attempts are made to force upon the narrative utterance a stricter frame of interpretation than the style is naturally adapted to. (A further step here is the possibility whereby the theologian may be said to be inspired in his own way; and thus, whereas he cites the original narrative as authority from God, his narrowing of the possible interpretation may later be viewed as itself done on authority from God.) If you wanted to say, “It’s essentially as though this were killing us,” your narrative way of stating such an essence or principle would be the same,
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whether you meant it literally or figuratively. In either case, you wouldn’t just say “The sense of mortification is profoundly interwoven with the sense of guilt.” Rather, you’d say: “The very meaning of death itself derives from such guilt.” Or, more accurately still, you’d simply show man sinning, then you’d show the outraged sovereign telling him that he’s going to die. And if he was the “first” man, then the tie-up between the idea of guilt and the imagery of death in his case would stand for such a “primal” tie-up in general. However, note how this ambiguous quality of narrative firsts can tend to get things turned around, when theologically translated into the abstract principles of “philosophemes.” For whereas narratively you would use a natural image (death—return to dust) to suggest a spiritual idea (guilt as regards the temptations implicit in a Covenant), now in effect the idea permeates the condition of nature, and in this reversal the idea of natural death becomes infused with the idea of moral mortification, whereas you had begun by borrowing the idea of physical death as a term for naming the mental condition which seemed analogous to it. VI T H E N A R R AT I V E P R I N C I P L E
IN
I M A G E RY
Besides discussing the way in which the narrative style translates principles into terms of temporal priority and personality, we should consider the peculiar role of imagery in such “archaeology.” One problem here is in trying to decide just how the concept of imagery should be limited. There is a sense in which all the things listed in the account of the Creation could be considered as images (lists of positive natural things deemed permeated by the principle or idea of divine authorship and authority). Here would be waters, sun, land, moon, stars, the various living things, etc., as defined by the “Spirit of God.” The formula, “Let there be light,” could be said to introduce (in terms of an act and an image) the “principle of elucidation” at the very start, and in terms of a darkness–light pair that, though both are in their way “positive” so far as their sheer physical character is concerned, are related dialectically as the flat negation of each other. Incidentally, also, the relation between the pre-Creative darkness and the Creative light also at the very start introduces, in actual imagery, the idea of the Order–Disorder pair—and it sets the conditions for expressing the imagistic treatment of the Counter-Order as a “Kingdom of Darkness.” The explicit statement that man is made in God’s image would be logologically translated: “God and man are characterized by a common motivational principle,” which we would take to be the principle of
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personality that goes with skill at symbol-using. This kinship is reaffirmed in the account of Adam’s naming the various animals, though also there is a notable difference in the degree of authority and authorship, as befits this hierarchal view of Order. The reference to the mist in chapter 2, we are told in The Interpreter’s Bible, once followed verse 8, on the Lord God’s planting of the garden, and originally read: “... and a mist used to go up from the earth and water the garden.” The same comment adds: “This is a statement to the effect that the garden was irrigated supernaturally—the word rendered mist has probably a mythological connotation3—not by human labor.” Whatever such a mist may be mythologically or theologically (where it has sometimes been interpreted as standing for “error”) there is a possible logological explanation for it, in keeping with the fact that an account of “firsts” naturally favors imagery associated with childhood. Such an image could well stand narratively, or “mythically,” for the word-using animal’s vague memory of that early period in his life when he was emerging into speech out of infancy. For at that time, the very growth of his feeling for words would be felt as a kind of confusion, or indistinctness, while a bit of linguistic cosmos (or verbal light) was gradually being separated from a comparative chaos (or inarticulate darkness) of one’s infantile beginnings. That is, whereas speechlessness probably has not the slightest suggestion of confusion or deprivation to an animal that is not born with the aptitude for speaking, the speechless state should be quite different with the human being’s period of emergency from infancy into articulacy. Yet, at the same time, it could be endowed with “promissory” or “fertile” connotations, insofar as the mistwanderer was moving towards clarity. At least, there is a notable example of such a mist in Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony. For as the work proceeds, it develops after the fashion of a swiftly accelerating regression, going back finally to the imagining of an initial source in “pure” matter (as maternal principle). Quite as we saw, in connection with Augustine, the final procession from a “first” to its unfolding in plenitude, Flaubert’s book traces plenitude back to its beginnings in a principle of heretic, unitary matter. In this reverse development, the fog of a monster’s breath marks the line of division between the realm of the verbal and the realm of infantile formlessness (where all things are patchy combinations wholly alien to the realm of Order as we know it). Similarly the fog-people of Wagner’s Niebelungen cycle seem to have such a quality (particularly in the Nebelheim of Das Rheingold, surely the most “infantile” of the plays, though all are somewhat like fairy stories).
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The complicating element to do with images, when used as the narrative embodying of principles, or ideas, is that the images bring up possibilities of development in their own right. Thus, there is a kind of “deathiness” implicit in the very term, “tree of life.” One might think of it as being cut down, for instance. The Biblical story relates it contrastingly to the forbidden fruit (which turns out to be a tree of death). But there is still the business of denying access to the tree as a tree; hence the arrangement whereby, after the expulsion, a flaming sword is set up, “which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.” The sword would seem most directly related to the idea of keeping people away from a tree; yet it also would fit with the idea of “protecting” life (though here, ironically, its kind of “protection” involves a denial, and thus another aspect of the negatives of dominion, with its principle of “capital punishment,” or in general “mortification”). We shall elsewhere discuss the implications of the imagery to do with the unnatural obstetrics of Genesis, the possible logological interpretation of nakedness, the imagery of eating and the role of the serpent as simultaneously the image and personal representative of the principle of temptation. Perhaps the only other major imaginal deployment in the first three chapters concerns the Lord God’s irate words to Adam (3:17): “Cursed is the ground for thy sake.” On this point, our Scofield Bible says the earth is cursed because “It is better for fallen man to battle with a reluctant earth than to live without toil.” But from the strictly logological point of view, Rashi’s commentary seems more in keeping with the principle of firstness that infuses these chapters: “This is similar to one who goes forth to do evil; and people curse the breasts from which he suckled.” Bashi here treats of a symmetry involving scene, agent, and act. The Lord God, to curse this agent thoroughly, curses the very ground he walks on. We might also remember, as regards the adham–adhamah pun, that this is the deathy, dominion-spirited ground from which he came. To be sure, images also hover about ideas, as stated in the style of philosophemes. Also, ideas contain an element of personality always, as Plato’s dialogues make apparent. And the Hobbesian notion of a quasioriginal Covenant indicates how the pressure of narrative thinking affects our ideas of laws, principles, summations. But though the “archaeological” style cannot be distinguished categorically from the “philosopheme,” one can at least distinguish their different slopes, or trends, and can in time spot the kinds of development that are specific to each.
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VII D O M I N I O N , G U I LT, S A C R I F I C E In sum, when we turn from the consideration of a terministic cycle in which the various terms mutually imply one another, to the consideration of the narrative terminology in these opening chapters of Genesis, we note that the narrative terms allow the idea of Order to be “processed.” Here one can start with the creation of a natural order (though conceiving it as infused with a verbal principle); one can next proceed to an idea of innocence untroubled by thou-shalt-not’s; one can next introduce a thoushalt-not; one can next depict the thou-shalt-not as violated; one can next depict a new Covenant propounded on the basis of this violation, and with capital punishment; one can later introduce the principle of sacrifice, as would become wholly clear when we came to the Noachian Covenant where, after the great cleansing by water, God gave Noah the rainbow sign, “And Noah builded an altar unto the Lord; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt-offerings on the altar” (8–20). Then gradually thereafter, more and more clearly, comes the emergence of the turn from mere sacrifice to the idea of outright redemption by victimage. The Scofield editor says of the Noachian Covenant: “It’s distinctive feature is the institution, for the first time, of human government—the government of man by man. The highest function of government is the judicial taking of life. All other governmental powers are implied in that. It follows that the third dispensation is distinctively that of human government.” Still, there is a notable difference between the idea of the kill in the sacrifice of an animal and the idea of the kill as per 9:6: “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” This is the lex talionis, the principle of human justice, conceived after the nature of the scales, and grounded in the idea of an ultimate authority. It is not the idea of vicarious sacrifice. That is found implicitly in Noah’s sacrifice of the clean animals as burnt-offerings. But ultimately the idea of cleanliness attains its full modicum of personality, in the idea of a fitting personal sacrifice. The principle of personal victimage was introduced incipiently, so far as theology goes, in connection with the next Covenant, involving Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac, on the Altar of God’s Governance—while the principle of personal victimage was also clearly there, in the idea of Israel itself as victim. It was completed in Paul’s view of Christ, and the New Kingdom.
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We should also note that, in proportion as the idea of a personal victim developed, there arose the incentives to provide a judicial rationale for the sacrifice more in line with the kind of thinking represented by the lex talionis. Thus the idea of a personally fit victim could lead to many different notions, such as: (1) the ideal of a perfect victim (Christ); (2) the Greeks’ “enlightened” use of criminals who had been condemned to death, but were kept on reserve for state occasions when some ritual sacrifice was deemed necessary; (3) Hitler’s “idealizing” of the Jew as “perfect” enemy. Whereas, the terms of Order, considered tautologically, go round and round like the wheel seen by Ezekiel, endlessly implicating one another, when their functions are embodied in narrative style the cycle can be translated into terms of an irreversible linear progression. But with the principle of authority personalized as God, the principle of disobedience as Adam (the “old Adam in all of us”), the principle of temptation as an Aesopian serpent, Eve as mediator in the bad sense of the word, and the idea of temptation reduced imagistically to terms of eating (the perfect image of a “first” appetite, or essential temptation, beginning as it does with the infantile, yet surviving in the adult), such reduction of the tautological cycle to a narrative linear progression makes possible the notion of an outcome. Thus when we read of one broken covenant after another, and see the sacrificial principle forever reaffirmed anew, narratively this succession may be interpreted as movement towards a fulfillment, though from the standpoint of the tautological cycle they “go on endlessly” implicating one another. Logologically many forms of victimage are seen as variants of the sacrificial motive. Burnt offerings, Azazel, Isaac, Israel in exile and the various “remnants” who undergo tribulations in behalf of righteousness can all be listed, along with Christ, as “reindividuations of the sacrificial principle.” But a theological view of the narrative can lead to a more “promissory” kind of classification, whereby all sacrifices and sufferings preceding the Crucifixion can be classed as “types of Christ.” When the devout admonish that “Christ’s Crucifixion is repeated endlessly each time we sin,” they are stating a theological equivalent of our logological point about the relation between the linear-temporal and the cyclical-tautological. Logologically, the “fall” and the “redemption” are but parts of the same cycle, with each implying the other. The order can be reversed, for the terms in which we conceive of redemption can help shape the terms in which we conceive of the guilt that is to be redeemed. In this sense, it is “prior” to the guilt which it is thought to follow (quite as the quality of a “cure” can qualify our idea of the “disease” for which it is thought to be the cure—or as a mode of “wish-fulfillment” can paradoxically serve to reinforce the intensity of the
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wishes). But narratively, they stand at opposite ends of a long development, that makes one “Book” of the two Testaments taken together. Thus, whereas narratively the Lord God’s thou-shalt-not preceded the serpent’s tempting of Eve, by appealing to the imagination, in mixing imagery of food with imagery of rule (“and ye shall be as Elohim”), and whereas the tempting preceded the fall, logologically the thou-shalt-not is itself implicitly a condition of temptation, since the negative contains the principle of its own annihilation. For insofar as a thou-shalt-not, which is intrinsic to Order verbally guided, introduces the principle of negativity, here technically is the inducement to round out the symmetry by carrying the same principle of negativity one step farther, and negating the negation. That is the only kind of “self-corrective” the negative as such has. This principle of yes and no, so essential to the personal, verbal, “doctrinal” “sense of right and wrong,” is potentially a problem from the very start. And when you add to it the “No trespassing” signs of empire, that both stimulate desires and demand their repression, you see why we hold that guilt is intrinsic to the idea of a Covenant. The question then becomes: Is victimage (redemption by vicarious atonement) equally intrinsic to the idea of guilt? The Bible, viewed either logologically or theologically, seems to be saying that it is. One notable misfortune of the narrative is its ambiguities with regard to the relations between the sexes, unless logologically discounted. If man, as seen from the standpoint of a patriarchal society, is deemed “essentially superior” to woman, of whom he is “lord and master,” it follows that, so far as the narrative way of stating such social superiority is concerned, man must be shown to “come first.” Accordingly, as regards the first parturition, in contrast with ordinary childbirth, woman must be depicted as being born of man. This is the only way to make him absolutely first in narrative terms. Thus the punishment pronounced on Eve (3:16): “Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” was ambiguously foretold (2:21, 22) where Eve is derived from Adam’s rib. A similar narrative mode of proclaiming man’s essential social superiority appears in Aeschylus’ Eumenides. Here, Athena, in her role as Goddess of Justice, gives her deciding vote at the “first” trial in the “first” law court—and appropriately she remarks that, though she is a woman, she was born not of woman but from the head of Zeus. (Her decision, incidentally, involves in another way the socio-political modifying of natural childbirth, since she frees Orestes of the charge of matricide by holding that he could not really have a mother, descent being through the male line, with the woman acting but as a kind of incubator for the male seed.)
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The consciousness of nakedness as the result of the fall likewise seems to have been interpreted too simply, without reference to the major stress upon the matter of a Covenant. The approach from the standpoint of “Order” would be somewhat roundabout, along these lines: Social order leads to differentiations of status, which are indicated by differences in clothing. Thus, the same socio-political conditions that go with a Covenant would also go with clothing, thereby making one conscious of nakedness. The Biblical” narrative itself makes clear that, under the conditions of Governance, sexual differentiation was primarily a matter of relative status. In a situation where man is to woman as master is to servant, and where the differences between the sexes were attested by clothes, nakedness would be too equalitarian. But after sexual differentiation by clothing had been continued for a sufficient length of time, people began to assume a far greater difference between “social” and “sexual” motives than actually exists, and this is true also of modern psychoanalysis—until now we’d need a kind of ironic dissociation such as Marx proposed in connection with the “fetishism of commodities,” before we could come even remotely near to realizing the extent of the social motives hidden in our ideas of sheerly “physical” sexuality. However, this marvelously accurate image of nakedness as interpreted from the standpoint of the estrangements resulting from Order in the sense of divergent rank, has been interpreted so greatly in purely sexual terms that often people seem even to think of Adam’s original transgression as essentially sexual. Insofar as clothes imply social estrangement or differentiation by status, they are by the same token a kind of “fall.” In themselves they are at odds with the natural order; yet nakedness is at odds with the order of our “second nature.” One final point, and our discussion of the specifically narrative resources here is finished. The opening sentence of Aristotle’s Nichomachaean Ethics can serve best as our text: “Every art and every inquiry, and likewise every action and practical pursuit, is thought to aim at some good: hence it has rightly been said that the Good is that at which all things aim.” Thus, whenever the Biblical account says, “And God saw that it was good,” we might take the formula as having, for its purely technical equivalent some such statement as, “And it was endowed with the principle of purpose.” Since words like “aim,” “end,” “purpose” are our most generalized terms for such an idea, it follows that the equating of “to be” with “to be good” (as in the first chapter of Genesis) is a way of stating ethicaIIy, dramatically, narratively that a thing’s “purpose” is technically one with its esse. Natural things, by their nature as creatures, are to be viewed as the actualities of God, hence as
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embodying a “design” (and they fit perfectly with Aristotle’s stress, which is concerned with the varieties of “action,” rather than with objects or things or processes in the sheerly neutral sense in which wholly impersonal, pragmatic science might view them). All told, the idea of purpose, so essential to the narrative principle of personality, is here ingrained in the idea of Order, by being identified with the “good,” whereby all things, by their mere act of being, contained in themselves the aim of their being. No, that isn’t quite the case. For their nature as “actualities” depends upon their nature as God’s acts. Accordingly, in the last analysis, their aim involves their relation to the aims of their author (as the words in a wellformed book derive their aim from the purpose of the book as a whole—the Bible being a quite “bookish” view of the creative process). Two further observations: (1) To recall, once more, that by the sheer dialectics of the case, this pronouncing of things as “good” brought up the possibilities of “evil.” (2) It is interesting to think how Spinoza’s Ethics in effect restated the Biblical narrative (though translating it from terms of “archaeology” into the circular terms of the “philosopheme,” treating of Creation “in principle”). Think of his word for purpose, conatus, the endeavor of each thing to go on being itself, unless or until prevented by the determinations imposed upon it by other things likewise endeavoring to go on being themselves. And he also had his technical equivalent of the particular thing’s relation to an over-all principle at once outside itself and permeating its very essence. The sacrificial principle in Spinoza would seem to take the form of a benign mortification, a peaceful systematic distrust of the goads of the gods of empire. NOTES 1. The clearest evidence that this principle of “divisiveness” is itself a kind of “protofall” is to be seen in the use made of it by the segregationists of the South’s Bible Belt. Members of the Ku Klux Klan refer to the classificatory system of Genesis as justification for their stress upon the separation of Negroes and whites. In an ironic sense, they are “right.” For when nature is approached via the principle of differentiation embodied in the notion of Social Order, then “Creation” itself is found to contain implicitly the guiltiness of “discrimination.” Furthermore, the Word mediates between these two realms. And the Word is social in the sense that language is a collective means of expression, while its sociality is extended to the realm of wordless nature insofar as this non-verbal kind of order is treated in terms of such verbal order as goes with the element of command intrinsic to dominion. 2. Grammatically, the word for God in the first chapter, “Elohim,” is a plural. Philologists may interpret this as indicating a usage that survives from an earlier
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polytheistic period in the development of Jewish Monotheism. Or Christian theologians can interpret it as the first emergence of a Trinitarian position, thus early in the text, with the Creator as first person of the Trinity, the Spirit that hovered over the waters as third person, and the creative Word as second person. (Incidentally, the words translated as “Lord God” in chapter II are Jehovah-Elohim. Later, in connection with the Abrahamic Covenant, the words translated as “Lord God” are Adonai Jehovah. Adonai, which means “master,” applies to both God and man—and when applied to man it also includes the idea of husband as master.) The distinction between authority and authorship is approached from another angle in Augustine’s Confessions I, where God is called the ordinator and creator of all natural things; but of sin he is said to be only the ordinator. 3. “The Book of Genesis: Exegesis” by Cuthbert A. Simpson, in The Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1900), I, 493.
ERICH AUERBACH
The Representations of Reality in Homer and The Old Testament
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he genius of the Homeric style becomes especially apparent when it is compared with an equally ancient and equally epic style from a different world of forms. I shall attempt this comparison with the account of the sacrifice of Isaac, a homogeneous narrative produced by the so-called Elohist. The King James version translates the opening as follows (Genesis 22:1): “And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said to him, Abraham! and he said, Behold, here I am.” Even this opening startles us when we come to it from Homer. Where are the two speakers? We are not told. The reader, however, knows that they are not normally to be found together in one place on earth, that one of them, God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from some unknown heights or depths. Whence does he come, whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told. He does not come, like Zeus or Poseidon, from the Aethiopians, where he has been enjoying a sacrificial feast. Nor are we told anything of his reasons for tempting Abraham so terribly. He has not, like Zeus, discussed them in set speeches with other gods gathered in council; nor have the deliberations in his own heart been presented to us; unexpected and mysterious, he enters the scene from some unknown height or depth and calls: Abraham! It will at once be said that this is to be explained by the particular concept of God which the
From Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. © 1953 Princeton University Press.
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Jews held and which was wholly different from that of the Greeks. True enough—but this constitutes no objection. For how is the Jewish concept of God to be explained? Even their earlier God of the desert was not fixed in form and content, and was alone; his lack of form, his lack of local habitation, his singleness, was in the end not only maintained but developed even further in competition with the comparatively far more manifest gods of the surrounding Near Eastern world. The concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing things. This becomes still clearer if we now turn to the other person in the dialogue, to Abraham. Where is he? We do not know. He says, indeed: Here I am—but the Hebrew word means only something like “behold me,” and in any case is not meant to indicate the actual place where Abraham is, but a moral position in respect to God, who has called to him-Here am I awaiting thy command. Where he is actually, whether in Beersheba or elsewhere, whether indoors or in the open air, is not stated; it does not interest the narrator, the reader is not informed; and what Abraham was doing when God called to him is left in the same obscurity. To realize the difference, consider Hermes’ visit to Calypso, for example, where command, journey, arrival and reception of the visitor, situation and occupation of the person visited, are set forth in many verses; and even on occasions when gods appear suddenly and briefly, whether to help one of their favorites or to deceive or destroy some mortal whom they hate, their bodily forms, and usually the manner of their coming and going, are given in detail. Here, however, God appears without bodily form (yet he “appears”), coming from some unspecified place—we only hear his voice, and that utters nothing but a name, a name without an adjective, without a descriptive epithet for the person spoken to, such as is the rule in every Homeric address; and of Abraham too nothing is made perceptible except the words in which he answers God: Hinne-ni, Behold me here—with which, to be sure, a most touching gesture expressive of obedience and readiness is suggested, but it is left to the reader to visualize it. Moreover the two speakers are not on the same level: if we conceive of Abraham in the foreground, where it might be possible to picture him as prostrate or kneeling or bowing with outspread arms or gazing upward, God is not there too: Abraham’s words and gestures are directed toward the depths of the picture or upward, but in any case the undetermined, dark place from which the voice comes to him is not in the foreground. After this opening, God gives his command, and the story itself begins: everyone knows it; it unrolls with no episodes in a few independent sentences whose syntactical connection is of the most rudimentary sort. In this
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atmosphere it is unthinkable that an implement, a landscape through which the travelers passed, the serving-men, or the ass, should be described, that their origin or descent or material or appearance or usefulness should be set forth in terms of praise; they do not even admit an adjective: they are serving-men, ass, wood, and knife, and nothing else, without an epithet; they are there to serve the end which God has commanded; what in other respects they were, are, or will be, remains in darkness. A journey is made, because God has designated the place where the sacrifice is to be performed; but we are told nothing about the journey except that it took three days, and even that we are told in a mysterious way: Abraham and his followers rose “early in the morning” and “went unto” the place of which God had told him; on the third day he lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. That gesture is the only gesture, is indeed the only occurrence during the whole journey, of which we are told; and though its motivation lies in the fact that the place is elevated, its uniqueness still heightens the impression that the journey took place through a vacuum; it is as if, while he traveled on, Abraham had looked neither to the right nor to the left, had suppressed any sign of life in his followers and himself save only their footfalls. Thus the journey is like a silent progress through the indeterminate and the contingent, a holding of the breath, a process which has no present, which is inserted, like a blank duration, between what has passed and what lies ahead, and which yet is measured: three days! Three such days positively demand the symbolic interpretation which they later received. They began “early in the morning.” But at what time on the third day did Abraham lift up his eyes and see his goal? The text says nothing on the subject. Obviously not “late in the evening,” for it seems that there was still time enough to climb the mountain and make the sacrifice. So “early in the morning” is given, not as an indication of time, but for the sake of its ethical significance; it is intended to express the resolution, the promptness, the punctual obedience of the sorely tried Abraham. Bitter to him is the early morning in which he saddles his ass, calls his serving-men and his son Isaac, and sets out; but he obeys, he walks on until the third day, then lifts up his eyes and sees the place. Whence he comes, we do not know, but the goal is clearly stated: Jeruel in the land of Moriah. What place this is meant to indicate is not clear—“Moriah” especially may be a later correction of some other word. But in any case the goal was given, and in any case it is a matter of some sacred spot which was to receive a particular consecration by being connected with Abraham’s sacrifice. Just as little as “early in the morning” serves as a temporal indication does “Jeruel in the land of Moriah” serve as a geographical indication; and in both cases alike, the complementary
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indication is not given, for we know as little of the hour at which Abraham lifted up his eyes as we do of the place from which he set forth—Jeruel is significant not so much as the goal of an earthly journey, in its geographical relation to other places, as through its special election, through its relation to God, who designated it as the scene of the act, and therefore it must be named. In the narrative itself, a third chief character appears: Isaac. While God and Abraham, the serving-men, the ass, and the implements are simply named, without mention of any qualities or any other sort of definition, Isaac once receives an appositive; God says, “Take Isaac, thine only son, whom thou lovest.” But this is not a characterization of Isaac as a person, apart from his relation to his father and apart from the story; he may be handsome or ugly, intelligent or stupid, tall or short, pleasant or unpleasant—we are not told. Only what we need to know about him as a personage in the action, here and now, is illuminated, so that it may become apparent how terrible Abraham’s temptation is, and that God is fully aware of it. By this example of the contrary, we see the significance of the descriptive adjectives and digressions of the Homeric poems; with their indications of the earlier and as it were absolute existence of the persons described, they prevent the reader from concentrating exclusively on a present crisis; even when the most terrible things are occurring, they prevent the establishment of an overwhelming suspense. But here, in the story of Abraham’s sacrifice, the overwhelming suspense is present; what Schiller makes the goal of the tragic poet—to rob us of our emotional freedom, to turn our intellectual and spiritual powers (Schiller says “our activity”) in one direction, to concentrate them there—is effected in this Biblical narrative, which certainly deserves the epithet epic. We find the same contrast if we compare the two uses of direct discourse. The personages speak in the Bible story too; but their speech does not serve, as does speech in Homer, to manifest, to externalize thoughts—on the contrary, it serves to indicate thoughts which remain unexpressed. God gives his command in direct discourse, but he leaves his motives and his purpose unexpressed; Abraham, receiving the command, says nothing and does what he has been told to do. The conversation between Abraham and Isaac on the way to the place of sacrifice is only an interruption of the heavy silence and makes it all the more burdensome. The two of them, Isaac carrying the wood and Abraham with fire and a knife, “went together.” Hesitantly, Isaac ventures to ask about the ram, and Abraham gives the wellknown answer. Then the text repeats: “So they went both of them together.” Everything remains unexpressed.
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It would be difficult, then, to imagine styles more contrasted than those of these two equally ancient and equally epic texts. On the one hand, externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feeling completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense. On the other hand, the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and “fraught with background.” I will discuss this term in some detail, lest it be misunderstood. I said above that the Homeric style was “of the foreground” because, despite much going back and forth, it yet causes what is momentarily being narrated to give the impression that it is the only present, pure and without perspective. A consideration of the Elohistic text teaches us that our term is capable of a broader and deeper application. It shows that even the separate personages can be represented as possessing “background”; God is always so represented in the Bible, for he is not comprehensible in his presence, as is Zeus; it is always only “something” of him that appears, he always extends into depths. But even the human beings in the Biblical stories have greater depths of time, fate, and consciousness than do the human beings in Homer; although they are nearly always caught up in an event engaging all their faculties, they are not so entirely immersed in its present that they do not remain continually conscious of what has happened to them earlier and elsewhere; their thoughts and feelings have more layers, are more entangled. Abraham’s actions are explained not only by what is happening to him at the moment, nor yet only by his character (as Achilles’ actions by his courage and his pride, and Odysseus’ by his versatility and foresightedness), but by his previous history; he remembers, he is constantly conscious of, what God has promised him and what God has already accomplished for him—his soul is torn between desperate rebellion and hopeful expectation; his silent obedience is multilayered, has background. Such a problematic psychological situation as this is impossible for any of the Homeric heroes, whose destiny is clearly defined and who wake every morning as if it were the first day of their lives: their emotions, though strong, are simple and find expression instantly.
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How fraught with background, in comparison, are characters like Saul and David! How entangled and stratified are such human relations as those between David and Absalom, between David and Joab! Any such “background” quality of the psychological situation as that which the story of Absalom’s death and its sequel (11 Samuel 18 and 19, by the so-called Jahvist) rather suggests than expresses, is unthinkable in Homer. Here we are confronted not merely with the psychological processes of characters whose depth of background is veritably abysmal, but with a purely geographical background too. For David is absent from the battlefield; but the influence of his will and his feelings continues to operate, they affect even Joab in his rebellion and disregard for the consequences of his actions; in the magnificent scene with the two messengers, both the physical and psychological background is fully manifest, though the latter is never expressed. With this, compare, for example, how Achilles, who sends Patroclus first to scout and then into battle, loses almost all “presentness” so long as he is not physically present. But the most important thing is the “multilayeredness” of the individual character; this is hardly to be met with in Homer, or at most in the form of a conscious hesitation between two possible courses of action; otherwise, in Homer, the complexity of the psychological life is shown only in the succession and alternation of emotions; whereas the Jewish writers are able to express the simultaneous existence of various layers of consciousness and the conflict between them. The Homeric poems, then, though their intellectual, linguistic, and above all syntactical culture appears to be so much more highly developed, are yet comparatively simple in their picture of human beings; and no less so in their relation to the real life which they describe in general. Delight in physical existence is everything to them, and their highest aim is to make that delight perceptible to us. Between battles and passions, adventures and perils, they show us hunts, banquets, palaces and shepherds’ cots, athletic contests and washing days—in order that we may see the heroes in their ordinary life, and seeing them so, may take pleasure in their manner of enjoying their savory present, a present which sends strong roots down into social usages, landscape, and daily life. And thus they bewitch us and ingratiate themselves to us until we live with them in the reality of their lives; so long as we are reading or hearing the poems, it does not matter whether we know that all this is only legend, “make-believe.” The oft-repeated reproach that Homer is a liar takes nothing from his effectiveness, he does not need to base his story on historical reality, his reality is powerful enough in itself; it ensnares us, weaving its web around us, and that suffices him. And this “real” world into which we are lured, exists for itself, contains nothing
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but itself; the Homeric poems conceal nothing, they contain no teaching and no secret second meaning. Homer can be analyzed, as we have essayed to do here, but he cannot be interpreted. Later allegorizing trends have tried their arts of interpretation upon him, but to no avail. He resists any such treatment; the interpretations are forced and foreign, they do not crystallize into a unified doctrine. The general considerations which occasionally occur (in our episode, for example, v. 360: that in misfortune men age quickly) reveal a calm acceptance of the basic facts of human existence, but with no compulsion to brood over them, still less any passionate impulse either to rebel against them or to embrace them in an ecstasy of submission. It is all very different in the Biblical stories. Their aim is not to bewitch the senses, and if nevertheless they produce lively sensory effects, it is only because the moral, religious, and psychological phenomena which are their sole concern are made concrete in the sensible matter of life. But their religious intent involves an absolute claim to historical truth. The story of Abraham and Isaac is not better established than the story of Odysseus, Penelope, and Euryclea; both are legendary. But the Biblical narrator, the Elohist, had to believe in the objective truth of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice—the existence of the sacred ordinances of life rested upon the truth of this and similar stories. He had to believe in it passionately; or else (as many rationalistic interpreters believed and perhaps still believe) he had to be a conscious liar—no harmless liar like Homer, who lied to give pleasure, but a political liar with a definite end in view, lying in the interest of a claim to absolute authority. To me, the rationalistic interpretation seems psychologically absurd; but even if we take it into consideration, the relation of the Elohist to the truth of his story still remains a far more passionate and definite one than is Homer’s relation. The Biblical narrator was obliged to write exactly what his belief in the truth of the tradition (or, from the rationalistic standpoint, his interest in the truth of it) demanded of him—in either case, his freedom in creative or representative imagination was severely limited; his activity was perforce reduced to composing an effective version of the pious tradition. What he produced, then, was not primarily oriented toward “realism” (if he succeeded in being realistic, it was merely a means, not an end); it was oriented toward truth. Woe to the man who did not believe it! One can perfectly well entertain historical doubts on the subject of the Trojan War or of Odysseus’ wanderings, and still, when reading Homer, feel precisely the effects he sought to produce; but without believing in Abraham’s sacrifice, it is impossible to put the narrative of it to the use for which it was written. Indeed, we must go even further. The Bible’s claim to truth is not only far
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more urgent than Homer’s, it is tyrannical—it excludes all other claims. The world of the Scripture stories is not satisfied with claiming to be a historically true reality—it insists that it is the only real world, is destined for autocracy. All other scenes, issues, and ordinances have no right to appear independently of it, and it is promised that all of them, the history of all mankind, will be given their due place within its frame, will be subordinated to it. The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us—they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels. Let no one object that this goes too far, that not the stories, but the religious doctrine, raises the claim to absolute authority; because the stories are not, like Homer’s, simply narrated “reality.” Doctrine and promise are incarnate in them and inseparable from them; for that very reason they are fraught with “background” and mysterious, containing a second, concealed meaning. In the story of Isaac, it is not only God’s intervention at the beginning and the end, but even the factual and psychological elements which come between, that are mysterious, merely touched upon, fraught with background; and therefore they require subtle investigation and interpretation, they demand them. Since so much in the story is dark and incomplete, and since the reader knows that God is a hidden God, his effort to interpret it constantly finds something new to feed upon. Doctrine and the search for enlightenment are inextricably connected with the physical side of the narrative—the latter being more than simple “reality”; indeed they are in constant danger of losing their own reality, as very soon happened when interpretation reached such proportions that the real vanished. If the text of the Biblical narrative, then, is so greatly in need of interpretation on the basis of its own content, its claim to absolute authority forces it still further in the same direction. Far from seeking, like Homer, merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history. This becomes increasingly difficult the further our historical environment is removed from that of the Biblical books; and if these nevertheless maintain their claim to absolute authority, it is inevitable that they themselves be adapted through interpretative transformation. This was for a long time comparatively easy; as late as the European Middle Ages it was possible to represent Biblical events as ordinary phenomena of contemporary life, the methods of interpretation themselves forming the basis for such a treatment. But when, through too great a change in environment and through the awakening of a critical consciousness, this becomes impossible, the Biblical claim to absolute
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authority is jeopardized; the method of interpretation is scorned and rejected, the Biblical stories become ancient legends, and the doctrine they had contained, now dissevered from them, becomes a disembodied image. As a result of this claim to absolute authority, the method of interpretation spread to traditions other than the Jewish. The Homeric poems present a definite complex of events whose boundaries in space and time are clearly delimited; before it, beside it, and after it, other complexes of events, which do not depend upon it, can be conceived without conflict and without difficulty. The Old Testament, on the other hand, presents universal history: it begins with the beginning of time, with the creation of the world, and will end with the Last Days, the fulfilling of the Covenant, with which the world will come to an end. Everything else that happens in the world can only be conceived as an element in this sequence; into it everything that is known about the world, or at least everything that touches upon the history of the Jews, must be fitted as an ingredient of the divine plan; and as this too became possible only by interpreting the new material as it poured in, the need for interpretation reaches out beyond the original Jewish-Israelitish realm of reality—for example to Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Roman history; interpretation in a determined direction becomes a general method of comprehending reality; the new and strange world which now comes into view and which, in the form in which it presents itself, proves to be wholly unutilizable within the Jewish religious frame, must be so interpreted that it can find a place there. But this process nearly always also reacts upon the frame, which requires enlarging and modifying. The most striking piece of interpretation of this sort occurred in the first century of the Christian era, in consequence of Paul’s mission to the Gentiles: Paul and the Church Fathers reinterpreted the entire Jewish tradition as a succession of figures prognosticating the appearance of Christ, and assigned the Roman Empire its proper place in the divine plan of salvation. Thus while, on the one hand, the reality of the Old Testament presents itself as complete truth with a claim to sole authority, on the other hand that very claim forces it to a constant interpretative change in its own content; for millennia it undergoes an incessant and active development with the life of man in Europe. The claim of the Old Testament stories to represent universal history, their insistent relation—a relation constantly redefined by conflicts—to a single and hidden God, who yet shows himself and who guides universal history by promise and exaction, gives these stories an entirely different perspective from any the Homeric poems can possess. As a composition, the Old Testament is incomparably less unified than the Homeric poems, it is
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more obviously pieced together—but the various components all belong to one concept of universal history and its interpretation. If certain elements survived which did not immediately fit in, interpretation took care of them; and so the reader is at every moment aware of the universal religio-historical perspective which gives the individual stories their general meaning and purpose. The greater the separateness and horizontal disconnection of the stories and groups of stories in relation to one another, compared with the Iliad and the Odyssey, the stronger is their general vertical connection, which holds them all together and which is entirely lacking in Homer. Each of the great figures of the Old Testament, from Adam to the prophets, embodies a moment of this vertical connection. God chose and formed these men to the end of embodying his essence and will—yet choice and formation do not coincide, for the latter proceeds gradually, historically, during the earthly life of him upon whom the choice has fallen. How the process is accomplished, what terrible trials such a formation inflicts, can be seen from our story of Abraham’s sacrifice. Herein lies the reason why the great figures of the Old Testament are so much more fully developed, so much more fraught with their own biographical past, so much more distinct as individuals, than are the Homeric heroes. Achilles and Odysseus are splendidly described in many well-ordered words, epithets cling to them, their emotions are constantly displayed in their words and deeds—but they have no development, and their life-histories are clearly set forth once and for all. So little are the Homeric heroes presented as developing or having developed, that most of them— Nestor, Agamemnon, Achilles—appear to be of an age fixed from the very first. Even Odysseus, in whose case the long lapse of time and the many events which occurred offer so much opportunity for biographical development, shows almost nothing of it. Odysseus on his return is exactly the same as he was when he left Ithaca two decades earlier. But what a road, what a fate, lie between the Jacob who cheated his father out of his blessing and the old man whose favorite son has been torn to pieces by a wild beast!— between David the harp player, persecuted by his lord’s jealousy, and the old king, surrounded by violent intrigues, whom Abishag the Shunnamite warmed in his bed, and he knew her not. The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only during the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality; and it is this history of a personality which the Old Testament presents to us as the formation undergone by those whom God has chosen to be examples. Fraught with their development, sometimes even aged to the verge of dissolution, they show a distinct stamp of individuality entirely foreign to the Homeric heroes. Time can touch the latter only
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outwardly, and even that change is brought to our observation as little as possible; whereas the stern hand of God is ever upon the Old Testament figures; he has not only made them once and for all and chosen them, but he continues to work upon them, bends them and kneads them, and, without destroying them in essence, produces from them forms which their youth gave no grounds for anticipating. The objection that the biographical element of the Old Testament often springs from the combination of several legendary personages does not apply; for this combination is a part of the development of the text. And how much wider is the pendulum swing of their lives than that of the Homeric heroes! For they are bearers of the divine will, and yet they are fallible, subject to misfortune and humiliation—and in the midst of misfortune and in their humiliation their acts and words reveal the transcendent majesty of God. There is hardly one of them who does not, like Adam, undergo the deepest humiliation—and hardly one who is not deemed worthy of God’s personal intervention and personal inspiration. Humiliation and elevation go far deeper and far higher than in Homer, and they belong basically together. The poor beggar Odysseus is only masquerading, but Adam is really cast down, Jacob really a refugee, Joseph really in the pit and then a slave to be bought and sold. But their greatness, rising out of humiliation, is almost superhuman and an image of God’s greatness. The reader clearly feels how the extent of the pendulum’s swing is connected with the intensity of the personal history—precisely the most extreme circumstances, in which we are immeasurably forsaken and in despair, or immeasurably joyous and exalted, give us, if we survive them, a personal stamp which is recognized as the product of a rich existence, a rich development. And very often, indeed generally, this element of development gives the Old Testament stories a historical character, even when the subject is purely legendary and traditional. Homer remains within the legendary with all his material, whereas the material of the Old Testament comes closer and closer to history as the narrative proceeds; in the stories of David the historical report predominates. Here too, much that is legendary still remains, as for example the story of David and Goliath; but much—and the most essential—consists in things which the narrators knew from their own experience or from firsthand testimony. Now the difference between legend and history is in most cases easily perceived by a reasonably experienced reader. It is a difficult matter, requiring careful historical and philological training, to distinguish the true from the synthetic or the biased in a historical presentation; but it is easy to separate the historical from the legendary in general. Their structure is different. Even where the legendary does not immediately betray itself by
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elements of the miraculous, by the repetition of well-known standard motives, typical patterns and themes, through neglect of clear details of time and place, and the like, it is generally quickly recognizable by its composition. It runs far too smoothly. All cross-currents, all friction, all that is casual, secondary to the main events and themes, everything unresolved, truncated, and uncertain, which confuses the clear progress of the action and the simple orientation of the actors, has disappeared. The historical event which we witness, or learn from the testimony of those who witnessed it, runs much more variously, contradictorily, and confusedly; not until it has produced results in a definite domain are we able, with their help, to classify it to a certain extent; and how often the order to which we think we have attained becomes doubtful again, how often we ask ourselves if the data before us have not led us to a far too simple classification of the original events! Legend arranges its material in a simple and straightforward way; it detaches it from its contemporary historical context, so that the latter will not confuse it; it knows only clearly outlined men who act from few and simple motives and the continuity of whose feelings and actions remains uninterrupted. In the legends of martyrs, for example, a stiff-necked and fanatical persecutor stands over against an equally stiff-necked and fanatical victim; and a situation so complicated—that is to say, so real and historical— as that in which the “persecutor” Pliny finds himself in his celebrated letter to Trajan on the subject of the Christians, is unfit for legend. And that is still a comparatively simple case. Let the reader think of the history which we are ourselves witnessing; anyone who, for example, evaluates the behavior of individual men and groups of men at the time of the rise of National Socialism in Germany, or the behavior of individual peoples and states before and during the last war, will feel how difficult it is to represent historical themes in general, and how unfit they are for legend; the historical comprises a great number of contradictory motives in each individual, a hesitation and ambiguous groping on the part of groups; only seldom (as in the last war) does a more or less plain situation, comparatively simple to describe, arise, and even such a situation is subject to division below the surface, is indeed almost constantly in danger of losing its simplicity; and the motives of all the interested parties are so complex that the slogans of propaganda can be composed only through the crudest simplification—with the result that friend and foe alike can often employ the same ones. To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend. It is clear that a large part of the life of David as given in the Bible contains history and not legend. In Absalom’s rebellion, for example, or in
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the scenes from David’s last days, the contradictions and crossing of motives both in individuals and in the general action have become so concrete that it is impossible to doubt the historicity of the information conveyed. Now the men who composed the historical parts are often the same who edited the older legends too; their peculiar religious concept of man in history, which we have attempted to describe above, in no way led them to a legendary simplification of events; and so it is only natural that, in the legendary passages of the Old Testament, historical structure is frequently discernible—of course, not in the sense that the traditions are examined as to their credibility according to the methods of scientific criticism; but simply to the extent that the tendency to a smoothing down and harmonizing of events, to a simplification of motives, to a static definition of characters which avoids conflict, vacillation, and development, such as are natural to legendary structure, does not predominate in the Old Testament world of legend. Abraham, Jacob, or even Moses produces a more concrete, direct, and historical impression than the figures of the Homeric world—not because they are better described in terms of sense (the contrary is the case) but because the confused, contradictory multiplicity of events, the psychological and factual cross-purposes, which true history reveals, have not disappeared in the representation but still remain clearly perceptible. In the stories of David, the legendary, which only later scientific criticism makes recognizable as such, imperceptibly passes into the historical; and even in the legendary, the problem of the classification and interpretation of human history is already passionately apprehended—a problem which later shatters the framework of historical composition and completely overruns it with prophecy; thus the Old Testament, in so far as it is concerned with human events, ranges through all three domains: legend, historical reporting, and interpretative historical theology. Connected with the matters just discussed is the fact that the Greek text seems more limited and more static in respect to the circle of personages involved in the action and to their political activity. In the recognition scene with which we began, there appears, aside from Odysseus and Penelope, the housekeeper Euryclea, a slave whom Odysseus’ father Laertes had bought long before. She, like the swineherd Eumaeus, has spent her life in the service of Laertes’ family; like Eumaeus, she is closely connected with their fate, she loves them and shares their interests and feelings. But she has no life of her own, no feelings of her own; she has only the life and feelings of her master. Eumaeus too, though he still remembers that he was born a freeman and indeed of a noble house (he was stolen as a boy), has, not only in fact but also in his own feeling, no longer a life of his own, he is entirely involved in
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the life of his masters. Yet these two characters are the only ones whom Homer brings to life who do not belong to the ruling class. Thus we become conscious of the fact that in the Homeric poems life is enacted only among the ruling class—others appear only in the role of servants to that class. The ruling class is still so strongly patriarchal, and still itself so involved in the daily activities of domestic life, that one is sometimes likely to forget their rank. But they are unmistakably a sort of feudal aristocracy, whose men divide their lives between war, hunting, marketplace councils, and feasting, while the women supervise the maids in the house. As a social picture, this world is completely stable; wars take place only between different groups of the ruling class; nothing ever pushes up from below. In the early stories of the Old Testament the patriarchal condition is dominant too, but since the people involved are individual nomadic or half-nomadic tribal leaders, the social picture gives a much less stable impression; class distinctions are not felt. As soon as the people completely emerges—that is, after the exodus from Egypt—its activity is always discernible, it is often in ferment, it frequently intervenes in events not only as a whole but also in separate groups and through the medium of separate individuals who come forward; the origins of prophecy seem to lie in the irrepressible politico-religious spontaneity of the people. We receive the impression that the movements emerging from the depths of the people of Israel-Judah must have been of a wholly different nature from those even of the later ancient democracies—of a different nature and far more elemental. With the more profound historicity and the more profound social activity of the Old Testament text, there is connected yet another important distinction from Homer: namely, that a different conception of the elevated style and of the sublime is to be found here. Homer, of course, is not afraid to let the realism of daily life enter into the sublime and tragic; our episode of the scar is an example, we see how the quietly depicted, domestic scene of the foot-washing is incorporated into the pathetic and sublime action of Odysseus’ homecoming. From the rule of the separation of styles which was later almost universally accepted and which specified that the realistic depiction of daily life was incompatible with the sublime and had a place only in comedy or, carefully stylized, in idyl—from any such rule Homer is still far removed. And yet he is closer to it than is the Old Testament. For the great and sublime events in the Homeric poems take place far more exclusively and unmistakably among the members of a ruling class; and these are far more untouched in their heroic elevation than are the Old Testament figures, who can fall much lower in dignity (consider, for example, Adam, Noah, David, Job); and finally, domestic realism, the
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representation of daily life, remains in Homer in the peaceful realm of the idyllic, whereas, from the very first, in the Old Testament stories, the sublime, tragic, and problematic take shape precisely in the domestic and commonplace: scenes such as those between Cain and Abel, between Noah and his sons, between Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, between Rebekah, Jacob, and Esau, and so on, are inconceivable in the Homeric style. The entirely different ways of developing conflicts are enough to account for this. In the Old Testament stories the peace of daily life in the house, in the fields, and among the flocks, is undermined by jealousy over election and the promise of a blessing, and complications arise which would be utterly incomprehensible to the Homeric heroes. The latter must have palpable and clearly expressible reasons for their conflicts and enmities, and these work themselves out in free battles; whereas, with the former, the perpetually smouldering jealousy and the connection between the domestic and the spiritual, between the paternal blessing and the divine blessing, lead to daily life being permeated with the stuff of conflict, often with poison. The sublime influence of God here reaches so deeply into the everyday that the two realms of the sublime and the everyday are not only actually unseparated but basically inseparable. We have compared these two texts, and, with them, the two kinds of style they embody, in order to reach a starting point for an investigation into the literary representation of reality in European culture. The two styles, in their opposition, represent basic types: on the one hand fully externalized description, uniform illumination, uninterrupted connection, free expression, all events in the foreground, displaying unmistakable meanings, few elements of historical development and of psychological perspective; on the other hand, certain parts brought into high relief, others left obscure, abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed, “background” quality, multiplicity of meanings and the need for interpretation, universal-historical claims, development of the concept of the historically becoming, and preoccupation with the problematic. Homer’s realism is, of course, not to be equated with classical-antique realism in general; for the separation of styles, which did not develop until later, permitted no such leisurely and externalized description of everyday happenings; in tragedy especially there was no room for it; furthermore, Greek culture very soon encountered the phenomena of historical becoming and of the “multilayeredness” of the human problem, and dealt with them in its fashion; in Roman realism, finally, new and native concepts are added. We shall go into these later changes in the antique representation of reality when the occasion arises; on the whole, despite them, the basic tendencies of the
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Homeric style, which we have attempted to work out, remained effective and determinant down into late antiquity. Since we are using the two styles, the Homeric and the Old Testament, as starting points, we have taken them as finished products, as they appear in the texts; we have disregarded everything that pertains to their origins, and thus have left untouched the question whether their peculiarities were theirs from the beginning or are to be referred wholly or in part to foreign influences. Within the limits of our purpose, a consideration of this question is not necessary; for it is in their full development, which they reached in early times, that the two styles exercised their determining influence upon the representation of reality in European literature.
G E O F F R E Y H A RT M A N
The Poetics of Prophecy
1
I
n our honorific or sophomoric moods, we like to think that poets are prophets. At least that certain great poets have something of the audacity and intensity—the strong speech—of Old Testament prophets who claimed that the word of God came to them. “The words of Jeremiah, the son of Hilkiah ... To whom the word of the Lord came in the days of Josiah ...” It is hard to understand even this introductory passage, for the word for “words,” divre in Hebrew, indicates something closer to “acts” or “word events,” while what the King James version translates as “to whom the word of the Lord came,” which hypostatizes the Word, as if it had a being of its own, or were consubstantial with what we know of God, is in the original simply hajah devar-adonai elav, “the God-word was to him.” We don’t know, in short, what is going on; yet through a long tradition of translation and interpretation we feel we know. Similarly, when Wordsworth tells us that around his twentythird year he “received” certain “convictions,” which included the thought that despite his humbler subject matter he could stand beside the “men of old,” we seek gropingly to make sense of that conviction. “Poets, even as Prophets,” Wordsworth writes,
From High Romantic Argument: Essays for M.H. Abrams, Lawrence Lipking, ed. © 1981 Cornell University Press.
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each with each Connected in a mighty scheme of truth, Have each his own peculiar faculty, Heaven’s gift, a sense that fits him to perceive Objects unseen before ... An insight that in some sort he possesses, A privilege whereby a work of his, Proceeding from a source of untaught things Creative and enduring, may become A power like one of Nature’s. [1850 Prelude xiii.30 1–12] In the earlier (1805) version of The Prelude “insight” is “influx,” which relates more closely to a belief in inspiration, or a flow (of words) the poet participates in yet does not control: “An influx, that in some sort I possess’d.” I will somewhat neglect in what follows one difference, rather obvious, between poet and prophet. A prophet is to us, and perhaps to himself, mainly a voice—as God himself seems to him primarily a voice. Even when he does God in many voices, they are not felt to stand in an equivocal relation to each other: each voice is absolute, and vacillation produces vibrancy rather than ambiguity. In this sense there is no “poetics of prophecy”; there is simply a voice breaking forth, a quasivolcanic eruption, and sometimes its opposite, the “still, small voice” heard after the thunder of Sinai. I will try to come to grips with that difference between poet and prophet later on; here I should only note that, being of the era of Wordsworth rather than of Jeremiah, I must look back from the poet’s rather than from the prophet’s perspective, while acknowledging that the very concept of poetry may be used by Wordsworth to reflect on—and often to defer—the claim that he has a prophetic gift. There is another passage in The Prelude that explores the relation between poet and prophet. Wordsworth had been to France during the Revolution, had followed that cataclysmic movement in hope, had seen it degenerate into internecine politics and aggressive war. Yet despite the discrediting of revolutionary ideals, something of his faith survived, and not only faith but, as he strangely put it, “daring sympathies with power.” In brief, he saw those terrible events in France as necessary and even divinely sanctioned. To explain his mood Wordsworth writes a confessional passage that also gives his most exact understanding of prophecy: But as the ancient Prophets, borne aloft In vision, yet constrained by natural laws
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With them to take a troubled human heart, Wanted not consolations, nor a creed Of reconcilement, then when they denounced, On towns and cities, wallowing in the abyss Of their offences, punishment to come; Or saw, like other men, with bodily eyes, Before them, in some desolated place, The wrath consummate and the threat fulfilled; So, with devout humility be it said, So, did a portion of that spirit fall On me uplifted from the vantage-ground Of pity and sorrow to a state of being That through the time’s exceeding fierceness saw Glimpses of retribution, terrible, And in the order of sublime behests: But, even if that were not, amid the awe Of unintelligible chastisement, Not only acquiescences of faith Survived, but daring sympathies with power, Motions not treacherous or profane, else why Within the folds of no ungentle breast Their dread vibration to this hour prolonged? Wild blasts of music thus could find their way Into the midst of turbulent events; So that worst tempests might be listened to. [1850 Prelude x.437–63] This eloquent statement has many complexities; but it is clear that though Wordsworth felt himself “uplifted from the vantage-ground / Of pity and sorrow,” he did not leave them behind in this moment of sublime vision and terrible purification. It is certainly a remarkable feature of a prophet like Jeremiah that “borne aloft / In vision” he yet takes with him “a troubled human heart.” Like Jonah, he tries to evade the commission, though not, like Jonah, by running away but rather by claiming he is not of age when it comes to speech (“Then said I, Ah, Lord GOD! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child”). Jeremiah even accuses God, in bitterness of heart, of the very thing of which God accused Israel: of seducing the prophet, or of being unfaithful (Jeremiah 20:7ff). Wordsworth expresses most strongly a further, related aspect of prophetical psychology: the ambivalent sympathy shown by the prophet for
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the powerful and terrible thing he envisions. This sympathy operates even when he tries to avert what must be, or to find a “creed of reconcilement.” The poet’s problem vis-à-vis the Revolution was not, principally, that he had to come to terms with crimes committed in the name of the Revolution or of liberty. For at the end of the passage from which I have quoted he indicates that there had been a rebound of faith, a persuasion that grew in him that the Revolution itself was not to blame, but rather “a terrific reservoir of guilt / And ignorance filled up from age to age” had “burst and spread in deluge through the land.” The real problem was his entanglement in a certain order of sensations which endured to the very time of writing: he owns to “daring sympathies with power,” “motions,” whose “dread vibration” is “to this hour prolonged,” and whose harmonizing effect in the midst of the turbulence he characterized by the oxymoron “Wild blasts of music.” We understand perfectly well that what is involved in Wordsworth’s sympathy with power is not, or not simply, a sublime kind of Schadenfreude. And that no amount of talk about the pleasure given by tragedy, through “cathartic” identification, would do more than uncover the same problem in a related area. The seduction power exerts, when seen as an act of God or Nature, lies within common experience. It does not of itself distinguish poets or prophets. What is out of the ordinary here is the “dread vibration”: a term close to music, as well as one that conveys the lasting resonance of earlier feelings. How did Wordsworth’s experience of sympathy with power accrue a metaphor made overt in “wild blasts of music”? The tradition that depicts inspired poetry as a wild sort of natural music (“Homer the great Thunderer, [and] the voice that roars along the bed of Jewish Song”) circumscribes rather than explains these metaphors. When we take them to be more than commonplaces of high poetry we notice that they sometimes evoke the force of wind and water as blended sound (cf. “The stationary blasts of waterfalls,” 1850 Prelude vi.626), a sound with power to draw the psyche in, as if the psyche also were an instrument or element, and had to mingle responsively with some overwhelming, massive unity. Despite the poet’s imagery of violence, the ideal of harmony, at least on the level of sound, is not given up. The soul as a gigantic if reluctant aeolian harp is implicitly evoked. How strangely this impulse to harmony is linked with violent feelings can be shown by one of Wordsworth’s similes. Similes are, of course, a formal way of bringing together, or harmonizing, different areas of experience. From Coleridge to the New Critics the discussion of formal poetics has often focused on the valorized distinction between fancy and imagination, or on the way difference is reconciled. Shortly before his reflection on the ancient
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prophets, and when he is still describing the indiscriminate carnage unleashed by Robespierre, Wordsworth has recourse to a strange pseudoHomeric simile comparing the tempo of killings to a child activating a toy windmill: though the air Do of itself blow fresh, and make the vanes Spin in his eyesight, that contents him not, But, with the plaything at arm’s length, he sets His front against the blast, and runs amain, That it may whirl the faster. [1850 Prelude x.369–74] An aeolian toy is used, explicitly now, to image a sublime and terrible order of events. The instrument is given to the wind, so that it may go faster; yet this childish sport is set in an ominous context. The innocent wish to have something go fast reflects on the child whose mimicry (as in the Intimations Ode) suggests his haste to enter the very world where that haste has just shown itself in heinous form. Though there is something incongruous in the simile, there is also something fitting: or at least a drive toward fitting together incongruous passions of childhood and adulthood; and may this drive not express the dark “workmanship that reconciles / Discordant elements” by a mysterious, quasi-musical “harmony” (1850 Prelude i.340ff.)? Here the reconciling music, by which the mind is built up, is already something of a “wild blast”; and when we think of the passage on prophecy to follow, on Wordsworth’s “daring sympathies with power,” we realize that what is involved in these various instances—lust for carnage, vertigo-sport, the child’s impatience to grow up, the poet’s fit of words, and the prophet’s sympathy with the foreseen event, however terrible—is an anticipatory relation to time, a hastening of futurity. The music metaphor, associated with wind and water sound, occurs in yet another context close to apocalyptic feelings. (By “apocalyptic” I always mean quite specifically an anticipatory, proleptic relation to time, intensified to the point where there is at once desire for and dread of the end being hastened. There is a potential inner turning against time, and against nature insofar as it participates in the temporal order.) Wordsworth’s dream in Prelude v of the Arab saving stone and shell from the encroaching flood, also identified as the two principal branches of humane learning, mathematics and literature, is given an explicitly apocalyptic frame. The poet is meditating on books “that aspire to an unconquerable life,” human creations
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that must perish nevertheless. Quoting from a Shakespeare sonnet on the theme of time, he reflects that we “weep to have” what we may lose: the weeping represents both the vain effort and the prophetic regret, so that the very joy of possessing lies close to tears, or thoughts deeper than tears. Only one detail of the ensuing dream need concern us. It comes when the Arab asks the dreamer to hold the shell (poetry) to his ear. “I did so,” says the dreamer, And heard that instant in an unknown tongue, Which yet I understood, articulate sounds, A loud prophetic blast of harmony; An Ode, in passion uttered, which foretold Destruction to the children of the earth By deluge, now at hand. [1850 Prelude v.93–98] A “blast of harmony” is not only a more paradoxical, more acute version of the metaphor in “blast of music,” but we recognize it as an appropriate figure for the shouting poetry also called prophecy. In the lines that follow, Wordsworth stresses the dual function of such poetry: it has power to exhilarate and to soothe the human heart. But this is a gloss that conventionalizes the paradox in “blast of harmony” and does not touch the reality of the figure. Our task is to understand the reality of figures, or more precisely, the reality of “blast of harmony,” when applied to prophecy, or prophetic poetry. I will suggest, on the basis of this figure, that there is a poetics of prophecy; and I will study it by reading closely two episodes in The Prelude entirely within the secular sphere: the “spot of time” alluding to the death of the poet’s father, and the ascent of Snowdon. After that a transition to the prophetic books, and to Jeremiah in particular, may lie open. 2 The death of Wordsworth’s father is not attended by unusual circumstances. As Claudius says in a play we shall refer to again: a “common theme / Is death of fathers.” Yet it is precisely the commonplace that releases in this case the “dread vibration.” The thirteen-year-old schoolboy is impatient to return home for the Christmas holidays, and climbs a crag overlooking two highways to see whether he can spot the horses that should be coming. From that bare, wind-blown crag he watches intensely, and
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shortly after he returns home his father dies. That is all: a moment of intense, impatient watching, and then, ten days later, the death. Two things without connection except contiguity in time come together in the boy, who feels an emotion that perpetuates “down to this very time” the sights and sounds he experienced waiting for the horses. Here is Wordsworth’s account in full: There rose a crag, That, from the meeting-point of two highways Ascending, overlooked them both, far stretched; Thither, uncertain on which road to fix My expectation, thither I repaired, Scout-like, and gained the summit; ‘twas a day Tempestuous, dark, and wild, and on the grass I sate half-sheltered by a naked wall; Upon my right hand couched a single sheep, Upon my left a blasted hawthorn stood; With those companions at my side, I watched, Straining my eyes intensely, as the mist Gave intermitting prospect of the copse And plain beneath. Ere we to school returned,— That dreary time,—ere we had been ten days Sojourners in my father’s house, he died, And I and my three brothers, orphans then, Followed his body to the grave. The event, With all the sorrow that it brought, appeared A chastisement; and when I called to mind That day so lately past, when from the crag I looked in such anxiety of hope; With trite reflections of morality, Yet in the deepest passion, I bowed low To God, Who thus corrected my desires; And, afterwards, the wind and sleety rain, And all the business of the elements, The single sheep, and the one blasted tree, And the bleak music from that old stone wall, The noise of wood and water, and the mist That on the line of each of those two roads Advanced in such indisputable shapes; All these were kindred spectacles and sounds To which I oft repaired, and thence would drink,
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As at a fountain; and on winter nights, Down to this very time, when storm and rain Beat on my roof, or, haply, at noon-day, While in a grove I walk, whose lofty trees, Laden with summer’s thickest foliage, rock In a strong wind, some working of the spirit, Some inward agitations thence are brought, Whate’er their office. [1850 Prelude xii.292–333] The secular and naturalistic frame of what is recorded remains intact. Yet the experience is comparable in more than its aura to what motivates prophecy. Though there is no intervention of vision or voice, there is something like a special, burdened relation to time. Wordsworth called the episode a “spot of time,” to indicate that it stood out, spotlike, in his consciousness of time, that it merged sensation of place and sensation of time (so that time was placed), even that it allowed him to physically perceive or “spot” time. The boy on the summit, overlooking the meeting point of two highways, and stationed between something immobile on his right hand and his left, is, as it were, at the center of a stark clock. Yet the question, How long? if it rises within him, remains mute. It certainly does not surface with the ghostly, prophetic dimension that invests it later. At this point there is simply a boy’s impatient hope, “anxiety of hope,” as the poet calls it (l. 313), a straining of eye and mind that corresponds to the “far-stretched” perspective of the roads. But the father’s death, which supervenes as an “event” (l. 309), converts that moment of hope into an ominous, even murderous anticipation. In retrospect, then, a perfectly ordinary mood is seen to involve a sin against time. The boy’s “anxiety of hope,” his wish for time to pass (both the “dreary time” of school and now of watching and waiting) seems to find retributive fulfillment when the father’s life is cut short ten days later. The aftermath points to something unconscious in the first instance but manifest and punishing now. The child feels that his “desires” have been “corrected” by God. What desires could they be except fits of extreme—apocalyptic— impatience, brought on by the very patience or dreary sufferance of nature, of sheep and blasted tree? That the boy bowed low to God, who corrected his desires, evokes a human and orthodox version of nature’s own passion. A similar correction may be the subject of “A slumber did my spirit seal,” where a milder sin against time, the delusion that the loved one is a
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“thing” exempt from the touch of years, is revealed when she dies and becomes a “thing” in fact. The fulfillment of the hope corrects it, as in certain fairy tales. In Wordsworth, hope or delusion always involves the hypnotic elision of time by an imagination drawn toward the “bleak music” of nature—of a powerfully inarticulate nature. Yet in both representations, that of the death of the father and that of the death of the beloved, there is no hint of anything that would compel the mind to link the two terms, hope against time and its peculiar fulfillment. The link remains inarticulate, like nature itself. A first memory is interpreted by a second: the “event” clarifies an ordinary emotion by suggesting its apocalyptic vigor. But the apocalyptic mode, as Martin Buber remarked, is not the prophetic. Wordsworth’s spots of time are said to renew time rather than to hasten its end. A wish for the end to come, for time to pass absolutely, cannot explain what brought the two happenings together, causally, superstitiously, or by a vaticinum ex eventu. Perhaps the apocalyptic wish so compressed the element of time that something like a “gravitation” effect was produced, whereby unrelated incidents fell toward each other. It is, in any case, this process of conjuncture or binding that is mysterious. Not only for the reader but for Wordsworth himself. A more explicit revelation of the binding power had occurred after the death of the poet’s mother. Wordsworth’s “For now a trouble came into my mind/ From unknown causes” (1850 Prelude ii.276–77) refers to an expectation that when his mother died the world would collapse. Instead it remains intact and attractive. I was left alone Seeking the visible world, nor knowing why. The props of my affection were removed, And yet the building stood, as if sustained By its own spirit! [1850 Prelude ii.277–81] What he had previously named, describing the relationship between mother and infant, “the gravitation and the filial bond,” continues to operate without the mother. This event contrary to expectation is the “trouble”; and the “unknown causes” allude to the gravitation, or glue or binding, that mysteriously sustains nature, and draws the child to it in the mother’s absence. Even loss binds; and a paradox emerges which focuses on the fixative rather than fixating power of catastrophe, on the nourishing and reparative quality of the “trouble.” Wordsworth, too benevolent perhaps,
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suggests that time itself is being repaired: that the pressure of eternity on thought (the parent’s death) creates an “eternity of thought” (1850 Prelude 1.402). The survivor knows that the burden of the mystery can be borne, that there is time for thought. Whether or not, then, we understand Wordsworth’s experience fully, the “spots of time” describe a trauma, a lesion in the fabric of time, or more precisely, the trouble this lesion produces and which shows itself as an extreme consciousness of time. Not only is there an untimely death in the case of the father, but it follows too fast on the boy’s return home. As in Hamlet, “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!” The righting of the injury somehow falls to the poet. “Future restoration” (1850 Prelude xii.286), perhaps in the double sense of a restoration of the future as well as of a restoration still to come, is the task he sets himself.1 Prophecy, then, would seem to be anti-apocalyptic in seeking a “future restoration,” or time for thought. But time, in Wordsworth, is also language, or what the Intimations Ode calls “timely utterance.” That phrase contains both threat and promise. It suggests the urgent pressure that gives rise to speech; it also suggests that an animate response, and a harmonious one, is possible, as in Milton’s “answerable style,” or the pastoral cliché of woods and waters mourning, rejoicing or echoing in timely fashion the poet’s mode. Ruskin referred to it as the pathetic fallacy but Abraham Heschel will make pathos, in that large sense, the very characteristic of prophetic language. More radically still “timely utterance” means an utterance, such as prophecy, or prophetic poetry, which founds or repairs time. The prophet utters time in its ambiguity: as the undesired mediation, which prevents fusion, but also destruction. It prevents fusion by intruding the voice of the poet, his troubled heart, his fear of or flight from “power”; it prevents destruction by delaying God’s decree or personally mediating it. Wordsworth speaks scrupulous words despite his sympathy with power and his attraction to the muteness or closure foreseen. By intertextual bonding, by words within words or words against words, he reminds us one more time of time. We cannot evade the fact that the anxious waiting and the father’s death are joined by what can only be called a “blast of harmony.” The two moments are harmonized, but the copula is poetic as well as prophetic. For the conjunction of these contiguous yet disparate happenings into a “kindred” form is due to a “working of the spirit” that must be equated with poetry itself. While in the boy of thirteen the process of joining may have been instinctual, the poet recollects the past event as still working itself out;
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the incident demonstrated so forceful a visiting of imaginative power that later thought is never free of it. What is remarkable in this type-incident— and so remarkable that it keeps “working” on the mind “to this very time”— is not only the “coadunation,” as Coleridge would have said, or “In-Eins-Bildung” (his false etymology for the German Embildungskraft, or imagination), but also that it is a “blast,” that the workmanship reconciling the discordant elements anticipates a final, awesome unification. Hope is always “anxious” in that it foresees not just unity but also the power needed to achieve unity, to blast things into that state. The fear, then, that mingles with apocalyptic hope also stills it, or brings it close to “that peace / Which passeth understanding” (1850 Prelude xiv.126–27), because of the uncertain, terrible nature of this final bonding, which evokes in the episode on the crag a bleak and bleating music and images of stunned, warped, blasted, inarticulate being. 3 I turn to the climatic episode of The Prelude, the ascent of Snowdon in Book xiv. Disregarding all but its barest structure, we see that it again presents a sequence of two moments curiously harmonized. The theme of time enters as elided when the moon breaks through the mist and into the absorbed mind of the climber. “Nor was time given to ask or learn the cause, / For instantly a light upon the turf / Fell like a flash ...” (xiv.37–39). This moment of prevenient light is followed as suddenly by a wild blast of music: the roar of waters through a rift in the mist. The second act or “event” is here an actual sound, separated off from sight and almost hypostatized as a sound. It is quite literally a “blast of harmony”: “The roar of waters ... roaring with one voice.” The appearance of the moon out of the mist is not, however, as unmotivated as might appear. It realizes an unuttered wish, “Let there be light,” as the poet climbs through the darkness to “see the sun rise.” Spotting the moon fulfills his hope in an unexpected way, which also foreshortens time. The mind of the poet is disoriented; but then time is lengthened as the sight of the moonstruck scene takes over in a kind of silent harmonization. If my hypothesis is correct, there is something truly magical here. The effect (“And there was light”) utters the cause—that is, utters the scriptural text (“Let there be light”) lodging as desire in the poet. Silence emits a “sound of harmony” (xiv.98–99) analogous to the music of the spheres. Not the poet but heaven itself declares the glory, the “And there was light” as “night unto night showeth knowledge.” Wordsworth seems to behold visibly the “timely
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utterance” with which Genesis begins—the very harmony between cause and effect, between fiat and actualizing response—and this spectacle seems to be so ghostly a projection of nature itself (rather than of his own excited mind) that he claims it was “given to spirits of the night” and only by chance to the three human spectators (xiv.63–65). Yet if the first act of the vision proper proves deceptive, because its motivation, which is a scriptural text, or the authority of that text, or the poet’s desire to recapture that fiat power, remains silent and inward, the second act, which is the rising of the voice of the waters, also proves deceptive, even as it falsifies the first. The sound of the waters (though apparently unheard) must have been there all along, so that what is shown up by the vision’s second act is a premature harmonizing of the landscape by the majestic moon: by that time-subduing object all sublime. Time also becomes a function of the desire for harmony as imagination now foreshortens and now enthrones the passing moment, or, to quote one of many variants, “so moulds, exalts, indues, combines, / Impregnates, separates, adds, takes away / And makes one object sway another so ...” In the poet’s commentary there is a further attempt at harmonizing, when moon and roaring waters are typified as correlative acts, the possessions of a mind That feeds upon infinity, that broods Over the dark abyss, intent to hear Its voices issuing forth to silent light In one continuous stream [xiv.71–74] An image of communion and continuity is projected which the syntax partially subverts, for “its” remains ambiguous, and we cannot say for sure whether the voices belong to the dark abyss or the heavenly mind. What remains of this rich confusion are partial and contradictory structures of unification, which meet us “at every turn” in the “narrow rent” of the text, and add up less to a “chorus of infinity” than again to a “blast of harmony.” 4 For prophet as for poet the ideal is “timely utterance,” yet what we actually receive is a “blast of harmony.” In Jeremiah a double pressure is exerted, of time on the prophet and of the prophet on time. The urgency of “timely utterance” cuts both ways. Moreover, while the prophet’s words must harmonize with events, before or after the event, the word itself is viewed as
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an event that must harmonize with itself, or with its imputed source in God and the prophets. A passage such as Jeremiah 23:9–11 describes the impact of the God-word in terms that not only are conventionally ecstatic but also suggest the difficulty of reading the signs of authority properly, and distinguishing true from false prophet. “Adultery” seems to have moved into the word-event itself. Concerning the prophets: My heart is broken within me, all my bones shake; I am like a drunken man, like man overcome by wine, because of the Loin and because of his holy words. For the land is full of adulterers; because of the curse the land mourns.... The time frame becomes very complex, then. On an obvious level the God-word as threat or promise is interpreted and reinterpreted in the light of history, so that Jeremiah’s pronouncements are immediately set in their time. “The words of Jeremiah, the son of Hilkiah ... to whom the word of the Lord came in the days of Josiah...” The ending jah, meaning “God,” reveals from within these destined names the pressure for riming events with God. Jeremiah’s prophecies are political suasions having to do with Israel’s precarious position between Babylon on one border and Egypt on the other in the years before the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. The very survival of Israel is in question; and the prophet is perforce a political analyst as well as a divine spokesman. He speaks at risk not only in the hearing of God but also in that of Pashur, who beat him and put him in the stocks (20:1–4), in that of so-called friends who whisper “Denounce him to Pashur,” and in that of King Zedekiah, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, who sends Pashur (the same or another) to Jeremiah, saying, “Inquire of the Lord for us” about Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon (21:1–3). On another level, however, since the book of Jeremiah knows that the outcome is “the captivity of Jerusalem” (1:3), a question arises as to the later force of such prophecy. Near the onset of Jeremiah’s career a manuscript of what may have been a version of Deuteronomy was found, and a dedication ceremony took place which pledged Judah once more to the covenant. The issue of the covenant—whether it is broken, or can ever be broken—and the part played in this issue by the survival of a book such as Jeremiah’s own is
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another aspect of the prophet’s utterance. Can one praise God yet curse oneself as the bearer of his word (20:13–14)? Or can Judah follow God into the wilderness once more, showing the same devotion as when it was a bride (2:2)? “I utter what was only in view of what will be.... What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.” That is Jacques Lacan on the function of language. Indeed, the contradictions that beset “timely utterance” are so great that a reversal occurs which discloses one of the founding metaphors of literature. When Jacques Lacan writes that “symbols ... envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together, before he comes into the world, those who are going to engender him ‘by flesh and blood’; so total that they bring to his birth, along with the gifts of the stars, if not with the gifts of the fairies, the shape of his destiny; so total that they give the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right to the very place where he is not yet and even beyond his death; and so total that through them his end finds its meaning in the last judgement, where the Word absolves his being or condemns it,” he is still elaborating Jeremiah 1:4. “Now the word of the LORD came to me saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.’ ” This predestination by the word and unto the word—the “imperative of the Word,” as Lacan also calls it, in a shorthand that alludes to the later tradition of the Logos—is then reinforced by Jeremiah 1:11–12. “And the word of the LORD came to me saying, ‘Jeremiah, what do you see?’ And I said, ‘I see a rod of almond.’ Then the LORD said to me, ‘You have seen well, for I am watching over my word to perform it.’” Here the pun of “rod of almond” (makel shaqued) and “[I am] watching” (shoqued) is more, surely, than a mnemonic or overdetermined linguistic device: it is a rebus that suggests the actualizing or performative relationship between words and things implied by the admonition: “I am watching over my word to perform it.” The admonition is addressed to the prophet, in whose care the word is, and through him to the nation; while the very image of the rod of almond projects not only a reconciliation of contraries, of punishment (rod) and pastoral peace (almond), but the entire problem of timely utterance, since the almond tree blossoms unseasonably early and is as exposed to blasting as is the prophet, who seeks to avoid premature speech: “Ah, Lord God! Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a child.”
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The forcible harmonizing of shaqued and shoqued, the pressure of that pun, or the emblematic abuse of a pastoral image, alerts us to the difficult pathos of prophetic speech. What does “watching over the word” involve? The prophets are politically and psychically in such a pressure-cooker situation (“I see a boiling pot,” Jeremiah 1:13) that a powerful contamination occurs. Their words cannot always be distinguished from those of God in terms of who is speaking. The prophet identifies now with God and now with his people; moreover, his only way of arguing with the Lord is through words and figures given by the latter. Lacan would say that there is an inevitable inmixing of the Discourse of the Other. Jeremiah argues with God in God’s language; and such scripture formulas as “according to thy word” recall this confused and indeterminate situation. When, in famous lyric verses, Jeremiah admits that he cannot speak without shouting, and what he shouts is “violence and destruction” (20:8), it is as if the God-word itself had suffered a crisis of reference. For this typical warning is now directed not against Israel but against God: it refers to the condition of the prophet who feels betrayed as well as endangered. Jeremiah’s hymn begins: “O Lord, you seduced me, and I was seduced,” where “seduce,” pittiytani, can mean both sexual enticement and spiritual deception—as by false prophets. No wonder that at the end of this hymn, the most formal and personal in the entire book, there is a surprising and unmotivated turn from blessing (“Sing to the LORD; praise the LORD”) to cursing (“Cursed be the day on which I was born!” 20:13–18). However conventional such a curse may be, and we find a famous instance in Job, it cannot but be read in conjunction with “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” Jeremiah’s “Cursed be the day” is a Caliban moment; God has taught the prophet to speak, and so to curse; or it is a Hamlet moment, the prophet being “cursed” by his election to set the time right. But more important, the curse is the word itself, the violence done by it to the prophet. He feels it in his heart and bones as a burning fire (20:9). The word that knew him before he was conceived has displaced father and mother as begetter: when he curses his birth his word really curses the word. Jeremiah is not given time to develop; he is hurled untimely into the word. The words of the prophet and the words of God can be one only through that “blast of harmony” of which Wordsworth’s dream still gives an inkling. 5 When even an intelligent contemporary discussion of “The Prophets as Poets” talks of a “symphony of the effective word” and “the gradual union
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of person and word,” and sees prophecy advancing historically from “word as pointer to word as the thing itself,” it adopts metaphors as solutions. The animating fiat spoken by God in the book of Genesis, which founds the harmonious correspondence of creative principle (word) and created product (thing), is literalized by a leap of faith on the part of the intelligent contemporary reader. Yet with some exceptions—Wolfgang Binder and Peter Szondi on the language of Hölderlin, Erich Auerbach on Dante and figural typology, Northrop Frye on Blake, M. H. Abrams and E. S. Shaffer on the Romantics, Stanley Cavell on Thoreau—it is not the literary critics but the biblical scholars who have raised the issue of secularization (or, what affinity is there between secular and sacred word?) to a level where it is more than a problem in commuting: how to get from there to here, or vice versa. Since Ambrose and Augustine, and again since the Romantic era, biblical criticism has developed together with literary criticism; and still we are only beginning to appreciate their mutual concerns. It is no accident that the career of Northrop Frye has promised to culminate in an Anatomy of the Bible, or in a summa of structural principles that could harmonize the two bodies of the logos: scripture and literature. By labeling an essay “The Poetics of Prophecy,” I may seem to be going in the same direction, and I certainly wish to; yet I think that the relationship between poetics and prophetics cannot be so easily accommodated. The work of detail, or close reading, ever remains, and quite possibly as a task without an ending. Even when we seek to climb to a prospect where secular and sacred hermeneutics meet on some windy crag, we continue to face a number of unresolved questions that at once plague and animate the thinking critic. One question is the status of figures. They seem to persist in language as indefeasible sedimentations or as recurrent necessity, long after the megaphone of prophetic style. Moreover, because of the priority and survival of “primitive” or “oriental” figuration, such distinctions as Coleridge’s between fancy and imagination tend to become the problem they were meant to resolve. Strong figurative expression does not reconcile particular and universal, or show the translucence of the universal in the concrete: there is such stress and strain that even when theorists value one mode of imaginative embodiment over another—as symbol over allegory or metaphysical wit—they admit the persistence and sometimes explosive concurrence of the archaic or depreciated form. Another important question is the status of written texts in the life of society or the life of the mind. Almost every tradition influenced by Christianity has aspired to a spiritualization of the word, its transformation
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and even disappearance as it passes from “word as pointer to word as thing itself.” A logocentric or incarnationist thesis of this kind haunts the fringes of most studies of literature, and explains the welcome accorded at present to semiotic counterperspectives. Textual reality, obviously, is more complex, undecidable, and lasting than any such dogma; and the dogma itself is merely inferred from historically ramified texts. A last question concerns intertextuality. From the perspective of scripture intertextuality is related to canon formation, or the process of authority by which the bibles (biblia) we call the Bible were unified. The impact of scripture on literature includes the concept of (1) peremptory or preemptive texts and (2) interpreters who find the unifying principle that could join books into a canon of classics. From a secular perspective these books, whether classified as literature or as scripture, have force but no authority; and to bring them together into some sort of canon is the coup of the critic, who harmonizes them by the force of his own text. His work reveals not their canonicity but rather their intertextuality; and the most suggestive theory along these lines has been that of Harold Bloom. The impact, according to him, of a preemptive poem on a later one is always “revisionary”: the one lives the other’s death, deviating its meaning, diverting its strength, creating an inescapable orbit. “Revisionary” suggests, therefore, a relationship of force: again, a blast of harmony rather than a natural or authoritative unification. For a reason not entirely clear to me, Bloom wishes to establish English poetry after Milton as a Milton satellite. Milton becomes a scripture substitute with the impressive and oppressive influence of scripture itself. Later poets must harmonize with Milton, willingly or unwillingly: even their deviations are explained by attempts to escape the Milton orbit. Yet I have shown that Wordsworth may imitate a scripture text (“Let there be light”) with a power of deviousness that is totally un-Miltonic. Milton and Nature, Wordsworth saw, were not the same. His return to scripture is not to its precise verbal content, though it is an implicit content (Genesis, light, voice) that infuses the texture of the vision on Snowdon. The form of the fiat, however, predominates over its content; and what we are given to see is not scripture reenacted or imaginatively revised—new testamented—but the unuttered fiat in its silent yet all-subduing aspect. What Wordsworth names and represents as Nature is the fiat power working tacitly and harmoniously, reconciling discordant elements, building up the mind and perhaps the cosmos itself. Snowdon’s Miltonic echoes, therefore, which recapitulate a portion of the story of creation as retold in the seventh book of Paradise Lost, are
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allusions whose status is as hard to gauge as those to Hamlet in the “spot of time” referring to the father’s death. The converging highways, moreover, in that spot of time could lead the contemporary reader (perhaps via Freud) to Oedipus, so that a question arises on the relation of revisionary to hermeneutic perspectives, making the intertextual map more tricky still. Yet Wordsworth’s vision, natural rather than textual in its apparent motivation, can still be called revisionary because a prior and seminal text may be hypothetically reconstituted. The act of reconstitution, however, now includes the reader in a specific and definable way. The poet as reader is shown to have discovered from within himself, and so recreated, a scripture text. The interpreter as reader has shown the capacity of a “secular” text to yield a “sacred” intuition by a literary act of understanding that cannot be divided into those categories. On the level of interpretation, therefore, we move toward what Schleiermacher called Verstehen, on the basis of which a hermeneutic is projected that seeks to transcend the dichotomizing of religious and nonreligious modes of understanding and of earlier (prophetic) and later (poetic-visionary) texts. 6 Returning a last time to Wordsworth: much remains to be said concerning the “gravitation and the filial bond” that links earlier visionary texts to his own. The reader, in any case, also moves in a certain gravitational field; and I have kept myself from being pulled toward a Freudian explanation of the nexus between the boy’s “anxiety of hope” and the guilty, affective inscription on his mind of a natural scene. My only finding is that should a God-word precede in Wordsworth, it is rarely foregrounded, but tends to be part of the poem’s ground as an inarticulate, homeless or ghostly, sound. It becomes, to use one of his own expressions, an “inland murmur.” In the second act of Snowdon this sound comes out of the deep and is suddenly the very subject, the “Imagination of the whole” (1805 Prelude xiii.65). Though the text behind that sound cannot be specified, it is most probably the word within the word, the Word that was in the Beginning (John 1:1), and which uttered as from chaos, “Let there be light.” In Milton the first words of the “Omnific Word” are “Silence, ye troubl’d Waves, and thou Deep, peace” (Paradise Lost vii.216), a proto-fiat Wordsworth may have absorbed into his vision of silence followed by his more radical vision of the power in sound. When the poet writes, “The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion” (“Tintern Abbey”), there is again no sense of a proof text of any
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kind. We recognize a congruity of theme between this waterfall and the “roar of waters” heard on Snowdon, and perhaps associate both with Psalm 42: “Deep calls unto deep at the thunder of thy cataracts.” Such allusions may exist, but they are “tidings” born on the wave of natural experience. Yet a prophetic text does enter once more in the way we have learned to understand. The word “passion,” by being deprived of specific reference, turns back on itself, as if it contained a muted or mutilated meaning. By a path more devious than I can trace, the reader recovers for “passion” its etymological sense of “passio”—and the word begins to embrace the pathos of prophetic speech, or a suffering idiom that is strongly inarticulate or musical, like the “earnest expectation of the creature ... subjected ... in hope” of which Paul writes in Romans (8:19–20), like sheep, blasted tree, and the boy who waits with them, and the barely speaking figures that inhabit the poet’s imagination. The event, in Wordsworth, is the word of connection itself, a word event (the poem) that would repair the bond between human hopes and a mutely remonstrant nature, “subjected in hope.” “Do you know the language of the old belief?” asks Robert Duncan. “The wild boar too / turns a human face.” Today the hope in such a turning includes the very possibility of using such language. A mighty scheme not of truth but of troth—of trusting the old language, its pathos, its animism, its fallacious figures—is what connects poet and prophet. When Wordsworth apostrophizes nature at the end of the Intimations Ode, he still writes in the old language, yet how precariously, as he turns toward what is turning away: And O, ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills and Groves, Forebode not any severing of our loves! BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE The locus classicus of Coleridgean poetics is found in Chapters 13 and 14 of the Biographia Literaria (1818), “On the Imagination, or Esemplastic Power,” etc. Aids to Reflection (1824) and a mass of miscellaneous lectures and readings contain many subtle and varying attempts to distinguish between symbolical and allegorical, analogous and metaphorical language, and so forth. Coleridge’s reflections on the subject of style and unity are much more intricate than my general comment suggests; see, for one example, “On Style,” reprinted in Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. T. M. Raysor (Cambridge, Mass., 1936), pages 214–17. Yet even there German-type speculation is mixed with practical and preacherly admonition. The major German influence in regard to art, revelation, and the question of unity (or
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“identity philosophy”) was, of course, Schelling. Martin Buber’s distinction between apocalyptic and prophetic is made in “Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour,” in On the Bible (New York, 1968). For Abraham Heschel on pathos, see The Prophets (New York, 1962). The intelligent contemporary discussion on prophets as poets is in David Robertson’s chapter of that title in The Old Testament and the Literary Critic (Philadelphia, 1977). Robertson acknowledges his debt to Gerhard von Rad’s Old Testament Theology, volume 2. To the literary scholars mentioned in my essay, I should add Paul de Man’s and Angus Fletcher’s work on the theory of allegory; Walter Benjamin’s seminal reconsideration of baroque allegory in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (originally published in 1928); and articles by Robert W. Funk on the parable in the New Testament and in Kafka. Frank Kermode is also working on the parable and has begun publishing on the idea of canon formation. Elinor Shaffer’s Kubla Khan and the Fall of Jerusalem (Cambridge, England, 1976) links up more specifically than Basil Willey movements in Bible criticism and considerations of literary form. Her chapter entitled “The Visionary Character” is especially valuable in summarizing the movement of thought whereby poets, critics, and theologians came to consider Holy Writ as composed of different poetic and narrative genres, and faced the question of how to value nonapostolic (generally “apocalyptic” rather than “prophetic”) visionariness. My quotations from Jacques Lacan can be found in Ecrits: A Selection (New York, 1977), pages 68 and 86. The issue of secularization in literary history is central to M. H. Abrams’ Natural Supernaturalism (1971) and has elicited, in the Anglo-American domain, many partial theories from Matthew Arnold to Daniel Bell. Stanley Cavell’s The Senses of Walden (1971) reveals a Wordsworthian type of underwriting in Thoreau, and one so consistent in its allusions to earlier epics and scriptures that Walden begins to emerge as a sacred book. NOTE 1. Ordinary language, like ordinary incident, does indeed become very condensed and tricky here. “Thither I repaired,” writes Wordsworth of the crag (l. 296), and again, toward the end, “to which I oft repaired” (l. 325), referring to the voluntary, sometimes involuntary, return of memory to the haunting scene. This “repaired” means simply “to go,” the “re-” functioning as an intensifying particle. But in the second use of the word, the “re-” inclines the word toward its original sense of “return,” or more specifically, “return to one’s native country,” repatriare. So that the first “repaired” may already contain proleptically the sense of returning to the father’s house: climbing the crag is the first step in a conscious yet unconscious desire to overgo time and repatriate oneself, return home,
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to the father. The relation of “repair” to its etymological source is as tacit as unconscious process; so it may simply be a sport of language that when Wordsworth introduces the notion of “spots of time” a hundred or so lines before this, he also uses the word, though in its other root meaning of “restore,” from reparare: There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue, whence, depressed By false opinion and contentious thought, Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight, In trivial occupations, and the round Of ordinary intercourse, our minds Are nourished and invisibly repaired; [1850 Prelude xii.208–15] Though the young Wordsworth repairs to that which should nourish and repair (his father’s house), he finds on the crag houseless or homeless phenomena, which hint at a stationary and endless patience. Whether “repair” may also have echoed in Wordsworth’s mind as the repairing of man and nature (ll. 298–302, which call hawthorn and sheep his “companions,” as well as “kindred” [l. 324], suggest his integration into a nonhuman family at the very point that the human one seems to fall away) must be left as moot as the foregoing speculations. The latter may suggest, however, not only the overdetermination of Wordsworth’s deceptively translucent diction, but the consistency of his wish to join together what has been parted.
HAROLD BLOOM
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begin with a parable, rather than a paradigm, but then I scarcely can distinguish between the two. The parable is Bacon’s, and I have brooded on it before, as pan of a meditation upon the perpetual (shall we say obsessive?) belatedness of strong poetry: The children of time do take after the nature and malice of the father. For as he devoureth his children, so one of them seeketh to devour and suppress the other, while antiquity envieth there should be new additions, and novelty cannot be content to add but it must deface. I doubt that I have been able to add much to that dark observation of Bacon’s, but I want again to swerve from it towards my own purposes. I don’t read the ghastly image of malicious time devouring us as irony or allegory, but rather as sublime hyperbole, because of the terrible strength of the verb, “devouring.” Time is an unreluctant Ugolino, and poems, as I read them, primarily are deliberate lies against that devouring. Strong poems reluctantly know, not Freud’s parodistic Primal History Scene (Totem and Taboo) but what I have called the Scene of Instruction. Such a scene, itself both parable and paradigm, I have shied away from developing, until now, probably
From The Breaking of the Vessels. © 1982 by The University of Chicago.
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because of my own sense of trespass, my own guilt at having become a Jewish Gnostic after and in spite of an Orthodox upbringing. But without developing such a notion, I cannot go further, and so I must begin with it here. We all choose our own theorists for the Scene of Instruction, or rather, as Coleridge would have said, we do not find their texts, but are found by them. More often than not, these days, the theorists that advanced sensibilities are found by are the German language fourfold of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, but the inevitable precursor for formulating a Scene of Instruction has to be Kierkegaard, allied to Marx and Heidegger, involuntarily, by his antithetical relationship to Hegel. It may be that any Scene of Instruction has to be, rather like Derrida’s Scene of Writing, more an unwilling parody of Hegel’s quest than of Freud’s. But I am content with a misprision of Kierkegaard, while being uneasily aware that his “repetition” is a trope that owes more than he could bear to the Hegelian trope of “mediation.” To talk about paradigms, however parabolically, in the context of poetry and criticism, is to engage the discourse of “repetition,” in Kierkegaard’s rather than Freud’s sense of that term. I haven’t ever encountered a useful discursive summary of Kierkegaard’s notion, and I myself won’t try to provide one, because Kierkegaard’s idea of repetition is more trope than concept, and tends to defeat discursiveness. His little book Repetition is subtitled “An Essay in Experimental Psychology,” but “experimental” there is the crucial and tricky term, and modifies “psychology” into an odd blend of psychopoetics and theology. Repetition, we are told first, “is recollected forwards” and is “the daily bread which satisfies with benediction.” Later, the book’s narrator assures us that “repetition is always a transcendence,” and indeed is “too transcendent” for the narrator to grasp. The same narrator, Constantine Constantius, wrote a long open letter against a Hegelian misunderstanding of his work, which insisted that true or anxious freedom willed repetition: “it is the task of freedom to see constantly a new side of repetition.” Each new side is a “breaking forth,” a “transition” or “becoming,” and therefore a concept of happening, and not of being. If repetition, in this sense, is always a transition or a crossing, then the power of repetition lies in what its great American theorist, Emerson, called the shooting of a gap or the darting to an aim. Kierkegaard, unlike Emerson, was a Christian, and so his repetition cannot be only a series of transitions; eternity becomes true repetition. But if we are more interested in poetry than in eternity, we can accept a limited or transitional repetition. We can say, still following the aesthetic
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stage in Kierkegaard, that Wallace Stevens is the repetition of Walt Whitman, or that John Ashbery is the repetition of Stevens. In this sense, repetition means the re-creation or revision of a paradigm, but of what paradigm? When a strong poet revises a precursor, he re-enacts a scene that is at once a catastrophe, a romance, and a transference. All three paradigms technically are tainted, though favorably from the perspective of poetry. The catastrophe is also a creation; the romance is incestuous; the transference violates taboo and its ambivalences. Are these three categories or one? What kind of a relational or dialectical event is at once creatively catastrophic, incestuously romantic, and ambivalently a metaphor for a trespass that works? For an instance, I go back to the example of Wallace Stevens, still the poet of our moment. When I was a youngster, the academy view of Stevens was that of a kind of hothouse exquisite, vaguely perfumed, Ronald Firbank grown fat, and transmogrified into a Pennsylvania Dutchman practising insurance in Hartford, Connecticut. Now, in 1981, this vision has its own archaic charm, but thirty years ago it filled me with a young enthusiast’s fury. I remember still the incredulous indulgence displayed by one of the masters of Yale New Criticism, now heartbreakingly mourned by me, when I read an essay in his graduate seminar suggesting that the seer of Hartford was the true ephebe of Walt Whitman, one of the roughs, an American. Stevens himself, a few miles up the road then, would have denied his own poetic father, but that after all is the most ancient of stories. I cite here again a small poem by the sane and sacred Walt that even Stevens confesses he had pondered deeply. The poem is called “A Clear Midnight”: This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best, Night, sleep, death and the stars. The Whitmanian Soul, I take it, is the Coleridgean moon, the Arab of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction. Perhaps the ocean would have been redundant had it been lined up with night, sleep, and death, instead of “the stars,” since moon and the tides are so intimately allied in the most pervasive of feminine tropes. We don’t need the ocean anyway, since the moon as mother of the months is always the mother proper, Whitman’s and our “fierce old mother,” moaning for us to return whence we came. The mother’s face is the purpose of the poem, as Keats told us implicitly, and Stevens in so many words. But
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the purpose of the poem, for the poet qua person, is Kenneth Burke’s purpose, and not my own. The poet qua poet is my obsessive concern, and the Scene of Instruction creates the poet as or in a poet. The Scene of Instruction in Stevens is a very belated phenomenon, and even Whitman’s origins, despite all his mystifications, are shadowed by too large an American foreground. A better test for my paradigms is provided by the indubitable beginning of a canonical tradition. The major ancient possibilities are the Yahwist, the strongest writer in the Bible, and Homer. Beside them we can place Freud, whose agon with the whole of anteriority is the largest and most intense of our century. Because Freud has far more in common with the Yahwist than with Homer, I will confine myself here to the two Jewish writers, ancient and modern. I want to interpret two difficult and haunting texts, each remarkable in several ways, but particularly as a startling manifestation of originality. One goes back to perhaps the tenth century before the Common Era; the other is nearly three thousand years later, and comes in our own time. The first is the story of Wrestling Jacob, and tells how Jacob achieved the name Israel, in Gen. 32:23–32, the author being that anonymous great writer, fully the equal of Homer, whom scholars have agreed to call by the rather Kafkan name of the letter J, or the Yahwist. The second I would call, with loving respect, the story of Wrestling Sigmund, and tells how Freud achieved a theory of the origins of the human sexual drive. As author we necessarily have the only possible modern rival of the Yahwist, Freud himself, the text being mostly the second of the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Here is the text of Jacob’s encounter with a daemonic being, as rendered literally by E. A. Speiser in the Anchor Bible: In the course of that night he got up and, taking his two wives, the two maidservants, and his eleven children, he crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had taken them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. Jacob was left alone. Then some man wrestled with him until the break of dawn. When he saw that he could not prevail over Jacob, he struck his hip at its socket, so that the hip socket was wrenched as they wrestled. Then he said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.” Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” Said the other, “What is your name?” He answered, “Jacob.” Said he, “You shall no longer be spoken of as Jacob, but as Israel, for you have striven with beings divine and human, and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked, “Please tell me
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your name.” He replied, “You must not ask my name.” With that, he bade him good-by there and then. Jacob named the site Peniel, meaning, “I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been preserved.” The sun rose upon him just as he passed Penuel, limping on his hip. I shall enhance my reputation for lunatic juxtapositions by citing next to this Sublime passage a cento of grotesque passages from Freud, the first two being from the second Essay, “Infantile Sexuality,” and the third from Essay III, but summarizing the argument of the second Essay: It was the child’s first and most vital activity, his sucking at his mother’s breast, or at substitutes for it, that must have familiarized him with this pleasure. The child’s lips, in our view, behave like an erotogenic zone, and no doubt stimulation by the warm flow of milk is the cause of the pleasurable sensation. The satisfaction of the erotogenic zone is associated, in the first instance, with the satisfaction of the need for nourishment. To begin with, sexual activity props itself upon functions serving the purpose of self-preservation and does not become independent of them until later. No one who has seen a baby sinking back satiated from the breast and falling asleep with flushed cheeks and a blissful smile can escape the reflection that this picture persists as a prototype of the expression of sexual satisfaction in later life. The need for repeating the sexual satisfaction now becomes detached from the need for taking nourishment. Our study of thumb-sucking or sensual sucking has already given us the three essential characteristics of an infantile sexual manifestation. At its origin it props itself upon one of the vital somatic functions; it has as yet no sexual object, and is thus autoerotic; and its sexual aim is dominated by an erotogenic zone. At a time at which the first beginnings of sexual satisfaction are still linked with the taking of nourishment, the sexual instinct has a sexual object outside the infant’s own body in the shape of his mother’s breast. It is only later that he loses it, just at the time, perhaps, when he is able to form a total idea of the person to whom the organ that is giving him satisfaction belongs. As a rule the sexual drive then becomes auto-erotic, and not until the
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period of latency has been passed through is the original relation restored. There are thus good reasons why a child sucking at his mother’s breast has become the prototype of every relation of love. The finding of an object is in fact a re-finding of it. Wrestling with a divine being or angel is rather a contrast to sucking at one’s mother’s breast, and achieving the name Israel is pretty well unrelated to the inauguration of the sexual drive. All that the Yahwist’s and Freud’s breakthroughs have in common is that they are breakthroughs, difficult to assimilate because these curious stories are each so original. But before I explore that common difficulty, I need to give a commentary upon each of these passages. What is the nature of Jacob’s agon, and what does it mean to see Freud’s own agon as being central to his theory of sexual origins? To consider the Yahwist as being something other than a religious writer would be as eccentric as to consider Freud a religious writer despite himself. But who sets the circumferences? All the academies, from the Academy of Ezra through the Academies of Alexandria on down to our own institutions, have in common their necessity for consensus. The Yahwist may have written to persuade, but he remains hugely idiosyncratic when compared either to the Elohist, who probably came a century after him, or to the much later Priestly Author, who may have belonged to the age of Ezra and the Return from Babylon, some six centuries after the Yahwist. E and P are far more normative than J, and far less original, in every meaning of “original.” But I want to specify a particular aspect of J’s originality, and it is one that I have never seen discussed as such. We are familiar, since the work of Nietzsche and of Burckhardt, with the ancient Greek concept of the agonistic, but we scarcely recognize an ancient Hebrew notion of agon, which is crucial throughout J’s writing. J is an unheimlich writer, and perhaps the greatest master of the literary Sublime in what has become Western tradition. But J is also the most remarkable instance of what Blake meant, when in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he characterized the history of all religions as choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. J’s poetic tales of Yahweh and the Patriarchs are now so much the staple of Judaism and Christianity, and have been such for so long, that we simply cannot read them. Yet they were and are so original that there is quite another sense in which they never have been read, and perhaps cannot be read. If we allowed them their strangeness, then their uncanniness would reveal that tradition never has been able to assimilate their originality. Yahweh appears to Abraham by the terebinths of Mamre; Abraham sits at the entrance of his tent as the day grows hot. He looks up, sees three men,
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one of them Yahweh, whom he recognizes, and invites them for an immediate meal. Yahweh and his angels devour rolls, curd, milk, and roast calf, while Abraham stands nearby. Yahweh then prophesies that Sarah, well past a woman’s periods, will have a son. Sarah, listening behind Yahweh’s back, at the tent entrance, laughs to herself. Yahweh, offended, asks rhetorically if anything is too much for him. Poor, frightened Sarah says she didn’t laugh, but Yahweh answers: “Yes, you did.” What can we do with a Yahweh who sits on the ground, devours calf, is offended by an old woman’s sensible derision, and then walks on to Sodom after being argued down by Abraham to a promise that he will spare that wicked city if he finds just ten righteous among the inhabitants? The silliest thing we can do is to say that J has an anthropomorphic concept of god. J doesn’t have a concept of Yahweh; indeed we scarcely can say that J even has a conceptual image of Yahweh. J is nothing of a theologian, and everything of a storyteller, and his strong interest is personality, particularly the personality of Jacob. J’s interest in Yahweh is intense, but rather less than J’s concern for Jacob, because Jacob is cannier and more agonistic even than Yahweh. Yahweh just about is the uncanny for J; what counts about Yahweh is that he is the source of the Blessing, and the Blessing is the aim of the agon, in total distinction from the Greek notion of agon. The contest among the Greeks was for the foremost place, whether in chariot racing, poetry, or civic eminence. The subtle and superb Jacob knows only one foremost place, the inheritance of Abraham and of Isaac, so that tradition will be compelled to speak of the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of Judah. The Blessing means that the nation shall be known as Israel, the name that Jacob wins as agonist, and that the people shall be known as Jews after Judah, rather than say as Reubens, if that first-born had been chosen. Such a blessing achieves a pure temporality, and so the agon for it is wholly temporal in nature, whereas the Greek agon is essentially spatial, a struggle for the foremost place, and so for place, and not a mastery over time. That, I take it, is why temporality is at the center of the nightlong wrestling between Jacob and some nameless one among the Elohim, and I am now ready to describe that most significant of J’s visions of agon. I quote again Speiser’s literal version of J’s text: In the course of that night he got up and, taking his two wives, the two maidservants, and his eleven children, he crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had taken them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. Jacob was left alone. Then some man
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wrestled with him until the break of dawn. When he saw that he could not prevail over Jacob, he struck his hip at its socket, so that the hip socket was wrenched as they wrestled. Then he said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.” Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” Said the other, “What is your name?” He answered, “Jacob.” Said he, “You shall no longer be spoken of as Jacob, but as Israel, for you have striven with beings divine and human, and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked, “Please tell me your name.” He replied, “You must not ask my name.” With that, he bade him good-by there and then. Jacob named the site Peniel, meaning, “I have seen God face to face, yet my life has been preserved.” The sun rose upon him just as he passed Penuel, limping on his hip. So great is the uncanniness of this that we ought to approach J with a series of questions, rather than rely upon any traditional or even modern scholarly commentary whatsoever. Jacob has left Laban, and is journeying home, uneasily expecting a confrontation with his defrauded brother Esau. On the night before this dreaded reunion, Jacob supervises the crossing, into the land of the Blessing, of his household and goods. But then evidently he crosses back over the Jabbok so as to remain alone at Penuel in Transjordan. Why? J does not tell us, and instead suddenly confronts Jacob and the reader with “some man” who wrestles with Jacob until the break of dawn. About this encounter, there is nothing that is other than totally surprising. J’s Jacob has been an agonist literally from his days in Rebecca’s womb, but his last physical contest took place in that womb, when he struggled vainly with his twin Esau as to which should emerge first, Esau winning, but dragging out his tenacious brother, whose hand held on to his heel. Popular etymology interpreted the name Jacob as meaning “heel.” Craft and wiliness have been Jacob’s salient characteristics, rather than the physical strength evidently displayed in this nocturnal encounter. Yet that strength is tropological, and substitutes for the spiritual quality of persistence or endurance that marks Jacob or Israel. Who is that “man,” later called one of the Elohim, who wrestles with Jacob until dawn? And why should they wrestle anyway? Nothing in any tradition supports my surmise that this daemonic being is the Angel of Death, yet such I take him to be. What Jacob rightly fears is that he will be slain by the vengeful Esau on the very next day. Something after all is curiously negative and even fearful about Jacob’s opponent. Rabbinical tradition explains this strange being’s fear of the dawn as being an angel’s
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pious fear lest he be late on Yahweh’s business, but here as so often the Rabbis were weak misreaders of J. Everything about the text shows that the divine beings dread of daybreak is comparable to Count Dracula’s, and only the Angel of Death is a likely candidate among the Elohim for needing to move on before sunrise. This wrestling match is not a ballet, but is deadly serious for both contestants. The angel lames Jacob permanently, yet even this cannot subdue the patriarch. Only the blessing, the new naming Israel, which literally means “May God persevere,” causes Jacob to let go even as daylight comes. Having prevailed against Esau, Laban and even perhaps against the messenger of death, Jacob deserves the agonistic blessing. In his own renaming of the site as Peniel, or the divine face, Jacob gives a particular meaning to his triumphal declaration that: “I have seen one of the Elohim face to face, and yet my life has been preserved.” Seeing Yahweh face to face was no threat to Abraham’s life, in J’s view, but it is not Yahweh whom Jacob has wrestled to at least a standstill. I think there is no better signature of J’s sublimity than the great sentence that ends the episode, with its powerful implicit contrast between Israel and the fled angel. Here is Jacob’s true epiphany: “The sun rose upon him just as he passed Penuel, limping on his hip.” If there is an aesthetic originality in our Western tradition beyond interpretive assimilation, then it inheres in J’s texts. We do not know Homer’s precursors any more than we know J’s, yet somehow we can see Homer as a revisionist, whereas J seems more unique. Is this only because Homer has been misread even more strongly than J has? The prophet Hosea is our first certain interpreter of wrestling Jacob, and Hosea was a strong poet, by any standards, yet his text is not adequate to the encounter he describes. But Hosea’s Yahweh was a rather more remote entity than J’s, and Hosea did not invest himself as personally in Jacob as J seems to have done. What interpretive paradigm can help us read Jacob’s contest strongly enough to be worthy of the uncanniness of J, an author who might be said impossibly to combine the antithetical strengths of a Tolstoy and a Kafka? I recur to the distinction between the Hebrew temporal Sublime agon and the Greek spatial striving for the foremost place. Nietzsche, in his notes for the unwritten “untimely meditation” he would have called We Philologists, caught better even than Burckhardt the darker aspects of the Greek agonistic spirit: The agonistic element is also the danger in every development; it overstimulates the creative impulse.... The greatest fact remains always the precociously panhellenic
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HOMER. All good things derive from him; yet at the same time he remained the mightiest obstacle of all. He made everyone else superficial, and that is why the really serious spirits struggled against him. But to no avail. Homer always won. The destructive element in great spiritual forces is also visible here. But what a difference between Homer and the Bible as such a force! The delight in drunkenness, delight in cunning, in revenge, in envy, in slander, in obscenity—in everything which was recognized by the Greeks as human and therefore built into the structure of society and custom. The wisdom of their institutions lies in the lack of any gulf between good and evil, black and white. Nature, as it reveals itself, is not denied but only ordered, limited to specified days and religious cults. This is the root of all spiritual freedom in the ancient world; the ancients sought a moderate release of natural forces, not their destruction and denial. [translated by William Arrowsmith] Whatever Nietzsche means by “the Bible” in that contrast to Homer, he is not talking accurately about J, the Bible’s strongest writer. Not that J, with his obsessive, more-than-Miltonic sense of temporality, essentially agrees with Homer upon what constitutes spiritual freedom; no, perhaps J is further from Homer in that regard than even Nietzsche states. J does not discourse in good and evil, but in blessedness and unblessedness. J’s subject, like Homer’s, is strife, including the strife of gods and men. And drunkenness, delight in cunning, in revenge, in envy, in slander, in obscenity are at least as much involved in the expression of J’s exuberance as they are of Homer’s. But J’s temporal nature is not Homer’s spatial realm, and so the agonistic spirit manifests itself very differently in the linguistic universes of these two masters. In Homer, the gods transcend nature spatially, but Yahweh’s transcendence is temporal. The overcoming of nature by means of the Blessing must be temporal also. Jacob’s temporal victory over one of the Elohim is a curious kind of creative act which is one and the same as Jacob’s cunning victories over Esau and Laban. In Greek terms this makes no sense, but in ancient Hebrew thinking this corresponds to that vision in which Yahweh’s creation of the world, his rescue of the Israelites at the Red Sea, and the return of his people from Babylon are all one creative act on his part. Thorleif Boman defines the Hebrew word for eternity, olam, as meaning neither otherworldliness nor chronological infinity but rather time without
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boundaries. Something like that is the prize for which agonists strive in J. When Jacob becomes Israel, the implication is that his descendants also will prevail in a time without boundaries. That Jacob is, throughout his life, an agonist, seems beyond dispute, and certainly was the basis for Thomas Mann’s strong reading of J’s text in the beautiful Tales of Jacob volume which is the glory of Mann’s Joseph tetralogy. Yet distinguishing Hebrew from Greek agon is not much beyond a starting point in the interpretation of the recalcitrant originality of J’s text. Whoever it is among the Elohim, the angel fears a catastrophe, and vainly inflicts a crippling wound upon Jacob, averting one catastrophe at the price of another. And yet, as agonists, the angel and Jacob create a blessing, the name of Israel, a name that celebrates the agonistic virtue of persistence, a persistence into unbounded temporality. That creation by catastrophe is one clear mark of this encounter. Another is the carrying across from Jacob’s struggles in earlier life, veritably in the womb, his drive to have priority, where the carrying across is as significant as the drive. If the drive for priority is a version of what Freud has taught us to call family romance, then the conveyance of early zeal and affect into a later context is what Freud has taught us to call transference. Catastrophe creation, family romance, and transference are a triad equally central to J and to Freud, and in some sense Freud’s quest was to replace J and the other biblical writers as the legitimate exemplar of these paradigms. Ambivalence is the common element in the three paradigms, if we define ambivalence strictly as a contradictory stance mixing love and hate towards a particular object. Before returning to Wrestling Jacob, I want to cite the most shocking instance of Jahweh’s ambivalence in the Hebrew Bible, an ambivalence manifested towards his particular favorite, Moses. The text is Exod. 4:24–26, translated literally: Yahweh encountered Moses when Moses camped at night on his way [to Egypt] and Yahweh sought to kill Moses. So Zipporah [Moses’ wife] cut off her son’s foreskin with a flint and touched Moses on his legs with it, saying: “Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me.” And when Yahweh let Moses alone, she added, “A bridegroom of blood due to the circumcision.” Confronted by this passage, normative interpretation has been very unhappy indeed, since in it the uncanny of originality has gone beyond all limits. Indeed only Gnostics, ancient and modern, could be happy with this text, in which the agonistic seems truly to have crossed over into a really
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shocking divine murderousness. Whoever it was among the Elohim, even if the Angel of Death, Jacob undauntedly confronted an agonist. Yet Zipporah is even more courageous in her rescue of Moses. Perhaps the Hebraic concept of agon is more extensive even than I have indicated. Consider, though only briefly, the opening of Psalm 19, which I cite in the extraordinary King James version: The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race. His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof. That marvelous fifth verse reverberates in Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, and is the most curiously Pindaric moment in the Bible, with the Hebrew agonistic vision coinciding just this once with the Greek. But against whom is this rejoicing bridegroom of a sun contending? Not with God but with man, must be the answer. The Psalmist is far more normative than the Yahwist. Who could conceive of a Psalm in the uncanny mode of the Yahwist? One way of arriving at a reading of Wrestling Jacob’s night encounter is to contrast it with the characteristic stances and attitudes of the poets of Psalms confronting their Maker. Voices in the Psalms do not demand blessings; they implore. The sun emerges from his chamber like a bridegroom, and rejoicing at his own skill as an agonist, but the sun reflects the glory of God. It is not God’s glory but Israel’s, meaning Jacob lust transformed into Israel, which is celebrated so sublimely by the Yahwist: The sun rose upon him just as he passed Penuel, limping on his hip. What allies Freud to the Yahwist is this agonistic Sublime, as manifested in the power of the uncanny, in what cannot be rendered normative. We might think of the school of Ego Psychology, of Heinz
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Hartmann, Lowenstein, Kris, and Erikson, as being Psalmists in relation to Freud-as-Yahwist, an analogy that could be continued by describing Lacan and his school as Gnostics. Scenes of Instruction like the agon of Jacob or Yahweh’s night attack upon Moses are akin to Freud’s fantasies of catastrophe, because the outrage to normative sensibilities is beyond assimilation. Even our difficulties in recovering the uncanny originality of J are matched by our difficulties in acknowledging how peculiar and extreme a writer Freud sometimes compels himself to be, for reasons nearly as unknowable as the Yahwist’s motives. Wittgenstein, who resented Freud, and who dismissed Freud as a mythologist, however powerful, probably was too annoyed with Freud to read him closely. This may explain Wittgenstein’s curious mistake in believing that Freud had not distinguished between the Primal Scene and the somewhat later Primal Scene fantasy. Freud’s “Primal Scene” takes place in the beginning, when an infant sees his parents in the act of love, without in any way understanding that sight. Memory, according to Freud, holds on to the image of copulation until the child, between the ages of three and five, creates the Primal Scene fantasy, which is an Oedipal reverie. One of my former students, Cathy Caruth, caught me in making this same error, so that in my literary transformation of Freud into the Primal Scene of Instruction, I referred to such a Primal Scene as being at once oral and written. I would clarify this now by saying that the “oral” scene is the topos or Primal Scene proper, the negative moment of being influenced, a perpetually lost origin, while the “written” scene is the trope or Primal Scene fantasy. This means, in my terms, that in a poem a topos or rhetorical commonplace is where something can be known, but a trope or inventive turning is when something is desired or willed. Poems, as I have written often, are verbal utterances that cannot be regarded as being simply linguistic entities, because they manifest their will to utter within traditions of uttering, and as soon as you will that “within,” your mode is discursive and topological as well as linguistic and tropological. As a Primal Scene, the Scene of Instruction is a Scene of Voicing; only when fantasized. or troped does it become a Scene of Writing. That Scene of Voicing founds itself upon the three models of family romance, transference, and catastrophe creation, and here I assert no novelty in my own formulation, since Dryden for one deals with the family romance of poets in his Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern, with poetic transference in stating his preference for Juvenal over Horace in his Discourse Concerning ... Satire, and even with a kind of catastrophe creation in his Parallel Betwixt Poetry and Painting. Dryden’s mastery of dialectical contrasts between related poets seems to me now as good a guide for an antithetical practical criticism
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as I can find. Dryden is dialectical both in the open sense that Martin Price expounds, an empirical testing by trial and error, and also in the antithetical sense in which his description of one poet always points back to the contrasting poet from whom the critic is turning away. What Dryden and the English tradition cannot provide is a third sense of critical dialectic, which in Freudian or Hegelian terms is the problematic notion of the overdetermination of language, and the consequent underdetermination of meaning. Hegelian terms do not much interest me, even in their Heideggerian and deconstructive revisions, since they seem to me just too far away from the pragmatic workings of poetry. Catastrophe creation, whether in its explicit Gnostic and Kabbalistic versions, or its implicit saga in the later Freud; contributes a model for distinguishing between the meaning of things in non-verbal acts, and the meaning of words in the linguistic and discursive acts of poetry. By uttering truths of desire within traditions of uttering, the poetic will also gives itself a series of overdetermined names. Gnosis and Kabbalah are attempts to explain how the overdetermination of Divine names has brought about an underdetermination of Divine meanings, a bringing about that is at once catastrophe and creation, a movement from fullness to emptiness. Freud is not only the powerful mythologist Wittgenstein deplored, but also the inescapable mythologist of our age. His claims to science should be shrugged aside forever; that is merely his mask. Freudian literary, criticism I remember comparing to the Holy Roman Empire: not holy, or Roman, or an empire; not Freudian, or literary, or criticism. Any critic, theoretical or practical, who tries to use Freud ends up being used by Freud. But Freud has usurped the role of the mind of our age, so that more than forty years after his death we have no common vocabulary for discussing the works of the spirit except what he gave us. Philosophers, hard or soft, speak only to other philosophers; theologians mutter only to theologians; our literary culture speaks to us in the language of Freud, even when the writer, like Nabokov or Borges, is violently anti-Freudian. Karl Kraus, being Freud’s contemporary, said that psychoanalysis itself was the disease of which it purported to be the cure. We come after, and we must say that psychoanalysis itself is the culture of which it purports to be the description. If psychoanalysis and our literary culture no longer can be distinguished, then criticism is Freudian whether it wants to be or not. It relies upon Freudian models even while it pretends to be in thrall to Plato, Aristotle, Coleridge, or Hegel, and all that I urge is that it achieve a clearer sense of its bondage. Freudian usurpation as a literary pattern, is uniquely valuable to critics because it is the modem instance of poetic strength, of the agonistic clearing
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away of cultural rivals, until the Freudian tropes have assumed the status of priority, while nearly all precedent tropes seem quite belated in comparison. When we think of earliness we now think in terms of primal repression, of the unconscious, of primary process, and of the drives or instincts, and all these are Freud’s figurative language in his literary project of representing the civil wars of the psyche. The unconscious turns out alas not to be structured like a language, but to be structured like Freud’s language, and the ego and superego, in their conscious aspects, are structured like Freud’s own texts, for the very good reason that they are Freud’s texts. We have become Freud’s texts, and the Imitatio Freudi is the necessary pattern for the spiritual life in our time. Ferenczi, a great martyr of that Imitatio, urged us in his apocalyptic Thalassa to drop once and for all the question of the beginning and end of life, and conceive the whole inorganic and organic world as a perpetual oscillating between the will to live and the will to die in which an absolute hegemony on the part of either life or death is never attained ... it seems as though life had always to end catastrophically, even as it began, in birth, with a catastrophe. Ferenczi is following yet also going beyond Freud’s apocalyptic Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where the Nirvana Principle or Death Drive is described as an “urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces.” Such an urge, Freud insists, takes priority over the Pleasure Principle, and so “the aim of all life is death.” Three years later, in The Ego and the Id, Freud speculated upon the two aboriginal catastrophes dimly repeated in every human development under the ill-starred dominance of the death-drive. Our curious pattern of sexual development, particularly the supposed latency period between the ages of five and twelve, is related to those great cataclysms when all the cosmos became ice and again when the oceans went dry and life scrambled up upon the shore. These are Freud’s scientistic versions of the Gnostic escapades of the Demiurge, or the great trope of the Breaking of the Vessels in the Lurianic Kabbalah. But why should Freud have been haunted by images of catastrophe, however creative? It is not, I think, hyperbolic to observe that, for the later Freud, human existence is quite as catastrophic a condition as it was for Pascal and for Kierkegaard, for Dostoevsky and for Schopenhauer. There is a crack in everything that God has made, is one of Emerson’s dangerously
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cheerful apothegms. In Freud, the fissure in us between primary process and secondary process insures that each of us is her or his own worst enemy, exposed endlessly to the remorseless attacks of the superego, whose relation to the hapless ego is shockingly like the Gnostic vision of the relation of Yahweh to human beings. The horror of the family romance, as Freud expounds it, is one version of this human fissure, since the child attempts to trope one of the stances of freedom, yet makes the parents into the numinous shadows that Nietzsche called ancestor gods. As a revision of the Primal Scene, the family romance’s falsification shows us that Oedipal fantasies are only ironies, or beginning moments merely, for truly strong poets and poems. This limitation makes the family romance a model neither catastrophic nor creative enough, and gives us the necessity for advancing to another model, the psychoanalytic transference, whose workings are closer to the dialectical crises of poetic texts. The Freudian transference, as I have attempted to demonstrate elsewhere, depends for its pattern upon the sublimely crazy myth that Freud sets forth in Totem and Taboo. Briefly and crudely, the totem is the psychoanalyst and the taboo is the transference. All the ambivalences of the Oedipal situation are transferred from the individual’s past to the analytical encounter; and the agon thus threatens to act out again the erotic defeat and tragedy of every psyche whatsoever. Against this threat, Freud sought to muster the strength of what he called “working through” but his beautiful late essay, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” confesses that the benign powers of the totemic analyst tend to be confounded by the malign intensity of each patient’s fantasy-making power. Working-through is replaced by repetition, and so by the death drive, which deeply contaminates all repressive defenses. This mutual contamination of drive and defense is the dearest link between Freud’s visionary cosmos and the arena of PostEnlightenment poetry. Contamination is not a trope but the necessary condition of all troping (or all defending); another word for contamination here might be “blurring” or even “slipping.” There may be boundaries between the ego and the id, but they blur always in the transference situation, just as poet and precursor slip together in the Scene of Instruction or influence relationship. I am suggesting that neither my use of Freud’s images of Oedipal ambivalence, nor those images themselves, are generally read strongly enough. Identification in the Oedipal agon is not the introjection of the paternal super ego but rather is a violent narcissistic metamorphosis. I rely here upon a formulation by the psychoanalyst Joseph H. Smith:
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The poet as poet is taken over by a power with which he has chosen to wrestle. It is not essentially a matter of passivity. The experience of a negative moment that coincides with the negative moment of a precursor is to be understood as an achieved catastrophe. It reaches beyond the ordinary understanding of oedipal identification to those primal internalizations which are and yet cannot be because no boundary is yet set across which anything could be said to be internalized. They are, rather, boundary-establishing phenomena which presuppose the possibility of internalization proper. But who is to say that there is not such a reestablishment of boundaries even in oedipal identifications? I would go further than Smith in suggesting that every ambivalent identification with another self, writer or reader, parent or child, is an agon that makes ghostlier the demarcations between self and other. That blurring or slipping creates, in that it restores the abyss in the Gnostic sense, where the abyss is the true, alien godhead that fell away into time when the Demiurge sickened to a catastrophic false creation. The transference shakes the foundations of the ego more authentically than the family romance does, even though the transference is an artificial Eros and the family romance a natural one. After all, the transference, like a poem, is a lie against time, a resistance that must be overcome if we are to accept unhappy truth. Let us call a transference a kind of parody of a Sublime poem, since the taboo protects the totem analyst from the patient, yet no taboo can protect a precursor poet from the fresh strength or daemonic counter-sublime of an authentic new poet. To call a transference a parody of a poem is to suggest that catastrophe creations and family romances are also parodies of poetic texts. How can a parody be a model or paradigm for interpretation? We are accustomed to thinking of poems as parodies of prior poems, or, even as parodies of paradigms. Yet reversing the order gets us closer, I am convinced, to the actualities of poetic interpretation. Yeats wrote that “Plato thought nature but a spume that plays / Against a ghostly paradigm of things.” Freud thought of nature very differently, yet he had his own version of a transcendentalism, in what he called “reality testing.” Yet his paradigms for object attachments play uncanny tricks upon nature, or perhaps rely upon the uncanny tricks that nature seems to play with human sexuality. I go back here to the passages I quoted from the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality earlier in this chapter. The child sucking at his mother’s breast becomes the paradigm for all sexual pleasure in later life,
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and Freud asserts that to begin with, sexual activity props itself upon the vital function of nourishment by the mother’s milk. Thumb-sucking and the sensual smacking of the lips then give Freud the three characteristics of infantile sexual manifestation. These are: (1) propping, at the origin, upon a vital somatic function; (2) auto-eroticism, or the lack of a sexual object; (3) domination of sexual aim by an erotogenic zone; here, the lips. It is at this point in his discussion that Freud makes one of his uncanniest leaps, relying upon his extraordinary trope of Anlebnung or propping (or anaclisis, as Strachey oddly chose to translate it). While the propping of the sexual drive upon the vital order still continues, the sexual drive finds its first object outside the infant’s body in the mother’s breast, and in the milk ensuing from it. Suddenly Freud surmises that just at the time the infant is capable of forming a total idea of the mother, quite abruptly the infant loses the initial object of the mother’s breast, and tragically is thrown back upon autoeroticism. Consequently, the sexual drive has no proper object again until after the latency period has transpired, and adolescence begins. Hence that dark and infinitely suggestive Freudian sentence: “The finding of an object is in fact a re-finding of it.” Thus human sexuality, alas, on this account has not had, from its very origins, any real object. The only real object was milk, which belongs to the vital order. Hence the sorrows and the authentic anguish of all human erotic quest, hopelessly seeking to rediscover an object, which never was the true object anyway. All human sexuality is thus tropological, whereas we all of us desperately need and long for it to be literal. As for sexual excitation, it is merely what Wrestling Sigmund terms a marginal effect (Nebenwirkung), because it reflects always the propping process, which after all has a double movement, of initial leaning, and then deviation or swerving. As Laplanche says, expounding Freud: “Sexuality in its entirety is in the slight deviation, the clinamen from the function.” Or as I would phrase it, our sexuality is in its very origins a misprision, a strong misreading, on the infant’s part, of the vital order. At the crossing (Laplanche calls it a “breaking or turning point’s of the erotogenic zones, our sexuality is a continual crisis, which I would now say is not so much mimicked or parodied by the High Romantic crisis poem, but rather our sexuality itself is a mimicry or parody of the statelier action of the will which is figured forth in the characteristic Post-Enlightenment strong poem. I call Freud, in, the context of these uncanny notions, “Wrestling Sigmund,” because again he is a poet of Sublime agon, here an agon between sexuality and the vital order. Our sexuality is like Jacob, and the vital order is like that one among the Elohim with whom our wily and heroic ancestor
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wrestled, until he had won the great name of Israel. Sexuality and Jacob triumph, but at the terrible expense of a crippling. All our lives long we search in vain, unknowingly, for the lost object, when even that object was a clinamen away from the true aim. And yet we search incessantly, do experience satisfactions, however marginal, and win our real if limited triumph over the vital order. Like Jacob, we keep passing Penuel, limping on our hips. How can I conclude? Paradigms are not less necessary, but more so, when the power and the originality of strong poets surpass all measure, as Freud and the Yahwist go beyond all comparison. Sexuality, in Freud’s great tropological vision, is at once a catastrophe creation, a transference, and a family romance. The blessing, in the Yahwist’s even stronger vision, is yet more a catastrophe creation, a transference, a family romance. Those strategems of the spirit, those stances and attitudes, those positrons of freedom; or ratios of revision and crossings, that I have invoked as aids to reading strong poems of the Post-Enlightenment, are revealed as being not wholly inadequate to the interpretation of the Yahwist and of Freud. So I conclude with the assertion that strength demands strength. If we are to break through normative or weak misreadings of the Yahwist and of Freud, of Wordsworth and Whitman and Stevens, then we require strong paradigms, and these I have called upon agonistic tradition to provide.
M A RT I N B U B E R
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n the actual reality of the catastrophe, “honest and wicked” (Job 9:22) are destroyed together by God, and in the outer reality the wicked left alive knew how to assert themselves successfully in spite of all the difficulties; “they lived, became old, and even thrived mightily” (21:7), whereas for the pious, endowed with weaker elbows and more sensitive hearts, their days “were swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and were spent without hope” (7:6); “the robbers’ tents are peaceful, and they that anger God have secure abodes” (12:6), whereas the upright is “become a brother of jackals” (30:29). This is the experience out of which the Book of Job was born, a book opposed to the dogmatics of Ezekiel, a book of the question which then was new and has persisted ever since. I cannot ascribe this book—which clearly has only slowly grown to its present form—in its basic kernel to a time later (or earlier) than the beginning of the exile. Its formulations of the question bear the stamp of an intractable directness—the stamp of a first expression. The world in which they were spoken had certainly not yet heard the answers of Psalm 73 or Deutero-Isaiah. The author finds before him dogmas in process of formation, he clothes them in grand language, and sets over against them the force of the new question, the question brought into being out of experience; in his time these growing
From On the Bible: Eighteen Studies. © 1968 Schocken Books.
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dogmas had not yet found their decisive opponents. The book, in spite of its thorough rhetoric—the product of a long-drawn-out literary process—is one of the special events in world literature, in which we witness the first clothing of a human quest in form of speech. It has rightly been said2 that behind the treatment of Job’s fate in this discussion lie “very bitter experiences of a supra-individual kind.” When the sufferer complains, “He breaks me around, and I am gone” (Job 19:10), this seems no longer the complaint of a single person. When he cries, “God delivers me to the wicked, and hurls me upon the hands of the evil-doers” (16:11), we think less of the sufferings of an individual than of the exile of a people. It is true it is a personal fate that is presented here, but the stimulus to speaking out, the incentive to complaint and accusation, bursting the bands of the presentation, are the fruit of supra-personal sufferings. Job’s question comes into being as the question of a whole generation about the sense of its historic fate. Behind this “I,” made so personal here, there still stands the “I” of Israel. The question of the generation, “Why do we suffer what we suffer?” had from the beginning a religious character; “why?” here is not a philosophical interrogative asking after the nature of things, but a religious concern with the acting of God. With Job, however, it becomes still clearer; he does not ask, “Why does God permit me to suffer these things?” but “Why does God make me suffer these things?” That everything comes from God is beyond doubt and question; the question is, How are these sufferings compatible with His godhead? In order to grasp the great inner dialectic of the poem, we must realize that here not two, but four answers stand over against each other; in other words, we find here four views of God’s relationship to man’s sufferings. The first view is that of the Prologue to the book which, in the form in which it has reached us, cannot have come from an ancient popular book about Job, but bears the stamp of a poetic formation. The popular view of God, however, stands here apparently unchanged.3 It is a God allowing a creature, who wanders about the earth and is subject to Him in some manner, the “Satan,” that is the “Hinderer” or “Adversary,” to “entice” Him (2:3)—the verb is the same as is used in the story of David being enticed by God or Satan to sin—to do all manner of evil to a God-fearing man, one who is His “servant” (1:8; 2:3), of whose faithfulness God boasts. This creature entices the deity to do all manner of evil to this man, only in order to find out if he will break faith, as Satan argues, or keep it according to God’s word. The poet shows us how he sees the matter, as he repeats in true biblical style the phrase “gratuitously.” In order to make it clear whether Job serves him
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“gratuitously” (1:9), that is to say, not for the sake of receiving a reward, God smites him and brings suffering upon him, as He Himself confesses (2:3), “gratuitously,” that is to say, without sufficient cause. Here God’s acts are questioned more critically than in any of Job’s accusations, because here we are informed of the true motive, which is one not befitting to deity. On the other hand man proves true as man. Again the point is driven home by the frequent repetition of the verb barekh, which means both real blessing and also blessing of dismissal, departure (1:5, 11; 2:5, 9)4: Job’s wife tells him, reality itself tells him to “bless” God, to dismiss Him, but he bows down to God and “blesses” Him, who has allowed Himself to be enticed against him “gratuitously.” This is a peculiarly dramatic face-to-face meeting, this God and this man. The dialogue poem that follows contradicts it totally: there the man is another man, and God another God. The second view of God is that of the friends. This is the dogmatic view of the cause and effect in the divine system of requital: sufferings point to sin. God’s punishment is manifest and clear to all. The primitive conception of the zealous God is here robbed of its meaning: it was YHVH, God of Israel, who was zealous for the covenant with His people. Ezekiel had preserved the covenant faith, and only for the passage of time between covenant and covenant did he announce the unconditional punishment for those who refused to return in penitence; this has changed here, in an atmosphere no longer basically historical,5 into the view of the friends, the assertion of an all-embracing empirical connection between sin and punishment. In addition to this, for Ezekiel, it is true, punishment followed unrepented sin, but it never occurred to him to see in all men’s sufferings the avenging hand of God; and it is just this that the friends now proceed to do: Job’s sufferings testify to his guilt. The inner infinity of the suffering soul is here changed into a formula, and a wrong formula. The first view was that of a small mythological idol, the second is that of a great ideological idol. In the first the faithful sufferer was true to an untrue God, who permitted his guiltless children to be slain; whereas here man was not asked to be true to an incalculable power, but to recognize and confess a calculation that his knowledge of reality contradicts. There man’s faith is attacked by fate, here by religion. The friends are silent seven days before the sufferer, after which they expound to him the account book of sin and punishment. Instead of his God, for whom he looks in vain, his God, who had not only put sufferings upon him, but also had “hedged him in” until “His way was hid” from his eyes (3:23), there now came and visited him on his ash heap religion, which uses every art of speech to take away from him the God of his soul. Instead of the “cruel” (30:21) and living God, to whom he clings, religion offers him
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a reasonable and rational God, a deity whom he, Job, does not perceive either in his own existence or in the world, and who obviously is not to be found anywhere save only in the very domain of religion. And his complaint becomes a protest against a God who withdraws Himself, and at the same time against His false representation. The third view of God is that of Job in his complaint and protest. It is the view of a God who contradicts His revelation by “hiding His face” (13:24). He is at one and the same time fearfully noticeable and unperceivable (9:11), and this hiddenness is particularly sensible in face of the excessive presence of the “friends,” who are ostensibly God’s advocates. All their attempts to cement the rent in Job’s world show him that this is the rent in the heart of the world. Clearly the thought of both Job and the friends proceeds from the question about justice. But unlike his friends, Job knows of justice only as a human activity, willed by God, but opposed by His acts. The truth of being just and the reality caused by the unjust acts of God are irreconcilable. Job cannot forego either his own truth or God. God torments him “gratuitously” (9:17; it is not without purpose that here the word recurs, which in the Prologue Satan uses and God repeats); He “deals crookedly” with him (19:6). All man’s supplications will avail nothing: “there is no justice” (19:7). Job does not regard himself as free from sin (7:20; 14:16f.), in contradistinction to God’s words about him in the Prologue (1:8; 2:3). But his sin and his sufferings are incommensurable. And the men, who call themselves his friends, suppose that on the basis of their dogma of requital they are able to unmask his life and show it to be a lie. By allowing religion to occupy the place of the living God, He strips off Job’s honor (19:9). Job had believed God to be just and man’s duty to be to walk in His ways. But it is no longer possible for one who has been smitten with such sufferings to think God just. “It is one thing, therefore I spake: honest and wicked He exterminates” (9:22). And if it is so, it is not proper to walk in His ways. In spite of this, Job’s faith in justice is not broken down. But he is no longer able to have a single faith in God and in justice. His faith in justice is no longer covered by God’s righteousness. He believes now in justice in spite of believing in God, and he believes in God in spite of believing in justice. But he cannot forego his claim that they will again be united somewhere, sometime, although he has no idea in his mind how this will be achieved. This is in fact meant by his claim of his rights, the claim of the solution. This solution must come, for from the time when he knew God Job knows that God is not a Satan grown into omnipotence. Now, however, Job is handed over to the pretended justice, the account justice of the friends, which affects not only his honor, but also his faith in justice. For Job, justice is not a
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scheme of compensation. Its content is simply this, that one must not cause suffering gratuitously. Job feels himself isolated by this feeling, far removed from God and men. It is true, Job does not forget that God seeks just such justice as this from man. But he cannot understand how God Himself violates it, how He inspects His creature every morning (7:18), searching after his iniquity (10:6), and instead of forgiving his sin (7:21) snatches at him stormily (9:17)—how He, being infinitely superior to man, thinks it good to reject the work of His hands (10:3). And in spite of this Job knows that the friends, who side with God (13:8), do not contend for the true God. He has recognized before this the true God as the near and intimate God. Now he only experiences Him through suffering and contradiction, but even in this way he does experience God. What Satan designed for him and his wife in the Prologue, recommended to him more exactly, that he should “bless” God, dismiss Him, and die in the comfort of his soul, was for him quite impossible. When in his last long utterance he swears the purification oath, he says: “As God lives, who has withdrawn my right” (27:2). God lives, and He bends the right. From the burden of this double, yet single, matter Job is able to take away nothing, he cannot lighten his death. He can only ask to be confronted with God. “Oh that one would hear me!” (31:35)—men do not hear his words, only God can be his hearer. As his motive he declares that he wants to reason with the deity (13:3); he knows he will carry his point (13:18). In the last instance, however, he merely means by this that God will again become present to him. “Oh that I knew where I might find Him!” (23:3). Job struggles against the remoteness of God, against the deity who rages and is silent, rages and “hides His face,” that is to say, against the deity who has changed for him from a nearby person into a sinister power. And even if He draw near to him again only in death, he will again “see” God (19:26) as His “witness” (16:19) against God Himself, he will see Him as the avenger of his blood (19:25), which must not be covered by the earth until it is avenged (16:18) by God on God. The absurd duality of a truth known to man and a reality sent by God must be swallowed up somewhere, sometime, in a unity of God’s presence. How will it take place? Job does not know this, nor does he understand it; he only believes in it. We may certainly say that Job “appeals from God to God,”6 but we cannot say7 that he rouses himself against a God “who contradicts His own innermost nature,” and seeks a God who will conduct Himself toward him “as the requital dogma demands.” By such an interpretation the sense of the problem is upset. Job cannot renounce justice, but he does not hope to find it, when God will find again “His inner nature” and “His subjection to the norm,” but only when God will appear to him again. Job believes now, as later Deutero-Isaiah (Isa. 45:15) did under
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the influence of Isaiah (8:17), in “a God that hides Himself.” This hiding, the eclipse of the divine light, is the source of his abysmal despair. And the abyss is bridged the moment man “sees,” is permitted to see again, and this becomes a new foundation. It has been rightly said8 that Job is more deeply rooted in the primitive Israelite view of life than his dogmatic friends. There is no true life for him but that of a firmly established covenant between God and man; formerly he lived in this covenant and received his righteousness from it, but now God has disturbed it. It is the dread of the faithful “remnant” in the hour of the people’s catastrophe that here finds its personal expression. But this dread is suggestive of the terror that struck Isaiah as he stood on the threshold of the cruel mission laid upon him—“the making fat and heavy.” His words “How long?” are echoed in Job’s complaint. How long will God hide His face? When shall we be allowed to see Him again? Deutero-Isaiah expresses (40:27) the despairing complaint of the faithful remnant which thinks that because God hides Himself, Israel’s “way” also “is hid” from Him, and He pays no more attention to it, and the prophet promises that not only Israel but all flesh shall see Him (40:5). The fourth view of God is that expressed in the speech of God Himself. The extant text is apparently a late revision, as is the case with many other sections of this book, and we cannot restore the original text. But there is no doubt that the speech is intended for more than the mere demonstration of the mysterious character of God’s rule in nature to a greater and more comprehensive extent than had already been done by the friends and Job himself; for more than the mere explanation to Job: “Thou canst not understand the secret of any thing or being in the world, how much less the secret of man’s fate.” It is also intended to do more than teach by examples taken from the world of nature about the “strange and wonderful” character of the acts of God, which contradict the whole of teleological wisdom, and point to the “playful riddle of the eternal creative power” as to an “inexpressible positive value.”9 The poet does not let his God disregard the fact that it is a matter of justice. The speech declares in the ears of man, struggling for justice, another justice than his own, a divine justice. Not the divine justice, which remains hidden, but a divine justice, namely that manifest in creation. The creation of the world is justice, not a recompensing and compensating justice, but a distributing, a giving justice. God the Creator bestows upon each what belongs to him, upon each thing and being, insofar as He allows it to become entirely itself. Not only for the sea (Job 38:10), but for every thing and being God “breaks” in the hour of creation “His boundary,” that is to say, He cuts the dimension of this thing or being out of “all,” giving it its fixed measure, the limit appropriate to this gift.
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Israel’s ancient belief in creation, which matured slowly only in its formulations, has here reached its completion: it is not about a “making” that we are told here, but about a “founding” (38:4), a “setting” (38:5, 9f.), a “commanding” and “appointing” (38:12). The creation itself already means communication between Creator and creature. The just Creator gives to all His creatures His boundary, so that each may become fully itself. Designedly man is lacking in this presentation of heaven and earth, in which man is shown the justice that is greater than his, and is shown that he with his justice, which intends to give to everyone what is due to him, is called only to emulate the divine justice, which gives to everyone what he is. In face of such divine teaching as this it would be indeed impossible for the sufferer to do aught else than put “his hand upon his mouth” (40:4), and to confess (42:3) that he had erred in speaking of things inconceivable for him. And nothing else could have come of it except this recognition—if he had heard only a voice “from the tempest” (38:1; 40:6). But the voice is the voice of Him who answers, the voice of Him that “heard” (31:35), and appeared so as to be “found” of him (23:3). In vain Job had tried to penetrate to God through the divine remoteness; now God draws near to him. No more does God hide Himself, only the storm cloud of His sublimity still shrouds Him, and Job’s eye “sees” Him (42:5). The absolute power has for human personality’s sake become personality. God offers Himself to the sufferer who, in the depth of his despair, keeps to God with his refractory complaint; He offers Himself to him as an answer. It is true, “the overcoming of the riddle of suffering can only come from the domain of revelation,”10 but it is not the revelation in general that is here decisive, but the particular revelation to the individual: the revelation as an answer to the individual sufferer concerning the question of his sufferings, the self-limitation of God to a person, answering a person. The way of this poem leads from the first view to the fourth. The God of the first view, the God of the legend borrowed by the poet, works on the basis of “enticement”; the second, the God of the friends, works on the basis of purposes apparent to us, purposes of punishment or, especially in the speeches of Elihu which are certainly a later addition, of purification and education; the third, the God of the protesting Job, works against every reason and purpose; and the fourth, the God of revelation, works from His godhead, in which every reason and purpose held by man are at once abolished and fulfilled. It is clear that this God, who answers from the tempest, is different from the God of the Prologue; the declaration about the secret of divine action would be turned into a mockery if the fact of that “wager” was put over against it. But even the speeches of the friends and of Job cannot be harmonized with it. Presumably the poet, who frequently
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shows himself to be a master of irony, left the Prologue, which seems completely opposed to his intention, unchanged in content in order to establish the foundation for the multiplicity of views that follows. But in truth the view of the Prologue is meant to be ironical and unreal; the view of the friends is only logically “true” and demonstrates to us that man must not subject God to the rules of logic; Job’s view is real, and therefore, so to speak, the negative of truth; and the view of the voice speaking from the tempest is the supralogical truth of reality. God justifies Job: he has spoken “rightly” (42:7), unlike the friends. And as the poet often uses words of the Prologue as motive words in different senses, so also here he makes God call Job as there by the name of His “servant,” and repeat it by way of emphasis four times. Here this epithet appears in its true light. Job, the faithful rebel, like Abraham, Moses, David, and Isaiah, stands in the succession of men so designated by God, a succession that leads to Deutero-Isaiah’s “servant of YHVH,” whose sufferings especially link him with Job. “And my servant Job shall pray for you”—with these words God sends the friends home (42:8). It is the same phrase as that in which YHVH in the story of Abraham (Gen. 20:7) certifies the patriarch, that he is His nabi. It will be found that in all the pre-exilic passages, in which the verb is used in the sense of intercession (and this apparently was its first meaning), it is only used of men called prophets. The significance of Job’s intercession is emphasized by the Epilogue (which, apart from the matter of the prayer, the poet apparently left as it was) in that the turning point in Job’s history, the “restoration” (Job 42:10) and first of all his healing, begins the moment he prays “for his friends.” This saying is the last of the reminiscences of prophetic life and language found in this book. As if to stress this connection, Job’s first complaint begins (3:3ff.) with the cursing of his birth, reminding us of Jeremiah’s words (Jer. 20:14ff.), and the first utterance of the friends is poured out in figures of speech taken from the prophetic world (4, 12ff.), the last of which (4:16) modifies the peculiar form of revelation of Elijah’s story (I Kings 19:12). Job’s recollection of divine intimacy, of “the counsel of God upon his tent” (Job 29:4), is expressed in language derived from Jeremiah (Jer. 23:18, 22), and his quest, which reaches fulfillment, to “see” God, touches the prophetic experience which only on Mount Sinai were nonprophets allowed to share (Exod. 24:10, 17). Jeremiah’s historical figure, that of the suffering prophet, apparently inspired the poet to compose his song of the man of suffering, who by his suffering attained the vision of God, and in all his revolt was God’s witness on earth (cf. Isa. 43: 12; 44:8), as God was his witness in heaven.11
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NOTES 1. [Buber discusses the Book of Job against the background of the prophecy of Ezekiel, who was sent to the “house of Israel” as “watchman” and warner of persons (Ezek. 3:17–21) and who spoke his message of personal responsibility. He established the concept of a God in whose justice it is possible to believe, a God whose recompense of the individual is objectively comprehensible. Those deserving salvation are saved. Over against this dogmatic principle stood man’s experience.—Ed.] 2. Johannes Hempel, Die althebräische Literatur (1930), p. 179. 3. I cannot agree with H. Torczyner’s view, expressed in his later (Hebrew) commentary on the book (I, 27), that “the story of the framework is later than the poem.” 4. The explanation that this expression is a euphemism (according to the view of Abraham Geiger, Urschrift und Übersetzungen der Bibel [1857], pp. 267ff., the language of later emendations, cf. Torczyner, I, 10) does not fit the facts. 5. The atmosphere of the poem is not basically historical, even if the chief characters of the story were historical persons, according to Torczyner’s view. 6. A. S. Peake, The Problem of Suffering (1904), pp. 94f.; cf. also P. Volz, Weisheit (Die Schriften des Alten Testaments, III [1911]), p. 62. 7. F. Baumgaertel, Der Hiobdialog (1933), p. 172. 8. Johannes Pedersen, Israel, I–II (English ed. 1926), 371. 9. Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige, 23–25 ed. (1936), pp. 99f.; cf. also W. Vischer, Hiob ein Zeuge Jesu Christi (1934), pp. 29ff.; W. Eichrodt, Theologie des Alten Testaments, III (1939), 145f. 10. Eichrodt, p. 146. 11. [The analysis continues with the comparison between the Book of Job and Psalm 73.—Ed.]
M A RT I N B U B E R
The Heart Determines: Psalm 73
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hat is remarkable about this poem—composed of descriptions, of a story, and of confessions—is that a man tells how he reached the true meaning of his experience of life, and that this meaning borders directly on the eternal. For the most part we understand only gradually the decisive experiences we have in our relation with the world. First we accept what they seem to offer us, we express it, we weave it into a “view,” and then think we are aware of our world. But we come to see that what we look on in this view is only an appearance. Not that our experiences have deceived us. But we had turned them to our use, without penetrating to their heart. What is it that teaches us to penetrate to their heart? Deeper experience. The man who speaks in this psalm tells us how he penetrated to the heart of a weighty group of experiences—those experiences that show that the wicked prosper. Apparently, then, the question is not what was the real question for Job—why the good do not prosper—but rather its obverse, as we find it most precisely, and probably for the first time, expressed in Jeremiah (12:1): “Why does the way of the wicked prosper?” Nevertheless, the psalm begins with a prefatory sentence in which, rightly considered, Job’s question may be found hidden.
From On the Bible: Eighteen Studies. © 1968 Schocken Books.
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This sentence, the foreword to the psalm, is Surely, God is good to Israel: To the pure in heart. It is true that the Psalmist is here concerned not with the happiness or unhappiness of the person, but with the happiness or unhappiness of Israel. But the experience behind the speeches of Job, as is evident in many of them, is itself not merely personal, but is the experience of Israel’s suffering both in the catastrophe that led to the Babylonian exile and in the beginning of the exile itself. Certainly only one who had plumbed the depths of personal suffering could speak in this way. But the speaker is a man of Israel in Israel’s bitter hour of need, and in his personal suffering the suffering of Israel has been concentrated, so that what he now has to suffer he suffers as Israel. In the destiny of an authentic person the destiny of his people is gathered up, and only now becomes truly manifest. Thus the Psalmist, whose theme is the fate of the person, also begins with the fate of Israel. Behind his opening sentence lies the question “Why do things go badly with Israel?” And first he answers, “Surely, God is good to Israel,” and then he adds, by way of explanation, “to the pure in heart.” On first glance this seems to mean that it is only to the impure in Israel that God is not good. He is good to the pure in Israel; they are the “holy remnant,” the true Israel, to whom He is good. But that would lead to the assertion that things go well with this remnant, and the questioner had taken as his starting point the experience that things went ill with Israel, not excepting indeed this part of it. The answer, understood in this way, would be no answer. We must go deeper in this sentence. The questioner had drawn from the fact that things go ill with Israel the conclusion that therefore God is not good to Israel. But only one who is not pure in heart draws such a conclusion. One who is pure in heart, one who becomes pure in heart, cannot draw any such conclusion. For he experiences that God is good to him. But this does not mean that God rewards him with his goodness. It means, rather, that God’s goodness is revealed to him who is pure in heart: he experiences this goodness. Insofar as Israel is pure in heart, becomes pure in heart, it experiences God’s goodness. Thus the essential dividing line is not between men who sin and men who do not sin, but between those who are pure in heart and those who are impure in heart. Even the sinner whose heart becomes pure experiences God’s goodness as it is revealed to him. As Israel purifies its heart, it experiences that God is good to it.
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It is from this standpoint that everything that is said in the psalm about “the wicked” is to be understood. The “wicked” are those who deliberately persist in impurity of heart. The state of the heart determines whether a man lives in the truth, in which God’s goodness is experienced, or in the semblance of truth, where the fact that it “goes ill” with him is confused with the illusion that God is not good to him. The state of the heart determines. That is why “heart” is the dominant key word in this psalm, and recurs six times. And now, after this basic theme has been stated, the speaker begins to tell of the false ways in his experience of life. Seeing the prosperity of “the wicked” daily and hearing their braggart speech has brought him very near to the abyss of despairing unbelief, of the inability to believe any more in a living God active in life. “But I, a little more and my feet had turned aside, a mere nothing and my steps had stumbled.” He goes so far as to be jealous of “the wicked” for their privileged position. It is not envy that he feels, it is jealousy, that it is they who are manifestly preferred by God. That it is indeed they is proved to him by their being sheltered from destiny. For them there are not,1 as for all the others, those constraining and confining “bands” of destiny; “they are never in the trouble of man.” And so they deem themselves superior to all, and stalk around with their “sound and fat bellies,” and when one looks in their eyes, which protrude from the fatness of their faces, one sees “the paintings of the heart,” the wish-images of their pride and their cruelty, flitting across. Their relation to the world of their fellow men is arrogance and cunning, craftiness and exploitation. “They speak oppression from above” and “set their mouth to the heavens.” From what is uttered by this mouth set to the heavens, the Psalmist quotes two characteristic sayings which were supposed to be familiar. In the one (introduced by “therefore,” meaning “therefore they say”) they make merry over God’s relation to “His people.” Those who speak are apparently in Palestine as owners of great farms, and scoff at the prospective return of the landless people from exile, in accordance with the prophecies: the prophet of the Exile has promised them water (Isa. 41:17f.), and “they may drink their fill of water,” they will certainly not find much more here unless they become subject to the speakers. In the second saying they are apparently replying to the reproaches leveled against them: they were warned that God sees and knows the wrongs they have done, but the God of heaven has other things to do than to concern Himself with such earthly matters: “How does God know? Is there knowledge in the Most
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High?” And God’s attitude confirms them, those men living in comfortable security: “they have reached power,” theirs is the power. That was the first section of the psalm, in which the speaker depicted his grievous experience, the prosperity of the wicked. But now he goes on to explain how his understanding of this experience has undergone a fundamental change. Since he had again and again to endure, side by side, his own suffering and their “grinning” well-being, he is overcome: “It is not fitting that I should make such comparisons, as my own heart is not pure.” And he proceeded to purify it. In vain. Even when he succeeded in being able “to wash his hands in innocence” (which does not mean an action or feeling of self-righteousness, but the genuine, second and higher purity that is won by a great struggle of the soul), the torment continued, and now it was like a leprosy to him; and as leprosy is understood in the Bible as a punishment for the disturbed relation between heaven and earth, so each morning, after each pain-torn night, it came over the Psalmist—“It is a chastisement—why am I chastised?” And once again there arose the contrast between the horrible enigma of the happiness of the wicked and his suffering. At this point he was tempted to accuse God as Job did. He felt himself urged to “tell how it is.” But he fought and conquered the temptation. The story of this conquest follows in the most vigorous form that the speaker has at his disposal, as an appeal to God. He interrupts his objectivized account and addresses God. If I had followed my inner impulse, he says to Him, “I should have betrayed the generation of Thy sons.” The generation of the sons of God! Then he did not know that the pure in heart are the children of God; now he does know. He would have betrayed them if he had arisen and accused God. For they continue in suffering and do not complain. The words sound to us as though the speaker contrasted these “children of God” with Job, the complaining “servant of God.” He, the Psalmist, was silent even in the hours when the conflict of the human world burned into his purified heart. But now he summoned every energy of thought in order to “know” the meaning of this conflict. He strained the eyes of the spirit in order to penetrate the darkness that hid the meaning from him. But he always perceived only the same conflict ever anew, and this perception itself seemed to him now to be a part of that “trouble” which lies on all save those “wicked” men—even on the pure in heart. He had become one of these, yet he still did not recognize that “God is good to Israel.” “Until I came into the sanctuaries of God.” Here the real turning point in this exemplary life is reached.
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The man who is pure in heart, I said, experiences that God is good to him. He does not experience it as a consequence of the purification of his heart, but because only as one who is pure in heart is he able to come to the sanctuaries. This does not mean the Temple precincts in Jerusalem, but the sphere of God’s holiness, the holy mysteries of God. Only to him who draws near to these is the true meaning of the conflict revealed. But the true meaning of the conflict, which the Psalmist expresses here only for the other side, the “wicked,” as he expressed it in the opening words for the right side, for the “pure in heart,” is not—as the reader of the following words is only too easily misled into thinking—that the present state of affairs is replaced by a future state of affairs of a quite different kind, in which “in the end” things go well with the good and badly with the bad; in the language of modern thought the meaning is that the bad do not truly exist, and their “end” brings about only this change, that they now inescapably experience their nonexistence, the suspicion of which they had again and again succeeded in dispelling. Their life was “set in slippery places”; it was so arranged as to slide into the knowledge of their own nothingness; and when this finally happens, “in a moment,” the great terror falls upon them and they are consumed with terror. Their life has been a shadow structure in a dream of God’s. God awakes, shakes off the dream, and disdainfully watches the dissolving shadow image. This insight of the Psalmist, which he obtained as he drew near to the holy mysteries of God, where the conflict is resolved, is not expressed in the context of his story, but in an address to “his Lord.” And in the same address he confesses, with harsh self-criticism, that at the same time the state of error in which he had lived until then and from which he had suffered so much was revealed to him: “When my heart rose up in me, and I was pricked in my reins, brutish was I and ignorant, I have been as a beast before Thee.” With this “before Thee” the middle section of the psalm significantly concludes, and at the end of the first line of the last section (after the description and the story comes the confession) the words are significantly taken up. The words “And I am” at the beginning of the verse are to be understood emphatically: “Nevertheless I am,” “Nevertheless I am continually with Thee.” God does not count it against the heart that has become pure that it was earlier accustomed “to rise up.” Certainly even the erring and struggling man was “with Him,” for the man who struggles for God is near Him even when he imagines that he is driven far from God. That is the reality we learn from the revelation to Job out of the storm, in the hour of Job’s utter despair (30:20–22) and utter readiness (31:35–39). But what the Psalmist wishes to teach us, in contrast to the Book of Job, is that the fact of
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his being with God is revealed to the struggling man in the hour when—not led astray by doubt and despair into treason, and become pure in heart—“he comes to the sanctuaries of God.” Here he receives the revelation of the “continually.” He who draws near with a pure heart to the divine mystery learns that he is continually with God. It is a revelation. It would be a misunderstanding of the whole situation to look on this as a pious feeling. From man’s side there is no continuity, only from God’s side. The Psalmist has learned that God and he are continually with one another. But he cannot express his experience as a word of God. The teller of the primitive stories made God say to the fathers and to the first leaders of the people: “I am with thee,” and the word “continually” was unmistakably heard as well. Thereafter, this was no longer reported, and we hear it again only in rare prophecies. A Psalmist (23:5) is still able to say to God: “Thou art with me.” But when Job (29: 5) speaks of God’s having been with him in his youth, the fundamental word, the “continually,” has disappeared. The speaker in our psalm is the first and only one to insert it expressly. He no longer says: “Thou art with me,” but “I am continually with Thee.” It is not, however, from his own consciousness and feeling that he can say this, for no man is able to be continually turned to the presence of God: he can say it only in the strength of the revelation that God is continually with him. The Psalmist no longer dares to express the central experience as a word of God; but he expresses it by a gesture of God. God has taken his right hand—as a father, so we may add, in harmony with that expression “the generation of Thy children,” takes his little son by the hand in order to lead him. More precisely, as in the dark a father takes his little son by the hand, certainly in order to lead him, but primarily in order to make present to him, in the warm touch of coursing blood, the fact that he, the father, is continually with him. It is true that immediately after this the leading itself is expressed: “Thou dost guide me with Thy counsel.” But ought this to be understood as meaning that the speaker expects God to recommend to him in the changing situations of his life what he should do and what he should refrain from doing? That would mean that the Psalmist believes that he now possesses a constant oracle, who would exonerate him from the duty of weighing up and deciding what he must do. Just because I take this man so seriously I cannot understand the matter in this way. The guiding counsel of God seems to me to be simply the divine Presence communicating itself direct to the pure in heart. He who is aware of this Presence acts in the changing situations of his life differently from him who does not perceive this Presence. The Presence
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acts as counsel: God counsels by making known that He is present. He has led His son out of darkness into the light, and now he can walk in the light. He is not relieved of taking and directing his own steps. The revealing insight has changed life itself, as well as the meaning of the experience of life. It also changes the perspective of death. For the “oppressed” man death was only the mouth toward which the sluggish stream of suffering and trouble flows. But now it has become the event in which God—the continually Present One, the One who grasps the man’s hand, the Good One—“takes” a man. The tellers of the legends had described the translation of the living Enoch and the living Elijah to heaven as “a being taken,” a being taken away by God Himself. The Psalmists transferred the description from the realm of miracle to that of personal piety and its most personal expression. In a psalm that is related to our psalm not only in language and style but also in content and feeling, the forty-ninth, there are these words: “But God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol, when He takes me.” There is nothing left here of the mythical idea of a translation. But not only that— there is nothing left of heaven either. There is nothing here about being able to go after death into heaven. And, so far as I see, there is nowhere in the “Old Testament” anything about this. It is true that the sentence in our psalm that follows the words “Thou shalt guide me with Thy counsel” seems to contradict this. It once seemed to me to be indeed so, when I translated it as “And afterwards Thou dost take me up to glory.” But I can no longer maintain this interpretation. In the original text there are three words. The first, “afterwards,” is unambiguous— “After Thou hast guided me with Thy counsel through the remainder of my life,” that is, “at the end of my life.” The second word needs more careful examination. For us who have grown up in the conceptual world of a later doctrine of immortality, it is almost self-evident that we should understand “Thou shalt take me” as “Thou shalt take me up.” The hearer or reader of that time understood simply, “Thou shalt take me away.” But does the third word, kabod, not contradict this interpretation? Does it not say whither I shall be taken, namely, to “honor” or “glory”? No, it does not say this. We are led astray into this reading by understanding “taking up” instead of “taking.” This is not the only passage in the Scriptures where death and kabod meet. In the song of Isaiah on the dead king of Babylon, who once wanted to ascend into heaven like the day star, there are these words (14:18): “All the kings of the nations, all of them, lie in kabod, in glory, every one in his own house, but thou wert cast forth away from thy sepulcher.” He is refused an honorable grave because he has destroyed his land and slain his people. Kabod
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in death is granted to the others, because they have uprightly fulfilled the task of their life. Kabod, whose root meaning is the radiation of the inner “weight” of a person, belongs to the earthly side of death. When I have lived my life, says our Psalmist to God, I shall die in kabod, in the fulfillment of my existence. In my death the coils of Sheol will not embrace me, but Thy hand will grasp me. “For,” as is said in another psalm related in kind to this one, the sixteenth, “Thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol.” Sheol, the realm of nothingness, in which, as a later text explains (Eccles. 9:10), there is neither activity nor consciousness, is not contrasted with a kingdom of heavenly bliss. But over against the realm of nothing there is God. The “wicked” have in the end a direct experience of their non-being; the “pure in heart” have in the end a direct experience of the Being of God. This sense of being taken is now expressed by the Psalmist in the unsurpassably clear cry, “Whom have I in heaven!” He does not aspire to enter heaven after death, for God’s home is not in heaven, so that heaven is empty. But he knows that in death he will cherish no desire to remain on earth, for now he will soon be wholly “with Thee”—here the word recurs for the third time—with Him who “has taken” him. But he does not mean by this what we are accustomed to call personal immortality, that is, continuation in the dimension of time so familiar to us in this our mortal life. He knows that after death “being with Him” will no longer mean, as it does in this life, “being separated from Him.” The Psalmist now says with the strictest clarity what must now be said: it is not merely his flesh that vanishes in death, but also his heart, that inmost personal organ of the soul, which formerly “rose up” in rebellion against the human fate and which he then “purified” till he became pure in heart—this personal soul also vanishes. But He who was the true part and true fate of this person, the “rock” of this heart, God, is eternal. It is into His eternity that he who is pure in heart moves in death, and this eternity is something absolutely different from any kind of time. Once again the Psalmist looks back at the “wicked,” the thought of whom had once so stirred him. Now he does not call them the wicked, but “they that are far from Thee.” In the simplest manner he expresses what he has learned: since they are far from God, from Being, they are lost. And once more the positive follows the negative, once more, for the third and last time, that “and I,” “and for me,” which here means “nevertheless for me.” “Nevertheless for me the good is to draw near to God.” Here, in this conception of the good, the circle is closed. To him who may draw near to God, the good is given. To an Israel that is pure in heart the good is given, because it may draw near to God. Surely, God is good to Israel.
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The speaker here ends his confession. But he does not yet break off. He gathers everything together. He has made his refuge, his “safety,” “in his Lord”—he is sheltered in Him. And now, still turned to God, he speaks his last word about the task which is joined to all this, and which he has set himself, which God has set him—“To tell of all Thy works.” Formerly he was provoked to tell of the appearance, and he resisted. Now he knows, he has the reality to tell of: the works of God. The first of his telling, the tale of the work that God has performed with him, is this psalm. In this psalm two kinds of men seem to be contrasted with each other, the “pure in heart” and “the wicked.” But that is not so. The “wicked,” it is true, are clearly one kind of men, but the others are not. A man is as a “beast” and purifies his heart, and behold, God holds him by the hand. That is not a kind of men. Purity of heart is a state of being. A man is not pure in kind, but he is able to be or become pure—rather he is only essentially pure when he has become pure, and even then he does not thereby belong to a kind of men. The “wicked,” that is, the bad, are not contrasted with good men. The good, says the Psalmist, is “to draw near to God.” He does not say that those near to God are good. But he does call the bad “those who are far from God.” In the language of modern thought that means that there are men who have no share in existence, but there are no men who possess existence. Existence cannot be possessed, but only shared in. One does not rest in the lap of existence, but one draws near to it. “Nearness” is nothing but such a drawing and coming near continually and as long as the human person lives. The dynamic of farness and nearness is broken by death when it breaks the life of the person. With death there vanishes the heart, that inwardness of man, out of which arise the “pictures” of the imagination, and which rises up in defiance, but which can also be purified. Separate souls vanish, separation vanishes. Time that has been lived by the soul vanishes with the soul; we know of no duration in time. Only the “rock” in which the heart is concealed, only the rock of human hearts, does not vanish. For it does not stand in time. The time of the world disappears before eternity, but existing man dies into eternity as into the perfect existence. NOTE 1. In what follows I read, as is almost universally accepted, lamo tam instead of lemotam.
FRANCIS LANDY
The Relationship of the Lovers
Voy por tu cuerpo como por el mundo I go through your body as through the world (Octavio Paz: Piedra del Sol) dein goldenes Haar Margarete dein aschenes Haar Sulamith your golden hair Margarete your ashen hair Shulamit (Paul Celan: Todesfuge)
1. I N T R O D U C T I O N : C H A R A C T E R
AND
ARCHETYPE
A
t the centre of the Song there is a relationship, of which critics have almost nothing to say. It appears as if the relationship of the lovers is not problematic; they are an idyllic couple, of whom nothing can be said, except perhaps to lay a tribute. The lovers are left to their privacy, and to the page they can never leave. Perhaps, though, there is a corresponding objective difficulty: the lovers are not distinct personalities. Old-fashioned character analysis is singularly unproductive. Hence the expenditure of energy on
From Paradoxes of Paradise: Identity and Difference in the Song of Songs. © 1983 The Almond Press. Note: This text has been modified such that in some instances when the author has provided English translations of foreign words, only the translations have been kept.
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constructing a coherent story, out of which the figures of the lovers will emerge more clearly. However, anecdotal curiosity, the vicissitudes of a particular couple, is but a displacement of the problem of love per se, that threatens to become too personal. We identify with the lovers, who exhaust the possibilities of love. This is the function of the multiple conflicting stories, to make them types of lovers, rather than single persons, a cumulative eidetic portrait. But herein also the Song is faithful to lovers. For lovers are among the most archetypal of human beings. In love, man and woman perform their parts in myth and romance, becoming most elementally human and intensely symbolised; for this reason love easily lapses into cliché, And yet—and here lies a difficulty—we should beware of treating them simply as archetypes. At all points there is a discourse between the specific and the collective, individuality is constantly on the verge of expression. The question then is of the individuality of lovers as they emerge from the background: the tension between the specific locality and incident and the universal context. Yet the lovers are only images of the poet, his fictions, his reflections of experience. They have no existence outside the poem, and its impression on the world. This banal truth would not be worth saying except as a prophylactic gesture against the Pathetic Fallacy, mistaking literary characters for real people, were it not that it points to their common identity in the poet. Their affairs, vagaries, emotions, reflect a psychic process, common to all of us, insofar as the poet is not a stranger to us. Yet the poem is now free of the poet, who is, in Jabès’ words, on its threshold (1963: 15); it constitutes the entire relationship of the lovers. They create the poem with their love. Imperceptibly, though, they absent themselves from their communication; they cannot touch or feel except outside the poem. Thus they too are on its threshold. We see this in the solipsistic dialogue, two monologues side by side. Even the brief exchanges are scrambled. Ironically, the only people to speak sensibly and to the point are the daughters of Jerusalem! The poem, created by the love of the lovers, thus separates them and grows between them. It incorporates the whole world between them through metaphor and metonomy. The lovers have an instrumental, syntactic function, communicating the poet’s love of the world and realigning the gender of things. For example, 2.10–13 is really a poem about the spring. The poet has a gift for gently and affectionately teasing his lovers through the wiles and pitfalls of coded language, the manipulation of social register; their discourse becomes indirect, allusive, hermetic. They communicate through gesture, tone of voice, with nothing to say. The messages of love are
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very simple. At this point their love coincides with the non-referential, narcissistic component of language. There is no relationship, merely the play of sounds, the pleasure in creating poetry for its own sake. The physical sensation contrasts with the psychic quest: the signifying totality with unthinking immediacy. H.P. Müller, in his sophisticated explorations of the magic of the Song, has approached it mostly in terms of homeopathy between man and the earth, in other words of a regenerative relationship. I should like to take his insight in a somewhat different direction. He notes that the most ancient poetry is magical speech, like spells or charms, and herein are to be found the religious roots of the lyric. But the lyric is associative, mellifluous speech, a composition of sound and images, whose extreme form is nonsense; just as magic tends to express itself in meaningless spells. In both cases there is an omnipotent regression, linguistic anarchy or ultimate power; man is unconstrained by rules of logic or nature. It is to this point, I hold, that the relationship of the lovers tends, through the poet. The only critic to have given serious attention to the lovers as internal figures, part of a psychic process, is Leo Krinetzki, under the influence of analytical psychology, in an admirably concentrated and bold—indeed nearly faultless—essay “Die Erotische Psychologie des Hohenliedes”.1 Its great contribution is to shift the discussion from the illusion of the single man and woman to the internal dynamics of each, from the imaginary real world in which the Song supposedly happens to the blend of fantasy and reality in which we live. Each person, according to Jungian theory, is androgynous;2 an unconscious female element (the anima) exists in the male psyche, and vice versa. The heterosexual partner in the outside world corresponds to this internal figure, through projection. Thus an investigation of the Song is an exploration of the archetypes out of which the self is constituted, not as a single entity, but as a constellation of personae. Furthermore, it explains the dominance of the woman in the Song, since she also stands for the Great Mother, the primary archetype (1970: 407–16). Necessarily, since he is limited for space, Krinetzki’s application of this material to the Song is sketchy, but nevertheless wonderfully illuminating. He adapts Neumann’s archetypal feminine symbol of the vessel, and traces its manifestations in the Song, in images of the vagina/belly, breasts and lips; in the Woman as the containing world; in its complex, enveloping relationship with the Lover. He perceives that alongside the fecund Great Mother there is the Terrible Mother, in other words, her inextricable ambivalence (1970: 411). Likewise the man represents the woman’s animus,3 though this corollary is not greatly developed in Krinetzki’s article. Through the
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concrete symbolic projection of the archetypes into the great world the lovers enter into relationship, not only with each other, but with all creatures. “Jeder erlebt den andern als etwas so Einmaliges, weil er in ihm ‘Die Welt’ schlechthin wiederfindet” (ibid.: 416). Thus they become for each other a “helpmeet”. Jungian psychology, especially when stripped of its mystifications, is a valuable critical tool. In particular, it introduces the concept of the Self as a psychosomatic unity, comprising ego and unconscious, personal biography and collective cultural heritage (Fordham: 98ff.). Fundamental to Jung’s thought is the conviction that the “ego”, the unique centre of consciousness, is only a small part of the Self, and that far more unites human beings than divides them. Hence we can understand each other. The collective unconscious amounts to no more than this, what we possess by virtue of being human beings or acquire from our environment (e.g. as Jews or Christians) as part of an historical entity.4 In particular, we all have innate drives and a propensity for fantasy—a propensity, in other words, to use our imagination to make sense of the world—which tends to be organised round particular “nodal points”, such as the breast mother, the child. These are the archetypes which, according to Jung, can only be represented in consciousness by images; in later life, their symbolic manifestations become very diverse. Finally, there is the process of individuation, the tendency of the Self to cohere, the wish to integrate all its fragmented components, whatever the cost and the resistance. This culminates in the conjunction of opposites, good and bad, animus and anima, ego and shadow. It is this process that I believe we may adduce in the Song; as well as its opposite, since the Self is a dynamic growing system, namely the rebirth of elements, animus and anima, Lover and Beloved, from the matrix, in a continuous cycle of union and differentiation. There is however the danger, into which I think Krinetzki runs, of mistaking the archetypal symbol for the archetype, the expression for the idea. This is encouraged by the technique of amplification, the interpretation of imagery with the aid of comparative mythology, that leads many analysts a merry dance. For instance, Krinetzki’s identification of the Vessel with the feminine archetype (1970: 408ff.), impressive as it is, does not in my view quite fit all the images of vessels in the Song, nor do justice to the symbol’s full potentiality. For the subject of the poem is really the self as a selfcontained entity that enters into relation with the world, “rounded like a stone”, in Stokes’s phrase (1971: 406), a vessel full of thoughts, feelings, activities. Hence the numerous images of vessels or containers in the poem, such as the garden or the palanquin, refer only secondarily to the vagina or
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the womb; literally they are images for the self, e.g. “A locked garden is my sister, my bride” (4.12). Only insofar as the self or psyche in the Song is feminine, as in the Hebrew language, is Krinetzki’s generalisation acceptable. For in this self the Lover and the Beloved constitute between them the mother. Maternal love, expressed practically in care and protection, is reproduced between them: it is the archetype of love. Perhaps we should replace the word “parent” for “mother”, for it is a long time before the father is distinguished as a separate person, and an independent relationship develops; until then the mother combines the attributes and is the repository of feelings that will later be distributed between the two parents. Nevertheless, if I retain the word mother—and it is with some hesitation and inconsistency that I do so—it is partly because of the actual identity of the mother and the original parent, partly because she is still invested with her elemental qualities—empathy, warmth, cooking and serving food, as opposed to the bread-winning, adventurous father. Thus the lovers project onto each other not only mother and father, reproducing the Oedipal entanglement, but their undivided precursor. This emerges functionally, through mutual caresses, elaborate bodylanguage, whereby the lovers, fragmented into numerous part-objects that coalesce, recognise themselves in the body of the other. Many of the lovers’ intimacies have their infantile correlate: images of lips and eyes pass freely to and fro; they feed each other, are incorporated into each other. Thereby a flow of identity passes between the lovers; they become one flesh, their personalities merge, and this synthesis has its own character. Within it the lovers have male and female roles, attract to themselves animus and anima qualities. They are submerged in their relationship, that defines them as human beings, nurses them and, indeed, frustrates them—the primary maternal tasks. Theirs is both a personal collectivity, a sense of belonging together, through their unique empathy, and a contiguity in the collective unconscious. I will try to show how all these symbolic layers can actually be experienced in the Song: i) ii) iii) iv) v)
through the exchange of imagery, the concurrence of voices and actions, the invention of a family, as in a novel, the fusion of all generations in a common matrix, and mythological resonances.
In the last chapter I will explore the most extensive of these, that with the garden of Eden.
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For paterfamilias, as has frequently been observed, the Song has only a mother (e.g. Falk 1982: 90; Trible 1978: 158); for fathers we have to look for phallic images or covert allusions. The appearances of this, mother coincide with moments of greatest intimacy; the effect is not only of benediction, but of a convergence of maternal and amorous affection, transmitting her influence to the lover. For example, in 6.9 his joy recalls her joy at the Beloved’s birth. The mother, moreover, contributes to the generative process, not only in life, but also in the Song, as part of a structural pattern; the references to her comprise a sequence, with reversions and recapitulations, from traumatic rejection to rebirth. In 1.6, her entry coincides with that of the Beloved, her first self-exposure; expulsion from the nuclear family precipitates the erotic encounter. But in 3.4–8.2 the approach to intercourse is a return to the mother; she presides over its public consummation in the wedding in 3.11; and in 6.9 and in 8.5 she is evoked at the moment of birth. Finally, in 8.8–10 the Beloved herself—according to my reading—takes over the maternal function; expulsion from the family is replaced by responsibility within it. Thus there is a movement from loss to restoration; the mother assists in the reproductive process, from desire to birth and future care. Love, the true maternal gift, infuses and gives birth to the poem, and is celebrated by it. The personification suggests a slightly rhetorical distance, as if the erotic drive could be awakened and abstracted, in turn indicative of a tension between the personal and the collective, the immense instinctual discharge and the fragile consciousness. This tension will be the nucleus of the third chapter. The poet with his speech produces this primary relationship, for himself and for us, talking in the air to the imagined memory or hallucination of the mother. It corresponds to his task of recreating the unity of the world, of restoring all fragmented relationships through metaphor. The poet has a conviction of a responsive universe, that his words are not vain; which is not merely, I think, the expectation of a sensitive audience but of an ideal invisible listener. It is an interior dialogue, both in the poet and in his personae, which we overhear, whose interlocutor is an internalised “other”, originally the parent, with whom the baby experiences a complete rapport. But the Muse is herself a mother, who creates the poet, who feeds him with thoughts and pleasures, whom he discovers within himself and as himself. Thus the poet is both listener and communicator, a participant in a dialogue with himself and with the world. The lovers are symbolically also twins, whose sibling representations will be subject to some attention; their duality couples—establishes kinship
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between—opposed terms. Deintegration is essential for the dynamic process to start, out of which relationship develops. The poem is separated from the poet, polarising opposites of imagination and reality, the immateriality of art and the quickness of the flesh. Poetry is thus a twin or complement of the poet, associated with the feminine side; as a fiction, it makes everything possible, and has a transcendent function. One aspect of poetry, as I shall argue in the next chapter, is the ideal of language that achieves perfection, becomes ethereal, pure form or music. Wallace Stevens, for example, in his poem “To the One of Fictive Music” invokes this as “Sister and mother and diviner love / And of the sisterhood of the living dead / Most near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom.” But there is another aspect. The mother also stands for the reality principle (Fordham: 116), that which initiates the baby into the world, the source of thirst as well as frustration. In the Song this is reflected in the association of the Beloved with nature, and especially the land of Israel. Alongside the transcendent function there is the attempt to find words for things, to integrate the real and the imaginary. If the mother and baby form one unit, to which she contributes security and constancy, it is that unity— of man and nature, consciousness and matter—that is at the basis of the Song. There is also the narcissistic element, to which I have already alluded, a condition without relation, except for the drama of the self as it fragments and integrates, producing sounds for the sheer anarchic pleasure of it, and letting them fall into silence. Finally, there is the archetype of the child. Both lovers emerge from the sexual encounter as newborn children, in 6.9 and 8.5, in a world regenerated by love. “When two kiss, the world changes” (Octavio Paz). I will begin with the general characteristics of the lovers, insofar as they can be discerned. Obviously in a lyrical poem, one does not approach the relationship as in a narrative, where characters are distinct, identifiable, in a more or less realistic and continuous story. The lyric is broken up into many snatches or glimpses, typical amorous moments, just as the characters appear through multiple conflicting personae. Yet the fragments are luminous, frequently naturalistic, allowing a reconstruction of personality behind them. One speculates or recognises the situation from one’s own worldly wisdom. The transition from incident to the total composition is more difficult and obscure; nonetheless—to my surprise—a few limited generalisations do emerge, from repeated readings, none of them certain or incapable of qualification, that give us at least a silhouette of coherent figures. They are
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also structural guidelines, indicating where to put the weight of the poem, enabling us to anticipate and respond to recurring patterns in the dance of lovers. Some of these correspond to Near Eastern conventions; others are more unexpected. First of all, since it is most obtrusive, is the dominance of the woman as a voice and presence. It is not simply a question of quantity, though the woman has more to say; it is also that the combined speeches of both lovers, with their different styles and concerns, focus on defining her image. Goitein (1957: 301–3) has seen this as evidence for the poet’s gender, and posited a poetess,5 since he or she seems to be far more at home in the feminine psyche than in the male; on the other hand, this could perhaps be explained by projection, the fascination of men with the mystery of women as the unknown part of themselves or anima. No generalisation, however, is absolute; a secondary figure of the Lover develops, in her shadow. Of the two lovers, only the Beloved is preoccupied with self-definition, from “I am black and/but comely” in 1.5 to “I am a wall” in 8.10. Only she indeed uses the first person pronoun “I” as if to stress this introversion (Goitein 1957: 302). For example, the redundant “I” in the marked parallelism at the beginnings of 5.4 and 5.5—“I arose ... I opened”—slows down the movement and makes us feel how she participates in it;6 it has a reflexive quality (“I arose myself”). Likewise, she is much more forthcoming about her adventures; we know about her brothers, her work, her midnight perambulations, her daring. If there is a story in the Song of Songs, it is of her self, shaped by suffering, pleasure and self-reflection, that is both proud and self-assertive, and very vulnerable. The Lover, in contrast, hardly talks about himself at all; there is no selfexamination, and hardly any narration. He shows us the Beloved from outside. Formal portraits or wasfs take up much of his time. He typically stands outside the consciousness of the Beloved and is fascinated by it. She is of immense power, capturing his heart with “one of her eyes, one bead of her necklace” (4.9), captivating a king in her tresses (7.6). The woman is the more interesting because she is the more active partner, nagging, restless, decisive. The man on the other hand is predominantly passive and complacent, as befits a king; his most memorable cry is the fourfold repetition of “Return” in 7.1, imperiously expecting her to come at his bidding. Even when he is stirred into ineffective wooing, we hear it only through her mouth (2.10–13, 5.2); her voice thus mingles with his, and we cannot tell whether it may not be her wish-fulfilment. This domination by the woman may seem strange in a Near Eastern setting, though it is not hard to discern elsewhere; but there is a price she has
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to pay, as the victim of humiliation, for breaking traditional restraints; and also as the central figure. For if the Lover is fascinated by her, she is committed to him. His is a possibly embarrassing infatuation, but as king and fawn he is essentially free, like the archetypal lover all over the world. She loves him, but he is only in love with Love. His only reference to it is “How beautiful and fair you are, O Love, among delights” in 7.77—Love as a wanton delight or pleasure. He is a fawn among the lilies, carelessly cropping flowers. His stance is characteristically aesthetic: for him Love is something beautiful, he spends much of his time looking at and anatomising the girl, and when he recalls her in 7.1, it is in terms reminiscent of striptease: “Return, return, O Shulammite, return, return, and let us gaze upon you; why do you (pl.) gaze on the Shulammite ...?” followed by a long description of her naked body. The Beloved, on the other hand, would never describe Love as “beautiful”: for her it is an infection (2.5, 5.8), not to be rashly contracted, that yet cures mortality; it is of absolute value and all-consuming. The Lover’s meditation has two extreme modes, both of which distance the Beloved, defensively romanticising her. The first is adoration, the cosmic hyperbole, commensurate with sky and earth, provoking delicious trepidation. Captivation is always the Lover’s excuse; but the metaphor of theophany— idealisation into a quasi-divine figure—conceals a castration fantasy, that the dazzled king, symbol of virility, is helpless in her gaze, caught in tresses. Reverence bestows respectability on the dark side of erotic obsession, that harbours also a hidden wish, to be without will, in the other’s power. The other mode of contemplation is the reverse of this: it is an affectionate condescension, expressed in particular through pet names. The plaything is innocent and helpless; the innocuousness of the relationship is stressed by the diminutive “my dove”, the attribute “my pure one”, the implication of chastity in “my sister”. The Beloved is possessed by the Lover, e.g. “To a/my mare in Pharaoh’s chariots I have compared you, my love” in 1.9 (cf. below, 176ff.), corresponding to the actual subordination of women to men, concubines to the king, in ancient times. She is part of his extended personality, subject to his control, exemplified by the idealisation that manipulates her into a figure of disarming purity, immaculate availability, in a relationship in which, for the moment, sexuality is banished. It is coy and tender, with an ironic pretence of childhood that barely dissimulates tremendous repression. The Beloved’s repertoire of endearments, on the other hand, is very limited: there is only “my love” and “He whom my soul loves”, a true confession rather than a sweet nothing. The lover as king has a creative function: he makes the Beloved royal, adorning her with jewelry, constructing her a palanquin,8 perfecting her
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image. He is thus man the artisan, the fabricator, owner of gardens. Alongside the meditative gaze, then, and devolving from it, is creative fantasy, equally aesthetic, that changes the world to suit our image. But it always escapes us. The palanquin is founded on the love of the daughters of Jerusalem; the cheeks show through the jewelry in 1.10–11; in 7.3—an image we shall come to—the workmanship of the thighs surrounds the mystery between them (cf. below, 258). Typically the Lover woos the Beloved, eliminating all improper suggestion, appealing to her compassion (5.2), flattery (2.14), or tempting her to pleasures (2.10–13); in other words, he is still dependent on her will, despite his fantasy of control, reinforced by showers of magnetic diminutives, and despite his status as king. For if he is the perpetual outsider, inveigling her from her portals, he is also the insider, in the midst of coteries of women, the centre of the kingdom. The absurdity of monarchy, as well as its isolation, is sympathetically depicted. From the multitudes of queens and concubines, he still says “One is she, my dove, my pure one, one is she ...” (6.9); the diminutive is immediately linked to the superlative, the comparison with the celestial bodies in 6.10. The recognition of her uniqueness cuts through the pomp of sovereignty: it is by virtue of being herself, as at the moment of birth, that she is uniquely prized by him, as himself. This is confirmed by the epithets “my dove, my pure one” that imply—through the word “tam” “complete, simple”—natural simplicity. At the centre of the Song and of the sumptuous court two human beings meet; beneath all the social pressures, conventional attitudes, sexual differentiations that separate them there is a simple equality. For instance, at the beginning of the Song the Beloved tells us “The king brought me into his chambers” (1.4)—temporarily, it is true, and at his bidding, she has been admitted to his sanctum, and what happened there is undisclosed. She is both outside—one of the maidens—and inside, knowing his intimate secrets. Again, in 5.1, he enters the garden that represents them both; at the end of the poem she dismisses him from it. Finally there are the epithets “my love” but also “my cousin”, and “my friend”, so familiar that they become almost indistinguishable. They present the lovers as bound by ties of kinship and affinity, but essentially equal, essentially companionable. And they remind us of the commandment “And you shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Ley 19.18)—the primary duty of human fellowship that is at the basis of the Song. The Beloved’s behaviour is paradoxical: she pursues him, wheedles him, yet chases him away. Her characteristic mode is active, not aesthetic; we have hardly any description, certainly no unmotivated contemplation of the
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Lover. Her only wasf is elicited by the daughters of Jerusalem; if insufficient as an Identikit, it certainly persuades them of his merits. Otherwise, the only sensual symbol for the Lover is the deer, whose beauty is a complex of a moment, in contrast to the highly articulated, static pictures of the Beloved. She does not adore him as a cosmic superlative; the apparent exception, the wasf of 5.10–16, is stiff and tense, contrasting with his animated, beautifully consistent portraits; there is a certain ambivalence, an over-conscientious definition. Neither does she patronise him, taking him into her affectionate orbit. Indeed it is difficult to say what she sees in him, except that she loves him. If he is overwhelmed by her, she is imbued with love. For its luminous touch on the nerves of love, its inner process, the Song is perhaps equalled in the ancient world only by Sappho. Perhaps, though, her attraction towards him is to be understood through the situation. The Beloved, as Krinetzki says, is signified by images of enclosure: the home, the garden, even the crannies in the rocks in 2.14. Thence the Lover seeks to draw her. For her, then, as fawn, he stands for everything that is free and open, the whole world from which she has been secluded. There is an anarchic, licentious part of herself, I shall argue below, that belongs to that world; union with the Lover is then an integration of herself. His seduction of her using images of the wind, trees and flowers is consequently not mere rhetoric, for it is with that world that he seduces her. In two remarkable passages, we listen to her listening to him beyond her threshold; the inner temptation alongside the outer persuasion. In one, the sound of her lover knocking coincides with that of her heart beating; it betrays her to humiliation (5.2–7). In the other, his voice is that of the spring (2.10–13), that says “Arise, my friend, my fair one, and come away”; it is echoed in that of the turtle dove, that only now, as a migratory bird, is heard in the land (2.12). And yet she does not come. Why? Because what she loves is this essential freedom, which is also a sexual freedom as “he who feeds among the lilies”. In the end she dismisses him: “Flee, my love, and be like a deer or a young gazelle on the mountains of spices” (8.14), in the shape of the fawn, the untrammelled animal. There is nevertheless an ambiguity here: in the sister-verse in 2.17, that closes the rapprochement we have just discussed, and again in 4.6, the Lover’s flight to the mountains is introduced by the mysterious circumlocution “Until the day blows and the shadows flee”. Interpretations differ, but I hold that the relevant hour is evening, since deer are diurnal animals.9 Thus though the day will part them, at night they shall be reunited. In the Song, as quasi-universally, day and night are metaphors for consciousness and unconsciousness, differentiation and fusion (cf. below,
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146). In the Song the lovers are simultaneously indissoluble and inaccessible. A similar set of ambiguities will be discovered in relation to the dialogue of 1.7–8. If for the Beloved the Lover is essentially a fawn, not to be tamed or limited—if by captivating him she imprisons him—for the Lover she is essentially untouched and immaculate, even at the moment of possession. The two poles never meet, that in each angle greet. If the Song celebrates sexuality, it also celebrates virginity. 2. A N D R O G Y N Y : F AW N S
AND
LILIES
The bodies of the lovers are disassembled and reconstructed in the Song, each constituent metaphorically combining with heterogenous elements to give the impression of a collage, a web of intricate associations and superimposed landscapes that serves to blur the distinction between the lovers, and between them and the external world. As Octavio Paz says in the verse I use as an epigraph, “Voy por to cuerpo como por el mundo”. The appearance of an affair between two independent individuals is complicated by an awareness of the multitude of selves and part-objects that make up each person. From the relationship of the lovers, which I have already discussed, we become entangled in that between their parts; like the poem, we lose the wood for the trees. If one is too frightened of losing the wood one will never enter the forest. Parts of the two lovers’ bodies will be found to correspond; an inter-personal unity will begin to develop, through linking metaphors. There is admittedly an element of projection in this, of making the loved one a reflection or image of oneself; this sympathetic imagining of oneself in the other is part of the process of integration that takes place in the poem. The loss of definition of the single body permits a process of regression and recreation, a fluidity between adult and infantile levels of experience. In particular, it passes the threshold of the relationship with a whole object, and evokes the time—not only of Freud’s oceanic feeling—when neither mother nor infant are realised as continuous beings; they are confused, split up into good and bad, and innumerable part objects—breasts, lips, etc. The role of infantile regression in love play and sweet-talk is universally familiar (Jakobson 1968: 17). The restoration of infantile bliss is, however, only secondary to its creative contribution to adult sexuality, to the concentration of both lives, the eternity in a flower of love. In this section, I shall begin to explore the interconnections and crossreferences, relying perhaps excessively on the wasfs or formal portraits, marvellous inventories of images, but turning also to more dynamic descriptions and incidents. I shall take an image and proceed to an
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elaboration of its correlatives and complements, not so much for its own sake, to attempt a total elucidation, but as a gradual introduction to the descriptive techniques of the Song, the familial tensions it perceives between the parts of the body, and its metaphorical landscape. The image is chosen at random, or rather because one critic finds it curious (Murphy 1973: 420); it might however be considered questionable to abstract an image from the centre of the poem, rather than to follow its sequence. It could be argued that the proper starting-point is 1.1 or 1.2, with “the kisses of his mouth”, for instance. It will be conceded that a reading inattentive to sequence is unbalanced; nevertheless, reading is gradual and cumulative, slowly recognising correspondences from all parts of the poem. Natural reading may well start from the centre, for example from the wasfs, with their crisp and very puzzling imagery. The image is that of 4.5: “Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a doe, who feed among the lilies”. Although any image would ultimately be equally productive, clearly breasts are endowed with the utmost emotive and aesthetic intensity; their essential ambiguity gives them a special status in the Song. They combine adult and infantile sexuality, visual and oral satisfaction, tactile and erectile qualities. They have active and passive characteristics; active insofar as they give suck, passive in that they are subject to the baby’s aggressive rage and hunger. On the adult level, they are conspicuous, attracting attention. As we shall find in the next chapter, ambiguity determines the aesthetic response, between desire and repression, perfect form and explosive energy. The breasts are an ideal entity, reproduced in many forms in art and architecture, in cusps, cupolas, etc.10 They combine extension, the roundness of feminine beauty, with altitude; compactness and fullness; centre and circumference. Though the Kleinian ambivalence of the good nourishing breast and the sadistic/persecutory one has little role to play in the Song, the breasts are both rich and maternal and thrusting and aggressive, combining masculine and feminine imagery and functions. They are opposed to the genitals as active, forward projections of the female body, and linked to them through synecdoche. Breasts are compared to towers in 8.10, as assertive and formidable, expressing the Beloved’s impact on the world and especially on the Lover. Besides their visual phallic similarity, towers are associated with the masculine world of arms and politics. They protect the integrity of the Beloved against assault, while advertising her attractions. Here then the breasts are primarily containers, hard, redoubtable, elevated. In 7.8–9, however, where breasts are clusters of dates or grapes, their feminine aspect is evident, their roundness and richness. The harmonious,
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unified breast is fragmented into numerous taut part-objects, that multiply the experience of bursting the skin and extracting the fruit indefinitely. Here, then, it is primarily an organ of suckling, soft, full, and vulnerable. Before turning to the central image of 4.5, I would like to discuss, albeit cursorily, the poetic qualities and resources of the wasf, especially the one in which it partakes, namely that of 4.1–5. The Lover as observer, as poet, in this portrait, translates bodily sensations into scenic snapshots, metonymy into metaphor. The parts of the body are metonymous with the vagina, or with the woman herself; through them, sexuality is diffused over the entire body and thence transmitted, via the imagery, to the landscape.11 The woman becomes transparent; her figure is superimposed on vivid pictures, of minimal descriptive value. Concentration on her expressive face deflects the imagination from the concealed body; propriety closes the portrait after the breasts. Synecdoche— using the face to represent the person—verges on metaphor i.e. likeness.12 Parts of the face correspond to parts of the body, and carry with them an unconscious symbolism. Dr. Eli Gutwirth has very kindly furnished me with some medieval examples, in which the length of the nose is directly correlated with character and potency.13 The metaphors thus have a double function: they ally the face with the active, external world, the setting of the Song, and they impart symbolic information. Through cubist disintegration, the reality of the face dissolves; each part, with its exotic image, is instrumental in a wider synthesis. The wasf itself, in the continuum of the poem, is isolated; a formal poetic exercise that sets the lovers at a distance from each other. Its intimacy contrasts with the public celebration of 3.11; and the descent from Lebanon in 4.8ff. may plausibly be held to introduce the comparison of the Beloved to a garden in 4.12–5.1, so that ch. 4 as a whole is an extended portrait of the Beloved, interrupted only by sighs and ejaculations. As such, however, the wasf, with its meticulous artifice, is a set piece, that does not participate in the movement of the Song. It has the effect of a still life with its complex absence of main verbs; in it each image is paratactically juxtaposed. If the passage is isolated, distinctively bounded from its neighbours, without logical connectives, each sentence within it duplicates this isolation. There is no syntactic frame, no plot, merely the association of tropes by contiguity. Yet the images within the sentences are buzzing with energy. It is as if the vitality has been displaced from the body to the correlate, with its sexual symbolism. Moreover, the images themselves are intricately related to others in the poem, and conform to its major preoccupations and settings. We have the relaxed pastoral idiom and activity of 4.1–2, the military/political dimension
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in 4.4, the gentle feral tableau in 4.5. This last is linked to the series through parallelism and complementary contrast. We bring to it from the other verses an expectation of extravagance, unreality, of poetic chimera. For the relationship of the lovers it substitutes the conceit, a self-referential congratulatory medium, which discloses an astonishing depth of meditative fantasy. There is thus a parallel metonymy in the object and the subject; libidinal energy is redirected both to the contiguous simile and to the optical imagination. There is an analogy between the continuity of the eye and the pastoral scene it witnesses and that of the infant (or Lover) and the breast; the flow of milk and the fusion of selves is in accord with the unity of discrete perceptual objects and the mind of the poet, in the field of consciousness. Sensually “Your two breasts are like two fawns” is an extraordinarily sensitive metaphor, combining colour, warmth, liveliness and delicate beauty. The Beloved’s breasts are brown, in motion, in repose, sweet, gentle, etc.14 Fawns are food, and fawns are visually delectable. Feliks (77) suggests an analogy between the dappled skin of the fawns and the nipples. In looking at the breasts, the Lover is returning to an undisturbed pastoral idyll. Later we will touch on its paradisal implications; here I am more concerned with it as a recollection of infancy. The breasts evoke suckling: two sucklings, “twins of a doe”, grazing among lilies.15 It is a strange reversal: the breast that gives suck itself suckles (cf. Cook: 122–3). On the one hand it is a clear case of projection; in the breast the Lover sees an early version of himself, since elsewhere in the poem there is a stock comparison of the Lover with a fawn. Visual satisfaction thus corresponds to lactation. At the same time the fawns, grazing among the lilies, are feeding off the earth, which in the Song, as in the Bible in general, has a maternal function, and is associated with the Beloved. The fawns are both “twins of a doe” and feed directly off the earth; there are thus two mothers in view, alternative and complementary. The breasts, then, produced by the woman’s body, fawns feeding off the earth and mother, are nurtured by femininity; their relationship to the mother is one of divergence as well as continuity.16 Hence their partial association with masculinity, the symbol of fawns, for instance. Moreover, in the adjuration “by the does or hinds of the field”, the doe, mother of fawns, represents the power that guarantees feminine sexuality. The meadow dotted with lilies, as in a pointillist painting, reproduces the image. The lilies embellish the earth, break up its texture, create a dynamic interplay; yet they are imparted by it. The preposition “ba” may [translate to] “among” or “on” the lilies (Pope 1976: 406), i.e. the lilies are either the diet of the fawns or the context in which they feed, the poetic
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equivalent of decor. The image then is either naturalistic—fawns grazing in springtime—or symbolic. If the fawns feed on them, then they are the breasts of the earth; in any case, they symbolically set the scene for the feast. If the lilies are red, as suggested by the comparison with the Lover’s lips in 5.13,17 and fragrant, a metaphorical link with nipples becomes more positive. Thus the breasts fill the informing eye; the fawns, ambiguous creatures representing both the Lover (2.8, 2.17, 8.14) and part of the woman’s body, combine also the infantile function of suckling with the adult pleasure in observation, reflection and artistic creation. In the caress verbally represented by the wasf, the breasts are at once a displacement of the vagina, arousing adolescent attraction, an aid in foreplay, and metaphorically construct an equivalence between past and present, the communion of lovers and that of mother and infant. Here historic and synchronic dimensions merge. Instead of the two lovers, and the objective relationship between them, we have a continuum, between the eye, the breast and the earth, in which the past envelops the present. The identity is shared between them. The maternal images—breasts, earth, doe—bestow the vital fluid; they in turn are reconstituted by the Lover. There is thus an inference of reciprocity, of a life cycle in which they both participate; the Lover, who owes his life and sustenance to his mother, in this luminous recollection of infancy is still absorbed in that mutual rhythm. His energy, his poetic talent, is nourished by her. Now in the form of the wasf, he returns that gift, just as, in the underlying image of intercourse, he restores the vital fluid. Lilies, as flowers, with their delicate beauty, are associated with femininity. In the Song, they are an image for the Beloved, in 2.1–2, corresponding to the apple tree as an emblem for the Lover in 2.3; the phrase in 4.5 “who feed among the lilies” recurs in the refrain: “My beloved is mine, and I am his, who feeds among the lilies” (2:16 // 6.3). Instead of the fawn “who feeds among the lilies” we have the Lover. Similarly in 6.2 the Lover goes down into his garden to pluck lilies; from the context the lilies off which he feeds may be identified with women (cf. Falk 1982: 104). For the relationship of suckling we have sexual fulfilment. The Lover/infant projects himself into the breasts that feed him and on which he is dependent; they are fawns, emblems of the Lover. We find the same process in reverse, in the Beloved’s portrait of the Lover, in connection with her symbol of the lily. “His lips are lilies, dropping flowing myrrh” (5.13). If the Lover sees himself in her breasts, she sees herself in his lips. Lips are commonplace metaphors for the vagina; we speak, for instance, of the labia of the vagina. This is not only a matter of appearance, but evokes their function as recipients of food and liquid, life-sustaining nourishment. If
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the breasts/fawns are paradoxically imagined as feeding, the lilies/lips are analogously imagined as giving, both in our verse (4.5), and in its sister verse, (5.13) where they “drop flowing myrrh”. Clearly, too, there is a symmetry of metonymy. If for the baby, especially in the early months, the breast is the most important part of the mother, for the mother the lips are the point of most intimate contact with the baby. The whole of the baby expresses itself in the lips; the whole of the mother is available through the breasts, and through them she gives life and love to the baby. In turn, he grasps and in fantasy devours the breast. Thus each is incorporated in the other, in the unity of mother and infant, the basis for that of the self and the world. The mouth in the Song is associated with sweetness and succulence. Corresponding to the Lover’s lips that “drop flowing myrrh” are those of the Beloved, which evoke the same verb “drop” in the lovely paronomasia “Your lips drop honey, O bride” (4.11).18 Parallel to this, in the next phrase we find “Honey and milk under your tongue.”19 There are several similar images for the palate—“And your palate like fine wine” (7.10), “His palate is all sweets” (5.16), etc. In each case there is an inversion of function: the palate that tastes food is tasted; the milk of childhood is found under the tongue, not in the breast or udder; honey and sweetness are reminiscent both of childhood and lactation, and correlative with bliss, as in the familiar expression “a land flowing with milk and honey.”20 Underlying this is the metaphor of the kiss. “His lips are lilies, dropping flowing myrrh”—apart from colour and fragrance—suggests an association of nectar with saliva; in turn, it is supposed, the superabundant myrrh is an index of his eagerness. As Marvin Pope (1976: 441) puts it, “amative oral activities other than sweet talk” are suggested, as throughout the Song. Moreover, the kiss is a wonderfully sensitive and versatile image for intercourse, as needs no illustration. The Song exploits the pun between to kiss and to drink, which we find also in Gen 29.10–11. For example, in the first verse of the Song itself—“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your caresses are better than wine” (1.2)—the sensation of the kiss and the Lover’s mouth is assimilated to that of wine (Lys: 63). In 8.1–2, the kiss of which the Beloved is deprived leads to a euphemistic fantasy of hospitality “I would give you to drink of my spiced wine, my pomegranate juice” (8.2). The interpenetration of selves in the kiss, as in intercourse, is an exchange of delectable fluids, a dissolution of boundaries; to pursue the motif of suckling, the Lover finds under the tongue of the Beloved the milk i.e. life and love received from her mother, and likewise in his mouth she partakes of his. And what they taste is themselves.
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To turn back to 5.13, and the description of the Lover: “His lips are lilies, dropping flowing myrrh”. She sees in him, from an imaginative and temporal distance, an infant, his lips opening like flowers, his mouth watering; just as he sees in her a primal bliss. In both cases there is an inversion of gender and function, the superimposition of adult sexuality, e.g. in the form of a kiss, on an infantile function. The inversion is confirmed by the context of the image, “dropping flowing myrrh”, in the wasf of 5.10–16. (5.12) His eyes are like doves by brooks of water, washed in milk, sitting by the flood (or fitly set). (13) His cheeks are like a bed of balsam, towers of spices; his lips are lilies, dropping flowing myrrh. They are all feminine images.21 In “His lips are lilies, dropping flowing myrrh”, perfuming, if not gilding, the lily, to the natural flower or girl we add the recollection of her haste and clumsiness only a few verses earlier, in seeking to admit her lover: “And my hands dropped myrrh, and my fingers flowing myrrh, onto the handles of the lock” (5.5). The phrase “to drop flowing myrrh” is transferred from her hands to his lips. Similarly, at the end of the sequence, the previous image, “His cheeks are like a bed of balsam”, is recalled in apposition to lilies in 6.2 “My love has gone down to his garden, to the beds of balsam to feed among the gardens, to pick lilies”. In turn it corresponds to the Beloved, the “locked garden” (4.12), the nursery of spices of 4.13–14. The elaboration of the image of cheeks “towers of [or growing] spices”, confirms the association with fragrance and the interchange of sexuality.22 Finally, the extended comparison of the eyes to doves in 5.12 uses a symbol, a pet name, for the Beloved e.g. “my dove, my pure one” (5.2, 6.9), “my dove in the clefts of the rock” (2.14). Thus on his face, the expressive articulate part of his body, we find animate images of the woman; whereas the rest of his body, though appropriately formidable, is coldly metallic and disjointed. By a curious paradox that which is alive in him and relates to her is feminine. 5.13 is, as it were, a very oblique comment on 4.5. The breasts (= fawns) are sustained by the lips (= lilies) which are those of the lover as a poet who trades kisses. In both verses the lilies have a maternal function, exuding nectar, or as part of the pasture; in both they derive from the earth, that is common to man and woman. Their activity as that which gives suck through the fawns to the Lover is reversed in 5.13, where the Lover’s greed for kisses is also generous. If the fawns communicate the sweetness of the lilies to the Lover, there is a suppressed collision of the two images from the two wasfs.
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Finally, the projection of each lover into the other—the Lover into the breasts, the Beloved into the lips—contributes to their union that is the work of the poem. (2.1) I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys. (2) Like a lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters. (3) Like an apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my love among sons; in his shade I sat and took pleasure, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. In 2.1–3 the lily and the apple are paired together in a competition of comparisons between the lovers. The Beloved among girls is like a lily among thorns; the Lover among young men is like an apple tree among the trees of the wood. The lily of the valleys in 2.1 is solitary and fragile;23 its calyx and whorl of sepals round the central funnel reinforces the feminine connotation. It is a quiet, naturalistic comment on her Sitz-im-Leben, perhaps a little rueful, addressed half or wholly to herself. The Lover’s gallant intrusion spoils the intimacy; the condition of the courtly compliment is that it be artificial, with its disarming absurdity. And then her reply is once more serious, with its sensible comparison of different trees. Moreover, as continually happens in the Song, the formal structure breaks down, and the image develops a life of its own. Trees as opposed to flowers are manly, powerful and vigorous; and indeed later in the Song we have a tree that conforms to phallic expectation figuratively attached to the Lover. He is “choice as cedars” (5.15). But the apple tree is an affectionate rather than an impressive tree, associated in the Song with shelter (“in its/his shade I sat and took pleasure”) and food (“and its fruit was sweet to my taste”).24 Clearly the primary reference is to sexual pleasure and more distantly to protection and provision, familiar male (or paternal) roles. Three verses later, his encircling arms substitute the shade of the tree; towards the end of the book in 8.5 she leans upon him. But equally, and originally, as we shall see, the tree has a maternal function: food and comfort come from the mother. The Beloved is also metaphorically linked with a tree—the date palm in 7.8–9: “This your height is like a palm tree, and your breasts are like clusters. I said: ‘I will climb the palm tree....’” It is a comparison of height and slenderness combined with pendulous breasts, heavy with fruit. There is perhaps a projective identification of the phallus and the woman.25 We catch a glimpse of amorous convention: the Lover sees himself as bold and triumphant, sex as an assertion of power. Slenderness is an index of litheness,
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common to both lovers, reminiscent of the deer or young gazelle. Metonymy, such as the comparison of the neck to a tower in 4.4 and 7.5, suggests it occasionally through analogy elsewhere in the poem. Slimness, the adolescent and somewhat ethereal beauty, whose sexual polarisation is not marked (and sometimes confused) is coupled with breasts, whose sweetness and fullness makes them unambiguously organs of suckling. Moreover, the comparison of height is not with other women, but with a diminutive Lover, who climbs the tree; in relation to him she is the infantile mother, the axis of his world, enormous and central, into whose arms he climbs and to whose legs he clings (“I will catch hold of its fronds”). There is an image of the Lover as a flower corresponding to that of the Beloved as lily: “A spray of henna is my love to me, in the vineyards of EinGedi” (1.14). Bright yellow flowers; it is unclear whether the “kera¯mîm” are vineyards or spice-plantations.26 In 4.13 “henna” or “camphire” blossoms, are planted in the garden of the Beloved. In contrast to the lily wherewith the Beloved defines herself, in essence, as a flower both commonplace and miraculous, here the Lover is defined in relation to her as something exotic, brought to her from the uncanny landscape of the Dead Sea, with its luxuriant crops, in the midst of desolation.27 This Dead Sea fruit has a miraculous, unnatural quality, reflected in its price. Spice too is a paradoxical commodity, with overtones of the supernatural; hence its use in magic and medicine, its place in folklore. This is primarily because of its pervasive subtlety (hence the most precious spice of all: saffron); not being food itself, it enhances food. The Beloved brings the Lover from the alien landscape, and uses him to dye her hair.28 In the previous verse there is an exact parallel in syntax and formal structure: “Like a sachet of myrrh is my love to me; between my breasts he lies” (1.13). The “bag of myrrh” is an ordinary female accessory,29 containing a spice from far away. Once again there is an affiliation of the remote and the close; myrrh likewise is associated with the Beloved. But the ending differs: “between my breasts he lies.”30 An adult sexual conceit overlays an image of infancy; as in 4.5 and 7.8, the breasts mediate between past and present; the fully-grown Lover is simultaneously perceived cradled between the breasts, tiny as a bag of myrrh. Between “between my breasts he lies” and “in the vineyards of EinGedi”, the variant endings of the otherwise symmetrical verses, the distances meet; the heterogenous vineyards—otherwise vineyards are metonymic with the Beloved herself—add their allure to her hair, and thus lay a tribute. Two flower images, two tree images. The lily in 2.1 is the simple and sublime feminine principle, untouched and unguarded, the identity ultimately desirable, and alone in the world; on it converge images of the
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vagina, nipples and lips. The milk flows to the fawns and the lips, and is reciprocated in the kiss, as we have seen; the same structure influences the other botanical symbols. The pleasure-giving, sheltering apple-tree, whose fruit drops into the mouth, combines a sexual conception (Tenor) with a maternal function and parental care; the Beloved is both the diminutive infant, sheltered and fed by the tree, cradled in her Lover’s arms, and a sexual partner. The milk—the sweet food—is now received from the Lover, who thus stands in for the mother; as in 5.13, there is a reversal of function. This is confirmed also by the paternal aspects of the tree. The Lover is tender, caressing, enfolding. There is nothing more maternal than a good father. The date palm is also a composite metaphor, combining exaggerated femininity and maternal eminence with a slender figure, into which the Lover projects his own wish for dominance, his own virility. The two trees initiate the process through which life is passed through the generations, from mother to son and thence to the Beloved. But they do so in reverse: whereas the apple tree is enveloping, as part of a community of trees, a wood, the isolated date palm is robbed of its fruit. The Lover is apparently its master, conforming to male assumptions, subverted, as we shall see, in the working out of the image. The image of henna is as fantastical as that of the lily is natural. The Lover is brought from far away, from the exotic oasis, to become an attribute of the Beloved, to increase her attractions. Once again, we have the dependence of the Lover on the Beloved, lodged between her breasts. The movement from Ein Gedi to the breasts is reminiscent of 4.5, where the fawns, fugitive animals, representative of the Lover in 2.8–9 in his search for the Beloved, are now identified with breasts, and at peace. The net we are casting will now tighten a little. In the fantasy that follows the extended simile of the date palm we find familiar images tumbling on top of each other—breasts like bunches of grapes, palate like wine, the fruit of all trees tasted together in a Surrealist banquet. Among them is the following strange image: “And the fragrance of your nose like apples” (7.9). What is so special about the smell of a nose? The image has caused hasty reinterpretation among sober and less sober commentators alike.31 It is not a question of love play, the “nose-kiss” of Ancient Egyptians and Eskimos.32 To discern a particular nose-smell is rare, however. This leads us to a second question. What is the connection, if any, between the apple tree in this verse and the apple tree in 2.3? How has the latter managed to insinuate itself in the elaboration of its corresponding image, the date palm?
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In a kiss, the nose perforce smells the nose; the observation is simple realism. But it conforms to a pattern. We have seen how the mouth tastes the mouth, that which gives suck itself suckles. The olfactory organ is savoured. Only elephant ears can be heard, but love looks are long. Moreover, the inhalation diffuses her fragrance through the body, in rhythmical alternation with the exhalation. She breathes him in also; the juxtaposed nostrils share each others’ breath. In a sense, he breathes himself; such lovers would not survive for long.33 For the breath is also the breath of life. They live through each other, in each other’s atmosphere. The continuity of the breath, merging inner and outer, as the underlying rhythm of our lives, is a metaphor for that of lovers, and that of mother and infant, ideally realised in the womb. Indeed, the interdependence of the self and the world, the air and consciousness, substitutes that of foetus and mother. We have the sensation of the breath, the smell, that revives infantile memories, and is one of the most pervasive, unconscious and emotive of senses, in common with the respiratory medium. In the Song, it is especially prominent, and we have already touched on instances. We now come to the second question: what is the relation with 2.3? Simple equation is inappropriate; the masculine signification of the tree in 2.3 cannot be transferred directly to the Beloved’s nose; the Lover does not smell himself. It is less an oblique comment than a subsidiary motif. The apple tree in 2.3 is paired with that in 8.5, to be discussed in due course; its fruit, the surfeit of apples, derives from it but is detached from it. In 2.5 apples are sought as the gift of the daughters of Jerusalem, representatives of global femininity, as the remedy for love-sickness. They are the commodity of love, passing in between the lovers; for the Beloved they originate in the Lover, and vice versa. Thus as well as the symbolism of the tree, that defines the dignity, identity, and common humanity of the lovers, we have the fruit, their shared resources, their produce.34 The smell of the apple is in anticipation; there is a slight, subtle contemplative shift. Only in the next verse is the fruit eaten. Corresponding to this is another image for the nose: “Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon, overlooking Damascus” (7.5). As in ch. 4, the extended comparison with a date palm is preceded by a wasf, whose principal characteristic is objective definition. Whereas in the Lover’s fantasy in 7.8–10 a medley of half-captured sense impressions overlap, each one of which dissolves the object and trespasses on the neighbouring appearances— so that the compact breast is atomised into grapes, the breaths merge, and finally the dissolving wine flows between the palates—in the wasf of 7.2–7 each item is very clear, perfectly articulated. In 7.8–10 the conclusion is a
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confusion of tongues, literal and metaphorical: “And your palate like fine wine, flowing to my lover [m.] smoothly, stirring the lips of sleepers” (7.10). Unobtrusively, in mid-sentence, the subject changes from Lover to Beloved, the fantasy is transferred or becomes reality.35 It is as if she can read his thought, and their identification is so complete that it passes automatically from one to the other. In the wasf, as in 4.7, the summary is a brief appraisal of value.36 In 7.10 the Beloved’s voice completes the dissolution of boundaries with an image of utter ambiguity: “stirring the lips of sleepers.”37 Sleep is both monistic, associated with death,38 and undifferentiated; it is both the ultimate fusion with the mother and without relation to her. The reference here is unclear— to the Lover / lovers / all lovers? / to the unawakened world, ignorant of love?39—and blends the paradoxes of the Song, namely that true consciousness is a loss of consciousness, self-fulfilment is through selfsurrender. In the wasf, the features are in sharp relief, uncompounded, each one the focus of exclusive concentration. The images are all more or less visual (Gerleman: 195), in other words, belonging to the most rational of senses. The optical faculty has the farthest range, the greatest definition, and distinguishes most precisely between self and other. There is an air of excessive conscientiousness in exact perception in the wasf, of scientific impersonality, compounded by geographical distance and aesthetic remoteness. The Beloved is far off. The head is part of the skyline, the clarity of outline indicative of the light, the Mediterranean purity, that enables one to see from Lebanon to Damascus, from the centre of the country to Lebanon, and that is a primary symbol for consciousness. “Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon, overlooking Damascus” is one of the most notorious images in the Song.40 Marvin Pope (1976: 627) makes the point well: If our lady is superhuman in nature and size, then the dismay about her towering or mountainous nose disappears as the perspective and proportions fall into focus. It is not a huge nose, but well-proportioned and slender as a tower, seen from a distance, against the background of Lebanon and the prospect of Damascus. Scale is provided by the context (from this point of view the nose is rather tiny); it is also that of the wasf as a whole. The appearance of the nose thus contrasts with its recondite smell, four verses later. It is conspicuous,41 attracting to itself more than its share
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of fantasy and folklore. The nose, as the most prominent and central feature of the face, helps determine its character. In the Beloved’s case, it is high, elegant and distant. If in 7.9 apples and breath are shared between the lovers, here it is admired from afar. Noses are intrusive (someone who is “nosey”) and affectionate, associated with pertness and play e.g. nose-kisses. If the lips are familiar erotic metaphors for the vagina, the nose may be compared to the phallus.42 The emphasis on slenderness, on altitude, is, I think, decisive. The nose matches the nose in a parody of combat, in which the man’s aggression is reinforced by the woman’s resistance. The struggle need not be enacted physically; the gestures of noses can be very expressive.43 The tower associated with military strength as well as erection, characterises the forward breasts in 8.10, as we have seen. Elsewhere in the Song, notably two phrases earlier, it depicts the Beloved’s neck; there is thus a direct link between neck and nose: Your neck is like the ivory tower; your eyes are pools at Heshbon, by the gate of Bat-Rabbim; your nose is like the tower of Lebanon, overlooking Damascus. (7.5) The image of the neck describes part of the woman, but its connotations are masculine; this is clearest in the most elaborated of the references, in 4.4: “Like the tower of David is your neck, built in winding courses; a thousand shields are hanging on it, all the weapons of the warriors”. David is the father of Solomon, the putative Lover and author of the Song, and he is also the prototypical hero.44 It is I think the only allusion to a father in the Song. As a fortification the tower is both formidable and defensive: in 8.10 it manifests the Beloved’s boldness and asserts her integrity; in 4.4 it is graced with the trophies of or garrisoned by a thousand soldiers;45 in 7.5 it protects the kingdom. As we have seen, breasts and noses alike are sexually ambiguous, representing a masculine projection as well as a feminine function. This is sustained by contiguity: 7.4, the verse previous to ours, is a slightly curtailed repetition of 4.5, with its image of breasts = fawns, that in turn follows that of the neck and tower in 4.4.46 The long, slender neck is a somewhat erratic signifier, that essentially confers grace and dignity on the bearer; in this it resembles the date palm in 7.8. Thus we find, corresponding to the cluster of feminine images on the face of the Lover, a set of masculine ones associated with the Beloved. Very noticeably, the Beloved’s mouth or lips are not depicted; nor is the Lover’s nose.
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7.5 Your neck is like the ivory tower; your eyes are pools at Heshbon, by the gate of Bat-Rabbim; your nose is like the tower of Lebanon, overlooking Damascus. (6) Your head upon you is like Carmel; and the fringe of your head like purple; a king is caught in tresses. Subtending these detailed observations, however, is an extended image, that subtly and completely reverses the appearance of distance, in that it is permeated with the Lover, and expresses their interpenetration. That which is hardly and ambiguously accomplished through wild dissolution in 7.8–10 is here an undramatic fact. The image is that of the kingdom, the Beloved as the land of Israel.47 The images are topographical, even where the referent, like the ivory tower, is unknown. Together, they compose a collective portrait—the tower of Lebanon sticks up like a nose, the head protrudes like Carmel,48 the eyes glitter like pools, from a bird’s eye perspective. The localities are all northern and peripheral; geographical inference would situate the Beloved’s pudenda around the centre of the country, near Jerusalem.49 The images give an impression of the life of the country—the watchful tower, the populous city, the exploitation of the sea. The military outpost in the far north, the remote city on the edge of the desert, the uncompromising headland, assert boundaries, the limits of the land, and also the possibility of influence beyond it, for example in the sea, or through trade, the busy traffic of Heshbon (it might be helpful to keep the exact images in mind: “Your eyes like pools in Heshbon [i.e. treasure, wealth] by the gate of Bat-Rabbim [lit. the daughter of the multitude] ... Your head like Carmel, its fringe of hair like purple [i.e. murex]”). The land is secure in its strength and prosperity; we have the abundant harvest in 7.3 as an illustration. The image of the Beloved as the land of Israel is a specialisation of that of the Beloved as earth or earth-mother, our starting-point in 4.5. It is to be found elsewhere, especially in 6.4, the comparison with Jerusalem and Tirzah, and in the wasf of 4.1–5, with its pastoral activities and Tower of David. In contrast, the Lover, in his wasf, is associated with remote sources of metals—Tarshish and sapphires. The luminosity of the description of the Beloved, and hence the apparent love for the land of Israel, is augmented by the interdependence of the images. The tower is erected against the sky; the whiteness of its ivory in 7.5, and its shimmering decoration in 4.4, make it conspicuous from afar. The eye, on the other hand, is an image of profundity; light is reflected in the water. We thus have an interplay of height and depth, the duplication of images in the central pool, surrounded by likenesses of
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towers. In the following verse, the head is framed by hair just as Carmel is bordered by the dark sea; Krinetzki (1964: 216) attractively suggested that the hair glows in the sun. The radiance is seductive and irresistible. There follows an unexpected subversion: “A king is caught in tresses.”50 And this suddenly is the point. The king is bound to his kingdom, to the royal purple: it expresses his power and wealth, is imbued with his personality; in turn, his wealth, prestige etc. only derives from its resources. This fusion is that of the lovers. 7.3 Your vulva is a round crater—let the mingled wine never be lacking! your belly is a heap of wheat, hedged with lilies. (4) Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a doe. As in 4.5, the fawns in 7.4 are associated with the feminine emblem of the lilies in 7.3,51 adjacent to the image of the vulva. The lilies that grace the harvest are indicative of the dependence of man on the earth, the people on the land, analogous to that of infant on mother, man on woman. If the expressive features represent the external defences, the belly connotes the internal economy. There is the same gratification of appetite as in 4.5 where the fawns feed among the lilies, of which the earth is the unfailing provider; it is reciprocated in adoration and adornment. If in 7.5–6 the woman is formidable and captivating, here she is bountiful, submissive and joyous (Soulen: 189–90); the previous image “Your vulva is a round crater—let the mingled wine never be lacking”52 confirms, through the image of intoxication and “mingled wine”, the dissolution of selves, the infantile clinging of the Lover to the inexhaustible cup of the Beloved, and completes the metaphorical fusion of sex and suckling, teat and vagina—the vagina is now, as it were, the breast. An underlying pattern is beginning to emerge, in which in the shadow of the distinctive features—the face, the date palm, etc.—and masked by the clarity of light, is the opposite configuration. The articulate face is a displacement of the body. It asserts the pride and dignity of the woman, her unassailable identity,53 but it contends with and is permeated by the union of the lovers, whose separate symbols, expressive of their uniqueness, merge, as do their bodily functions; apples are shared under the apple tree and date palm; a few verses later (7.12) we also find henna-flowers, evoked by the Beloved for a tryst. Contrariwise, the Lover’s face, with its lively feminine imagery, conducts the repressed energy of the statuesque body. There is the mechanism of projection or, conversely, mutual recognition. But there is also another process involved: a split between appearance and reality, a fusion
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despite appearances. Between them the lovers create a composite lover; each of them engenders his own child. Lebanon, on which the Beloved’s nose is situated, is an important signifier in the Song. The appearance of Lebanon is associated with the Lover—for example, we have “his appearance is like Lebanon” in 5.15—as is the height and strength of its familiar timber—“choice as cedars” (ibid.). But the fragrance of Lebanon is feminine: “And the fragrance of your skirts is like the fragrance of Lebanon” (4.11). The Lover is enveloped by the scents emanating from the herbs and cedar trees as he walks there. The clothes fit the body as the forest clothes Lebanon, suggesting an analogy between the Lebanon and the woman: the woman as the source of effluvia, the Lebanon as the soil on which vegetation grows, from which the sap is transmuted into perfume. The Lebanon is part of the earth that is personified in the Beloved. In 7.5, too, Lebanon is the connection between the nose with its tower and the earth; it represents the substance of the face and is part of the woman’s body. The palanquin of love, in 3.9, is made out of the wood of Lebanon: “Solomon made himself a palanquin, from the trees of Lebanon”. In part this is an ironic reflection, since the palanquin is truly fashioned with the love of the daughters of Jerusalem; all the king’s power and wealth—his dominion over cedars—provides only the outer framework. On the other hand, the panelling, with its resin, is both a tribute to the value of love, and subtly permeates the chamber with the scents and colours of Lebanon. In 1.17 too the houses of the lovers are of cedars.54 And in 8.9 a cedar construction— palisade or plank—reinforces or frames the door of the Beloved. There it is both a masculine intrusion and a feminine assertion, whose ambiguities we shall explore when we investigate that passage in Chapter Three. In each case, then, cedar is bisexual—the house shared by lovers, the palanquin built by Solomon and paved by the daughters of Jerusalem, the adolescent girl whose changes are both physical and social. Likewise it is associated with both lovers in the Song: its appearance is masculine, mighty and imposing, its essence is feminine. Thus we come to the derivation of masculine from feminine imagery, as part of the reconstitution of the mother. Moreover, the context is familiar from our previous discussion: “Your lips drop honey, O bride; honey and milk are under your tongue, and the fragrance of your skirts is like the fragrance of Lebanon” (4.11). The kiss accompanies the image of Lebanon in 5.15–16 also: “His appearance is like Lebanon, choice as cedars. His palate is all sweets....” The cycle between mother and infant, breasts and lips, the craving for satisfaction, for the exploratory tongue, is cancelled out by this relaxed participation in the life of
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the mother, supported rhetorically by the slowing down of the line: “And the fragrance of your skirts is like the fragrance of Lebanon”. The previous verse, too, follows the same pattern: “How lovely are your caresses, my sister, my bride; how much better are your caresses than wine, and the fragrance of your oils than all spices” (4.10). Dionysiac intoxication, the flow of liquid between the lovers, gives way to quiet breathing. It is paralleled by 1.1–4, where it is the Lover whose caresses are better than wine, and whose ointments are sweet. We have another instance of the reciprocity of lovers. The scent of the clothes corresponds to the fragrance of the apples in 7.9; there, likewise, the continuity of breathing, that flows uninterrupted between and through their lives, sustains and validates the accompanying orgasm; their momentary encounter is also a lasting concord. 7.8–10, with its intensity and dissipation, matches 4.8–11 in relation to the previous wasf; in both there is a sudden image of fragrance. Aggression is in search of tranquillity; to return to our primal idyll, the quietness of fawns feeding off lilies. We have come to the turning of many ways. We have discerned various inversions of imagery: the breasts as fawns, the man’s lips as lilies; each lover discovers himself intricately constellated in the other. The sustenance of life passes from the lilies to the fawns, from the female to the male, and thence back to the Beloved; there is a cycle, an unfailing spring. The Beloved sits under the apple tree; its delight is breathed by the Lover in 7.9. The differentiating features in 7.5–6 conceal and permit the interaction of king and kingdom, the discourse of fawns and lilies in 7.3–4. The rapprochement of lovers, the confusion of selves, as more and more complexes of images are built, leaves their essential identities untouched, and diffused. The milk passes from the mother to the lover and back again; both lovers seek in the other their first love, their mother. For the Beloved the sheltering apple is predominantly maternal, combining sex and suckling, as do the Lover’s lips. There is a general metamorphosis of imagery; the lilies feed the fawns, feminine fragrance is concealed in masculine appearance, as we have seen in the case of Lebanon. For both lovers derive from and reconstitute the primordial bisexual mother, the ambivalent archetype to which we now turn. NOTES 1. Krinetzki’s 1981 commentary had not yet appeared when I wrote this chapter; in it the perceptions of his 1970 article are applied in depth to the exegesis of the Song. 2. 1970: 406. This however is common ground between Freudians and Jungians (see, for example, Freud (1933: 147–9) (“On the Psychology of Women”).
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3. 415–16. He constructs it, however, out of an array of not always convincing phallic images, often drawn from Jung’s more abstruse alchemical researches, e.g. the identification of red lilies with masculinity and white lilies with femininity (1963, 265). 4. Rosemary Gordon (1978: 173) defines the collective unconscious as “the communal and collective heritage of the species, man”, containing “impulses, dreams and fantasies ... characteristic of man in general”. Fordham (145) contrasts the collective unconscious, which is equivalent to the archetypal shadow of an individual, with the conscious expressions of a society; it is often that which society denies in itself, and is potentially subversive. It is essentially a cultural acquisition, not an innate inheritance; this has been the source of much misunderstanding. 5. Falk (1982: 86) comments somewhat acerbically on the general attribution to a male poet; Lys (10) considers composition by a woman a possibility, an opinion widespread among biblical feminists. There is no decisive evidence, nor does it substantially affect the interpretation. In this work, however, I have related to a male poet, fictively identified with Solomon, who is beyond the threshold of the poetic world he contemplates; this is perhaps only relevant to my conclusion, considering 8.13–14. 6. Levinger (64) notes the slowness the repeated “I” contributes to the verse; Krinetzki (1981: 160) suggests that the stress marks her disappointment and grief, and observes that it is followed by “my love”, the occasion of grief, repeated in successive words: “I opened to love, but my love had vanished, gone ...” Pope (1976: 521), however, finds no evidence of stress in the redundancy, merely late Hebrew usage, citing Ecclesiastes. In Ecclesiastes, however, superfluous phraseology, and especially the repeated stress on “I”, is rhetorically very powerful, communicating the solipsistic and loquacious universe the speaker inhabits. Pope gives no reason for his dismissiveness. 7. Gerleman (201) and Rudolph (174) read “love” as “the loved one”, following the Vulgate. One need not take it as an abstraction for the Beloved, with Pope (1976: 632). As Gordis (1976: 96) says, it is “best taken as an apostrophe to the love-experience itself”. The frequent emendation of “among delights” to “daughter of delights” (e.g. Pope 1976: 632; J. B. White 47) is plausible but hardly necessary. On the basis of this verse, Fox (1981) suggests that the word “‘ahabâ” is ambiguous, as in English, and may be an endearment. He draws a dubious parallel with Egyptian MRWT. 8. The palanquin, though made for himself, is clearly linked by the context to Solomon’s wedding; with Winandy (1965) etc. I hold it to be parallel to Solomon’s bed in 3.7, associated through the ambiguous question “who is this?” with the Beloved. 9. Pope (1976: 408) and Gordis (1974: 83–84) assume that the phrase “until the day blows and the shadows flee” refers to the morning twilight, since they consider the context to betoken love-making. This, however, is unargued. Lys (130–32), after deliberating lengthily whether the shadows are those that stretch in the evening or disperse in the morning, contributes the original and elegant consideration that the scene (2.8–17) that this verse concludes is an invitation to a country walk, and could hardly be at night. Krinetzki (1964: 139–40) perceives, brilliantly, a metaphorical link between the flight of the deer and the fleeing shadows. 10. The relationship of art and architecture to the mother has been most extensively explored by Adrian Stokes (e.g. 1965, 1972), who illuminatingly alludes, for example, to the importance of the unitary breast principle in early Renaissance art (1965: 21–22), or to the varying significance of smoothness and roughness (e.g. “Smooth and Rough” 1972: 72). See especially his essay “Art and the Sense of Rebirth”, 1972: 67–78.
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11. Cf. Fox (“Love, Passion, and Perception”: 12–14) whose analysis of the technique of the wasf is similar to mine. For Fox, the images communicate a metaphysics of love, a universal eros. He pays little attention, however, to their symbolic connotations, nor to the complex relationship between the parts of the body, with their attendant comparisons, in other words to overall structure. Falk (1982: 80–84) rightly maintains that the images of the wasfs are no more absurd than those of, for example, metaphysical and modern poetry, and biblical critics who have dismissed them as bizarre merely betray their own insensitivity. For a survey of interpretative follies, see Soulen (1967). Falk claims that only a little imaginative empathy is required to see the point of the images, and that most are visual though a few (e.g. our simile in 4.5) are tactile. This, however, is to limit them sensorily—in that often the comparison is exceedingly complex—and emotively, in that it denies the relative independence of their ostensible subject that Fox well defines. 12. As Jakobson argues (1960: 370) this is perhaps characteristic of poetry in general. 13. Cf. E. Kane “The Personal Appearance of Juan Ruiz” (106–7): “Most interesting of all these erotic folk beliefs is that which associates length of the nose with the proportions of the male generative member”, and the further discussion by Dunn (81–82). I owe both these references to Dr Gutwirth. Ehrenzweig (1965: 210–12) provides some amusing examples. 14. Pope (1976: 470) astutely remarks on an implication of youthfulness in the image (cf. Krinetzki 1981: 137); his suggestion that the breasts are small by analogy with the fawns is not impossible if a little too literal. 15. Pope (1976: 470) deletes “who feeds among the lilies” to conform to the parallel verse in 7.4; he holds that it has mistakenly been borrowed from 2.16–17. His objection to the image is not clear; he says nothing more than that there is “something wrong” with it. It is a good example of the technique whereby an image develops a life of its own, and is “presentational” as well as “representational”, as Fox contends. 16. The comparison of the relationship of the fawns to the doe with that of the breasts to the beauty is well-perceived by Chouraqui (57), for whom the image expresses ideas of fecundity, maternity, beauty and innocence. 17. The “sˇôsˇannaˆ ”, like the “h . abas.s.elet” that is bracketed with it in 2.1, has not been conclusively identified. As Falk (1976: 214) sagely avers, “The particular flowers she calls herself are not important”. This sentence is missing from her 1982 volume, where she claims that the identification of the flowers is crucial to the understanding of 2.1–2 (114–15), but fails to specify how, except that they are common wildflowers. Gerleman (116) cites Dalman’s opinion that “sˇôsˇannaˆ ” is a generic term for any flower with a calyx. The most widespread view is that of Feliks (28), that it is the “lilium candidum” “as the most beautiful, largest and most fragrant of the flowers of Israel”. The objection is raised by Pope (1976: 368), that the “lilium candidum” is not red, and hence is inadequate as a metaphor for the Lover’s lips; against this, Feliks considers that the analogy is of smell, not colour. Moreover, he is constrained to distinguish between “sˇ ôsˇannaˆ ” and the “sˇôsˇannaˆ ” and the “sˇôsˇannaˆ ha¯ ‘ama¯qîm”, since the “lilium candidum” does not grow in valleys. One would have thought, however, that shape and colour are the most distinctive qualities of lips. Pope’s suggestion that the “sˇôsˇannaˆ ” is to be identified with the Egyptian “sˇ sˇ ˇsn”, the sacred lotus or water-lily, is attractive, and supported by much evidence of its symbolic sexual import, both near (e.g. Canaanite Astarte plaques) and far. Nevertheless, the
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naturalism does suggest the Israeli landscape (“lily of the valleys” etc.), where the lotus did not grow, except perhaps in the Jordan Valley. Another suggestion, that it is the “anemone” (Robert and Tournay 436 and Wittekindt: 94f.) has generally fallen into disfavour, since the anemone is of little fragrance (Lys: 100). 18. As Krinetzki observes, citing Budde, the long-drawn-out corresponding syllables articulate the dropping of the honey (1981: 143; 1964: 168). The verbal metaphor is enriched by alliteration and assonance: the repeated unvoiced labio-dental fricatives /f/ and /s´/ in “no¯fet tit.t.o¯fnâ s´iftôtayik” “Your lips drop honey” trickle past the teeth and lips; the hard dental plosive /t. / separates the syllables; the stressed compact /o/ rounds them, supported by the narrow unstressed drift of the /i/s: “no¯fet tit.t.o¯fnâ s´iftôtayik ...” 19. Rudolph (150) soberly comments “Die Zungenkuss spielt in der ‘ars amandi’ vielen Völker eine grosse Rolle”. 20. The best discussion is by Krinetzki (1981: 144). Falk (1982: 104) considers that “milk and honey” is a fixed oral pair. Lys (186) citing Dussaud, adduces El’s dream of the wadis flowing with honey as a portent of Baal’s resurrection in the Baal-Anat Cycle (UT 49.111. 6–7, 12–13), to suggest that “milk and honey” have paradisal connotations. Avishur (516) sees wine and honey (npt) and oil and honey (npt) as conventional pairs, both in Ugaritic and Hebrew, and links wine in 4.10b with oil in 4.10c and honey in 4.11; he rightly points out that 4.10 and 4.11 are parallel tricola, and thus stylistically closer to Ugaritic. The exampla are not entirely unconvincing, since they are very few (two from Ugaritic, one from Proverbs), and unsurprising. 21. Krinetzki (1981: 169–170) compares 5.13 to the description of the Beloved as the spice-garden in 4.12–5.1, and thence to the feminine archetypal image of the vessel; he perceives also the infantile correlate, identifying the Lover with the “puer aeternus” who arouses the Beloved’s maternal instincts. He notes too that the lips are closely linked to the genitalia, and proposes that manly youth and beauty derive from the archetype of the “Great Mother”, suggesting this as an element in paedophilia. 22. Most commentators follow the Versions in reading “mgdlt” as a participle “growing” rather than as a noun “migdelôt” “towers”, with the MT (Pope 1976: 540; Gordis 1974: 91; Lys: 225 etc.). NEB and others plausibly interpret “migdelôt” as “chests”, following Mishnaic usage (Jastrow, Dictionary: 726). In either case, the essential comparison of the lover’s cheeks with spices is unaffected. Gerleman (175), in line with his theory that the images of the wasfs are specific references to Egyptian conventions, explicates the towers as spice-cones worn at Egyptian feasts; it is of no consequence to him that spice-cones were worn on the head whereas the simile describes the cheeks (Pope 1976: 540; Krinetzki 1981: 279 n.397), since it is a literary “topos” to which incidental details are irrelevant. Levinger (70) provides no firm evidence for his contention that “migdal” may mean “balcony”, clearly designed to conform to the extended metaphor he perceives between the Lover and a temple; the cheeks would comprise a window-box. There is a beautiful paronomasia between “da¯gûl me¯reba¯bâ” (DGL MR) “choice above ten thousand” in 5.10 and “migdelôt merqa¯hîm” (GDL MR) in our verse. 23. Falk (1976: 214) derives an insinuation of toughness from the image; she is a plant that grows on all soils. Krinetzki (1981: 88) considers that the metaphor is an unassuming comparison with common wildflowers; hers is not an outstanding beauty. In 2.2, the Lover contradicts this. Falk’s present interpretation (1982: 115) is very similar (cf. Rudolph: 129). Both of these interpretations lack the sensuous directness that is the primary quality of the
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image: the delicate loveliness of the flower, the familiar miracle of the spring, with its transience, combining pathos and uniqueness. 24. The fruit in question is uncertain. Apples did not grow wild in Ancient Israel; on the other hand, the same objection militates against the apricot (NEB), citron, and other fruits variously suggested. The quince, proposed in a note by Marcia Falk (1982: 115), is odourless (cf. 7.9) and sour. Feliks (32) suggests that it is a species of crab-apple with an unusually pleasant smell. Gerleman (116) and Rudolph (130) raise the possibility that the apple tree is precious because of its rarity. 25. The association is quite common in Romantic poetry, as illustrated in abundance by Praz. A wonderful 20th-century parallel is from Lorca’s poem “Amnon y Thamar”, in which Tamar is described as “agudo norte de palma” (“sharp pole-star of palm”—tr. Gili and Spender). 26. For the latter interpretation (cf. “kerem zayit” “olive grove” in Jud. 15.5), see Pope (1976: 354) and Feliks (49). Pope gives a short account of the archaeological excavations of the perfume industry at Ein Gedi. According to Gordis (1974: 80), however, it was famous for its vineyards (cf. Krinetzki 1981: 245 n.100). 27. Krinetzki (1981: 81–2) sees in the Dead Sea and the flourishing oasis a symbol of the coexistence of life and death, that cannot exist the one without the other. 28. The preposition “be” in “bekarmê ‘ên gedî” “in the vineyards of Ein Gedi” is open to the reading from as well as the more usual in (Lys: 92, Pope 1976: 354 etc.). I would suggest that the ambiguity combines both localities in the movement: the henna is simultaneously visualised in its natural habitat and in the Beloved’s possession. 29. Lys: 90 notes that a bag of myrrh (in fact a flask of spikenard or foliatum) is one of the items that a woman is forbidden to carry on the public domain on the Sabbath (Mishnah Shabbat 6.3). More or less all commentators mention the widespread use of this article; Pope remarks that it may still be bought (1976: 351). 30. Lys (91) suggests that the bag of myrrh is inseparable from the Beloved, worn at night when she is otherwise undressed. 31. Gordis (1974: 84) and Schoville (1970: 96–7), for example, interpret “yap” as “face”. The less sober suggestion is that of Pope (1976: 636–7), who thinks it may refer to the vulva or clitoris, on the grounds that in Ugaritic the metaphor of a nose (lap) may refer to a city gate (2 Aqht V: 4–5). In Ugaritic, “‘ap” is attested as a term for the nipple, and this is more possible (Dahood: 1976). Nevertheless, if there is an extended metaphor of a kiss in this passage, as most commentators suppose, the most natural reference would still be to the nose, as the part of the face adjacent to the mouth. 32. For the Egyptian category of nose-kiss cf. Gerleman: 203, J. B. White: 138. White believes the nose-kiss consists of breathing or sniffing round the partner’s nose. 33. Krinetzki (1964: 222) conceives that they are forced to breathe through their noses since their mouths are stopped with kisses. Against this view, which seems somewhat contrived, Pope (1976: 636) objects that one breathes through one’s nostrils the odour of the mouth. In his recent commentary, Krinetzki (1981: 201) has stressed the unification of the breath. 34. Levinger (83) sees a further allusion to “between my breasts he shall lie” in 1.13 in “And may your breasts be like clusters of grapes” in 7.9. Now he responds to her wish. 35. 7.10 is a problematic verse, because of the change of speaker in the middle. Gerleman (203) objects that this is unexampled in the Song, though 4.16 is possibly analogous. Gerleman accordingly redivides the sentences after “like fine wine”; considers
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that another comparison with wine is missing; and joins 7.1Ob to 7.11. Others drop “dôdî” “my love” (e.g. Pope 1976: 639), change it (e.g. to “lî” “to me”: Rudolph: 174), repoint it (e.g. “dôday” “my caresses”: Krinetzki 1981: 198), or reinterpret it (e.g. Gordis 1974: 97, who considers it to be a plural i.e. “flowing for lovers”, or Schoville (1970: 98), who reads it as a Phoenician third-person suffix). There is no real objection to the change of speaker, however; cf. Lys (269) and J. B. White (132). Fox (“Love, Passion and Perception”: 5) cites this as “a prime example of how the lovers’ words balance each other”. 36. The clarity of visual description is accentuated by the chiastic keyword “beautiful” that links the beginning of the wasf with the end. Nearly all critics, however, regard 7.7 as the beginning of the following sequence, but without explication. In view of the exact parallel with the wasf of chapter 4, that begins “Behold, you are beautiful, my friend” (4.1), and ends “You are entirely beautiful, my friend” (4.7), this is quite unjustified. A similar inclusion is to be found in the wasf of 5.10–16 (cf. Introduction p. 45). 37. The obscurity is increased by the hapax legomenon “dôbe¯b”. The common interpretations are “flowing/stirring” (from ZWB) and the factitive “causing to murmur” from Aram. DBB “murmur” (cf. Jastrow, Dictionary: 226 for Talmudic and Midrashic usage, and Pope 1976: 643, for the alternative interpretations). Both are possible, though the first is simpler, and fits both meanings of “ysˇnym”. Many critics follow the Sept. reading of “teeth” for MT “yesˇe¯nîm” “sleepers”; some attempt to adapt it to the MT, through enclitic Mems and the like. Pope (1976: 641) quotes a good suggestion by D.N. Freedman that the Yod before “sˇnym” be changed to Waw. Both readings are possible, though the MT “sleepers” is more interesting. 38. The Midrash and Rashi, following the allegorical interpretation, consider the “sleepers” to be the “dead”. Pope (1976: 641) adopts this reading, and proposes that the reference is to libations to ancestors, since it suits his theory that the Song originated in funeral feasts. 39. Lys (269) and Gordis (1974: 97) hold that the predicate of “yesˇe¯nîm” is the lovers, presumably after their love has been satisfied; Levinger (84) considers it to be a conceit— extravagant in my view—for motionless lips. Goitein (1957: 289) remarks very beautifully that her wine “awakens the Lover to dream for ever of his Beloved”. One may well associate wine and sleep, not to mention sleeping together. The referent of “yesˇ e¯nîm” “sleepers” may be the lovers, in their mutual embrace; or it may be all lovers, as in 5.1, indulging in the wine that here stimulates their dreams; or it may be all those who are unawakened by love, as in 8.5. Delitzsch’s comment, cited by Pope (1976: 641), that drinking in sleep is unknown takes the metaphor too literally: nor is the referent of palate, namely kisses, inappropriate, as Pope surmises. Kisses may be dreamt, whether “dôbe¯b” be taken to mean flowing over lips or causing them to murmur. 40. Rashi expresses his astonishment as follows: “I cannot interpret this as a nose, neither literally nor metaphorically, for what sort of praise is this to say that she has a nose as large and erect as a tower? Therefore, I say, “‘appek” is an expression for the face”. Falk (1982: 127) interprets it similarly. However, Ibn Ezra, who had seen minarets, remarks that it is “a straight nose, without defects”. 41. Krinetzki (1964: 216) linked the root meaning of Lebanon i.e. “white” with the colour of the ivory tower. Her remote beauty is reinforced by the snow-covered peaks. The suggestion is ingenious, if a little recherche. He has abandoned this interpretation in his recent commentary (1981: 191), where he stresses the aggressiveness of the image. Rudolph (173) considers that it may be a peak of Lebanon, and not a tower.
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42. Cf. the articles on mediaeval chiromancy cited in n.29; the extraordinary attention with which antisemites scrutinise Jewish noses, connected with the fantasy of Jewish potency; the supposed nobility of Roman noses; the dominance of noses in cartoons. There is a splendid discussion and illustration of this in Ehrenzweig (1965: 213–14). 43. Also the nasal sounds /m/ and /n/, especially when they are non-phonemic i.e. purely emotive in function. /n/ for example tends to be associated with anger. We say “mmm” to convey appetite or wonder. 44. Krinetzki (1964: 160). The mention of David, in Krinetzki’s current view (1971: 183 etc.), is one of the elements that serves to root the Song in a specifically Israelite and consequently religious setting. Though there may be a pun between “da¯ wîd” and “dôd”, this does not justify Lys’ translation “Tour-le-Cheri” (167). 45. For this practice see Ezekiel 27.10–11 (Pope 1976: 468). Only Levinger (53) raises the alternative provenance of the shields, whether they are captured from the enemy and hence displayed as a sign of victory, or else are hung in readiness by the troops, and thus a show of strength (53). Isserlin’s suggestion that the verse is an extended simile of a necklace, comparable to a statue at Arsos, is very attractive and has been widely adopted. 46. Levinger (80) suggests an alliterative connection between “s.ebiyyâ” “doe” and “s.awwa¯’re¯k” “your neck” to explain the omission of “ha¯rô’îm basˇ sˇôsˇannîm”. Refrains in the last two chapters are frequently condensed e.g. 7.11, 8.4 (cf. Introduction above). Furthermore, whereas the comparisons in the wasfs of ch. 4 and ch. 5 vary greatly in elaboration, those in ch. 7 are generally of two clauses each. 7.4 thus parallels 7.2b, 7.3a, 7.3b etc. Pope (1976: 624) suggests that the last phrase is omitted so as not to duplicate “hedged with lilies” at the end of the previous verse (in 4.5, however, he excises “who feed among the lilies” to correspond to 7.4:). However, “lilies” appear at the end of 6.2 and 6.3 without apparent awkwardness. 47. “The many geographic metaphors (Kedar, Heshbon, Tirzah, Engedi etc.), by their repetition, persistently suggest identifying the contour of the country with the body of the beloved” (Cook: 127) cf. Krinetzki (1964: 216). The geographical allegory is itemised in considerable detail by Robert and Tournay; for example, the two breasts are identified with Mt. Ebal and Gerizim. Clearly, there is no cartographical exactitude in the Song; it is no criticism to say with Pope (1976: 626) that the eyes are misplaced. For what we have is a set of peripheral geographical landmarks. Gerleman (195) sees them as indicative of the predominant royal travesty. 48. Gordis (1974: 96), Ibn Ezra and others suggest that “karmel” should be “karmîl” “crimson” (II Chron 2.6 etc.), corresponding with “‘argaman” “purple”. On the other hand, “Carmel” creates a far better visual image, in accord with the geographical sequence, contiguous with the sea and its produce. Levinger (80) believes there may be a deliberate pun between “karmîl” and “karmel”, as does Lys (263–4). 49. According to the Talmud (T. B. Sukkah 49a–b), the vagina of the Shekhinah— hence of the world and in particular the land of Israel—is the altar in Jerusalem. Robert and Tournay identify Jerusalem in this sequence with the navel or vulva of 7.3, basing themselves on such prophetic allusions as Eze 5.5, and the assumption that everything in the passage must have its geographic correlate. 50. Pope (1976: 630) writes that the emendations proposed for this phrase, especially the last word, are “scarcely worth reviewing”; “reha¯t.îm”, denoting “watering troughs” (Gen 30.38, 41, Ex 2.16) from Aram. RHT = run, is a straightforward metaphor for
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flowing or wavy hair, as Lys amusingly illustrates (265). Feliks (109), following some of the Versions, attaches the word “melek” “king” to the previous phrase i.e. “a king’s purple, bound with threads”—cf. also Krinetzki 1981: 191. Not only does this make the last colon too short, as Pope observes (1976: 630), but the previous one is lengthened impossibly, quite apart from the abysmal anticlimax. Levinger (81) suggests, rather beautifully, that “reha¯t.îm” and “ra¯h.ît.e¯nû” in 1.17 are variants of each other; that the runnels of “reha¯t.îm” merge with the light fretwork of 1.17, woven into the fringe of the hair of the previous phrase, to which this is in apposition. 51. Jacob, cited by Levinger (80), draws attention to a Palestinian custom of decorating sheaves with flowers; Feliks (107) states that harvested wheat is normally protected by thorns, and the lilies are indicative of her beauty (cf. 2.2). 52. Opinions are divided whether the rare word “sˇorere¯k” denotes “your navel” (cf. Eze 16.4, Prov 3.8) or “your vulva” (Arab. “s´irr”) cf. Pope (1976: 617). Krinetzki (1981: 192) suggests that the navel is a metonym for the entire genital region. The development of the image of the crater in which “the mingled wine may never be lacking” leads me to favour the second interpretation. 53. If the face symbolises the reality principle, the “face” we expose and submit to the world, the body represents the explosive pleasure principle, which we conceal under clothes (Paz 1975: 4). 54. For the suggestion that the wood is aromatic, see Feliks (33–34). 55. Pope (1976: 469) lists these; Gerleman (145) describes their elimination as pedantry. Schoville (1970: 75) notes that in Ugaritic the number often precedes the dual (e.g. for emphasis). As a zoologist, Feliks (14) observes that only one species of “sebî” commonly bears twins, namely the “gazella subgutturosa”, now extinct in Israel. 56. Pope (1976: 470) avers that the youthful fawns convey the small size of the “mammary orbs”, according to the ideals of Arabic pulchritude. Other references to breasts in the Song contradict this supposed predilection, as we have seen. 57. In the Dogon religion, for example, as recorded by Marcel Griaule, the first human beings were four sets of twins; only with the fall from perfection, the menstrual cycle, and mortality, did single births begin to occur. Twins thus are a sign of original perfection, and in consequence are loaded with propitiatory gifts. In the Nuer culture, twins are quasi-divine, like birds, mediating between earth and heaven (Lévi-Strauss 1969: 151–54). The Dioscuri, according to Jung, represent a duality of mortality and immortality (1959a: 121–2). Frazer, inevitably, produces a multitude of examples of uncertain value.
J . D A N I E L H AY S
Has the Narrator Come to Praise Solomon or to Bury Him?: Narrative Subtlety in 1 Kings 1–11
T
he Solomon narratives (1 Kgs 1–11) present a rather curious story. For the first ten chapters Solomon and his kingdom are extolled and their glories praised. Then, abruptly, in 1 Kings 11, the narrator condemns him, underscoring his flagrant idolatry. The two portrayals appear to be quite different; indeed, they seem to describe two very different individuals. One proposed solution to this schizophrenic narrative relationship is to view the differences as inherent to the sources that the final editor or redactor used. Proponents of this view would argue that most of the material the final (deuteronomistic) editor used in chs. 1–10 was pro-Solomonic, praising his deeds and actions. This ‘final’ editor, however, writing in light of the Babylonian captivity, then added his own assessment of Solomon, focusing on the disastrous idolatry of Solomon, idolatry being one of the key themes running throughout the final form of the book (1–2 Kings). The editor apparently made little effort to revise the viewpoint of the various proSolomonic sources that he incorporated into the first part of his work. Thus the contrast is explained. Another suggested solution is that the text, inconsistent as it seems, does actually reflect Solomon’s life. That is, Solomon was faithful to Yahweh until his old age, when his wives led him into idolatry. The abruptness of the text thus reflects an equally drastic change in Solomon’s historical life, as he
From Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 28, no. 2 (December 2003). ©2003 The Continuum Publishing Group, Ltd.
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turned quickly from walking faithfully with Yahweh to serving a multitude of foreign gods. In recent years several Old Testament scholars have been re-examining the literary structure of this unit, looking for structural clues to the problem. These writers have observed that some literary units in 1 Kings 1–11 appear to be parallel to other units. Several hypotheses relating to the structure of this unit have been suggested. Parker, for example, argues that 1 Kings 1–2 and 11.14–43 frame the story, but that the main unit extends from 3.1 to 11.13. In a chiastic arrangement, chs. 3–8 are paralleled by 9.1–11.14. The first unit is favorable to Solomon while the second unit is hostile.1 Brettler, on the other hand, proposes that there are three basic units: ‘Solomon’s accession to the throne’ (chs. 1–2), ‘Solomon serves Yahweh and is blessed’ (3.3–9.23), and ‘Solomon violates Deut. 17.14–17 and is punished’ (9.26–11.49).2 Both Parker and Brettler, however, structure their units around negative sections and positive sections, with the earlier sections being negative and the later sections being positive. Such analysis from a literary point of view is helpful and does point us in the right direction, but does not really answer all of the questions raised by this passage (as discussed below). Jobling also sees the narrative as consisting of a positive section (1 Kgs 3–10) bracketed by two negative sections (the bloodbath in 2.12–46, and the foreign women in ch. 11), but he disagrees with Parker, arguing instead that ch. 10 is likewise positive to Solomon. Jobling understands 1 Kings 3–10 as describing a ‘mythical’ ideal kingdom, a Golden Age narrative similar to this genre in other cultures. He does note some tension in the Golden Age section between the unconditional blessings of Yahweh (based on the Davidic Covenant of 2 Sam. 7) and the conditional Deuteronomic blessings, but he argues that the unconditional aspects subvert the conditional ones so that the Golden Age comes across as truly glorious. Jobling then tries to connect the positive picture in 1 Kings 3–10 with idealized economics while connecting the ‘fall’ in 1 Kings 11 to foreign, externally related sexuality, which he notes is symbolically absent from the Golden Age.3 Recent works from the fields of narrative criticism and feminist criticism have likewise underscored the inadequacy of traditional approaches to the Solomon narratives. They have highlighted numerous textual ambiguities and surface contradictions. For example, Gunn and Fewell draw upon the Solomon narratives to illustrate irony and ambiguity. They point out numerous events in the Solomon narratives that raise questions and doubts (and perhaps outrage the shadow of David’s affair with Bathsheba and her role in the succession of Solomon, Solomon’s questionable piety and his true attitude toward the temple, Solomon’s ‘walk’ in the statutes of David
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except for his sacrifices at the high places, the treatment and fate of Abishag, Solomon’s sin and punishment contrasted with that of Jezebel, and the implications relating to Solomon’s failure to marry the Queen of Sheba.4 However, although Gunn and Fewell help to point out the tensions in the Solomon narratives, as well as the problems with reading these narratives along traditional lines, they do not really offer an overall approach to interpreting these tensions. Lasine, on the other hand, does offer an overall approach, although it appears inadequate. First of all, he notes the wide and disparate range of conclusions that scholars propose in regard to Solomon. He then suggests that this phenomenon reflects the actual ‘indeterminacy’ of the text itself. Lasine moves beyond the recognition of ambiguity and gaps that Sternberg,5 Fewell and Gunn point out, proposing that the text is intentionally indeterminate. Lasine argues that the narratives intentionally ‘hide’ Solomon from the reader, ‘encouraging a variety of subjective responses to the texts’.6 Yet Lasine appears to overlook the role of irony and ambiguity in the story as a whole. For example, he discusses the different ways to view Solomon’s marriage to the daughter of Pharaoh. He notes that from a deuteronomistic view such a marriage can be condemned, but that in light of the practices in other ancient Near Eastern monarchies such a marriage would be acceptable, even laudable. Thus, Lasine argues, the portrayal is ambiguous and indeterminate.7 However, as I argue below, it seems much more plausible to understand this contrast in views as part of the very point that the narrator is making. Israel is not to be like the other nations. What is ‘laudable’ in other monarchies is ‘detestable’ to Yahweh when it violates the deuteronomistic decrees. The narrator uses irony precisely to make this point, which is indeed determinate, once the irony is noticed. Another work that highlights the inadequacies of early treatments of Solomon, pointing out ambiguities and tensions throughout the story, yet then proposing an overall approach to the book that incorporates these tensions, is Camp’s recent thought-provoking book Wise, Strange and Holy. Instead of interpreting Solomon through the lenses of Deuteronomy, as I suggest, she proposes to read Solomon through the lenses of Proverbs. She places the narrative in the later post-exilic time within a ‘wisdom’ context, noting that the central themes ‘woman wisdom’ and ‘the strange/foreign woman’ of Proverbs are likewise central themes in the Solomon narratives. Her work analyzes the intricate interaction between these two themes. In so doing, while working off of a different interpretive framework than I do, she does observe many of the same textual ironies that this study addresses.8
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A few of the more recent commentaries on 1 Kings, especially those influenced by narrative criticism, have also noted that the negative assessment of Solomon is not restricted to ch. 11, but that there are numerous negative statements about Solomon scattered throughout 1 Kings 1–10. However, none of them actually develops the theme. Thus Fretheim, for example, writes, ‘This break [between chs. 10 and 11] is not as stark as at first appears; the narrator does prepare the reader in chs. 2–10 for the “fall” in chapter 11’. Nelson alludes to a ‘dark undercurrent’ in these texts as a ‘counter-theme’. Likewise, Brueggemann writes, ‘In the judgment of this narrative, Solomon is quite a mixed bag of worldly success and Torah failure’.9 Indeed, narrative criticism has alerted us not only to structural features, but also to the possibility of sub-surface features such as irony and subtlety.10 Out of this narrative reading context I propose an alternative approach to interpreting the Solomonic narratives. I would like to suggest that the narrator is not really praising Solomon at all in 1 Kings 1–10.11 On the surface of the text, especially when read out of context, the narrator does seem to heap praise after praise on Solomon and the realm that he built. However, I will argue that there are numerous clues that suggest to us that perhaps the narrator is playing literary games with his readers. He may be openly and overtly praising Solomon on the surface, but he does not tell the story with a straight face, and if we look closely, we see him winking at us. On the surface the text glorifies the spectacular reign of Solomon. The point of many details in the text is to impress the reader with the glory of Solomon and his reign. However, below the surface another theme lurks, quietly and ironically pointing out some serious inconsistencies and some serious problems that the surface story glosses over.12 We as readers are given a tour of a fantastic, spectacular and opulent mansion. Everywhere we look we see wealth and quality. However, without changing the inflection of his voice the tour guide points out places where the façade has cracked, revealing a very different structure. Continuing with the standard speech which glorifies the building, the guide nonetheless makes frequent side comments and uses nuances that let us know that his glowing praise for the structure is not really his honest opinion of the facility, and he wants us also to see the truth. Finally, at the end of the tour, he can restrain himself no more, and he tells us plainly that the building is basically a fraud, covered with a thin veneer of glitz and hoopla, and soon will collapse under its own weight. This is the manner in which the narrator of 1 Kings leads us on a tour of the House of Solomon. Now let us examine the evidence and see if we can substantiate such a position. First of all, in validating any interpretive position, context is a
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critical factor. The books of 1 and 2 Kings are books describing the history of Israel from a theological perspective. The central question driving the story in these two books is whether or not the monarchy, and thus also the people, will keep the law and follow Yahweh.13 The answer to this question is, of course, ‘no’. The initial readers stand in the exile—the monarchy is gone, the land is lost, and the temple has been destroyed. Thus 1 Kings 1–11 must be read within the context of 2 Kings 25, where the final destruction of Jerusalem and the temple are described. The broader context, but one no less important, is formed by the books of Deuteronomy and 1–2 Samuel. Regardless of the variety of views regarding the details of the composition of 1–2 Kings, there is a fairly strong consensus that Deuteronomy (and 1–2 Samuel) forms a critical background for understanding the books. Deuteronomy is the expression of the law and covenant relationship that forms the criteria by which the kings and the nation are evaluated. Likewise the words of Samuel and the life of David add to the criteria by which the narrator judges the history of Yahweh’s people in 1–2 Kings. The methodology which I am suggesting in this study is one in which we reread 1 Kings 1–11 very carefully within the context of Deuteronomy and 1–2 Samuel. The narrator, I suggest, does not make explicit references back to these books, but he does make numerous implicit references. Thus, while on the surface he may seem to be praising Solomon, to those who hold Deuteronomy in their hands as they listen it becomes clear that he is often critical of Solomon’s reign. This is narrative subtlety, or perhaps irony.14 The clearest illustration of this is in regard to Deut. 17.14–20. This text is especially pertinent because it describes the requirements that the law placed on the king. Besides exhorting the king to read the law carefully all the days of his life (17.18–20), this text also states the following: Be sure to appoint over you the king Yahweh your God chooses ... The king, moreover, must not acquire great numbers of horses for himself or make the people return to Egypt to get them, for Yahweh has told you, ‘You are not to go back that way again’. He must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray. He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold. (Deut. 17.15–17) So Deuteronomy stressed that Yahweh himself must select the king. Furthermore, this text prohibited three things for the king. First, the king was not to accumulate large numbers of horses, especially from Egypt. These
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are probably to be understood as chariot horses, for which Egypt was famous. Second, he was not to accumulate many wives, and third, he was not to accumulate large quantities of gold and silver. Is the narrator of 1 Kings aware of these prohibitions? Note the following text in 1 Kgs 10.26–29: Solomon accumulated chariots and horses; he had fourteen hundred chariots and twelve thousand horses, which he kept in the chariot cities and also with him in Jerusalem. The king made silver as common in Jerusalem as stones, and cedar as plentiful as sycamore-fig trees in the foothills. Solomon’s horses were imported from Egypt and from Kue ... (1 Kgs 10.26–29) The narrator mentions that Solomon accumulated horses (12,000 of them), that he made silver to be common, and that he imported the horses from Egypt.15 Moreover, the next several verses (11.1–3) delineate his disregard of the prohibition against accumulating many wives. So, at least four aspects of Deuteronomy 17 are mentioned in close proximity. Clearly the narrator is making allusions to the Deuteronomy 17 prohibitions.16 Furthermore, note the literary style of the allusions. The narrator does not begin an overtly negative description of Solomon until ch. 11. At the end of ch. 10 he is still ‘praising’ Solomon. Indeed, in 10.23 he proclaims, ‘King Solomon was greater in riches and wisdom than all the other kings of the earth’. Within this context of proclaiming Solomon’s greatness the narrator boasts of Solomon’s numerous chariot horses, casually mentioning that he paid for these horses out of his vast silver hoards. Furthermore he seems to brag that Solomon acquired the horses from Egypt. This, I suggest, is not a praise of Solomon, but rather a subtle, yet serious, indictment. ‘Look how great Solomon was’, the narrator says on the surface. ‘He was great in violating Yahweh’s law’, the narrator is really saying, right below the surface. This observed subtlety is important because it establishes in a clear text that the narrator does indeed employ this type of subtle critique as a literary style. Therefore, we can justify the approach of going back into the first ten chapters of the Solomon narratives and looking for other subtle hints of covenant violation or of impropriety on the part of Solomon and his ‘glorious’ kingdom. From the very beginning of the Solomon narratives, things seem to be rather suspicious, at least from a theological point of view. Indeed, the entire Succession Narrative of Solomon is characterized by political intrigue and royal court power struggles.17 The narrator gives us a substantial amount of
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detail describing this intrigue. Numerous characters play significant roles: David, Nathan, Zadok, Bathsheba, Benaiah, Adonijah, Joab, Abiathar and the beautiful young Abishag. However, missing from this list is the central character from 1–2 Samuel, Yahweh.18 Yahweh says nothing and does nothing (at least not overtly) in Solomon’s rise to power.19 Nowhere in the story of Solomon’s succession to the throne does the narrative include anything at all resembling Yahweh’s direct selection of Solomon.20 Nathan the prophet has a conversation with Bathsheba (1.11–14) and with David (1.24–27) concerning the succession to the throne and he does not argue in either case that Solomon should be the next king because Yahweh has selected him. The argument that Nathan and Bathsheba use to persuade David is to remind him of an oath that he supposedly made to Bathsheba that her son Solomon would be the next king.21 Whether David actually made the pledge or whether he is simply senile,22 this argument works and David proclaims, ‘I will surely carry out today what I swore to you by Yahweh, the God of Israel: Solomon your son shall be king after me, and he will sit on my throne in my place’ (1.30). Neither David, Nathan the prophet, nor Zadok the priest inquires of Yahweh in the matter. Indeed David seems to rely solely on his own authority in the matter as he states in 1.35, ‘I have appointed (hw( literally “to command”) him ruler over Israel and Judah’. In addition, David repeatedly refers to the throne as ‘my throne’ (1.30, 35, also in the oath attributed to David, cited in 1.13 and 1.17).23 Glaringly absent from David’s proclamation is any reference to the fact that Yahweh chose Solomon to be the next king. Indeed, Yahweh’s voice in this part of the story emerges only as David charges Solomon with keeping the decrees, commands, laws and requirements of Yahweh. At this point David quotes Yahweh, ‘If your descendants watch how they live, and if they walk faithfully before me with all their heart and soul, you will never fail to have a man on the throne of Israel’. The only speech by Yahweh in the Succession Narrative is that of an ominous warning about being unfaithful to Yahweh, a condition that the new king Solomon will ultimately fail to keep. Thus we see that the opening events in 1 Kings 1–2 are somewhat questionable in regard to presenting Solomon in a positive light.24 Fretheim notes a similar phenomenon, and he cites three additional ‘subtle reservations’ that the narrator introduces into this section: Benaiah’s misgivings regarding the violation of the sanctuary to kill Joab (2.28–30), Bathsheba’s support of Adonijah’s request and Solomon’s resultant anger and immediate reneging on the promise he had made to her (2.19–24), and ‘Shimei’s seemingly innocent violation of the agreement with Solomon’
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(2.39–43) which resulted in his death. ‘The narrator’, Fretheim continues, ‘seems to have introduced enough ambiguity into the account of Solomon’s actions to stop the reader from simply adopting an unquestioning stance toward what he has done... One wonders why the narrator found it necessary to be critical in relatively subtle ways.’25 In 1 Kings 3 Yahweh actually appears to Solomon and endows him with wisdom. This appearance would form the strongest support that Yahweh had indeed chosen Solomon and that Solomon was truly and faithfully worshipping Yahweh in his early years. However, as in 1 Kings 1–2 this chapter likewise contains several negative references that serve to taint the rosy picture of Solomon that might otherwise emerge. Indeed, the statement in 3.1 should explode like a bombshell in the reader’s mind, ‘Solomon made an alliance with Pharaoh king of Egypt and married his daughter’. Egypt almost always has negative connotations in the Old Testament. Brueggemann underscores the negative connotation of this passage, writing, ‘Egypt is a term in Israelite memory and tradition that bespeaks brutality, exploitation, and bondage, the demeaning of the human spirit, and the suppression of covenantal relations. Indeed, Israelite memory concerning Yahweh is that the taproot of faith and life is emancipation from Pharaoh.’26 Furthermore, note that the name of the pharaoh is not given. Brueggemann suggests that this anonymity connects him emotionally to the pharaoh of the exodus, who was also left unnamed. Solomon has ‘allied himself with Pharaoh, the antithesis of everything Israelite ... and the marriage signals Solomon’s deliberate departure from what traditional Israel treasured most’?27 Furthermore, 3.1 also informs the reader that this marriage took place early in Solomon’s reign—he brought Pharaoh’s daughter to Jerusalem before the temple was completed.28 This marriage, perhaps one of Solomon’s most serious mistakes, occurs at the beginning of his reign and not at the end. Note that the main contextual subject of this part of the story revolves around the high places (twmk), mentioned in 3.2, 3 and 4. It is suggestive to note the close proximity of Solomon’s foreign wife to the statement that Solomon worshipped at the high places, particularly in light of this close connection in the indictment against Solomon in ch. 11. Note the similarity between 3.1–3 and 11.1–8.29 In 3.1–3, the narrator mentions that Solomon marries the daughter of Pharaoh, that he loves Yahweh, and that he and the people offer sacrifices and incense at the high places at this point these ‘high places’ are vague and not at all specific. In 11.1–8, by contrast, the narrator tells the readers that not only did Solomon marry the daughter of Pharaoh, but also that he married a multitude of foreign women in direct violation of
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Yahweh’s command. As mentioned above, now he loves his wives instead of loving Yahweh. As a result he and his wives offer sacrifices and burn incense at the twmb or high places, only now the high places are clearly described as dedicated to Chemosh and Molech, and Solomon not only worshipped here—he constructed these worship sites. Can this similarity be accidental? Does it not seem likely that the narrator has so placed these references in ch. 3 so as to give an ominous foreshadowing of the terrible things to come? Solomon does not wait until ch. 11 to start his downward slide. He starts off already quite some way down the slide; ch. 11 merely describes the clear impact at the bottom. Keep in mind that Solomon lived in Jerusalem where the tabernacle and the ark were located. This location represented the presence of Yahweh. Why would Solomon travel away from the ark to offer sacrifice to Yahweh? Ironically, the altar in the tabernacle of Yahweh has been mentioned in the near vicinity of these verses, but not in regard to Solomon’s worship. Back in 2.28–34 Joab fled to this altar for protection. Solomon, remember, orders Benaiah to slay him anyway. The grammar of 3.3 is perhaps the strongest indicator that the high places may be negative. The text states, ‘Solomon showed his love for Yahweh by walking according to the statutes of his father David, except that he offered sacrifices and burned incense on the high places’. The Hebrew adverb qr introduces a restrictive clause, presenting an exception or a clarification of the clause before it.30 It carries a nuance in this passage of ‘however’, or ‘on the other hand’. So, clearly the implication of this ‘however’ or ‘except’ is that, from the beginning, Solomon is following some questionable worship practices. The fact the narrator mentions this rather nonchalantly only underscores his use of irony. So, it is possible that the narrator is being subtle and perhaps a bit sarcastic in 3.1–3. Solomon shows his ‘love’ for Yahweh in the context of marriage to Pharaoh’s daughter. He shows his love by following in the footsteps of his father David, with all the accompanying ambiguities. And he shows his love by sacrificing at the high places, which David never did. Yet most would argue that the following episode (3.4–15) is a very positive portrayal of Solomon. While at Gibeon Yahweh appeared to Solomon in a dream, and was pleased to honor Solomon’s request for wisdom. Yahweh likewise promised wealth and honor. Obviously Solomon had responded to Yahweh in a way that was pleasing to Yahweh and this passage does show Solomon in a positive light. However, this passage also contains a few hints of the trouble to come. In 3.9 Solomon did not specifically ask for wisdom, but he asked literally for a ‘hearing heart’
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(kl(m#) so that he can discern between good and evil (kl+ and (d). Yahweh promised him a wise ($$Mbh) and discerning (Nyb) heart (bl). The focus of the term ‘heart’ (bl, bbl) was not only on the emotions, but also more particularly on the function of decision-making. For Yahweh the attitude of the heart was critical. When he selected David in 1 Sam. 16.7 Yahweh stated that mortals looks with the eyes but he looks at the heart. After promising Solomon a wise and discerning heart, Yahweh then repeated the Deuteronomic stipulations: ‘if you keep my statutes and commandments then I will give you long life’. Brueggemann notes that it is ‘not enough that Solomon make a good choice at the outset. He must make a good choice all along the way, the choice of listening and obeying, for it is in choosing obediently that Israel and its king choose life.’31 Fretheim notes that in this passage Solomon himself, in effect, ‘sets the standard by which his own rule will be judged, finally, in negative terms’.32 The description of the gift that Yahweh gave to Solomon in ch. 3 is focused on his heart. In ch. 11 the reader finds out that the heart of Solomon was precisely the main problem. Indeed, in 11.4 the word heart occurs three times: Solomon’s wives turned his heart toward other gods, and his heart was not wholly true (Ml#, a wordplay?)33 to Yahweh as David’s heart had been. While in 3.9 Yahweh gave Solomon the wisdom to discern between bw+ and (r (good and evil), in 11.6 the narrator tells his readers that Solomon did (r (evil) in the eyes of Yahweh. In 11.9 the unfaithful heart of Solomon is mentioned again, this time resulting in Yahweh’s anger, specifically due to the fact that Yahweh had appeared directly to Solomon twice. This combination in 11.9 of Solomon’s unfaithful heart and the appearance of Yahweh to him is apparently a direct allusion back to Yahweh’s appearance to Solomon in ch. 3, where Solomon’s heart is the main subject of discussion. I would suggest that the main purpose within the broad story of Solomon for including the narrative of Yahweh’s appearance and his gift of wisdom to Solomon in 3.4–15 is to underscore Solomon’s great culpability for his later apostasy. This text is not ultimately praising Solomon; it is underscoring the absurdity of his turning away from Yahweh. Yahweh appeared directly to him and gave him a wise heart so that he could discern good and evil. Nonetheless, the heart of this so-called ‘glorious’ king will choose evil and turn away from Yahweh. The lesson of squandered potential is one that runs throughout 1–2 Kings. Those in exile could easily look back at the blessings bestowed on them and ask what could have been, if only ... After Solomon is given ‘the hearing heart’ or the ‘wise heart’, in 3.4–15, the narrator then shares an episode where Solomon’s wisdom is supposedly demonstrated. In 3.16–28 two prostitutes come before Solomon
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with a dispute over ownership of an infant. As is well known, Solomon threatens to cut the child in half, thus revealing the true mother by her reaction to his threat. All Israel marveled at his wisdom and ability to carry out justice (hnz). This story is almost universally taken as one that simply demonstrates Solomon’s great wisdom and discernment. However, let us back up a minute and ask, ‘What is wrong with this picture?’ Prostitution (hnz) was strictly outlawed both in Deuteronomy and in Leviticus.34 In fact, Deut. 23.19 refers to prostitution as an ‘abomination to Yahweh’.35 Solomon doesn’t even mention that their very occupation that produced this child was a violation of the law of Yahweh that he as king was bound to uphold and enforce. Can a true demonstration of justice (hnz, mentioned twice in 3.28) be demonstrated in ignorance of the law? In addition, does the presence of these two prostitutes say anything about the moral state of the kingdom? And what of the child?36 Is the child symbolic? Are the prostitutes symbolic? It maybe significant to note that the majority of usages of the term prostitute (hnz) in the Hebrew Bible are figurative references to apostasy, specifically the phenomenon of Israel chasing after foreign gods.37 In the context of the upcoming civil war between Judah and Israel, the struggle for the throne, and the immediate lapse into foreign idolatry, this story is rather suggestive. In ch. 4 the organizational features of Solomon’s great kingdom are extolled. Often this chapter is viewed as further evidence of Solomon’s great wisdom we are encouraged to look at how well organized and spectacular the government of Solomon was! However, as in the earlier chapters discussed above, this one also contains some peculiar features, especially when the chapter is read within the broader context of the whole story. First of all, the bureaucracy described in 1 Kings 4 is exactly what Yahweh told Samuel to warn Israel about back in 1 Samuel 8 when Israel asked for a king. Samuel cites the words of Yahweh, warning in 8.11, ‘This is the +p#m that the king who will reign over you will do’. Samuel then describes the exploitation of a royal government the king will take your sons and daughters, your fields, vineyards, and flocks. ‘You yourselves will become his slaves ... You will cry out for relief from the king, but Yahweh will not hear’ (1 Sam. 8.16–17). The imperial system described by Samuel was not fulfilled to any degree by either Saul or David. It is Solomon that fulfills all of the details of Samuel’s prediction. Indeed 1 Kings 4 details the fulfillment explicitly! Thus the irony of the chapter. Solomon’s organizational glory is the very thing that Yahweh warned the nation about in 1 Samuel. Indeed, one of Solomon’s officials was Adoniram, the one in charge of forced labor. This is an ominous reference, because the forced labor issue
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will be the one that precipitates the civil war between Judah and Israel, leading to the rift in the kingdom. In addition, if the narrator is not being sarcastic or ironic in this chapter then there are several quite curious features in these verses. Taxes, warned of by Samuel in 1 Samuel 8, are described in 1 Kgs 4.7, 22–23 and 27–28. Sandwiched in between this discussion of taxes is the statement that the people ‘ate, drank and were happy’ (4.20), and that each man lived in safety under his own vine and fig tree (4.25). However, a few verses later in ch. 5 the narrator will add that Solomon conscripted 30,000 men from Israel to work for him. Likewise, 1 Kings 12 paints quite a different picture from the peace and prosperity in 1 Kings 4. The ‘whole assembly of Israel’ came to Solomon’s son and said, ‘Your father put a heavy yoke on us’ (12.4). Rehoboam adds to the description in his refusal to listen to their demands, stating in 12.14, ‘my father scourged you with whips’. Rehoboam’s refusal to ease the burden his father had placed on the people led to the rejection of his rule, the assassination of Adoniram, who was in charge of forced labor, and open civil war.38 Chapter 5 begins the story of Solomon’s construction of the temple, often viewed as the high point of Solomon’s reign, indeed sometimes viewed as the high point in Israelite history. However, as in those above, this passage contains some troubling elements if placed within the context of 2 Samuel. Solomon writes to Hiram to negotiate for cedar to be used in the temple. Solomon refers back to Yahweh’s covenant with David in 2 Samuel 7 as part of his rationale for building the temple. However, Solomon seriously misquotes the situation and the words of Yahweh as recorded in 2 Samuel 7. David is prevented from building a house for Yahweh, not because of external struggles as Solomon argues, but because Yahweh did not need a house nor apparently did he want a house. Brueggemann notes that such a house violates Yahweh’s freedom. He says: ‘Yahweh wants no temple because Yahweh is on the move, completely unfettered. And certainly Yahweh wants no cedar house, because cedar smacks of affluence and indulgence.’39 The fact that Yahweh specifically mentions cedar in 2 Samuel 7 is very ironic, because Solomon cites this passage as part of the justification for his contract negotiations with Hiram to obtain cedar! Also note that Solomon has no trouble finding himself in 2 Sam. 7.13, ‘he is the one who will build a house for my Name’. It is interesting that Solomon does not mention the next verse, ‘When he does wrong (hw(, from Nw() I will punish him ...’ Yahweh’s message to David in 2 Samuel 7 speaks of Solomon’s temple in v. 13 and Solomon’s ‘acts of iniquity’ in the very next verse, definitely clouding the prophecy.
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Also note that the temple is not at all central in Yahweh’s discussion with David in 2 Samuel 7. There is indeed a wordplay on ‘house’ that runs throughout the passage. David wanted to build Yahweh a house, but Yahweh said, ‘No, I will build you a house’. It is Yahweh’s promise of building David’s house that is central. In 5.13–18 the narrator presents a detailed description of the forced labor that Solomon used to build the temple.40 There is no mention of any wages being paid to the workers, in spite of the frequent mention of superfluous wealth floating around in the Solomonic empire. The absence of payment to the workers is in strong contrast to the repair work in the temple that Josiah undertakes later on in the story (2 Kgs 22.3–7). In Josiah’s case, the narrator goes out of his way explicitly to mention that Josiah paid the workers for their work. Thus the opening paragraphs regarding the construction of the glorious temple contain negative undercurrents. Underscoring this is the reference in 6.1 to the exodus from Egypt. The proximity of forced building labor to the mention of the exodus is suggestive and highly ironic. Indeed, throughout these chapters there is the interesting interchange of references to Pharaoh, the exodus from Egypt, Solomon’s large state building program, forced labor and chariot horses from Egypt. Chapter 6 begins the description of the glorious temple, intended on the surface to overawe the reader. However, Yahweh intrudes into the catalog of extravagance with a stern warning in 6.11–13. ‘As for this temple you are building’, Yahweh warns, ‘only if you keep my decrees and commandments ... will I live among you’. The splendor of the temple is not the critical element leading to Yahweh’s presence. He dwelt among them prior to the temple construction. He warns them in 6.11–13 that obedience is the requirement for his continued presence. The placement of this warning in the middle of the temple description is significant and in keeping with the narrator’s scheme of quiet qualification and criticism that runs right below the surface ‘praise and glory’. For two chapters the spectacular nature of the temple (and Solomon’s other buildings) is described. However, as in the earlier chapters, the narrator continues to undermine the surface intention of glorifying Solomon and the temple. In 6.38–7.1, for instance, the narrator states that Solomon took seven years to build the house of Yahweh, but he took thirteen years to build his own house.41 What is the point of placing these two construction schedules side by side? Is the point that Solomon works faster on the temple, seven years being an incredibly short time for such a work? Or is there some subtle implication that the house of Yahweh is perhaps not as central to the
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construction scheme as it should be?42 Chapter 7 actually refers to five royal buildings that Solomon constructed. The temple was part of a large royal complex. The splendor of the temple complex and its furnishings are described throughout ch. 7. Nelson notes the irony in this chapter, for all of the glorious labor of Solomon in furnishing the temple will be undone as the plot of 1–2 Kings unfolds. He writes, Shishak will rifle the treasury (14.26). Ahaz will strip the stands and remove the bulls under the sea (2 Kings 16.17). Hezekiah will remove the gold from the doors (2 Kings 18.16). 2 Kings 24.13 reports that Nebuchadnezzar cut up the gold vessels that Solomon had made, and in the final disaster Nebuzaradan burns the temple itself (2 Kings 25.9). The gold and silver are melted down and the great items of bronze are broken up (2 Kings 25.13–17). This final list is a hollow echo of the confident inventory of chapter 7.43 The narrator subtly points out to the readers that the temple is ‘part of the royal complex, situated where it is to legitimize and propagandize for the monarchy’.44 The location and centrality of the temple in Solomon’s new camp is quite different than the role and centrality that the tabernacle played in Moses’ camp. In 1 Kings 8 Solomon brings the ark from the City of David to the new temple. Yahweh’s presence then fills the temple. As part of the dedication service, Solomon then prays a series of three prayers. Most of this section, including the prayers of Solomon, appears to be grounded firmly in the theology of Deuteronomy. However, there are a few incongruities and curiosities in this text that merit discussion. First of all, the timing is significant. 1 Kings 6.38 notes that the temple was completed in the eighth month, while the dedication ceremony of 1 Kings 8 takes place eleven months later, in the seventh month (8.2). Actually, as Provan points out, the delay was a minimum of eleven months, yet could have been longer. The specific year is not mentioned.45 No explanation for the delay is stated.46 More significantly, the episode describing the ceremonial procession that transports the ark to the temple presents a stark contrast with that described in 2 Samuel 6. In that event David throws all decorum aside and dances with joy before the ark, wearing only a linen ephod. The focus of David’s procession was on his joy and his humility before Yahweh. What a
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contrast with Solomon! There is no mention of Solomon dancing before Yahweh. Furthermore, in contrast to David’s humility, Solomon spends much of the chapter boasting of the temple that he himself built for Yahweh. He tells Yahweh rather arrogantly, ‘I have indeed [infinitive absolute plus perfect] built a magnificent temple for you’ (8.13). In case anyone misses the fact that Solomon is responsible for this temple, he reiterates this fact five additional times, referring to ‘this house which I have built’ (8.20, 27, 43, 44,48). Likewise in 8.21 he states, ‘I have provided a place for the ark ...’ There is no hint of David’s humility in Solomon. Yahweh returns to speak to Solomon a second time in ch. 9, after Solomon has completed his magnificent building program. As might be expected, Yahweh does not seem overly impressed. Has he not read the earlier chapters? Does he not know the splendor of this fantastic house that Solomon has built for him? Yahweh makes no comment whatsoever on the appearance of the temple. He does, however, perhaps pick up on Solomon’s boast, ‘I have built this house’. Yahweh states, ‘I have consecrated this house which you have built’. Yahweh mentions this twice (9.3, 7), stressing the point that the importance of this house is not in the grandeur of its construction but in the significance of Yahweh’s consecrating presence. Skipping over any accolades and speaking considerably more briefly than Solomon did, Yahweh turns to the critical issue at hand—obedience to the law. ‘I have consecrated this house’, Yahweh states in v. 3. ‘But as for you’, he continues in v. 4 and in the next several verses, ‘you must keep the law and walk obediently or else I will leave this temple and it will be destroyed’. Provan notes, ‘A dark cloud now looms quite visibly over the Solomonic empire, for all the glory of 1 Kings 3–8. The temple is no sooner built than we hear of its inevitable end; the empire is no sooner built than we hear of its inevitable destruction’.47 The presence of Yahweh is of profound significance in the history of his relationship with Israel, but the magnificent stones, cedar and gold of the temple are not. The narrator, writing after the destruction of the temple, knows this. The narrator is not boasting about the temple; he is critiquing the disastrously wrong theology behind such a boast.48 The remainder of ch. 9 picks up several themes from chs. 4–5 but continues to stack these themes up negatively against Solomon.49 Solomon has a slight falling out with his ally and friend Hiram of Tyre. The narrator discusses the dispute nonchalantly. Solomon gives Hiram 20 cities in Galilee as payment for his services, but Hiram despises these cities as being worthless. The shocking feature that is mentioned only in passing is that Solomon gives away a large portion of Galilee, part of the Promised Land!
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Solomon sells a significant chunk of the land to Hiram for ‘cedar, pine and gold!’ What right does he have before Yahweh to sell off the Promised Land? This subtle criticism explodes into a scathing critique when read within the context of the rest of 1–2 Kings, particularly 1 Kings 16. In that chapter the prototypical evil king, Ahab, seeks to buy a vineyard from a peasant farmer, Naboth. With the help of Jezebel (is there an intertextual connection between Jezebel’s home of Sidon and Hiram’s home of Tyre?) Naboth is framed and executed, allowing Ahab to take possession of the property. This property was in Jezreel (16.1), which was within the region that the term ‘Galilee’ defined at the time. While the Jezreel connection may be tentative, the two incidents do appear to be related. Thus Naboth’s words to Ahab likewise ring true to Solomon, ‘Yahweh forbid that I should give to you the inheritance of my fathers’ (16.3). What does Solomon do about the inheritance or property rights of the inhabitants of these cities? In a story that is hurtling downward toward the complete exile of the people from the land, Solomon’s casual release of 20 cities is ominous. Other red flag items appear in ch. 9, drawing attention back to the exodus and to deuteronomistic prohibitions. Pharaoh and his daughter are mentioned again twice (9.16, 24). Also mentioned are forced labor, store cities and chariots. Note also the nearby reference to the PwsMy (Red Sea or Sea of Reeds) in 9.26. Israel no longer needs Yahweh in order to deal with the PwsMy. Solomon’s ships sail freely across it to bring him more gold. Thus in this section Solomon has given away part of the Promised Land, accumulated chariots in violation of Deuteronomy 17, married the daughter of the hated Pharaoh of Egypt, constructed store cities with forced labor, and then sailed back across the PwsMy. Certainly the narrator is not naïve about the exodus tradition and the numerous allusions to exodus terminology that occur in this text. The end of 2 Kings definitely reflects a literary reversal of the exodus—the people lose the land and even return to Egypt. Is the narrator giving his readers a strong hint of that reversal already? The visit from the Queen of Sheba in 1 Kings 10 reflects the same type of literary subtlety that we have observed in the earlier chapters. On the surface the Queen’s visit praises Solomon for his great wisdom and wealth. However, both Brueggemann and Fretheim note the two subtle critiques from the mouth of the visiting monarch. First, in praising Solomon’s wisdom the Queen declares in 10.8, ‘Happy (or blessed) are your wives [following the LXX: the Hebrew reads “men”]! Happy are these your servants who continually attend you!’ She has limited the resultant blessing or happiness of Solomon’s great wisdom and wealth to the palace entourage, rather than to the people at large. Second, in 10.9 she inadvertently declares that Yahweh
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has placed Solomon on the throne to execute ‘justice and righteousness’. Fretheim suggests that this may have been the narrator’s subversive way of noting that ‘justice and righteousness’ was absent from Solomon’s reign by this time.50 Brueggemann feels that this reference is placed here intentionally by the narrator as an ominous anticipation of the disastrous events to come in chs. 11 and 12.51 As mentioned in the beginning of this study, the end of ch. 10 contains obvious references to Deut. 17.14–17, particularly the accumulation of silver, gold and horses. Solomon’s blatant disregard of these guidelines from Yahweh is further revealed in his ridiculously excessive harem described in ch. 11. By ch. 11, however, the narrator drops his subtlety and proclaims the final verdict Solomon did evil in the eyes of Yahweh. His heart had turned away from Yahweh, even though Yahweh had appeared to him twice (11.6, 9). It is critical to keep in mind that throughout the Solomon narratives it is the covenant with David that drives the positive or blessing side of the story, not Solomon’s piety. The narrator is not subtle about this emphasis, stressing David’s faithfulness and Yahweh’s promise to him. Yahweh will speak to Solomon three times. In ch. 3 he provides Solomon with wisdom, but warns him to walk as David walked (3.14). In ch. 6 the voice of Yahweh intrudes into the description of the temple construction, primarily as a warning to Solomon to follow Yahweh’s laws. In addition Yahweh explicitly mentions his promise to David (6.11–13). In ch. 11 Yahweh’s anger burns against Solomon because he has not kept the law or remained faithful. However, Yahweh declares that ‘for the sake of David’ he will not tear the kingdom away from Solomon during his lifetime. The glorious time of blessing, prosperity and peace that Israel enjoyed during Solomon’s reign was not due to Solomon’s faithful service to Yahweh but due to David’s and due to Yahweh’s promise to David. So, in conclusion, there is strong evidence to support the view that the narrator is not schizophrenic, praising Solomon for ten chapters and then suddenly condemning him. Rather the narrator develops a fascinating but negative critique of Solomon throughout the Solomonic narratives. His critique is subtle, employing irony, word associations and implicit rather than explicit references to Deuteronomy, 1–2 Samuel and the rest of 1–2 Kings. The clear, but implicit references to Deuteronomy 17 at the end of 1 Kings 10 provide the strongest single supporting argument for this view. Many of the other arguments may appear weak if analyzed one at a time in isolation. However, taken together, especially in light of the clear references in ch. 10, and viewed within the overall theological context of 1–2 Kings, the
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multitude of individual texts presented here provide an overwhelming amount of evidence that the narrator is indicting and not glorifying. The subtle narrator of 1–2 Kings has not come to praise Solomon but to bury him. NOTES 1. Kim Ian Parker, ‘Repetition as a Structuring Device in 1 Kings 1–11’, JSOT 42 (1988), pp. 19–27. Parker reiterates this structural analysis, organizing it around the themes of Wisdom and Torah in tension in ‘Solomon as Philosophical King? The Nexus of Law and Wisdom in 1 Kings 1–11’, JSOT 53 (1992), pp. 75–91. 2. Marc Brettler, ‘The Structure of 1 Kings 1–11’, JSOT 49 (1991), pp. 87–97. Amos Frisch, ‘The Narrative of Solomon’s Reign: A Rejoinder’, JSOT 51 (1991), pp. 3–14, suggests that the unit runs from 1.1 to 12.24. The units are arranged concentrically around the central section describing the temple (6.1–9.9). The first half is positive about Solomon, showing that loyalty to God brings blessings, while the later half is negative and critical, showing that disloyalty brings misfortune. For earlier attempts to analyze the structure of 1 Kgs 1–11, see Bezalel Porten, ‘The Structure and Theme of the Solomon Narrative (1 Kings 3–11)’, HUCA 38 (1967), pp. 93–128; and Y.T. Radday, ‘Chiasm in Kings’, Linguistica Biblica 31 (1974), pp. 52–67 (55–56). 3. David Jobling, ‘“Forced Labor”: Solomon’s Golden Age and the Question of Literary Representation’, Semeia 54 (1992), pp. 57–76. Jobling does note many of the same unusual ironies that I will underscore in this paper—the presence of Pharaoh’s daughter, the treaty with Hiram and the frequent mention of Deuteronomic conditioned blessings. However, he interprets this phenomenon in the opposite direction from what I suggest. He argues that the mythical portrayal of the Golden Age subverts and marginalizes the negative aspects of Solomon to extol the ideal. I suggest that we place this material within a broader framework, first within the entire text of 1–2 Kings, and then within the entire Deuteronomic History, which primarily tracks the downward spiral of Israel due to Deuteronomic disobedience. Thus I suggest that the negative Deuteronomic critique running through 1 Kgs 3–10 subverts (quietly and only through irony) the positive. 4. See the following works by David M. Gunn and Danna Nolan Fewell: ‘Narrative, Hebrew’, in ABD, IV, pp. 1023–27; Narrative in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford Bible Series; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 152–55, 167–68; and Gender, Power, and Promise: The Subject of the Bible’s First Story (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993), esp. pp. 161–77. 5. Sternberg stresses the function of ambiguity and gaps. He also uses the Solomon narrative as an example of the importance for the reader to move beyond the surface to the depth. See Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 186–229, 342–47. 6. Stuart Lasine, Knowing Kings: Knowledge, Power, and Narcissism in the Hebrew Bible (SBL Semeia Studies, 40; Atlanta: SBL, 2001), pp. 139–40. 7. Stuart Lasine, ‘The King of Desire: Indeterminacy, Audience, and the Solomon Narrative’, Semeia 71 (1995), pp. 85–118 (89). Fox critiques Lasine in the same volume, but follows a traditional understanding of Solomon. Thus Fox argues that the so-called ‘indeterminacy’ is due either simply to the complexity of Solomon or the residual of
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redactional layers in the text. See Michael V. Fox, ‘The Uses of Indeterminacy’, Semeia 71 (1995), pp. 173–92 (182, 190). 8. Claudia V. Camp, Wise, Strange and Holy: The Strange Woman and the Making of the Bible (JSOTSup, 320; Gender, Culture, Theory, 9; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). Camp’s argument for a Proverbs background instead of Deuteronomy loses much of its strength as one moves beyond the Solomon narrative into the rest of 1–2 Kings (and then into the rest of the Deuteronomic History). Yet, as Camp demonstrates, wisdom and foreign (‘strange’) women are significant and interrelated themes in the Solomon narratives, laced with deep irony and ambiguous suggestive allusions, factors that must be taken into account. 9. Terrence Fretheim, First and Second Kings (Westminster Bible Companion; Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1999), p. 20; Richard Nelson, First and Second Kings (Interpretation; Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1987), p. 66; Walter Brueggemann, 1 and 2 Kings (Smyth & Helwys Commentary; Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2000), p. 11. 10. Younger notes that the fact of sophisticated structural unity in 1 Kings 1–11 is an indicator of the text’s figurative nature. See K. Lawson Younger, Jr, ‘The Figurative Aspect and the Contextual Method in the Evaluation of the Solomonic Empire (1 Kings 1–11)’, in David J.A. Clines, Stephen E. Fowl and Stanley E. Porter (eds.), The Bible in Three Dimensions: Essays in Celebration of Forty Years of Biblical Studies in the University of Sheffield (JSOTSup, 87; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1990), pp. 157–75. 11. There is disagreement over whether 1 Kgs 1–2 should be included with the narrative of Solomon (1 Kgs 3–11) or with the so-called ‘Succession Narrative’ (2 Sam. 9–20). I would suggest that 1 Kgs 1–2 is transitional and does connect to both the preceding unit and the following unit. The tone and literary approach of both units is similar, however. Gunn and Fewell take a similar view. They label this phenomenon as a ‘shifting boundary’, where one story’s end also functions as the next story’s beginning. They use 1 Kgs 1–2 as a primary example. See Gunn and Fewell, Narrative in the Hebrew Bible, pp. 111–12. Regarding the literary strategy of the Succession Narrative, Ackerman writes, ‘Beneath the cool, dispassionate voice of the omniscient narrator is a lament that Israel’s brief moment of greatness was lost by the perverse actions of passionate and headstrong individuals’ (James S. Ackerman, ‘Knowing Good and Evil: A Literary Analysis of the Court History in 2 Samuel 9–20 and 1 Kings 1–2’, JBL 109 [1990], pp. 41–60 [59]). 12. Dorsey provides a chiastic structural arrangement of 1 Kgs 3–11. He argues that the narrator’s framing of the unit with negative material about Solomon’s wives indicates that the overall thrust is going to be condemnatory. Dorsey’s conclusions based on this framing are similar to those suggested in the present study. See David A. Dorsey, The Literary Structure of the Old Testament: A Commentary on Genesis–Malachi (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1999), pp. 137–38. 13. Brueggemann, 1 and 2 Kings, p. 3. 14. The use of irony as a tool in Hebrew narrative is well documented. Fewell and Gunn cite Solomon as an example (1 Kgs 3.3 in light of 1 Kgs 11.3, 7, 8) in their discussion of irony in Hebrew narrative. See Fewell and Gunn, ‘Narrative’, p. 1026. Sternberg (The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, pp. 342–47) discusses this phenomenon in connection with character development in a story. Often the text will give an initial epithet concerning the character. However, the narrator will then engage in ‘indirect characterization’, moving from surface to depth. Sternberg notes that this type is the most important, but the ‘most
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tricky’. Thus the initial epithet pronouncing Solomon’s wisdom, Sternberg argues, ‘serves not so much to guide as to lure and frustrate normal expectation: to drive home in retrospect the ironic distance between the character’s auspicious potential under God and his miserable performance in opposition to God’. Fokkelman makes a related observation, noting that discovering the true hero in a text can be less than straightforward because a character can be a hero in a narratological sense, but a villain in a moral sense. See J.P. Fokkelman, Reading Biblical Narrative: An Introductory Guide (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1999), p. 82. Amit adds to the discussion by exploring ‘hidden polemics’ in biblical narrative. He concludes that while some polemics are explicit, lying on the surface, others are implicit, developed subtly over the course of the story. The implicit polemic, he argues, is often more powerful. Amit states that the narrator is often subtle with his polemics, especially if the topic is a controversial one such as an assessment of a king. Although the narrator’s polemic is not explicit, lying on the surface, he will, nonetheless, place multiple ‘signs’ and ‘landmarks’ along the way, which, when taken in toto, reveal to the reader the polemical point of the narrator. See Yairah Amit, Hidden Polemics in Biblical Narrative (trans. Jonathan Chipman; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000), pp. 56–58, 93–98. 15. For a discussion of the international trade in chariots and horses, and of Solomon’s implied involvement in this trade, see Yutaka Ikeda, ‘Solomon’s Trade in Horses and Chariots in Its International Setting’, in Tomoo Ishida (ed.), Studies in the Period of David and Solomon and Other Essays: Papers Read at the International Symposium of Biblical Studies, Tokyo, 5–7 December, 1979 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1982), pp. 213–38. 16. Nelson, First and Second Kings, p. 67, writes, ‘Yet no one with a Deuteronomistic theological background could ever have missed the broad hint of the last verses about horses from Egypt (10.28–29), which point directly to Deuteronomy 17.16. This provides a transition to the breakdown of shalom in chapter 11 caused by Solomon’s violation of Deuteronomy 17.17.’ 17. Gunn and Fewell, Narrative in the Hebrew Bible, p. 155, conclude: ‘As we enter this story of succession we might expect that the key phrases about being king and sitting on the throne of the great King David would intimate exhilaration and celebration. Instead we find by the end of the story that something quite other has happened. These words carry ominous overtones of power struggle, duplicity, and paranoia. David’s throne is no different from the thrones of a myriad other monarchs.’ 18. Both Ackerman (‘Knowing Good and Evil’, p. 53) and Fokkelman maintain that it is significant that Nathan no longer speaks in the name of God. In fact the only one who uses God’s name is Benaiah, the ‘bloody hatchet man’ (J.P. Fokkelman, King David (II Sam. 9–20 & I Kings 1–2]. I. Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel [Studia Semitica Neerlandica; Assen: Van Gorcum, 1981], p. 370). 19. Nelson, First and Second Kings, p. 22, posits that Yahweh is actually working behind the scenes, even through the devious political plots of the court, to bring his chosen king Solomon to power. However, this is far from obvious and there is no clear mention at all in this narrative that Solomon is even truly Yahweh’s choice. Recall that in Deut. 17.15 Yahweh warns that the king must be one that he has chosen rhb). In accordance with this, note that both of the two previous kings Saul and David are clearly chosen by Yahweh and anointed by Samuel as directed by Yahweh. The selection and anointing of David in 1 Sam. 16 forms a gigantic contrast with the ‘selection’ and anointing of Solomon. Yahweh speaks directly to Samuel, telling him to pass over David’s older brothers because he has
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not chosen (rhb) them, but then to rise up and anoint David for he is the one. After David is anointed the spirit of Yahweh comes upon him in power (1 Sam. 16.8–13). 20. There is perhaps evidence of Yahweh’s selection of Solomon back in 2 Sam. 12.24–25. This text states that, after Solomon was born, Yahweh loved him and therefore named him Jedidiah, or ‘loved of Yahweh’. A.A. Anderson suggests that this naming may be an affirmation of Solomon’s status as heir to the throne. Anderson (2 Samuel [WBC; Waco, TX: Word Books, 19891, p. 165) cites N. Wyatt, ‘“Jedidiah” and Cognate Forms as a Title of Royal Legitimation’, Bib 66 (1985), pp. 112–25 (112). However, the point of stating that Yahweh loved this son may simply be in contrast to the firstborn son of David and Bathsheba, which dies under an apparent curse from God, an event which occurs only a few verses earlier (2 Sam. 12.14–19). 21. Several writers note that nowhere in the narrative does it say that David made this vow. Nathan puts this vow into the mouth of Bathsheba. Furthermore, the questions of Nathan and Bathsheba to David in 1.20 and 1.27 imply that the choice of the heir to the throne had not been announced, even to them. See Nelson, First and Second Kings, p. 20; David M. Gunn, The Story of King David (JSOTSup, 6; Sheffield: JSOT, 1978), p. 105; Tomoo Ishida, ‘Solomon’s Succession to the Throne of David—A Political Analysis’, in idem (ed.), Studies in the Period of David and Solomon, pp. 175–87 (179). 22. For a discussion on the possible deception occurring here, see Harry Hagan, ‘Deception as Motif and Theme in 2 Sam 9–20; 1 Kgs 1–2’, Bib 60 (1979), pp. 301–26, and David Marcus, ‘David the Deceiver and David the Dupe’, Prooftexts 6 (1986), pp. 163–71. 23. Gunn, The Story of King David, p. 105; Nelson, First and Second Kings, p. 21. 24. David’s vengeful vendetta against Joab and Shimei is also puzzling (1.5–9), especially his command to Solomon to kill Joab. David’s former colleague and military commander fled to the tabernacle and took hold of the horns of the altar. Such an action is prescribed in Exod. 21.12–14 for protecting a man who has unintentionally killed someone and is seeking protection from revengeful relatives. Solomon ordered that Joab be executed anyway and indeed Benaiah, the new commander of the army, entered the tent and slew Joab, the old commander of the army. The irony is rich and tragic. David had stated to Solomon that Joab’s alleged crimes were the slaying of Abner and Amasa (1.5–6). Abner was the commander of Saul’s army and he had fought against David and Joab. After David won the civil war Joab killed Abner to avenge his brother (whom Abner had killed) and to consolidate his hold as commander of the army. Amasa had been the commander of Absalom’s army, the one that had driven David out of Jerusalem during Absalom’s rebellion. So Joab’s great sin was to execute two former commanders after the war had actually been won and power consolidated. In both cases Joab replaced the man he killed as commander. Benaiah’s execution of Joab forms an extremely close parallel. Solomon had become king; all significant military opposition had ended. Yet Benaiah kills the former commander anyway. The difference, of course, was that Joab’s murder of Abner and Amasa had been against the will of David the king, while Benaiah’s execution of Joab (also murder?) is specifically ordered by King Solomon. 25. Fretheim, First and Second Kings, p. 27. Labeling the items of reservation as ‘interwoven aspects of indeterminacy’, Camp (Wise, Strange and Holy, pp. 156–57) provides a similar list: (1) the moral evaluation of Solomon’s violence in establishing the kingdom; (2) the moral evaluation of the ‘wisdom’ to which the violence is attributed; (3) questions regarding God and his choice of Solomon; and (4) ambiguities surrounding Abishag and Bathsheba.
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26. Brueggemann, 1 and 2 Kings, p. 45. 27. Brueggemann, 1 and 2 Kings, p. 43, also points out that Solomon appears to construct much of his government structure and his building program on the Egyptian model. Thus while Pharaoh is mentioned in 3.1, the implications of the relationship with the Egyptians run throughout the account of Solomon’s reign. 28. Does the narrator imply anything by mentioning Solomon’s house first and Yahweh’s house second? 29. Fretheim, First and Second Kings, p. 62. 30. Bruce K. Waltke and M. O’Connor, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990), §39.3.5c. 31. Brueggemann, 1 and 2 Kings, p. 49. 32. Fretheim, First and Second Kings, p. 31. 33. Most writers recognize the wordplay between Solomon and Mwl# (‘peace’), for Solomon brings a time of peace to the nation (except for the forced labor?). There also appears to be a wordplay here in 11.4, but this one is quite ironic, between Solomon and Ml# (‘full, complete, at peace’), for his heart is not Ml# toward Yahweh. 34. Elaine Adler Goodfriend, ‘Prostitution (Old Testament)’, in ABD, V, pp. 505–10 (505); Victor H. Matthews and Don C. Benjamin, Social World of Ancient Israel 1250–587 BCE (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993), p. 133. 35. Peter C. Craigie, The Book of Deuteronomy (NICOT; London: Hodder & Stoughton; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), p. 302. 36. Goodfriend, ‘Prostitution (Old Testament)’, p. 506, writes, ‘A society which valued the patrilineal bloodline so highly would logically have a real abhorrence of children with no known paternity and of the mother who bred them’. 37. Gary Hall, ‘hnz’, in Willem A. VanGemeren (ed.), New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis (5 vols.; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997), I, pp. 1122–25 (1123); S. Erlandsson, ‘hnz’, TDOT, IV, pp. 101–104; Raymond C. Ortlund, Whoredom (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996). 38. Furthermore, in the midst of the description relating to Solomon’s glorious kingdom of peace and prosperity, the narrator (4.26) casually mentions Solomon’s chariot horses—12,000 of them, if we follow the LXX. The MT implies 40,000 stalls and 12,000 horsemen (NRSV). This statement comes right after the declaration of safety throughout the land (4.25) and the implication is that the condition of safety in the land is a direct result of Solomon’s great standing army. However, as mentioned above, Deut. 17.16 strictly forbids the accumulation of horses by the king. Has the narrator introduced Solomon’s great chariot army in order to impress the reader, or is he trying quietly to illustrate the departure of Solomon from walking in the way of Yahweh and trusting him for national security to following the way of typical powerful monarchs in the ancient Near East? Throughout much of the rest of the Hebrew Bible, placing faith in chariots becomes an idiom for not trusting in Yahweh (Ps. 20.7; Isa. 2.7–8; 22.18; 31.1; Mic. 5.10). Not only does Deuteronomy strictly prohibit the king from accumulating chariots and horses, but also Samuel, in his warning to the nation about the dangers of the monarchy, mentions chariots three times (1 Sam. 8.11–12). In addition, 2 Sam. 8.3–5 records that in one battle David captured a thousand chariots with horses and charioteers. What did David do with this new accumulation of military might? He hamstrung all of the chariot horses except 100 of them. If Deuteronomy and 1–2 Samuel form the contextual background through which the narrator’s words are to be understood, then this text is seething with irony.
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39. Brueggemann, 1 and 2 Kings, p. 75. 40. This issue has been discussed briefly above, but a few additional comments should be added here. In this passage Solomon conscripted 30,000 Israelites who worked in shifts, one month on and two months off. These workers are explicitly identified as Israelites. In addition Solomon also had 150,000 stonecutters and haulers, whose ethnicity is not identified in this passage. In 1 Kgs 9.22 (ET), however, the narrator states that Solomon did not conscript any Israelites as part of his slave labor, but used Israelites only as soldiers and officials, while conscripting other nationalities to be the actual slave laborers. The terms used in the two passages are slightly different (sm in 5.13 [ET] and rk( sm in 9.22 [ET]) and several scholars have suggested that there was a difference in status—the Israelites were only required to work one third of the time, thus they were forced laborers, but not permanent slaves. The Canaanites and other inhabitants of the land, however, were forced to be permanent slaves. See, e.g., I. Mendolsohn, ‘On Corvée Labor in Ancient Canaan and Israel’, BASOR 167 (1962), pp. 31–35, and Fretheim, First and Second Kings, pp. 38–39. Soggin, however, argues against this distinction, maintaining that the terms are synonymous. See J. Alberto Soggin, ‘Compulsory Labor Under David and Solomon’, in Ishida (ed.), Studies in the Period of David and Solomon, pp. 259–67. However the tension between the texts is to be resolved, it is clear from 5.13 that a significant number of Israelites were forced to work on the temple. Furthermore, in light of the explosive reaction to the forced labor situation in ch. 12 after Solomon’s death, this forced labor appears to refer to something that was neither voluntary nor pleasant. 41. Gunn and Fewell, Narrative in the Hebrew Bible, p. 168, make the same observation, writing: ‘The glory of Yahweh’s house, moreover, soon gives way (1 Kgs 7.1–12 and chs. 9–11) to the expanding glory of Solomon’s own house ... A reader might well decide that this whole elaborate narrative edifice harbors no little ironic comment on the king.’ 42. Brueggemann, 1 and 2 Kings, p. 93. 43. Nelson, First and Second Kings, p. 47. 44. Brueggemann, 1 and 2 Kings, pp. 103–104. 45. Iain W. Provan, 1 and 2 Kings (New International Biblical Commentary; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1995), p. 75. 46. Some have suggested that the delay was to coordinate the dedication with the Feast of Booths (or Tabernacles), which also took place at this time. Thus the reference to ‘festival’ in 8.2 would refer to the Feast of Booths (or Tabernacles). Fretheim (First and Second Kings, pp. 48–49) points out that Deut. 31.9–13 stipulated that the written law (Deuteronomy) be read at this festival. Yet there is no mention of such a reading occurring in 1 Kgs 8. In fact, there is no mention of Solomon ever reading the law, either to himself or to the people. This omission is underscored by the contrast seen in the narrative of King Josiah, who reads all the words of the Book of the Covenant in the hearing of all the people (2 Kgs 23.2). No doubt this is related to the positive summary of Josiah, ‘he did what was right in the eyes of Yahweh’ (2 Kgs 22.2), in contrast to the negative summary of Solomon, ‘he did evil in the eyes of Yahweh’ (1 Kgs 11.6). 47. Provan, 1 and 2 Kings, p. 83. 48. Camp (Wise, Strange and Holy, p. 171) notes the rhetorical interweaving ‘of Solomon’s temple-building with his wisdom, his foreign women, other foreigners, and other buildings’. She suggests that this points to a ‘flaw’ or ‘faultline in the lovingly described temple construction’. Camp also notes the extreme irony in Yahweh’s statement to Solomon in 9.7: ‘the house I have consecrated for my name I will cast out of my sight;
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and Israel will become a proverb (l#m) and a taunt among all peoples’. Earlier, in 1 Kgs 4.29–34, the text boasted of Solomon’s proverbs (l#m), noting that men of all nations would come to hear his proverbs. 49. Provan, 1 and 2 Kings, p. 84. Nelson (First and Second Kings, p. 66), however, states that the dark undercurrent is only hinted at in these verses. 50. Fretheim, First and Second Kings, p. 60. 51. Brueggemann, 1 and 2 Kings, p. 134. Fewell and Gunn (Gender, Power, and Promise, pp. 174–77) highlight the ambiguity of the Queen of Sheba episode, and note that there are two very different possible readings: one which praises King Solomon, and one which praises the Queen of Sheba at Solomon’s expense. The fact that Solomon does not marry this woman is both interesting and suggestive. Camp (Wise, Strange and Holy, pp. 176–77) points out that the Queen of Sheba combines together the two themes of ‘wise’ and ‘strange’ (that is, foreign), the two themes that are central to Camp’s study. Camp suggests that the Queen of Sheba is the ideal that slipped through Solomon’s fingers. Camp’s insightful observation is helpful to the present study, even though my approach is different. If we read from a deuteronomistic viewpoint, we note that the Queen of Sheba is wise and is foreign, but that she also has a profound awareness of Yahweh. One of the reasons cited that prompted her visit was Solomon’s relation to Yahweh (1 Kgs 10.1). Then after she sees Solomon’s wealth and wisdom, she proclaims, ‘Blessed be Yahweh your God, who has delighted in you and set you on the throne of Israel! Because Yahweh loved Israel forever, he has made you king to execute justice and righteousness.’ The Queen of Sheba thus stands in stark contrast to the multitude of Solomon’s wives who worshipped foreign idols. Solomon marries the foreign women who worship pagan idols, but the one who seems to acknowledge Yahweh (and is wise, too) he is unable—or unwilling—to marry.
D . H . L AW R E N C E
Apocalypse
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ecause, as a matter of fact, when you start to teach individual selfrealisation to the great masses of people, who when all is said and done are only fragmentary beings, incapable of whole individuality, you end by making them all envious, grudging, spiteful creatures. Anyone who is kind to man knows the fragmentariness of most men, and wants to arrange a society of power in which men fall naturally into a collective wholeness, since they cannot have an individual wholeness. In this collective wholeness they will be fulfilled. But if they make efforts at individual fulfilment, they must fail for they are by nature fragmentary. Then, failures, having no wholeness anywhere, they fall into envy and spite. Jesus knew all about it when he said: To them that have shall be given, etc. But he had forgotten to reckon with the mass of the mediocre, whose motto is: We have nothing and therefore nobody shall have anything. But Jesus gave the ideal for the Christian individual, and deliberately avoided giving an ideal for the State or the nation. When he said, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” he left to Caesar the rule of men’s bodies, willy-nilly: and this threatened terrible danger to a man’s mind and soul. Already by the year 60 A.D. the Christians were an accursed sect; and they were compelled, like all men, to sacrifice, that is to give worship to the living Caesar. In giving Caesar the power over men’s bodies, Jesus gave him
From Apocalypse. © 1931 by the estate of David Herbert Lawrence.
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the power to compel men to make the act of worship to Caesar. Now I doubt if Jesus himself could have performed this act of worship, to a Nero or a Domitian. No doubt he would have preferred death. As did so many early Christian martyrs. So there, at the very beginning was a monstrous dilemma. To be a Christian meant death at the hands of the Roman State; for refusal to submit to the cult of the Emperor and worship the divine man, Caesar, was impossible to a Christian. No wonder, then, that John of Patmos saw the day not far off when every Christian would be martyred. The day would have come, if the imperial cult had been absolutely enforced on the people. And then when every Christian was martyred, what could a Christian expect but a Second Advent, resurrection, and an absolute revenge! There was a condition for the Christian community to be in, sixty years after the death of the Saviour. Jesus made it inevitable, when he said that the money belonged to Caesar. It was a mistake. Money means bread, and the bread of men belongs to no men. Money means also power, and it is monstrous to give power to the virtual enemy. Caesar was bound, sooner or later, to violate the soul of the Christians. But Jesus saw the individual only, and considered only the individual. He left it to John of Patmos, who was up against the Roman State, to formulate the Christian vision of the Christian State. John did it in the Apocalypse. It entails the destruction of the whole world, and the reign of saints in ultimate bodiless glory. Or it entails the destruction of all earthly power, and the rule of an oligarchy of martyrs (the Millennium). This destruction of all earthly power we are now moving towards. The oligarchy of martyrs began with Lenin, and apparently others also are martyrs. Strange, strange people they are, the martyrs, with weird, cold morality. When every country has its martyr-ruler, either like Lenin or like those, what a strange, unthinkable world it will be! But it is coming: the Apocalypse is still a book to conjure with. A few vastly important points have been missed by Christian doctrine and Christian thought. Christian fantasy alone has grasped them. 1. No man is or can be a pure individual. The mass of men have only the tiniest touch of individuality: if any. The mass of men live and move, think and feel collectively, and have practically no individual emotions, feelings or thoughts at all. They are fragments of the collective or social consciousness. It has always been so. And will always be so. 2. The State, or what we call Society as a collective whole cannot have the psychology of an individual. Also it is a mistake to say that the State is made up of individuals. It is not. It is made up of a collection of fragmentary beings. And no collective act, even so private an act as voting, is made from
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the individual self. It is made from the collective self, and has another psychological background, non-individual. 3. The State cannot be Christian. Every State is a Power. It cannot be otherwise. Every State must guard its own boundaries and guard its own prosperity. If it fails to do so, it betrays all its individual citizens. 4. Every citizen is a unit of worldly power. A man may wish to be a pure Christian and a pure individual. But since he must be a member of some political State, or nation, he is forced to be a unit of worldly power. 5. As a citizen, as a collective being, man has his fulfilment in the gratification of his power-sense. If he belongs to one of the so-called “ruling nations,” his soul is fulfilled in the sense of his country’s power or strength. If his country mounts up aristocratically to a zenith of splendour and power, in a hierarchy, he will be all the more fulfilled, having his place in the hierarchy. But if his country is powerful and democratic, then he will be obsessed with a perpetual will to assert his power in interfering and preventing other people from doing as they wish, since no man must do more than another man. This is the condition of modern democracies, a condition of perpetual bullying. In democracy, bullying inevitably takes the place of power. Bullying is the negative form of power. The modern Christian State is a soul-destroying force, for it is made up of fragments which have no organic whole, only a collective whole. In a hierarchy each part is organic and vital, as my finger is an organic and vital part of me. But a democracy is bound in the end to be, obscene, for it is composed of myriad disunited fragments, each fragment assuming to itself a false wholeness, a false individuality. Modern democracy is made up of millions of frictional parts all asserting their own wholeness. 6. To have an ideal for the individual which regards only his individual self and ignores his collective self is in the long run fatal. To have a creed of individuality which denies the reality of the hierarchy makes at last for more anarchy. Democratic man lives by cohesion and resistance, the cohesive force of “love” and the resistant force of the individual “freedom.” To yield entirely to love would be to be absorbed, which is the death of the individual: for the individual must hold his own, or he ceases to be “free” and individual. So that we see, hat our age has proved to its astonishment and dismay, that the individual cannot love. The individual cannot love: let that be an axiom. And the modern man or woman cannot conceive of himself, herself, save as an individual. And the individual in man or woman is bound to kill, at last, the lover in himself or herself. It is not that each man kills the thing he loves, but that each man, by insisting on his own individuality, kills the lover in himself, as the woman kills the lover in herself. The Christian dare not love: for love
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kills that which is Christian, democratic, and modern, the individual. The individual cannot love. When the individual loves, he ceases to be purely individual. And so he must recover himself, and cease to love. It is one of the most amazing lessons of our day: that the individual, the Christian, the democrat cannot love. Or, when he loves, when she loves, he must take it back, she must take it back. So much for private or personal love. Then what about that other love, “caritas,” loving your neighbour as yourself? It works out the same. You love your neighbour. Immediately you run the risk of being absorbed by him: you must draw back, you must hold your own. The love becomes resistance. In the end, it is all resistance and no love: which is the history of democracy. If you are taking the path of individual self-realisation, you had better, like Buddha, go off and be by yourself, and give a thought to nobody. Then you may achieve your Nirvana. Christ’s way of loving your neighbour leads to the hideous anomaly of having to live by sheer resistance to your neighbour, in the end. The Apocalypse, strange book, makes this clear. It shows us the Christian in his relation to the State; which the gospels and epistles avoid doing. It shows us the Christian in relation to the State, to the world, and to the cosmos. It shows him in mad hostility to all of them, having, in the end, to will the destruction of them all. It is the dark side of Christianity, of individualism, and of democracy, the side the world at large now shows us. And it is, simply, suicide. Suicide individual and en masse. If man could will it, it would be cosmic suicide. But the cosmos is not at man’s mercy, and the sun will not perish to please us. We do not want to perish, either. We have to give up a false position. Let us give up our false position as Christians, as individuals, as democrats. Let us find some conception of ourselves that will allow us to be peaceful and happy, instead of tormented and unhappy. The Apocalypse shows us what we are resisting, unnaturally. We are unnaturally resisting our connection with the cosmos, with the world, with mankind, with the nation, with the family. All these connections are, in the Apocalypse, anathema, and they are anathema to us. We cannot bear connection. That is our malady. We must break away, and be isolate. We call that being free, being individual. Beyond a certain point, which we have reached, it is suicide. Perhaps we have chosen suicide. Well and good. The Apocalypse too chose suicide, with subsequent self-glorification. But the Apocalypse shows, by its very resistance, the things that the human heart secretly yearns after. By the very frenzy with which the
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Apocalypse destroys the sun and the stars, the world, and all kings and all rulers, all scarlet and purple and cinnamon, all harlots, finally all men altogether who are not “sealed,” we can see how deeply the apocalyptists are yearning for the sun and the stars and the earth and the waters of the earth, for nobility and lordship and might, and scarlet and gold splendour, for passionate love, and a proper unison with men, apart from this sealing business. What man most passionately wants is his living wholeness and his living unison, not his own isolate salvation of his “soul.” Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters. So that my individualism is really an illusion. I am a part of the great whole, and I can never escape. But I can deny my connections, break them, and become a fragment. Then I am wretched. What we want is to destroy our false, inorganic connections, especially those related to money, and re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.
FRANK KERMODE
The Man in the Macintosh, the Boy in the Shirt
Where the deuce did he pop out of? Ulysses
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o far I have been unable to represent the lot of the interpreter as an altogether happy one. Yet the world is full of interpreters; it is impossible to live in it without repeated, if minimal, acts of interpretation; and a great many people obviously do much more than the minimum. Interpretation is the principal concern of their waking lives. So the question arises, why would we rather interpret than not? Or, why do we prefer enigmas to muddles? We may begin to consider the problem by thinking about James Joyce’s Ulysses. The institution controlling literary interpretation thinks well of the book; and I, as a reasonably docile member of it, endorse its valuation. I have taken no part in the exegetical labors that are the inescapable consequence; but one doesn’t need to have done that to be aware that the work offers certain opportunities to interpreters—opportunities which, fortunately for one’s younger colleagues, have every appearance of being inexhaustible. One such is the riddle of the Man in the Macintosh. It is, if you like, an aporia of the kind that declares itself when a text is scrutinized with an intensity normally thought appropriate only after institutional endorsement. Such scrutiny may originate in an enthusiastic cult, as it did in the present instance; and in the early stages the establishment may be hostile to the cult.
From The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. © 1979 by Frank Kermode
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But if it decides to take over the enterprise—as it took over Joyce studies— it absorbs and routinizes that primitive enthusiasm. There occurs a familiar transition from the charismatic to the institutional. Let me remind you about the Man in the Macintosh. He first turns up at Paddy Dignam’s funeral, in the Hades chapter. Bloom wonders who he is. “Now who is that lanky looking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I’d like to know?” And Bloom reflects that the presence of this stranger increases the number of mourners to thirteen, “Death’s number.” “Where the deuce did he pop out of? He wasn’t in the chapel, that I’ll swear.” The newspaper reporter Hynes doesn’t know the man either, and following a conversational mix-up records his name as M’Intosh. The stranger is thus given a spurious identity, a factitious proper name, by the same hand that distorts Bloom’s by calling him Mr. Boom—a diminution of identity. Later, in “The Wandering Rocks,” a number of people are recorded as having taken note of or ignored the procession of the Lord Lieutenant. For example, Mr. Simon Dedalus removed his hat; Blazes Boylan offered no salute, but eyed the ladies in the coach; and “a pedestrian in a brown macintosh, eating dry bread, passed swiftly and unscathed across the viceroy’s path.” Why “unscathed”? Did he pass very close to the wheels? Is the Lord Lieutenant peculiarly dangerous to such persons? In “Nausicaa” Bloom, wondering who the “nobleman” may be who passes him on an evening stroll, again remembers the man, and now seems to know more about him, for he obscurely reminds himself that the man has “corns on his kismet,” which may mean “is famous for being unlucky.” Appearing yet again at the end of “The Oxen of the Sun,” Mackintosh is described—though once more the sense is dubious—as poor and hungry. He is drinking Bovril, a viscous meat extract from which one makes a hot bouillon that is held to be fortifying, though preferred, in the ordinary way, by people of low income, and perhaps a plausible supplement to dry bread. Perhaps the stranger’s eating habits are telling us something about him; perhaps we are to read them as indices of social standing and character. Yet it appears that Mackintosh Has a grander cause for sorrow than simple poverty and habitual bad luck; for we are told that he “loves a lady who is dead.” This might explain his presence at the funeral as well as his dietary carelessness and his reckless transit across the path of the viceroy. He next turns up in a more positive, though phantasmagoric role; at the foundation of Bloomusalem in “Circe” he springs up through a trapdoor and accuses Bloom of being in truth Leopold M’Intosh, or Higgins, a notorious fire-raiser. Bloom counters this further threat to his already shrunken and distorted identity by shooting M’Intosh; but later the man is
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observed going downstairs and taking his macintosh and hat from the rack, which understandably makes Bloom nervous. And sure enough he returns; but only at the end of the novel, in the “Ithaca” section, when Bloom, meditating the pattern of the day’s events, or their lack of it, hears the timber of the table emit a loud, lone crack, and returns in his musings to the enigma of M’Intosh. Not for long, however; as he puts out his candle he is reminded of another and far more ancient enigma: “Where was Moses when the candle went out?” It can be argued1 that MacIntosh is susceptible of explanation in terms of the known relations between Joyce’s book and the Odyssey of Homer. He represents Homer’s Theoclymenos, a character who turns up in the fifteenth book as an outlaw getting free passage with Telemachus, and then again, rather mysteriously, in the twentieth book, when the suitors, having mocked Telemachus for saying he won’t coerce his mother into marrying one of them, suddenly grow sad. At this point “the godlike Theoclymenos” offers a comment on their behavior, and a dire prophecy. He tells the suitors that their faces and knees are veiled in night, that there is a sound of mourning in the air, that the walls are splashed with blood and the porch filled with ghosts on their way to Hades. The effect of these observations is to restore the good humor of the suitors, and no more is heard of the godlike outlaw. One possible, though severe, opinion of the Homeric Theoclymenos is that his prophecy is banal and his presence in the story quite without point— in fact, that he is simply an intrusion, and does not belong to the poem at all. Can this be said to justify the presence of Macintosh in Ulysses? One would then have to explain how the relevance of Macintosh is established by the irrelevance of Theoclymenos. Certainly, however, they have something in common. Macintosh’s making the extra man and bringing the total of mourners to thirteen, and the occurrence of the funeral in the Hades chapter, chime with the funereal tone of the prophecy in Homer. But there is still a lot left to explain. Perhaps Joyce, now imitating another famous precursor, was at his exercise of putting particular persons into his book, as Dante put certain people, in his case people of importance, into hell. So it has been proposed that Macintosh is really a man called Wetherup, who is actually mentioned twice in Ulysses (with his name misspelled and represented as given to the utterance of platitudes, though not as wearing a macintosh. Note also that Macintosh is identified, by some scholars, with Mr. James Duffy, a character in Joyce’s story “A Painful Case,” which is to be found in Dubliners. Mr. Duffy is a shadowy wanderer and the lover of a dead woman. He illustrates what Joyce called “the hated brown Irish paralysis”; if he really is the man in the macintosh it is appropriate that
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Bloom should forget all about him as soon as he climbs into Molly’s bed. What is more, Duffy is partly based on Joyce’s brother Stanislaus, who was puritanical about sex, and argued that its absence made friendship between man and man, and its presence friendship between man and woman, equally impossible. Stanislaus was aware that James had him in mind when he invented Mr. Duffy, for he declared that Duffy was “a portrait of what my brother imagined I should become in middle age.”2 Joyce vouched for none of this, but we know he liked jokes and riddles, and that he sometimes teased his admirers by asking them “Who was the man in the macintosh?” Another view of the whole matter is that Macintosh is absolutely gratuitous and fortuitous, a mere disturbance of the surface of the narrative. So Robert M. Adams, who says that Joyce is just playing with our “unfulfilled curiosity,” and that if the identification of Macintosh with Wetherup, or presumably one of the other tedious possibilities I have outlined and some that I have not (for instance, that MacIntosh is Joyce himself ), is correct, then “we may be excused for feeling that the fewer answers we have for the novel’s riddles, the better off we are.” Adams is persuaded that in the texture of this novel “the meaningless is deeply interwoven with the meaningful” so that “the book loses as much as it gains by being read closely.”3 I daresay there is a larger literature on this drab enigma than I have suggested—certainly there could be: why, for instance, the epidemic of misspelled names?4—but this is enough to be going on with. The real question is, why do we want to solve it anyway? Why does the view of Adams commend itself to us not at once, not as intuitively right, but as somehow more surprising and recondite than the attempts to make sense of MacIntosh? Why, in fact, does it require a more strenuous effort to believe that a narrative lacks coherence than to believe that somehow, if we could only find out, it doesn’t? Here is a cryptic and far from wholly satisfactory answer: within a text no part is less privileged than the other parts. All may receive the same quality and manner of attention; to prevent this one would need to use metatextual indicators (typographical variation, for instance) and there are no such indicators in the present instance. Why is this so? There must be supra-literary forces, cultural pressures, which tend to make us seek narrative coherence, just as we expect a conundrum to have an answer, and a joke a point. Our whole practice of reading is founded on such expectations, and of course the existence of genres such as the pointless joke and the deviant conundrum depends upon the prior existence of the normal sort. Just so do detective stories depend upon the coherence of elements in an occult plot
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that declares itself only as the book ends. There are detective novels, of which Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes is the supreme example, which disobey this convention; but far from disregarding it, they depend upon it for their effect. In short: just as language games are determined by historical community use, so are plot games; and the subversion of the values of either depends on the prior existence of rules. It is a prior expectation of consonance, the assumption that as readers we have to complete something capable of completion, that causes us to deal as we do with the man in the macintosh. We look for an occult relation (since there is no manifest relation) between all the references to him. It may be hidden in Homer, or in the larger body of Joyce’s writing, or in his life, or in some myth; for we may well decide that MacIntosh is Death, or even that he is Hermes. Only when we are exhausted by our unprofitable struggle with the dry bread, the Bovril, the corns, the charge that Bloom himself is M’Intosh, do we relapse into a skepticism which is willing to entertain the notion of Robert Adams’ nude emperor. We come to rest somewhere in the end, for the incoherence of the evidence can induce real anxiety. Perhaps, then, the appearances of MacIntosh lack coherence because they mime the fortuities of real life; that relates to another of our conventional expectations of narrative. Perhaps its satisfaction may sometimes entail the use of incoherences, devices by means of which, as Adams expresses it, the work of art may “fracture its own surface.”5 There are current at present much bolder opinions than this one, which presupposes, rather conventionally, that some or much of a text can and should be processed into coherence, though some, if after careful interpretative effort it resists this treatment, may be left alone, or dealt with in a different way. One bolder view would be that an ideal text would be perfectly fortuitous, that only the fractures are of interest; that in establishing coherence we reduce the text to codes implanted in our minds by the arbitrary fiat of a culture or an institution, and are therefore the unconscious victims of ideological oppression. Freedom, the freedom to produce meaning, rests in fortuity, in the removal of constraints on sense. Insofar as Ulysses is not a congeries of MacIntoshes it falls short of the ideal, though a determined reader may do much to correct it by resisting the codes. Newly liberated from conventional expectations first formulated by Plato, solidified by Aristotle, and powerfully reinforced over the past two centuries, we are no longer to seek unity or coherence, but, by using the text wantonly, by inattention, by skipping even (every time you read A la Recherche du temps perdu it can be a new novel, says Roland Barthes, because you skip different parts each time6), by encouraging in ourselves perversities of every sort, we
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produce our own senses. The reason why Adams could give the establishment a bit of a shock without going anywhere near these Utopian extremes is simply that Joyce studies, and kindred literary researches, were already institutionalized—a paradigm was established, “normal” research was in progress, to adapt Thomas Kuhn’s terms7—so that even to propose that normal exegesis should be withheld from certain passages in Ulysses was unorthodox enough, close enough to the revolutionary, to cause a stir. Let us now turn to the Boy in the Shirt (sindo¯n, a garment made of fine linen; not precisely a shirt, rather something you might put on for a summer evening, or wrap a dead body in, if you were rich enough). The Boy (actually a young man, neaniskos) is found only in Mark (14:51–52). At the moment of Jesus’ arrest, says Mark—and Matthew agrees—all the disciples forsook him and fled. And both agree further that his captors then led him to the high priest. But between these two events Mark alone inserts another: “And a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body; and they seized him, but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked.” And that is all Mark has to say about this young man. The difficulty is to explain where the deuce he popped up from. One way of solving it is to eliminate him, to argue that he has no business in the text at all. Perhaps Mark was blindly following some source that gave an inconsistent account of these events, simply copying it without thought. Perhaps somebody, for reasons irrecoverably lost, and quite extraneous to the original account, inserted the young man later. Perhaps Matthew and Luke omitted him (if they had him in their copies of Mark) because the incident followed so awkwardly upon the statement that all had fled. (It is also conjectured that the Greek verb translated as “followed,” sune¯kolouthei, might have the force of “continued to follow,” though all the rest had fled.8) Anyway, why is the youth naked? Some ancient texts omit the phrase epi gumnou, which is not the usual way of saying “about his body” and is sometimes called a scribal corruption; but that he ran away naked (gumnos) when his cloak was removed is not in doubt. So we have to deal with a young man who was out on a chilly spring night (fires were lit in the high priest’s courtyard) wearing nothing but an expensive, though not a warm, shirt. “Why,” asks one commentator, “should Mark insert such a trivial detail in so solemn a narrative?”9 And, if the episode of the youth had some significance, why did Matthew and Luke omit it? We can without difficulty find meanings for other episodes in the tale (for instance, the kiss of Judas, or the forbidding of violent resistance, which makes the point that Jesus was not a militant revolutionist) but there is nothing clearly indicated by this one.
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If the episode is not rejected altogether, it is usually explained in one of three ways. First, it refers to Mark’s own presence at the arrest he is describing. Thus it is a sort of reticent signature, like Alfred Hitchcock’s appearances in his own films, or Joyce’s as MacIntosh. This is not widely believed, nor is it really credible. Secondly, it is meant to lend the whole story verisimilitude, an odd incident that looks as if it belongs to history-like fortuity rather than to a story coherently invented—the sort of confirmatory detail that only an eyewitness could have provided—a contribution to what is now sometimes called l’effet du réel. We may note in passing that such registrations of reality are a commonplace of fiction; in their most highly developed forms we call them realism. Thirdly, it is a piece of narrative developed (in a manner not unusual, of which I shall have something to say later) from Old Testament texts, notably Genesis 39:12 and Amos 2:16. Taylor, with Cranfield concurring, calls this proposition “desperate in the extreme.”10 I suppose one should add a fourth option, which is, as with MacIntosh, to give up the whole thing as a pseudo-problem, or anyway insoluble; but although commentators sometimes mention this as a way out they are usually prevented by self-respect and professional commitment from taking it. Now we have already noticed that Mark, for all the boldness of its opening proclamation (“The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ”) is, to say the least, a reticent text, whether its reserve is genuinely enigmatic or merely the consequence of muddle. Moreover, as I have suggested, where enigmas are credibly thought to exist in a text, it is virtually impossible to maintain that some parts of it are certainly not enigmatic. This is a principle important to the history of interpretation, and it was by carefully violating it with his fractured-surface theory that Robert Adams upset people. Let us then look at two attempts that have been made to treat the boy in the shirt as enigmatic and functional. The first of these very well illustrates one alarming aspect of the business of interpretation, which is that by introducing new senses into a part of the text you affect the interpretation of the whole. And this “whole” may be not simply Mark, but the history of early Christianity, It has lately been shown that there was more than one version of Mark. Morton Smith found, in a Judean monastery, an eighteenth-century Greek manuscript in which was copied a letter written by Clement of Alexandria at the end of the second century. After demonstrating that this letter was indeed written by Clement, Smith studies a passage in it that purports to be a quotation from Mark, though it is nowhere to be found in the gospel as we have it. The context is as follows: Clement is commending his correspondent Theodore for taking
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a firm line with the Carpocratian Gnostics, a contemporary libertine sect which believed it right to sin that grace might abound; indeed they were “unafraid to stray into ... actions whose very names are unmentionable,” as Irenaeus, speaking of Carpocatians and Cainites alike, reports.11 Now Clement wishes to distinguish his authentic secret Mark from the inauthentic and conceivably licentious secret Mark of the Carpocratians. He explains that Mark first wrote his gospel in Rome, drawing on the reminiscences of Peter (we know from other evidence that Clement, like most other people, accepted this account of the origin of the gospel). But on that occasion Mark left out certain secrets. After Peter’s martyrdom, says Clement, Mark went to Alexandria, where he “composed a more spiritual gospel” for the exclusive use of those who were “being initiated into the great mysteries.” Carpocrates had presumably taken over this secret gospel and adulterated it with his own interpretations. In the circumstances, says Clement, it will be best for the faithful to deny the very existence of a secret version. He then quotes a passage from the authentic Alexandrian version. It must have come somewhere in the present tenth chapter of the gospel, and it tells of a visit to Bethany. In response to the plea of a woman, Jesus rolled back the door of a tomb and raised a rich young man from the dead. The young man, looking upon him, loved him, and begged to be with him. After six days he was commanded to go to Jesus at night. This he did, wearing a linen garment (sindo¯n) over his naked body (epi gumnou). During the night Jesus instructed the young man in “the mystery of the kingdom of God.” Then the text continues at 10:35 as we now have it. Clement goes out of his way to deny that the true, as distinct from the spurious, secret text contains the words gumnos gumnou, which might suggest that the master as well as the catechumen was naked. Whether this suggestion bore on baptismal practice, or had other magical and sexual import, is a matter for conjecture in the light of what is known of Carpocratian habits; for of course if Clement is telling the truth the words have no place in his genuine text, only in the spurious version of Carpocrates. In Morton Smith’s opinion the initiation in question was baptism. The story of the young man raised from the dead is obviously related to that of Lazarus, which occurs only in John, and Smith believes they have a common original older than the Mark we now have. He also thinks that our young man in the linen shirt is this same young man in Clement’s gospel who had looked and loved and worn a sindo¯n over his naked body. In the extant gospels Jesus never baptizes, but in Clement’s version of Mark baptism must have been a central rite; and Clement would want to preserve this initiation
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ceremony from contamination by the libertine Gnostics. Anyway, the young man in Mark’s account of the arrest is on his way to be baptized; that is why he is naked under his sindo¯n, a garment appropriate to symbolic as well as to real burial, and appropriate also to symbolic resurrection, both to be enacted in the ceremony. His baptism would take place in a lonely garden, under cover of night. We know that Jesus set guards (on this theory, to prevent interruption) and we know that the guards fell asleep. He was then surprised with the naked youth. Thus the entire narrative is altered to make sense of a part of it. But the account I have so far given is a very inadequate account of Smith’s hypothesis. He also proposes the view that the secretiveness of Mark’s Jesus almost throughout the gospel is related to this use of baptism as initiation into the mysteries of the kingdom. Jesus is here regarded as a magician or shaman, the Transfiguration is explained as a shamanistic ascent. Now the Gnostic libertine interpretation of the secret gospel can be seen as an attempt to preserve or recover an original mystery concealed by the expurgated “Roman” version of Mark in general circulation. Like Clement, only more so, the Gnostics could think of the popular text as corrupt and imperfect in consequence of its attempt to keep the secrets. And whatever may be said about the provenance of these Alexandrian secret texts, they do provide a reason why the text as we have it appears both to reveal and proclaim, and at the same time to obscure and conceal.12 We see, then, that an interpretation of our two Marcan verses along the lines proposed by Morton Smith entails a drastic revision of the received idea of a much larger text. We might want to ask some low-level questions about plausibility: for example, why did the hand that so expertly curtailed the tenth chapter fail to deal with the anomalous verses about the young man in the shirt? And perhaps there could be other explanations for the repetition of epi gumnou. This, as I said, has been thought unacceptable; it is absent from some good manuscripts at 14:51, and Taylor drops it from his text; but its recurrence in Clement’s letter must mean either that it was right, and that Mark used it twice, or that whoever wrote the secret version of Chapter 10 did so with the story of the young man in mind. At any rate it seems not unlikely that in the two verses we have been considering the secret gospel is showing through, a radiance of some kind, merely glimpsed by the outsider. And we should not be unduly surprised that the gospel, like its own parables, both reveals and conceals. It is obvious by now that the story of the young man in the shirt cannot be simply interpreted; and complex interpretations, whether or not they have the seismic historical effects of Morton Smith’s, will always have
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consequences that go far beyond the local problem. The most elegant interpretation known to me is that of Austin Farrer.13 It uses as evidence Mark’s linguistic habits, but it also finds in the gospel an occult plot, this time typological in style. Farrer was writing before the discovery of Clement’s letter. It would probably have changed his argument in some ways, though he would doubtless have found useful to his purposes the occurrence, in the secret Mark, of the words neaniskos (not the most usual word for a young man) and sindo¯n. Mark uses neaniskos, in the public gospel, only for the young man who fled, and for the one who, at the end of the gospel, greets the women at Jesus’ empty tomb. Behind Farrer’s interpretation is the knowledge that many of the crucial events in the gospel, especially in the Passion narrative, are closely related to Old Testament texts. They fulfill these texts, and the narrative as we have it records, and is in a considerable measure founded upon, such fulfillments. More of this later; for the moment it is sufficient that an event in the gospel stories may originate, and derive some of its value from, a relationship with an event in an earlier narrative. The force of the connection may be evident only if we are aware of the conditions governing such relationships, for example that the relation of Jesus to the Law, and of Christian to Jewish history, is always controlled by the myth of fulfillment in the time of the end, which is the time of the gospel narratives. If this is granted, there is always a possibility that the sort of relationship Taylor called “desperate in the extreme”—between the story of the young man and the texts in Genesis and Amos—exists. Moreover, if the gospel contains allusions so delicate and recondite to earlier and uncited texts, why should there not be internal allusions and dependencies of equal subtlety? By seeking out such occult structural organizations one might confer upon Mark, after centuries of complaint at his disorderly construction, the kind of depth and closure one would hope to find in what has come to be accepted as the earliest and, in many ways, the most authoritative of the gospels. Farrer’s theories about Mark—numerological, typological, theological—are far too complicated to describe here, though to a secular critic they are exceptionally interesting. He himself altered them and then more or less gave them up, partly persuaded, no doubt, by criticisms of them as farfetched, partly disturbed by the imputation that a narrative of the kind he professed to be discussing would be more a work of fiction than an account of a crucial historical event. Neither of these judgments seems to me well founded. But let me say briefly what he made of the young man in the cloak. He sets him in a literary pattern of events preceding and following the Passion: for example, the unknown woman anoints Jesus at Bethany, and he
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says this anointing is an early anointing for burial; afterwards the women make a futile attempt to anoint his corpse. The youth who flees in his sindo¯n forms a parallel with the youth (also neaniskos) the women find in the tomb. The first youth deserted Jesus; the second has evidently been with him since he rose. Furthermore, the linen in which Joseph of Arimathea wraps the body is called a sindo¯n, so there seems to be an intricate relationship between the neaniskos in his sindo¯n and the body in the tomb, now risen. As I say, the relation might have been made still more elaborate had Farrer known of the passage in Clement, which also involves a neaniskos in a tomb. He tells us that the punishment of a temple watcher who fell asleep on duty was to be beaten and stripped of his linen garment; which may have a bearing on the boy’s losing his. He also accepts the affiliation which Taylor rejected, believing that the young man is related to (he does not say “invented to accord with”) two Old Testament types, one in Amos (2:16)—“on that day the bravest of warriors shall be stripped of his arms and run away”—and the other in Genesis (39:12), where Joseph escapes from the seduction attempt of Potiphar’s wife by running away and leaving his cloak in her hands. In such patterns as these, Farrer detected delicate senses, many of them ironical. And since he was not an adherent of the latest school of hermeneutics, he believed that Mark must have intended these senses, and that he must have had an audience capable of perceiving them. So far from being a bungler, awkwardly cobbling together the material of the tradition, Mark developed these occult schemes “to supplement logical connection,” by which I take it Farrer meant something like “narrative coherence.” He let his imagination play over the apparently flawed surface of Mark’s narrative until what Adams calls fractures of the surface became parts of an elaborate design. I do not doubt that Farrer’s juggling with numbers gets out of hand. But even that has a basis in fact. He was confronting a problem that earlier exegetes had experienced. Since there is certainly a measure of arithmological and typological writing in the New Testament (twelve apostles and twelve tribes, Old Testament types sometimes openly cited, sometimes not) is there not reason to think that intensive application may disclose more of it than immediately meets the eye? Yet the more complex the purely literary structure is shown to be, the harder it is for most people to accept the narratives as naively transparent upon historical reality. At one point Farrer even suggests that the young man deserting is a figure representing the falling off of all the others. This seems to me a fine interpretation. We have, at this moment in the narrative, three principal themes: Betrayal, Flight, and Denial. Judas is the agent of the first and Peter
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of the third. I shall have more to say of Judas as Betrayal in Chapter Four. Peter, halfway through the gospel, was the first to acknowledge the Messiah, though the acknowledgment was at once followed by a gesture of dismissal by Jesus: “Get behind me, Satan—you care not for the things of God but the things of man.” Now he apostasizes and perhaps even curses Jesus,14 exactly at the moment when his master is for the first time asserting his true identity and purpose before the Sanhedrin. The implication, first made at the moment of recognition, and followed by the first prophecy of the Passion, is that the chief apostle will, when the Passion begins, deny the master. On both occasions he stands for the wholesale denial of Jesus, almost for Denial in the abstract. So too this young man, who is Desertion. The secret passage enhances this reading; the typical deserter is one who by baptism or some other rite of initiation has been reborn and received into the Kingdom. Nevertheless he flees. Thus we may find in this sequence of betrayal, desertion, and denial, a literary construction of considerable sophistication, one that has benefited from the grace that often attends the work of narration—a grace not always taken into account by scholars who seek to dissolve the text into its elements rather than to observe the fertility of their interrelations. It must, however, be said again that these narrative graces entail some disadvantages if one is looking more for an historical record than for a narrative of such elaborateness that it is hard not to think of it as fiction. How do the interpretations of Smith and Farrer differ? The first assumes that Mark built up an esoteric plot, using material that was somehow also available to John, who developed it differently in the story of Lazarus and his sisters. The second argues that Mark worked an existing Passion narrative, presumably quite simple, into a complex narrative structure so recherché that between the first privileged audience and the modern interpreter himself no one ever understood it in its fullness. The frame of reference of the first is provided by the techniques of historiography, that of the second by literary criticism. Each is in its own way imaginative, though the quality of imagination differs greatly from one to the other. A Schweitzer might place Smith’s work in the tradition of lives of Jesus, beginning two centuries ago with Bahrdt and Venturini,15 which assumed that what made sense of the gospel narratives was something none of them ever mentioned: for example, that Jesus was the instrument of some secret society. As to Farrer, his work was rejected by the establishment, and eventually by himself, largely because it was so literary. The institution knew intuitively that such literary elaboration, such emphasis on elements that must be called fictive, was unacceptable because damaging to what remained of the idea that the gospel narratives were still, in some measure, transparent upon history.16
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The constructions of Smith are historical; those of Farrer are literary. But they both assume that there is an enigmatic narrative concealed in the manifest one. Each suggests that an apparent lack of connection, the existence of narrative elements that cannot readily be seen to form part of a larger organization, must be explained in terms of that hidden plot, and not regarded as evidence of a fractured surface, or mere fortuities indicating that reality may be fortuitous. Joyce once said of Ulysses: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.”17 This is a shrewd joke, but the suggestion that enigmas and puzzles have necessarily to be “put in” is false. Joyce was only imitating the action of time. It would be more accurate to say that whatever remains within the purview of interpretation—whether by the fiat of the professors or of some other institutional force—will have its share of enigmas and puzzles. Whatever is preserved grows enigmatic; time, and the pressures of interpretation, which are the agents of preservation, will see to that. Who was the man in the macintosh? Mr. Duffy, Stanislaus Joyce, Mr. Wetherup, Bloom’s doppelgänger, Theoclymenos, Hermes, Death, a mere series of surface fractures? Each guess requires the construction of an enigmatic plot, or, failing that, a declaration that the text is enigmatically fortuitous. Who was the boy in the linen shirt, and where did he pop out of? The answers are very similar: a candidate for baptism, an image of desertion, a fortuity that makes the surface of narrative more like the surface of life. So I return to the question I have already put: why do we labor to reduce fortuity first, before we decide that there is a way of looking which provides a place for it? I have still no satisfying answer; but it does appear that we are programmed to prefer fulfillment to disappointment, the closed to the open. It may be that this preference arises from our experience of language-learning; a language that lacked syntax and lacked redundancy would be practically unlearnable. We depend upon well-formedness—less so, it must be confessed, in oral than in written language: in the written story there is no visible gesture or immediate social context to help out the unarticulated sentence, the aposiopesis. There are modern critics who think our desire for the well-formed—or our wish to induce well-formedness where it is not apparent—is in bad faith. They hold that it is more honest to experience deception, disappointment, in our encounters with narrative. They have not yet prevailed; we are in love with the idea of fulfillment, and our interpretations show it. In this we resemble the writers of the New Testament and their immediate successors, who were, though much more strenuously, more exaltedly, in love with fulfillment; the verb meaning to
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fulfill, and the noun pleroma, full measure, plenitude, fulfillment, are endlessly repeated, and their senses extend from the fulfillment of prophecy and type to the complete attainment of faith. Such expectations of fullness survive, though in attenuated form, in our habitual attitudes to endings. That we should have certain expectations of endings, just as we have certain expectations of the remainder of a sentence we have begun to read, has seemed so natural, so much a part of things as they are in language and literature, that (to the best of my knowledge) the modern study of them begins only fifty years ago, with the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky. It was he who showed that we can derive the sense of fulfilled expectation, of satisfactory closure, from texts that actually do not provide what we ask, but give us instead something that, out of pure desire for completion, we are prepared to regard as a metaphor or a synecdoche for the ending that is not there: a description of the weather or the scenery, he says, will do,18 say the rain at the end of Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, or the river at the end of Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum. These are matters that still require investigation; the fact that they do so testifies to the truth of the statement that we find it hardest to think about what we have most completely taken for granted. Now it happens that Mark is never more enigmatic, or never more clumsy, than at the end of his gospel; and I can best bring together the arguments of this chapter by briefly considering that ending. Too briefly, no doubt; for whole books have been written about it, and it has been called “the greatest of all literary mysteries.”19 It is worth saying, to begin with, that nobody thought to call it that until after Mark had come to be accepted as the earliest gospel and Matthew’s primary source; we do not recognize even the greatest literary mysteries until the text has gained full institutional approval. When Mark was thought to derive from Matthew it was easy to call his gospel a rather inept digest, as Augustine did; and then the abruptness of the ending was merely an effect of insensitive abridgment, and not a problem at all, much less a great mystery. Even now there are many who are impatient of mystery, and wish to dispose of it by asserting that the text did not originally end, or was not originally intended to end, at 16:8. But very few scholars dare to claim that the last twelve verses, 9–20, as we still have them in our Bibles, are authentic, for there is powerful and ancient testimony that they are not. The gospel we are talking about ends at 16:8. In the previous verse the young man in the tomb gives the women a message for Peter and the disciples concerning their meeting with the risen Jesus. But they flee the tomb in terror and say nothing to anybody. This ending must soon have come to seem
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strange, which is why somebody added the extra twelve verses. We are not entitled to do anything of that kind; we can argue that the gospel was, for some reason, left unfinished; or we can interpret the ending as it stands. The last words of the gospel are: “for they were afraid,” ephobounto gar. It used to be believed that you could not end even a sentence with such a construction; and to this day, when it is accepted that you could do so in popular Greek, nobody has been able to find an instance, apart from Mark, of its occurrence at the end of a whole book. It is an abnormality more striking even than ending an English book with the word “Yes,” as Joyce did. Joyce’s explanations of why he did so are interestingly contradictory. Ulysses, he told his French translator, “must end with the most positive word in the human language.”20 Years later he told Louis Gillet something different: “In Ulysses,” he said, “to represent the babbling of a woman as she falls asleep, I tried to end with the least forceful word I could possibly find. I found the word yes, which is barely pronounced, which signifies acquiescence, selfabandonment, total relaxation, the end of all resistance.”21 Here again Joyce gives the professors a license to interpret which they would have had to take anyway. The only positive inference to be made from these two remarks is that Joyce knew, as Shklovsky did, that we all want to make a large interpretative investment in the end, and are inclined to think the last word may have a quite disproportionate influence over the entire text. Later he ended Finnegans Wake with the word the; in one sense it is as weak as Mark’s enclitic gar, though in another it is definite though barely pronounced, and deriving strength from the great ricorso, which makes it the first word in the book as well as the last. These ambiguities are not unlike those of Mark’s problematical ending. Let us pass by the theories which say the book was never finished, that Mark died suddenly after writing 16:8, or that the last page of his manuscript fell off, or that there is only one missing verse which ties everything up (such a verse in fact survives, but it is not authentic and will probably not be in your Bible), or that Mark had intended to write a sequel, as Luke did, but was prevented. Let us also skirt round the more congenial theory of Jeremias, that Mark went no further because he thought that what happened next should be kept from pagan readers.22 We can’t deny that this fits in with a pattern of revelation and deception observable elsewhere in Mark; nor that there is evidence of secrets reserved to the initiate, or expressed very cryptically, as in Revelation. Still, it’s hard to see why the gospel, which is a proclamation of the good news, should stop before it had fairly reached the part that seemed most important to Paul; by Mark’s time it had been preached for an entire generation.
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So let us assume that the text really does end, “they were scared, you see,” and with gar as the last word, “the least forceful word” Mark “could possibly find.” The scandal is, of course, much more than merely philological. Omitting any post-Easter appearance of Jesus, Mark has only this empty tomb and the terrified women. The final mention of Peter (omitted by Matthew) can only remind us that our last view of him was not as a champion of the faith but as the image of denial. Mark’s book began with a trumpet call: “This is the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God.” It ends with this faint whisper of timid women. There are, as I say, ways of ending narratives that are not manifest and simple devices of closure, not the distribution of rewards, punishments, hands in marriage, or whatever satisfies our simpler intuitions of completeness. But this one seems at first sight wholly counter-intuitive, as it must have done to the man who added the twelve verses we now have at the end. A main obstacle to our accepting “for they were scared” as the true ending, and going about our business of finding internal validation for it, is simply that Mark is, or was, not supposed to be capable of the kinds of refinement we should have to postulate. The conclusion is either intolerably clumsy; or it is incredibly subtle. One distinguished scholar, dismissing this latter option, says it presupposes “a degree of originality which would invalidate the whole method of form-criticism.”23 This is an interesting objection. Form-criticism takes as little stock as possible in the notion of the evangelists as authors; they are held to be compiling, according to their lights, a compact written version of what has come to them in oral units. The idea that they shaped the material with some freedom and exercised on the tradition strong individual talents was therefore foreign to the mode of criticism which dominated the institution throughout the first half of the present century. And that alone is sufficient to dispose of the idea as false. Now all interpretation proceeds from prejudice, and without prejudice there can be no interpretation; but this is to use an institutional prejudice in order to disarm exegesis founded on more interesting personal prejudices. If it comes to a choice between saying Mark is original and upholding “the whole method of form-criticism” the judgment is unhesitating: Mark is not original. To be original at all he would have had to be original to a wholly incredible extent, doing things we know he had not the means to do, organizing, alluding, suggesting like a sort of ancient Henry James, rather than making a rather clumsy compilation in very undistinguished Greek. Yet if we look back once more to the beginning of Mark, we might well have the impression that this brief text, so much shorter than any of the other
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gospels, at once gave promise of both economy and power. First, an exultant announcement of the subject, then the splendidly wrought narrative of John the Baptist, which, though heavy with typology, has memorable brevity and force. It is a world away from the overtures of the other gospels. Matthew and Luke were not content with it, perhaps it did not seem a true beginning, this irruption of a hero full grown and ready for action; so they prefixed their birth stories and genealogies. We are so used to mixing the gospels up in our memory into a smooth narrative paste that laymen rarely consider the differences between them, or reflect that if we had only Mark’s account there would be no Christmas, no loving virgin mother, no preaching in the temple—nothing but a clamorous prologue, the Baptist crying in the wilderness, with his camel-skin coat and his wild honey. Matthew and Luke started earlier, with Jesus’ ancestry, conception, and birth; John exceeded them both, and went back to the ultimate possible beginning, when, in the pre-existence of Jesus, only the Word was. Mark, it appears, could not maintain this decisiveness, this directness. He grows awkward and reticent. There are some matters, it seems, that are not to be so unambiguously proclaimed. The story moves erratically, and not always forward; one thing follows another for no very evident reason. And a good deal of the story seems concerned with failure to understand the story. Then, after the relative sharpness and lucidity of the Passion narrative, the whole thing ends with what might be thought the greatest awkwardness of all, or the greatest instance of reticence: the empty tomb and the terrified women going away. The climactic miracle is greeted not with rejoicing, but with a silence unlike the silence enjoined, for the most part vainly, on the beneficiaries of earlier miracles—a stupid silence. The women have come to anoint a body already anointed and two days dead. Why are they so astonished? Jesus has three times predicted his resurrection. Perhaps they have not been told? Perhaps their being dismayed and silent is no stranger than that Peter should have been so disconcerted by the arrest and trial? He knew about that in advance. And we might go on in this way, without really touching the question. Farrer, extending the argument I’ve already mentioned, finds the answer in the double pattern of events before and after the Crucifixion. Before it, Jesus said he would go to Galilee; spoke of the anointing; gave to the disciples at the Last Supper a sacramental body which should have made it clear to them that the walling up of a physical body was unimportant. The disciples fled before the Crucifixion, the women after it. And all in all, says Farrer, the last six verses of the gospel (3–8) form “a strong complex refrain, answering to all the ends of previous sections in the Gospel to which we
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might expect it to answer.”24 So for him the ending, like everything else in this strange tacit text, is part of an articulate and suggestive system of senses which lies latent under the seemingly disjointed chronicle, the brusquely described sequence of journeyings and miracles. Farrer may persuade us that even if he is wrong in detail there is an ending here at the empty tomb, and it is for us to make sense of it. Earlier, in my first chapter, I used the term “fore-understanding.” It is a translation of the German word Vorverständnis, and its value in hermeneutics is obvious. Even at the level of the sentence we have some ability to understand a statement before we have heard it all, or at any rate to follow it with a decent provisional sense of its outcome; and we can do this only because we bring to our interpretation of the sentence a preunderstanding of its totality. We may be wrong on detail, but not, as a rule, wholly wrong; there may be some unforeseen peripeteia or irony, but the effect even of that would depend upon our having had this prior provisional understanding. We must sense the genre of the utterance. Fore-understanding is made possible by a measure of redundancy in the message which restricts, in whatever degree, the possible range of its sense. Some theorists, mostly French, hold that a fictive mark or reference inevitably pre-exists the determination of a structure; this idea is not so remote from Vorverständnis as it may sound, but it is so stated as to entitle the theorist to complain that such a center must inevitably have an ideological bearing. “Closure ... testifies to the presence of an ideology.”25 To restrict or halt the free movement of senses within a text is therefore thought to be a kind of wickedness. It may be so; but it is our only means of reading until revolutionary new concepts of writing prevail; and meanwhile, remaining as aware as we can be of ideological and institutional constraints, we go about our business of freezing those senses into different patterns. Of course the inevitability of such constraints, which increase with every increase of ideological or institutional security, is a reason why outsiders may produce the most radiant interpretations. The conviction that Mark cannot have meant this or that is a conviction of a kind likely to have been formed by an institution, and useful in normal research; the judgments of institutional competence remove the necessity of considering everything with the same degree of minute attention, though at some risk that a potential revolution may be mistaken for a mere freak of scholarly behavior. But there are occasions when rigor turns to violence. The French scholar Etienne Trocmé, steeped in Marcan scholarship and the methods of modern biblical criticism, can argue that an understanding of the structure of Mark depends upon our seeing that in its
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original form it ended, not at 16:20, and not at 16:8 either, but at the end of the thirteenth chapter, which forms the so-called Marcan apocalypse, and immediately precedes the Passion narrative. Given the religious and political situation at the moment of writing, this is where the gospel ought to end, with an allusion to the genre of apocalypse current at that time, and a solemn injunction to watch, which refers to a particular first-century community of Christians and not to the historical narrative as such. If one accepts this position it becomes possible to show that the preceding part of the text is consonant with this ending; and what is not consonant can be explained as the work of the editor who later revised the gospel and added the Passion narrative for a “second edition, revised and supplemented by a long appendix.”26 By such means one may, without violating the institutional consensus, prepare a text that conforms with one’s own rigid foreunderstanding of its sense. On the other hand, Farrer’s reading is condemned as it were by institutional intuition; we may therefore call it an outsider’s interpretation. I find it preferable to interpretations that arise from the borrowed authority of the institutionalized corrector, and presuppose that the prime source of our knowledge of the founder of Christianity will necessarily be compliant with whatever, for the moment, are the institution’s ideas of order. Farrer’s notions of order were literary, and although his tone is always reverent, and occasionally even pious, he makes bold to write about Mark as another man might write about Spenser, except that he has some difficulty with the problem of historicity, for he could certainly not accept Kant’s word for it that the historical veracity of these accounts was a matter of complete indifference. Of course his motive for desiring fulfillment was related to his faith and his vocation. But his satisfaction of that desire was to be achieved by means familiar to all interpreters, and like the rest he sensed that despite, or even because of, the puzzles, the discontinuities, the amazements of Mark (and the gospel is full of verbs meaning “astonish,” “terrify,” “amaze,” and the like), his text can be read as somehow hanging together. If there is one belief (however the facts resist it) that unites us all, from the evangelists to those who argue away inconvenient portions of their texts, and those who spin large plots to accommodate the discrepancies and dissonances into some larger scheme, it is this conviction that somehow, in some occult fashion, if we could only detect it, everything will be found to hang together. When Robert Adams challenged this conviction he was thought bold. The French utopians challenge it in a different way, condemning the desire for order, for closure, a relic of bourgeois bad faith. But this is an announcement of revolutionary aims: they intend to change
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what is the case. Perhaps the case needs changing; but it is the case. We are all fulfillment men, pleromatists; we all seek the center that will allow the senses to rest, at any rate for one interpreter, at any rate for one moment. If the text has a great many details that puzzle us, we ask where they popped up from. Our answers will be very diverse: Theoclymenos or Stanislaus, Mr. Duffy or Death, a hooded phallus haunting tombs, a mimesis of fortuity and therefore not in itself fortuitous. Or perhaps: a candidate for baptism; a lover; a mimesis of actuality; a signature. We halt the movement of the senses, or try to. Sometimes the effort is great. Bloom failed with the man in the macintosh; the hour was late, too late for him to sort out carnal and spiritual, manifest and latent, revealed and concealed. He had had a long hard day and went, quite carnally, to bed. Perhaps he returned to the question later, as we must. NOTES 1. Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s Ulysses, New York, 1931, pp. 152f. Gilbert got the idea from Victor Bérard’s Les Phéniciens et l’Odyssée, in which all the mysterious movements of Theoclymenos are set forth, with the speculation that he may have been a hero in a part of the epic cycle following the Odyssey—the Telegony. 2. Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, New York, 1958, p. 165; and articles by John O. Lyons (in James Joyce Miscellany, 2nd series, London, 1959, pp. 133f ) and by Thomas E. Connolly (in James Joyce’s Dubliners, ed. Clive Hart, London, 1969, pp. 107f ). 3. Robert M. Adams, Surface and Symbol, New York, 1962, pp. 218, 245–246. Hélène Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, translated by Sally A. J. Purcell, New York, 1972, expressly disagrees with Adams, saying that by the time the table emits its loud lone crack Bloom “knows ... who M’Intosh was ... The garment has become transparent to Bloom’s ‘unconscious substance,’ and he has now to struggle against the truth that is self-imposed” (712f ). How we know this is not explained. 4. Note the persistent suppression of Bloom’s name in the concluding pages of “Cyclops.” Indeed, as Gilbert points out, “the idea of anonymity or misnomer is suggested under many aspects”—perhaps by way of allusion to Odysseus’ change of name to No-man in the relevant episode of Homer (James Joyce’s Ulysses, p. 252). 5. Adams, Surface and Symbol, p. 186. 6. The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller, New York, 1975, p. 11. 7. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., Chicago, 1970. 8. Taylor, St. Mark, pp. 561–562. 9. Cranfield, St. Mark, p. 438. 10. Taylor, St. Mark, p. 551, Cranfield, St. Mark, p. 438. 11. Quoted by H. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 2nd ed. rev., Boston, 1963, p. 274. Jonas, describing the Gnostic “Hymn of the Pearl” or “Song of the Apostle Judas Thomas,” mentions that the symbolism of a garment includes a use of it as the heavenly or ideal double of a person on earth, sometimes the Saviour. That an allegory of Gnostic origin has
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been intruded at this point in the Passion narrative has not, so far as I know, been proposed by the exegetes, who may well find it wholly counter-intuitive. 12. Morton Smith, Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, Cambridge, Mass., 1973; The Secret Gospel, London, 1974. 13. Austin Farrer, A Study in St. Mark, London, 1951; St. Matthew and St. Mark, 1954 (2nd ed., 1966). 14. For the view that Peter’s third denial is a formal curse directed against Jesus, see Helmut Merkel, “Peter’s Curse,” The Trial of Jesus, ed. Ernst Bammel (Studies in Biblical Theology, second series, 13), London, 1970, pp. 66–71. 15. Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, p. 4. 16. For the difficulties that arise when “history-likeness” is confused with historical reference, see Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, New Haven, 1974. 17. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, New York, 1959, p. 535. He also told Samuel Beckett “I may have oversystematized Ulysses” (Ellmann, p. 715). 18. “La Construction de la nouvelle et du roman,” in T. Todorov ed. Théorie de la littérature: Textes des Formalistes russes, Paris, 1965, pp. 170–196. 19. D. E. Nineham, Saint Mark (Pelican Gospel Commentaries), Harmondsworth, 1963, p. 439. 20. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 536. 21. Ellmann, p. 725. (Translation slightly altered.) 22. J. jeremias, The Eucharistic Words of Jesus, translated by Norman Perrin, London, 1966, p. 132. 23. W. L. Knox, quoted in Taylor, St. Mark, p. 609. 24. Farrer, Study, p. 174. 25. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics, London, 1975, p. 244. 26. Etienne Trocmé, The Formation of the Gospel According to Mark, translated by Pamela Gaughan, London, 1975, p. 240.
H E R B E RT M A R K S
Pauline Typology and Revisionary Criticism
C
oncern over the problem of intertestamental continuity goes back to the paradoxical attitude of the earliest Christian writers, who in the New Testament presented their teachings on the one hand as a confirmation of the scriptural word, on the other as a decisively new revelation. Unlike the more overtly theological paradoxes professed in the creeds, this literary paradox, for which the term “typology” may serve as a convenient flag, has never been dogmatically defined. The most influential proposals from the second century on share a common dependence on Paul’s letter-spirit antithesis; yet differing theological presuppositions have led, in circular fashion, to quite different theories of interpretation. Unfortunately, the rich legacy of hermeneutic debate tends to color our reading of Paul himself, whose letters contain examples of and directives for a way of reading scripture (and by extension other literature) that cannot be comfortably reconciled with any normative mode of interpretation.1 To argue a contrast between Paul and the Church is itself a venerable tradition, and Harnack’s remark that the history of dogma is “a history of Pauline reactions in the Church” is justly celebrated (1905:136). However, the opposition I have in mind is not offered as a critique of a theological institution, but rather as a demonstration of the motives governing a kind of creative interpretation whose source is the impulse toward imaginative
From Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52, no. 1 (March 1984). © 1984 American Academy of Religion.
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autonomy, or, to use the language of the New Testament, toward exousia (power or freedom). Such an impulse produces a deep though often disguised ambivalence toward the primary text; for it is only at the text’s prior instigation and within its matrix of given forms that the interpreter, whether poet or theologian, can conceive his own vision. In his studies of modern poetry, Harold Bloom has described such ambivalence as an “anxiety of influence,” relating it to the generic principle, first formulated by Vico, that priority in the natural order is equivalent to authority in the spiritual order (1973:13). While interpreters unaffected by it tend to promote “the idealizing process that is canonization” (1976:71), the “strong” or creative reader, by willfully distorting the antecedent text succeeds in arrogating to himself some measure of its authority. It will be my contention here that Paul’s subordination of the Jewish scriptures to their “spiritual” understanding is a paradigmatic instance of revisionary power realized in the process of overcoming a tyranny of predecession. In historical terms, this approach leads to conclusions that might be characterized vaguely as Marcionite. More precisely, it would salvage a central insight from the position of Marcion’s foremost expositor, Adolf von Harnack, who (with the exception of Nietzsche2) was the modern writer most sensitive to the antithetical aspect of the Pauline writings. In Harnack’s view, Paul never intended the Hebrew Bible to become the Erbauungsbuch of Christianity; the faith he envisioned would have been entirely “spiritual” and not a book-religion at all, although his actual use of scripture, particularly his typological exegesis, contributed to the opposite effect (1928). Admittedly, the reasoning on which this conclusion is based is often dubious (the significance of the scarcity of Old Testament quotations in the shorter letters is debatable as is the uncritical identification of “letter” with scripture), but the estimation of Paul’s fundamentally agnostic stance toward scriptural tradition seems to me accurate. I would suggest however, in disagreement with Harnack, that it is precisely in his typological exegesis that Paul’s stance is most apparent. Literal and spiritual represent opposing terms, but the literary is one of the realms in which both may be defined. Indeed, “in the Judaeo-Christian development,” as James Barr has written, the very “possibility of being radical or revolutionary is connected with being a book religion” (136). THE CANONICAL PERSPECTIVE For the most part, modern students of Paul have neglected this idea— a neglect I would like to examine briefly, as it will help to bring out the
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deeper tendency of Paul’s own thinking. One may begin by distinguishing three types of interpretation. A reading that is not revisionary, in the sense defined above, is apt to be either expository or apologetic. Since modern New Testament scholarship, for all its avowed objectivity, has allowed these latter to intermingle, it is hardly surprising that the distinctively antithetical character of Paul’s hermeneutics has not been properly appreciated. Precritical discussion of the relationship between the two testaments was by derivation an apologetic enterprise. It began as a response to Jewish critics, on the one hand, and to those radicals, on the other, whose aggressive emphasis on discontinuity was perceived to be a corollary of gnostic dualism. With the rise of historical criticism and the attendant redefinition of the sensus litteralis, Old and New ceased to be a prominent focus of attention. Questions of signification gave way to questions of verification, and the drive to uncover the historical facts (wie es eigentlich gewesen) fostered scholarly indifference to textual correspondences. At the same time, the emergence of Old Testament and New Testament criticism as separate academic disciplines created a special obstacle to intertestamental study. Modern efforts to bridge this gap are based on the essentially empirical premise that scriptural exegesis played an important part in the life of the early Christian communities. It is generally assumed that members of the incipient churches were searching the scriptures, first, for ways to interpret events in the life of Jesus which impressed them as extraordinary, and, second, for ways to make the proclamation of their interpretation acceptable to their contemporaries. C. H. Dodd, whose book According to the Scriptures has been the starting point for a succession of impressive studies on the historical use of the Old Testament in the New, announces this hypothesis in his opening chapter. In Dodd’s words, “the Church was committed, by the very terms of its kerygma, to a formidable task of biblical research, primarily for the purpose of clarifying its own understanding of the momentous events out of which it had emerged, and also for the purpose of making its Gospel intelligible to the outside public” (14).3 In short, the Church’s primary interpretive task is assumed to have been one of assimilation, of harmonizing its primitive kerygma with the existing body of Jewish tradition, and such familiar New Testament features as introductory formulae, typological correspondences, and prophecy fulfillments are credibly explained as responses to this descriptive or apologetic challenge. It should be noted, however, that this critical approach, which leads naturally to an emphasis on continuities between Old and New, is not without apologetic overtones of its own. Most obvious is the explicit bias toward what C. F. D. Moule calls “the pressure of events”: “The Christians
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thus found themselves pushed by the pressure of events into a new way of selecting, relating, grouping, and interpreting what we call ‘Old Testament’ passages; and while the scriptures of the Jews undoubtedly exercised a great influence upon the form in which they presented their material, and ultimately upon the very writing and collecting of the Christian scriptures, this influence was evidently subordinate both to the influence of the apostolic witness to Jesus and to the living inspiration of the Christian prophets in the Church” (85). Here, the insistence on the priority of the Church’s witness, the sharp distinction between form and content, and the reluctance to allow that scriptural interpretation might have played an initiatory or constitutive rather than a merely expository role in the New Testament’s evolution all testify to the desire of historical criticism to save the phenomena at any cost. Although, as Hans Frei has demonstrated, this interest may be traced to the failure of post-Enlightenment Protestant theology to differentiate historylikeness from history, or meaning from historical truth, the hypothesis advanced has more in common with precritical efforts to define the relationship between the two testaments than is commonly supposed.4 For orthodox Christian commentators, Old and New Testament, whatever their relative merits, were the two parts of a determined canon whose unique authority, aside from Eastern debates over the Apocrypha, was virtually established from the time of Irenaeus. Canonicity was the starting point of biblical hermeneutics. The task of the theologian was to link the two parts of the canon together in a static bond, and to this end correspondences were observed or invented. Modern scholars construct a parallel to this situation when, from the flexible body of oral traditions, liturgical practices, and social alliances embedded in the New Testament, they hypostasize an original “kerygma,” which functions hermeneutically much like a canonical text. In this way, the predicament of the New Testament authors comes to resemble the more familiar predicament of the established Church. Viewed through the correspondent lenses of the canonical spectacles, the earliest Christian exegetes seem also to be engaged in a labor of assimilation, selecting and interpreting likely Old Testament texts in accordance with an external principle. This bias has been most evident in studies of the synoptic gospels. But it has colored the discussion of Paul’s hermeneutics as well, where it has had the acknowledged effect of assimilating Pauline exegesis to early Christian (and Qumran) exegesis as a whole. Thus, D. Moody Smith, reviewing recent research on the use of the Old Testament in the New, can write of Paul’s “conviction that the Old Testament finds its fulfillment in a new event or series of events which have occurred or are about to occur,” and, further, that
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of the several heads under which Paul’s relation to the Old Testament may be summarized the “first, and most important ... is his general prophetic and kerygmatic understanding of the Old Testament as the precursor, prefiguration, and promise of the Gospel” (36–37). Such a summary is only justified on the premise that in Paul the messianic proof-texts characteristic of the gospels are, as E. E. Ellis says, “presupposed,” thus freeing the apostle to focus his attention on “the next step—the significance of the Scriptures for the Messianic Age and Messianic Community” (115).5 In this way, the difference between Paul and the synoptic tradition is limited to a difference in topical emphasis, while the basic presupposition of Dodd, that the significance of the Jewish scriptures for Christianity was primarily descriptive or apologetic, remains intact. One recognizes its influence in the pragmatic views of Paul’s hermeneutics set forth by critics as different as Willi Marxsen, who stresses that Paul never starts out from a scriptural text but rather uses scriptural references to clarify particular Christian messages—a method he characterizes as “implicitly apologetic” (28)—and Barnabas Lindars, who goes so far as to assert that “the curse of the Law was an aspect of the Passion apologetic” (235). In sum, the majority of modern scholars have taken a nicely domesticated view of Paul’s position. One might call this the Lukan view; for in the Book of Acts Paul too appears to resort to the allegedly fundamental practice of using biblical prophecy to explain the identity and significance of Jesus. We see him preaching the gospel according to scripture to the Jewish congregations in Antioch (13:16-41), Thessalonica (17:2f.), and Rome (28:23), as well as in his self-defense before Agrippa (26:22f.), developing correspondences between the messianic prophecies and the life of Jesus. However, appeals to scripture markedly similar in form are also ascribed to Peter (2:22–36), to Philip (8:30-35), and to the risen Christ (Lk 24:27, 44–47), suggesting that such testimonies are part of a literary pattern rather than a record of actual words or styles.6 (The fact that all the passages, except for Peter’s, call special attention to the exegetical process itself may indicate that Luke was anxious to endow that method of reading on which his own gospel tradition depended with a legitimizing pedigree.) Moreover, when one examines Paul’s own letters, one finds that despite the density of scriptural quotations—approximately one third of the New Testament total, mostly concentrated in the four Hauptbriefe—not one is ever used as testimony to establish the identity of Jesus. This holds even if one includes, in addition to overt citations, general allusions to Old Testament episodes or themes and the many formulaic appeals to scriptural authority. The two apparent exceptions, 1 Corinthians 15:3–5 and Romans 1:3f., both occur in
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the context of creedal summaries adopted from common liturgical tradition.7 The use of fulfillment words, such as the verb ple¯roun so prevalent in Acts and elsewhere, to connect biblical prophecy with a more recent event is likewise uncharacteristic. The fact is, Paul’s writing gives little indication that he concerned himself at all with the events of Jesus’ life. What we today might call the question of facticity had for him a subtler consequence, hinted, for example, in Galatians 2:19f., where the conviction that Jesus was actually crucified according to the law is the implicit premise behind the claim that his own death to the law is a revitalization. For Paul, the given belief in a crucified messiah was the punctum stans from which to project that otherwise groundless series of dialectical revisions (power in weakness, wisdom in folly, life in death, fulfillment in abrogation) of which his hermeneutics are an integral part. One thus searches in vain through the extant letters for a literal or historical apologetics. It is from his soteriology that his Christology has largely to be inferred, and evidence for the specific influence of biblical prophecy is purely conjectural. THE AUTHORITY OF SCRIPTURE Paul most often appeals to the authority of scripture to reinforce ethical precepts or to adjudicate specific questions of personal conduct and church policy (Rom 13:9f., 14:11; 1 Cor 5:13, 9:9; 2 Cor 8:15, 9:9; and elsewhere). Such parenetic uses, while suggesting that Paul continued to recognize the law’s directive or regulatory function, have a limited bearing on the question of the deeper relationship between the two testaments. However, a few of them demonstrate a peculiar reversal, by which the text, though cited as authoritative, seems to owe its significance not to its own intrinsic merit but to something in the situation of the interpreter. These passages, though not unprecedented in first-century Jewish exegesis, reveal features of the more original orientation that governs Paul’s attitude toward scripture as a whole. The best example is Paul’s parenetic use of aspects of the exodus tradition in 1 Corinthians 10:1–11 to admonish his readers against backsliding and moral laxity: “I want you to know, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and the sea, and all ate the same supernatural food and all drank the same supernatural drink. For they drank from the supernatural Rock which followed them, and the Rock was Christ. Nevertheless with most of them God was not pleased; for they were overthrown in the wilderness.” Paul’s identification of the rock with Christ
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subordinates the scriptural text to a group of midrashic traditions, including perhaps the “rejected stone” tradition of the early Church. More centrally, the Israelites, “baptized into Moses” but still liable to destruction, are important only insofar as readers of scripture are capable of seeing in their predicament a prefiguration of their own situation: “Now these things are warnings to us, not to desire evil as they did. Do not be idolaters as some of them were; as it is written, ‘The people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to dance.’ We must not indulge in immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day. We must not put the Lord to the test, as some of them did and were destroyed by serpents; nor grumble, as some of them did and were destroyed by the Destroyer. Now these things happened to them as a warning, but they were written down for our instruction, upon whom the end of the ages has come.” Here then it is the special understanding of the interpreter that determines the significance of the text, which only assumes its exemplary or prescriptive role by virtue of that understanding (cf. Rom 15:4; 4:23f.). As with the Qumran sectarians, the eschatology highlighted in the final phrase emphasizes the communal or ecclesiastical dimension in opposition to the realized eschatology of the “spirituals.” But it is hard to see how such reasoned convictions affect the interpretive act itself. Paul does not simply interpret the exodus events as instructive examples to Christians. He suggests, more boldly than the pesharim or their New Testament counterparts, that the biblical events were recorded in written form for the specific purpose of eliciting the interpretation he gives them: that insofar as they are scripture, they originated “as a warning,” the principal meaning and interest of which lay in its anticipatory quality. The word translated “warning” in the RSV is tupos in Greek, and it is this passage together with Romans 5:14 that has given Paul his reputation as the originator of typological interpretation. (The same word, which derives ultimately from the verb tuptein meaning “to strike,” also occurs with its ordinary meaning of “example” or “standard” elsewhere in the letters.)8 In the classic definition of Erich Auerbach, a typological or figural interpretation “establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfills the first” (53). This connection is a dialectical one, involving a strong negative contrast between type and antitype, which Gerhard von Rad has aptly designated the “element of supersession” (329; cf. Eichrodt in Westermann [226]). Since the precursor is asserted to be less substantial than the successor, the “fulfillment” of the Old Testament text may be said to entail its simultaneous annulment. Auerbach exaggerates the
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case when he writes that Paul’s use of typology “intended to strip the Old Testament of its normative character and show that it is merely a shadow of things to come” (50). The rebuke to the “spirituals” in 1 Corinthians 4:6 (me¯ huper ha gegraptai), for example, preserves the premise of scriptural authority without which vital response would have slipped into solipsism. But the patent effect of the antitype was to narrow the social and spiritual order within which the normative character of scripture continued to obtain. It is common to present Pauline typology in contrast with its Philonic counterpart. When Justin Martyr writes that the brazen serpent raised on a pole (Num 21:9) is a type of Christ, for example, he is held to be interpreting in the Pauline or Palestinian tradition (Trypho 112). When his contemporary Theophilus of Antioch writes that the three days of creation preceding the appearance of the sun and stars are “types of the trinity, god, his word, and his wisdom,” he is said to be using a Philonic or Alexandrian kind of typology, otherwise known as allegory (Autol. 2.15). Definitions of the two are legion. To continue with Auerbach: “The two poles of the figure are separate in time, but both, being real events or figures are within time, within the stream of historical life.... Since one thing represents and signifies the other [typological] interpretation is ‘allegorical’ in the widest sense. But it differs from most of the allegorical forms known to us by the historicity both of the sign and what it signifies” (53–54).9 One may appreciate this difference by comparing Paul’s identification of the rock of Massah with Christ, and Philo’s interpretation of the rock as a symbol of divine wisdom (Leg. alleg. 2.86; cf. Wis. 11.4). In Paul’s reading, there is a radical actualization, a drastic evacuation of the past into the present, which “strikes” indirectly at the priority, and hence the authority, of the scriptural text. In Philo, on the other hand, the temporal dimension is irrelevant, and, as a result, the antithetical impulse is of a less aggressive order. Whereas the Platonic dialectic which lies behind allegorical reading is cognitive (to use the vocabulary of William Hamilton), the Pauline dialectic is conative. Thus, for Philo, the discovery of the hidden meaning of the rock is an end in itself, while Paul, having appropriated the scriptural figure, incorporates it as part of a dramatic sequence in which he and his contemporaries are the ultimate term. Revisionary correspondences of this order do not originate with the New Testament. Repeated breaks characterize the whole history of Yahwism, and one can trace the revolution of patterns and motifs that recapitulate earlier traditions without dissolving their historical status at almost every stage in the development of the biblical text. This is especially true of the prophets, who were consciously looking for a new David, a new exodus, a new covenant, and a new city of God. To Hosea, for example, the intimacy
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of the early wilderness period foreshadowed Israel’s final union with Yahweh (2:14–23), while to Second Isaiah, the exodus from Egypt, the covenant with Noah, and the foundation of Zion all appeared as types of Israel’s ultimate redemption. For the Hebrew writers, no less than for Paul, the second term of these analogies was meant to supersede the first. A prophecy of the new exodus in Second Isaiah provides the most dramatic illustration, with its injunction to “remember not the former things nor consider the things of old” directly preceding its announcement of the “new thing” (43:18f.—a passage that in its entirety may have inspired the Pauline doctrine of a “new creation” [2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15]). Even here, however, one must recognize that the prophetic oracle refers to a future act of Yahweh, a work he is on the point of inaugurating, rather than to an actual consummation. This future orientation is generally characteristic of the Hebrew Bible, where fulfillments are constantly being postponed or sublated into ever more figurative promises.10 Accordingly, a contrast may be drawn between Old Testament typology, which continues to direct the reader’s expectations toward a continually receding future—“into the void” as Karl Barth has put it (89)—and Christian typology, in which the act of fulfillment will already have been accomplished. From one point of view, such “actualized” typology is more ambiguous than its Old Testament prototype; for while its antithetical potential remains appreciable, it may also serve (in fact, most often serves) to establish continuities, as in the apologetic writings of the church fathers. The New Testament writers themselves all maintain the tension between these two possibilities (continuity and discontinuity). But just as Matthew, embellishing his picture of Jesus as a second Moses, leans to one side of the balance, so Paul, with his concern for the situation of the interpreter, leans sharply to the other. Since both make use of temporally grounded correspondences, the difference is less a matter of practice than of intention. Matthew’s principal concern is the identity of Jesus; hence, he remains attached to the content of scripture. In Paul’s letters on the other hand, not the kerygma but the interpreter is the primary focus, and the attitude toward scripture is therefore more aggressive. Otherwise stated, for Paul interpretation is first and foremost an occasion for the exercise of “Christian freedom” or exousia—that ambiguous catchword whose root means “being” and whose English equivalents include “license” and “autonomy” as well as “authority” and “power.” Paul’s concern with autonomy operates at various levels. It shows itself most obviously in his polemical and ecclesiastical activity, leading him to disclaim emphatically any connection with the hierarchy of the Jerusalem church, and perhaps
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determining his denial in Galatians 1:22 that he was known by sight to the churches of Judaea.11 At a more personal level, it stimulated his impatience with the attitude, if not the practices, of contemporary Jewish exegesis, which had made the cessation of direct revelation the implicit foundation for its “hedge about the torah” (Aboth 1.1). In contrast to the rabbis, Paul saw himself as carrying on the prophetic line, proclaiming to a generation engrossed in religious conventions and intimidated by its own past that divine intervention was a current reality. Accordingly, he speaks of being “set apart” before birth (Gal 1:15; cf. Isa 49:1; Jer 1:5), and compares himself to Moses, the archetypal prophet (2 Cor 3:7ff.; Rom 9:3, 10:1), and to David, the author of the Psalms (2 Cor 4:13). But at the level that concerns us here, Paul’s impulse toward spiritual autonomy prompted a deep ambivalence toward the Bible itself, making him not an apologist—dependent on scripture for legitimating testimony—but a dogmatist—affirming the priority of his own conceptions by imposing them on the earlier tradition. Like Jesus, according to the testimony of Mark, he wished to teach ho¯s exousian echo¯n, “as one who had authority, and not as the scribes” (1:22). EXOUSIA AND INTERPRETATION Paul employs the word exousia repeatedly in elaborating his theory of Christian conduct, and, though he never uses it in a hermeneutic context, his most explicit discussion of scriptural interpretation insists on the importance of freedom (eleutheria) as a concomitant of spiritual understanding (2 Cor 3:17).12 Significantly, this discussion begins with Paul’s attempt to authenticate his own authority: “For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God’s word; but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ.... Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not in a written code but in the Spirit; for the written code kills, but the Spirit gives life” (2 Cor 2:17; 3:5f.). Despite the subtle disclaimer in 3:5a (cf. Phil 3:9), this position is tantamount to a proclamation of autonomy; for the direct commission from God frees the apostle from acknowledging any lesser power, including, as it turns out, the power of sacred scripture (cf. Gal 1:11f.). This becomes clearer in the sequel, where the declaration of competence provides the ground for Paul’s elaboration of a distinctive theory of interpretation, geared to the recipients of the “new covenant.” The idea of a new covenant is a prominent motif in the Hebrew Bible itself. It appears most notably in Jeremiah, where its antithetical implications
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are already developed: “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (31:31–33). The point here is not that the content of the Sinai covenant is to be nullified, but rather that the manner in which it is apprehended is to change (cf. 24:7; 32:39f.). The same position is taken by Ezekiel when he opposes the “heart of flesh” to the “heart of stone” and makes inspired understanding the sign of divine acceptance (36:26f.; cf. 11:19f.). Thus, in the major prophets, the dynamics of supersession are already asserted within a hermeneutic context. Paul puts this tradition to an extremely personal (and, it may seem, whimsical or reductive) use when he writes to the Corinthians that, although he has presented no apostolic credentials, they themselves are his “letter of recommendation” (perhaps because Paul has converted them to Christianity, perhaps because he has continued to care for them affectionately), “written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” (3:3). In introducing the scriptural allusion, Paul writes, as a rhetorician might, to embellish his claim of competence. But the prophetic text, once invoked, continues to haunt him, and within three lines he returns to confront it via the “new covenant” of which he has been qualified by God to be a minister. “Not in the written code but in the spirit,” he adds, rounding out the “letter of recommendation” figure; for authenticity can never be bound to a determined tenor. On the contrary, it is a self-accrediting power that only subsists by constant revision, and its manifestations are ever evolving “from one degree of glory to another” (3:18). The Hebrew Bible contains a variety of covenant traditions, but theologically they can be divided into two principal types. On the one hand, there is the Davidic-Abrahamic tradition, in which Yahweh promises to bless his people but no reciprocal obligation is imposed. On the other hand, there are the covenants at Sinai and Shechem, in which Israel commits itself to adhere strictly to the conditions set forth by Yahweh. George E. Mendenhall has spoken of the new covenant in Jeremiah, with its emphasis on divine forgiveness, as a product of the amalgamation of these two traditions (51). Israel had broken its covenant obligations according to the Mosaic tradition, and so forfeited its right to protection; according to the Abrahamic tradition,
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however, Yahweh’s protection was inalienable. The renewal of the covenant in such a manner as to eliminate the danger of disobedience satisfied both allegations. Where Jeremiah harmonizes the two traditions, Paul’s procedure, however, is to set them at odds. One observes this most readily in Galatians 3 and 4, where the more remote covenant of grace—likened to Sarah, bearing children for freedom—is adduced in subversion of the more immediate Mosaic law—likened to Hagar, “bearing children for slavery.” In 2 Corinthians, the same subversive procedure is working, but here no positive model from scripture is proposed. Rather, the “emphasis upon direct responsibility to God, upon freedom and self-determination,” which Mendenhall finds characteristic of the Abrahamic covenant tradition (52), is appropriated to a new “dispensation of righteousness” which prevails in despite of all written authority. Paul’s revisionary strategy is thus twofold: he factors the scriptural tradition and uses one part of it to discredit the other;13 and he presents the remaining benefits as exclusive prerogatives of his new life in Christ. In addition, of course, he revises the covenant’s temporal status: what was prophecy in Jeremiah is actuality in Paul. The fact that in the Galatians passage Paul’s concern is clearly with the law as commandment or demand, and that the authority of scripture as such is hardly questioned, raises the possibility that his polemic against the “written code” in 2 Corinthians is of more limited application than I have been arguing. A correlation between gramma and a more strictly theological sense of nomos appears for example in Romans 7:6: “But now we are discharged from the law, dead to that which held us captive, so that we serve not under the old written code but in the new life of the Spirit.” The meanings of “the law” in Paul’s writings is too large a question to treat adequately here.14 As the Greek translation of torah, however, nomos was at least potentially synonymous with the Bible as a whole, and this is obviously the sense it is intended to have in Romans 3:19, where the passages from the prophets and psalms quoted in the preceding verses are regarded jointly as nomos. Presumably the “old covenant” of which Paul speaks in 2 Corinthians 3:14 also has this meaning (cf. Mekilta Pisha 5, “By covenant is meant nothing else but the Torah”). Moreover, just as Paul implicitly acknowledges the authority of scripture in passages where the motivation of the interpreter is not in question, so he can refer to the law as “holy” and “spiritual” (Rom 7:12, 14) apart from its oppressive effect on those who serve it. As E.E. Ellis writes, “Graphe¯ and nomos both signify for Paul the revealed will of God. But the law understood as a legal system apart from Christ could only bring death; so also the whole Old Testament understood and applied without the illumination of the pneuma often resulted not in graphe¯ but only
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in gramma.... The issue of the Law versus Christ here passed into Paul’s understanding of the nature of Scripture itself” (27). Freedom from the law as command and freedom from the law as text are finally interchangeable for Paul, because both are metonymic on a kind of freedom that has no identifiable locus in rational or sensual experience. Its locus is the gospel— something unknown and inconceivable—whose content is either the dramatic paradox of the messiah crucified or the subtler enigma of its own proclamation. Whether the negative term in Paul’s antitheses appears to have a legal or a hermeneutic referent is thus a matter of relative indifference. An emphasis on the law as command would, Paul felt, inevitably be accompanied by a transformation of writings (graphe¯ ) into a written code (gramma)—i.e., into a canonized, and therefore “petrified,” order of compulsion. In this connection, Paul’s attitude might be compared to that of Moses in the imaginative view of some early writers (e.g., Barn., ch. 4), when, observing the idolatry of the Israelites, and recognizing that it would extend to the torah as well, he chose to shatter the tablets, thus initiating the process that culminated in the “tablets of the heart.” Paul’s own “shattering,” however, as appears from his elaboration of the letter–spirit antithesis in the chapter we have been discussing, involves an active depreciation of Moses foreign to the apologetic reading of his successors: “Now if the dispensation of death, carved in letters on stone, came with such splendor that the Israelites could not look at Moses’ face because of its brightness, fading as this was, will not the dispensation of the Spirit be attended with greater splendor?” (2 Cor 3:7f.). At first appearance, this is a fairly straightforward contrast between the Mosaic law and the new covenant. “Carved in letters on stone” emphasizes the written, formulaic quality of the former and helps explain why it is a “dispensation of death” in opposition to the dynamic “dispensation of the Spirit.” But the idea that the light shining in Moses’ face, that is, the power and glory of the Mosaic writings, was a fading splendor is not found in the passage from Exodus to which Paul alludes (34:29–35). In fact, the prevailing Jewish interpretation insisted that Moses’ face shone undiminished until his death.15 Here then is an example of the kind of exegetical freedom Paul advocates; for his “competence” has allowed him willfully to revise the scriptural text, conforming it to his own antithetical purposes. This revision becomes the very core of Paul’s argument in the following lines. It is, he admits, his own “hope” of a splendor that will outshine Moses’ that makes him “very bold”: “not like Moses, who put a veil over his face so that the Israelites might not see the end of the fading splendor. But their minds were hardened; for to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil
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remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away” (3:13f.). In the Priestly account of the descent from Sinai which underlies this passage, Moses assumes the veil not because his glory is fading but because it is too awesome for the Israelites to face. The veil is analogous in this respect to the veil set up in the tabernacle, as in Solomon’s temple, to screen off the holy of holies (Exod 26:31–33; 40:21), or to the wings of the guardian cherubim which overshadow the mercy seat on top of the ark itself (25:18–22). It is the condition of Yahweh’s self-revelation to an impure or stiff-necked people, too mistrustful to embrace its covenanted role or realize the full meaning of its liberation. By its agency, the divine glory, of which Moses’ glory is a reflection, is at the same time objectively present yet imperfectly accessible to generations that must still endure a wilderness wandering and, with one exception (Joshua; the high priest), perish in exile. Paul allows a part of this idea to come through when he asserts a connection between the veil and the hardness of the Israelites. But the full meaning only resurfaces at the beginning of the next chapter, when it is no longer a question of the Mosaic code but of Paul’s own gospel! These lines ostensibly mark the resumption of his self-defense against the rival apostles; but beneath this topical struggle for recognition, the engagement with Moses reaches its crisis: “Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart. We have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways; we refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God’s word, but by the open statement of the truth we would commend ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God. And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled only to those who are perishing” (4:1–3). Again, the disclaimer is a warning; for what Paul has done is underhanded indeed. By claiming for his own gospel an attribute of the Mosaic code, he has appropriated to himself the glory of the scriptural tradition. He began, as we have seen, by introducing a distorted reading of that tradition so as to discredit Moses, but he concludes here by assuming its legitimate meaning, thus displacing the veiled splendor of the old covenant with the veiled “light of the gospel of the glory of Christ” (4:4). Paul effects a similar reversal in Romans 10:5ff., when he interprets the words of Moses’ farewell address, “It is not in heaven.... But the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart” (Deut 30:12–14), as a reference to Christ, “the word of faith which we preach.” It is easy to confuse Paul’s meaning here with the common early Christian view that Jesus was himself the “new torah” personified (Davies, 1952:93). But Paul knows Christ less conventionally, as an operant virtue rather than a hypostasized essence: as an imperative to actualizing exegesis (“Christ the evolver” in
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Coleridge’s phrase) who also integrates the ego-centric into the representative “I”—the I “in Christ.” As a result, the antitype of the old covenant for Paul is always the gospel, and the antitype of Moses, Paul himself. When Christ appears as an antitype, it is in conjunction with Adam, “who was a type of the one who was to come” (Rom 5:14). Though the typological relation remains temporal, the context here is more properly mythical than historical (cf. 1 Cor 15:22, 45ff.). Paul’s purpose is to convince us that grace will prevail over sin. “As [Adam’s] trespass led to condemnation for all men, so [Christ’s] act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men” (Rom 5:18). The supersessive element is made explicit in the three verses contrasting the free gift of righteousness with the “original” gratuitous trespass. Since it must overcome a resistance, the counteraction or revision is the stronger act (pollo¯ mallon). Resistance, in this case, may be identified with the law, which functions as an agent of repression. Like the interpreter’s text, law provides for the dialectical antithesis, without which supersession would be mere repetition. Its power is potentially stifling, but since Christ, as the antitype, is “prior” to Adam, its final effect is an intensification: “Law came in, to increase the trespass; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (5:20). THE PROSPECTIVE STANCE Typology, as Harold Bloom has recognized in Poetry and Repression, is a revisionary mode, which works by making the later perpetually earlier than its predecessors. (One might say that in typology the later text becomes the cause [aitia] of the earlier text’s subsistence.) If one is willing to use the terminology adapted after Quintilian, it can be defined more narrowly as a form of transumption or metalepsis, from the “trope-reversing trope,” in which “a word is substituted metonymically for a word in a previous trope.... Metalepsis leaps over the heads of other tropes and becomes a representation set against time, sacrificing the present to an idealized past or hoped-forfuture” (1975:102–3). “Properly accomplished, this stance figuratively produces the illusion of having fathered one’s own fathers, which is the greatest illusion, the one that Vico called ‘divination,’ or that we could call poetic immortality” (1976:20). Bloom goes on to insist that the New Testament lacks such a stance in regard to the Old. But as our whole discussion has suggested, the contrary is patently the case, at least so far as Paul is concerned.16 According to Bloom’s own definition in the same essay, “the scheme of transumption ... demands a juxtaposition of three times; a
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true one that was and will be ...; a less true one that never was ...; and the present moment, which is emptied out of everything but the experiential darkness against which the poet-prophet struggles” (1976:90). In Milton’s description of the Chariot of Paternal Deitie in Book vi of Paradise Lost, which Bloom cites as an example, these times are respectively occupied (1) by the ultimately primary texts in Ezekiel and Revelation, which Paradise Lost contrives to rival as a result of the transumption; (2) by the antecedent texts of Virgil, Dante, and Petrarch, which Milton overleaps; and (3) by the allusion to Milton’s own self-portrait as “the invincible warriour Zeale” riding “over the heads of Scarlet Prelats” in his An Apology Against a Pamphlet. Since Paul is a theoretician rather than a poet, the correlative instances from his writings are overt rather than allusive.17 In the case of the Romans passage just discussed, they could be enumerated as follows: (1) Adam unfallen, which is the moment of creation with which fallen mankind is reconciled as a result of the transumptive stance (the “true” time “that was and will be”); (2) Adam fallen, or the Old Testament history, ending in Christ crucified (the “less true one that never was”); and (3) the “all men” represented by Paul himself as he is “buried” and “crucified” with Christ (Rom 6:4, 6) (the “present moment” of strife and “experiential darkness”). To reiterate, Paul is not concerned here with who Christ is, but with what Christ does. He is “the one who was to come,” and what he does (overleaping his own death) makes what he is a continual possibility. It is an axiom of revisionary criticism that “a creative interpretation is ... necessarily a misinterpretation.” Such deliberate misreadings arise, according to Bloom, “out of the illusion of freedom, out of a sense of priority being possible” (1973:43, 96). The torah, as the dominant literary influence on Paul’s thinking, had to be challenged if Paul was to realize the autonomy he desired; for it was at least partly the experience of its mediating power that had awakened his own yearning for an unmediated covenant. Of course, such a situation was finally an impossible one, as Paul well understood. No matter how boldly he proclaimed his “new creation,” its presence had always to remain a lie since it could never relieve him from the burden of indebtedness to its own scriptural sources. Yet in contempt of all logic, Paul continued to brave the verdict of reprobation, announcing his ministry to be greater than that of his precursors, as if the spiritual freedom of which he boasted could be gained by sheer strength of desire. It was a defiant and precarious stance, whether one calls it hermeneutic heroism, or more poetically holy folly. Paul never ceases to revere the Jewish scriptures, but he maintains that to read them in a vitalizing rather than a stupefying fashion one has need of a special dispensation. This dispensation is inseparable from the prospective
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stance toward revelation which Paul affirms in his letter to the Philippians, “forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead” (3:13). His subordination of scripture to its “spiritual” understanding thus implies a profound conviction that what matters most is not the conclusion or content of the interpretation, but the occurrence of the interpretive act itself. “Although the history of the nation and the world has lost interest for Paul,” writes Bultmann, “he brings to light another phenomenon, the historicity of man” (1957:43). “Historicity” here carries the existential conviction that man creates his own essence through his personal acts—acts which are necessarily incursions against his own past. The act of interpretation does not exhaust or define this self-creation, but it epitomizes it more perspicuously than most kinds of activity; since in interpretation the “past” takes the form of a recognizable text and need not be retrieved from a chaos of unannealed events and impressions. Before this monumental past, those who would study interpretation with Paul are faced with two options: they can apprehend and vindicate his readings, or they can emulate his method. Most common expositors take the former path. They accept Christ, the content of Paul’s revision, as a given and follow his directive to read the Old Testament by the light of the New. There are some, however, who would prefer to take Paul’s act or attitude as authoritative. They would know the “dispensation of the spirit” as a straining toward freedom, knowing that this always involves a struggle against one’s own patrimony in the deepest sense—“the inevitable struggle,” to use Barth’s words, “of revelation against the religion of revelation” (239). Within the temporal framework that the Bible insists on, they would recognize that the content of the gospel is never fixed. Something like this stance has been implicit in the biblical interpretation of such sects as the Montanists and the Spiritual Franciscans, but for the most part their insights have been intermixed with a tendency toward historical literalism. For the true disciples of Paul on this second path, one should rather turn to the poets, in whose hands an interpretation, as one poet reminds us, is always “a horde of destructions.” NOTES 1. Even a superficial survey of the role of the letter-spirit antithesis in the history of biblical hermeneutics would require a sizeable monograph. The most notable landmarks would include Origen’s Platonizing justification of threefold exegesis in the fourth book of De principiis; Augustine’s revision of Tyconius’s third rule in De doctrina christiana (III.33.46; 37.56); Thomas’s definition of the sensus litteralis in the Summa theologiae (Iq.1a.10); and Luther’s displacement of the literal–spiritual distinction in the course of the
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Dictata on the Psalms, leading to the rejection of allegory. Readers interested in pursuing the subject might best begin with the references under 2 Cor 3:6 in the Biblia Patristica. For a critical overview and initial bibliography, see Ebeling (1942, 1958, 1959), Grant (1957, 1963), and Preus. I wish to thank Professor Wayne Meeks of Yale University for helping me to a better understanding both of Paul’s letters and of my own response to them. 2. Nietzsche, characteristically, was both repelled and fascinated by what he recognized as Paul’s “Wille zur Macht.” See especially The Anti-Christ, section 42. 3. Among subsequent studies that accept this fundamental premise, Barnabas Lindars’s deserves special mention. There are also a number of important books on individual New Testament writings. For a critical survey of recent research, see the articles by Smith and Miller. 4. Since Paul’s writings are not narratives, critics are less inclined to read them as reflective of events than as witness to an underlying theology, itself predicated on historical testimony; however, the reductive emphasis on the subject matter, the hermeneutic transition from how to what, remains evident. In this connection, Frank Kermode’s recent observation concerning critical writing on the gospels is relevant to New Testament scholarship as a whole: “The claim that the gospels are truth-centered continues for many to entail the proposition that they are in some sense factual, even though the claim takes the form of saying that the fact they refer to is a theology” (121). 5. A similar argument is developed with more care by Nils Dahl who, though admitting the absence of scriptural proofs in the extant epistles, affirms that Jesus’ messiahship is the “latent presupposition” for Paul’s theology (1974:37–47). Dahl contends, however, that the messiahship of Jesus was not originally an exegetical notion even for the gospel writers (1974:10–36). 6. The reliability of Acts as a historical document was first discredited by F. C. Baur. The theological differences between the Paulinism of Acts and that of the letters were elaborated most carefully by Vielhauer. 7. Paul’s purpose in Gal 3:13 in referring the “curse” of Deut 21:23 to Christ’s crucifixion is clearly not to establish the identity of Jesus, but to define the role and status of the law in such a way as to accommodate both of the testimonies from scripture cited as conflicting in the previous verses. A classic illustration of the underlying rabbinic middah (sˇ eˇneˇ keˇtûbîm hammakh.îsˇ îm) occurs in Mek. Pisha 4 (Lauterbach: 1.32); cf. Dahl (1977:159–78) and, for background, the study by Schwarz. 8. Rom 6:17; Phil 3:17; 1 Thes 1:7; and 2 Thess 3:9. Cf. 1 Tim 4:12; and Titus 2:7. For a full lexical discussion, see the study by K. J. Woollcombe in Lampe and Woollcombe (60–65). 9. Comparable definitions may also be found in Lampe and Woollcombe (40), Hanson (7), and most of the authors reprinted in Westermann. These modern conceptions of typology tend to be more abstract than their precritical antecedents. The German critics in particular hesitate to speak of static persons, objects, or institutions as types, but rather focus on events interpreted as standing under a conceptual arch of promise and fulfillment (von Rad). James Barr has criticized this tendency as inappropriate to the New Testament, where precisely the more specific usage predominates. (See Barr [103–48] for a trenchant criticism of the whole typology–allegory distinction.) 10. Achtemeier (77–81) gives a convenient compend of instances interpreted from the viewpoint of von Rad; see too the theoretical discussion by Nohrnberg (18–19).
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11. Compare the contradictory evidence in Acts 8:3, though Wilhelm Heitmüller’s defense of the Galatians account (translated in part in Meeks [308–19]) remains persuasive. 12. Exousia and eleutheria appear to be almost interchangeable for Paul, as in the following passages where the identical issue is in question: “For you were called to freedom [eleutheria], brethren; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another” (Gal 5:13); “Only take care lest this liberty (exousia) of yours somehow become a stumbling block to the weak” (1 Cor 8:9). Note too how the word eleutheros introduces the discussion of exousia in 1 Cor 9:1ff. 13. Paul thus reverses at a more abstract level the rabbinic practice of reconciling antinomies; cf. n. 7. 14. For an introduction to the larger issues, see Bultmann (1951:259–69) and Davies (1962). 15. And even beyond, though the tradition is hard to date; see Ginzberg (6:37 n. 204) for sources. There is an attempt to construct a possible midrashic antecedent for Paul’s interpretation in Childs (621–23). 16. In Bloom’s most recent writing, the dismissive attitude toward the New Testament has been substantially modified; see his forthcoming lecture on the Gospel of John to appear in a collection of symposium papers edited by Alvin Rosenfeld for Indiana University Press. For the traditional meaning of metalepsis, see Quintilian, Institutes 3.6.37–39; the citations in Lausberg (1.295); and especially the definitive survey by Hollander (133–49). 17. It need hardly be emphasized that I have been dealing here with Paul as an exegete and theoretician, not as a literary stylist. An analysis of Paul’s artistic achievement would not be irrelevant, but the passages in his writing that strike me as the most powerful tend to confront the traditions of contemporary popular literature rather than the Bible. I think, for example, of the celebrated peristasis catalogue in 2 Cor 11, which takes off on the traditions of the Cynic-Stoic diatribe and the imperial res gestae (Meeks: 57 n. 2, 63 n. 6); the praise of love in 1 Cor 13, patterned on the Greek encomium on a virtue; and the prophecy of the resurrection in 1 Cor 15, which would seem to be the undoing of a gnostic myth.
REFERENCES Achtemeier, Elizabeth. 1973. The Old Testament and the Proclamation of the Gospel. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Auerbach, Erich. 1959. “Figura.” In Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Trans. from the German (1944) by Ralph Manheim. New York: Meridian Books. Barr, James. 1966. Old and New in Interpretation. New York: Harper & Row. Barth, Karl. 1956. Church Dogmatics 1,2. Trans. from the German (1938) by G. T. Thomson and Harold Knight. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Baur, F.Chr. 1876. Paul, The Apostle of Jesus Christ. Trans. from the 2d German ed. (1866) by Edward Zeller. London: Williams & Norgate. Vol. 1. Biblia Patristica. 1975. Biblia Patristica: Index des citations et allusions bibliques dans la littérature patristique. Paris: Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique. Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1975. A Map of Misreading. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1976. Poetry and Repression. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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Bultmann, Rudolf. 1951. Theology of the New Testament. Vol. 1. Trans. from the German (1941) by Kendrick Grobel. New York: Scribners. ———. 1957. The Presence of Eternity. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1962. “Adam and Christ According to Romans 5.” Trans. from the German (1959) in Current Issues in New Testament Interpretation. Ed. by William Klassen and Graydon F. Snyder. New York: Harper & Row. Childs, Brevard. 1974. The Book of Exodus: A Critical, Theological Commentary. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Dahl, Nils Alstrup. 1974. The Crucified Messiah and Other Essays. Minneapolis: Augsburg Press. ———. 1977. Studies in Paul: Theology for the Early Christian Mission. Minneapolis: Augsburg Press. Davies, W. D. 1952. Torah in the Messianic Age. Philadelphia: Society of Biblical Literature. ———. 1962. “Law in the NT.” The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. G. A. Buttrick, gen. ed. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Dodd, C. H. 1953. According to the Scriptures: The Sub-structure of New Testament Theology. London: Nisbet. Ebeling, Gerhard. 1942. Evangelische Evangelienauslegung. Munich: Forschungen zur Geschichte und Lehre des Protestantismus. N.p. ———. 1958. “Geist and Buchstabe.” Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. 3d ed. Vol. 2. Tübingen: Mohr. ———. 1959. “Hermeneutik.” Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. 3d ed. Vol. 3. Tübingen: Mohr. Ellis, E. Earle. 1957. Paul’s Use of the Old Testament. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. Frei, Hans W. 1974. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ginzberg, Louis. 1925. The Legends of the Jews. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society. Grant, Robert M. 1957. The Letter and the Spirit. London: S.P.C.K. ———. 1963 A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible. Rev. ed. New York: Macmillan. Hanson, R. P. C. 1959. Allegory and Event. Richmond: John Knox. Harnack, Adolf von. 1905. History of Dogma. Vol. 1. Trans. from the 3d German edition (1894) by Neil Buchanan. London: Williams and Norgate. ———. 1928 “Das Alte Testament in den Paulinischen Briefen und in den Paulinischen Gemeinden.” Sitxungsberichte der Preussichen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin), pp. 124–41. Heitmiiller, Wilhelm. 1912. “Zum Problem Paulus und Jesus.” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 13:320–27. Hollander, John. 1981. The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kermode, Frank. 1979. The Genesis of Secrecy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lampe, G. W. H., and Woollcombe, K. J. 1957. Essays on Typology. Naperville, Ill.: A. R. Allenson. Lausberg, Heinrich. 1960. Handbuch der Literarischen Rhetorik. Munich: Max Hueber. Lauterbach, Jacob Z., ed. 1933. Mekilta de Rabbi Ishmael. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society. Lindars, Barnabas. 1961. New Testament Apologetic. Philadelphia: Westminster Press.
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Marxsen, Willi. 1968. Introduction to the New Testament. Trans. from the 3d German edition (1963) by G. Buswell. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Meeks, Wayne A. 1972. The Writings of St. Paul. New York: Norton. Mendenhall, George D. 1970. “Covenant Forms in Israelite Traditions.” In The Biblical Archaeologist Reader. Vol. 3. Ed. by David Noel Freedman and G. Ernest Wright. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor-Doubleday. Miller, Merril P. 1971. “Targum, Midrash, and the Use of the Old Testament in the New Testament.” Journal for the Study of Judaism 2:29–82. Moule, C. F. D. 1962. The Birth of the New Testament. New York: Harper & Row. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1888. The Anti-Christ. In Twilight of the Idols; and The Anti-Christ, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Nohrnberg, James. 1974. “On Literature and the Bible.” Centrum 2:2. Preus, James Samuel. 1969. From Shadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Schwarz, Adolf. 1913. Die hermeneutische Antinomie in der Talmudischen Litteratur. Vienna: Alfred Hölder. Smith, D. Moody, Jr. 1972. “The Use of the Old Testament in the New.” In The Use of the Old Testament in the New and Other Essays: Studies in Honor of William Franklin Stinespring. Ed. by James M. Efird. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Vielhauer, Philipp. 1950. “On the ‘Paulinism’ of Acts.” Trans. from the German by William C. Robinson, Jr., and Victor P. Furnish. In Perkins School of Theology Journal 17 (1963). Rept. in Studies in Luke–Acts. Ed. by Leander E. Keck and J. Louis Martyn. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1966. von Rad, Gerhard. 1965. Old Testament Theology. Vol. 2. Trans. from the German (1960) by D. M. G. Stalker. New York: Harper & Row. Westermann, Claus, ed. 1963. Essays on Old Testament Hermeneutics. Trans. from the German (1960), ed. by James Luther Mays. Richmond: John Knox.
B E N E D I C T T. V I V I A N O , O . P.
John’s Use of Matthew: Beyond Tweaking
S U M M A RY The question of the gospel of John’s relation to the synoptic gospels is a classic one. This article presupposes direct Johannine knowledge of the synoptics and some inner-canonical polemic. It explores twelve instances of John’s knowledge of Matthew’s gospel and his reaction to Matthew: from flat contradiction, to restrained criticism, to refinement, acceptance and deepening. The cases concern Emmanuel, the light of the world, Elijah and the Baptist, the transfiguration, the messianic secret, the sabbath, the role of Peter, turning the other cheek, the use of the Old Testament, christology, judgment, and discipleship.
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any a reader of the gospels has been struck by the different perspectives represented by Matthew’s “You are the light of the world” (Matt 5:14) and John’s “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12). A pre-critical reader would understand the difference thus: one day Jesus said one thing, another day he said something else—to make a different point. Why not? A redaction-critically oriented reader would think: the Matthean saying reflects Matthew’s ethical, anthropological interest, while the Johannine saying expresses John’s Christological concentration. Those who hold to the
From Revue Biblique (January 2004). © 2004 L’Ecole Biblique et Archéologique Française.
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Gardner-Smith view that John knew synoptic-like traditions but did not know the three synoptic gospels directly might hear a distant echo of Matthew in John 8:12.1 Those readers however who hold that (1) the main author of the Fourth Gospel knew all three of the synoptics directly, just as we do, and who further hold to the old Tübingen school (F.C. Baur) view that (2) there is polemic inside the New Testament canon of one book against another, one sacred author against another, such readers, I say, would take a different stance. Such readers would be tempted to see in John 8:12 a direct criticism of Matt 5:14, a deliberate and explicit correction of Matt 5:14. In that case the question could be asked, to what extent does John’s gospel undertake, throughout its length and breadth, a running critique of Matthew? That is the question this article attempts to address. (This article cannot be exhaustive because the implications of the question are too many for them all to be tracked down in 30 pages.) If the question has not been asked before and a systematic answer provided, that is because many Johannine scholars do not or have not shared its two presuppositions: (1) direct Johannine knowledge of the synoptics and/or (2) inner-canonical polemic. Of these two presuppositions, the first, direct Johannine knowledge of the three synoptic gospels, would have met less resistance until the twentieth century. For before 1900 most commentators shared Clement of Alexandria’s view that the fourth evangelist, after the other three had had their say, decided to write a “spiritual” gospel, i.e., implicitly, he knew and took into account the earlier gospels.2 The second presupposition, inner-canonical polemic, meets resistance at all times because it seems, at first glance, to contradict the belief in the divine inspiration of Scripture: would the Holy Spirit allow such unseemly infighting among the sacred authors? The resistance can only be overcome by those who recognise that its argument is an apriori deduction from a dogmatic premise. This premise, when applied with a heavy hand, blinds its holders to some plain facts in the texts themselves: e.g., the conflicts between Galatians and the letter of James, which the early church tried to resolve, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, as described in Acts 15. Once the premise of divine inspiration is understood to include, to allow for, inner-canonical polemic, the way is open for the kind of inquiry we would like to undertake. This presupposition is the contribution of the Tübingen school of F.C. Baur in the early 19th century, which pioneered, by trial and error, a more historical understanding of the New Testament.3 As for the first presupposition, John’s full knowledge of the Synoptics, what convinced me of the old “classical” view (but with the Tübingen
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polemical “update” or “edge”) was D. Moody Smith’s careful, intentionally neutral, presentation of the problem,4 plus the weakness of two major works which attempt to prove the opposite view, that John did not know the Synoptics directly but only synoptic-like traditions.5 Their failure to convince me led me to be open to the seductive powers of Hans Windisch’s Überlegenheitstheorie. That is, John not only knew the earlier three, but intended to replace or even eliminate them by producing a vastly superior gospel.6 This tempting hypothesis of John’s feeling of superiority to the other evangelists ought however to be accepted with reservations, for the following reasons. (1) John nowhere rejects by name a Synoptic gospel. (2) John could not have rejected all the contents of the other gospels since he draws upon them; at most he rejected parts. (3) By A.D. 100 it was too late for John to overturn and to displace the other gospels totally. (To be sure, John almost succeeded in some places and periods, as did Matthew in other places and periods. Both Matthew and Luke for long succeeded in having Mark rather forgotten and neglected. Mark was copied, but not much used in the lectionaries or commented on.) Perhaps we should distinguish between John’s achievement (he failed to displace the others totally) and his intention to replace them. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” (4) Although John may have wished to claim more, as a matter of historical fact his gospel was taken into the church’s canon of the New Testament alongside the other gospels and had to compete with them. In the course of time John prevailed over the others in his influence on high theology (Trinity, Christology, pneumatology), and on the theology of the sacraments of baptism and eucharist, but not in the areas of detailed Christian ethics or in the quest for the historical Jesus,7 or in the construction of an ordered ecclesiology (at least for some groups). Although John can be seen as a deepening reflection on some elements received from Mark and Q,8 and as having a real affinity with many Lucan traditions, it seems at first that his relation to Matthew is more tense, more critical.9 It was in fact my initial working assumption that John undertook a consistent critique of Matthean redactional theological positions. This assumption also happens to underlie not a little controversial theology today, which cherishes John’s diminishment of Peter, so that the matter of John’s use of Matthew, whether positive or negative, remains very much a live issue.10 Although my initial assumption is born out to some extent, the final impression is rather less uniform and one-sided. Sometimes John simply takes a Matthean tradition and improves it in a sympathetic way, so that even Matthew himself would, in all probability, have approved of it. It is then not a question of criticism or of polemic so much as of progress, of growth. But
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this can only be shown by an examination of specific cases. In the course of this article we will examine twelve cases. 1. Let us begin with Matthew’s first two chapters, his gospel of Jesus’ origins: He begins with a genealogy of Jesus’ roots in the Hebrew Bible and in the intertestamental period, and then he tells the story of Jesus’ virginal conception. He goes on to narrate the intertwined story of the hostility of king Herod the Great and the adoration by the magi with their three gifts. For John, the question of Jesus’ origins is of burning significance throughout his gospel (notice the frequency of the adverb pothen, whence, which recurs thirteen times in his gospel), but for John what counts is not Jesus’ human origins (he makes light of these in 1:45–46; 7:41), but his heavenly origins, his coming from (or being sent by) the Father in heaven. John also prefers not to use the theolougomenon of the virginal conception of Jesus which, on our hypothesis, he knew from Matthew and Luke. Instead, in his Prologue (1:1–18), he presents Jesus’ origins as the divine Logos who becomes flesh in the person of Jesus.11 Further, John is aware of the hostility of the world and its powers to Jesus and takes them seriously, not to mention demonic opposition (hostile powers: 1:5,10–11; 5:16–18; 7:1,19,25,30; 8:37,40; 11:53; demonic: 12:31; 16:11; 14:30; 8:44) but he is not interested in Herodian vassal kings. The hostility to Jesus in John comes from unbelieving Judeans and their religious leaders, and from sceptical Pilate, representative of the Roman emperor, but also from unbelieving disciples (6:70–71). On a deeper level, Matthew cites Isa 7:14, a prophecy of Emmanuel, and carefully explains that name, with the help of Isa 8:8,10, as meaning ‘God is with us.’ This phrase represents a variant of the covenant formulary, whose full form runs: “I will be your God and you will be my people” or, abbreviated, “I will be with you and you will be with me.”12 This is the basic contract of loyalty and “marital” fidelity between God and his people, that runs throughout the Bible, even though it may be a relatively late theme and though it is derived from Ancient Near Eastern suzerainty treaties. It is a fundamental expression of God’s commitment, protection and presence. Matthew’s point is that this divine commitment and will to save his people is present in the person of Jesus (see also Matt 18:20; 28:20). In John one finds an echo of this Christology of divine presence in Jesus in 3:2, where Nicodemus says, among other things, “For no one can do the signs which you do, unless God is with him.” Here at the outset, we see that Matthew and John are not at odds on the matter of a high Christology, though they may take different roads to get there, and although John may go further than Matthew. Here they are at one on the point of applying the
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covenant formula in relation to Jesus as God’s emissary (Jn 3:2a) and presence on earth. Finally, as the magi bow down to the ground and adore the enfant Jesus (Matt 2:11), so too does the man born blind in John (9:38). The rule holds here as elsewhere: what is found together as a unit in the synoptics, is sometimes found scattered in John.13 Our first case has shown some not inconsiderable differences, but no clear case of polemic, unless one construes the option for the Prologue as a hostile rejection of the virginal conception. But there is no hint of this in the Prologue. The variant reading in John 1:13, which reads a singular instead of a plural, and is found only in non-Greek versions, is an attempt at harmonisation of the two viewpoints but this attempt need not have been motivated by the desire to overcome the scandal of an implied criticism.14 Above all, on the matter of Jesus as God’s presence on earth as the expression of God’s covenant fidelity, there is complete agreement. 2. In Matt 5:14–16, we read: “You are the light of the world ... Let your light shine before men, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” These words begin with a bold declaration and conclude with an exhortation (an imperative in the third person plural) and a two-part result clause. The words, coming as they do from the Sermon on the Mount, are peculiar to Matthew’s gospel. They are addressed to the crowds. (Usually it is said that they are addressed to the disciples. But although Matt 5:1 could be read to mean that Jesus spoke only to the disciples, in 7:28 the crowds are astounded at his teaching, which implies (a) that they heard it, (b) that it was addressed to them.) The declaration, in the indicative, functions as an encouragement and also as a basis on which to found the exhortation. The imagery comes from Deutero-Isaiah: 42:6; 49:6; 51:4. In a healthy society everyone needs a chance to “shine” in one way or another, ideally in a governing assembly.15 Here in Matthew the purpose of our shining is two-fold. First the shining itself consists of our good works, i.e., ethical works as a missionary strategy, as a witness and a “draw”. The result should not be praise rendered to us or our own self-satisfaction but that the observers give glory to God. The text then, while strongly ethical, does not see ethics as an end in itself. Rather, it sees ethical conduct as related to doxology, as having a religious, theo-logical finality, viz., praise of God. So Matthew’s text cannot be dismissed as purely anthropological or Pelagian. When we turn to John 8:12, we notice a different accent: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.” The obvious point is that this formulation manifests John’s concentration on Christology. Ethics separated from faith in Christ
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will not do for John. That this is intended as at least in part a corrective of Matthew is suggested by John 15:8, which shows a further awareness of Matt 5:14–16. (We will return to it.) That is, the echo of Matthew is not purely an accident, a coincidence. John is making a point in regard to Matthew. For him only through Jesus are men saved. Matthew may occasionally say the same (11:27), but he is so interested in presenting a detailed ethic that he often fails to insist upon it. Once however this point is made, John can rejoin Matthew to a remarkable degree. First, he borrows a synoptic word for discipleship, “following,” instead of his usual “believe in” or “come to” Jesus. This believing disciple, the verse goes on to say, will not walk, that is, live, conduct himself, in darkness, that is, in the realm of death, but he will possess (eschatologically?, the two verbs, are future, but for John are probably realized already now, in this life) the light of life. That is, he will possess the source of full life, in this world and in the next (cf. Ps 56:13; Job 33:30), “the way out of human existential need”.16 The accent is no longer on good deeds, but on the one good deed of following, that is, believing. But the ethical note is recovered and the glorification of God of which Matthew speaks is also found in a neglected verse which could be said to complete John 8:12 and increase his rapprochement with Matthew. John 15:8 reads: “My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.” Here Matt 5:14 is taken over, with John’s Christological correction discreetly but really present in the “my” disciples. Fruit-bearing would especially refer to love of the members of the community as a form of witness (John 13:35). Karpos, fruit, is a favorite word for Matthew (19x; Mark 5x; Luke 12x; John 10x), in the sense of good deeds. So, in 8:12, John shows his sense of superiority to Matthew, his Christological correction, and yet, in 15:8, is able to take over, in his own way, Matthew’s deep ethical concern. 3. In Matt 11:14, speaking of John the Baptist, Jesus says: “If you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come,” an allusion to Mal 3:23 (cf. Sir 48:10), which promises a return of Elijah in the end times.17 Later, in 17:10–13 the same identification between Elijah and the Baptist is made in fuller fashion: “Elijah has already come, and they did not recognise him, but they did to him whatever they pleased ... Then the disciples understood that he was speaking to them about John the Baptist.” (In this added verse, Matthew is making explicit what is already implicit in Mark 9:11–13.) On the other hand, in John 1:21,25, the Baptist denies that he is Elijah, and this is repeated by the emissaries of the Pharisees. A strange business indeed. That is the problem. What to make of it? First, we need to notice that Luke,
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before John, does not follow Mark and Matthew on this point. He does not take over Mark 9:10–13, and, in 1:17, the angel says to Zechariah that his son will act “with the spirit and power of Elijah,” but, implicitly, will not be identical to him. Here, as in many other cases, John stands closer to Luke than to the other two evangelists.18 Next, we need to realize that in Malachi and Sirach, Elijah is not the precursor of the Messiah; he is the precursor of God as God comes in judgment. This biblical promise was probably still lively in the Baptist community at the time that the fourth evangelist was writing. On this view Elijah redivivus either functions as a quasi-Messiah (in Sir 48:10d his duty is “to restore the tribes of Jacob,” a messianic function if ever there was one), or else there is simply no place for a Messianic figure at all. The evangelist John, who probably knew Baptist circles well, reacts to their strong belief in Elijah’s role by ruling out any connection between the Baptist and Elijah.19 When thirdly we return to Matthew and Mark, we see that they have taken a different approach. They have inherited or invented the idea that Elijah is the precursor of the Messiah (not of God) and they go on to downgrade the Baptist as Elijah to be the precursor of Jesus. John then decides not to follow them in this line because (a) such a view of Elijah is not clearly scriptural, (b) this line would not have been of any use to him in his ongoing polemic with the disciples of the Baptist (in Asia Minor?, cf. Acts 19:1–7), since they did not hold this view of Elijah’s role. Although John’s manner of treating Matthew and Mark here may seem to us a little abrupt and rough (a flat contradiction), he did have serious grounds for taking a different line. As a note of clarification we may add that the comparison we are making is only on the level of the Matthean and Johannine redaction. On the level of the historical John the Baptist and the historical Jesus, strictly speaking there need be no contradiction, because the Baptist could really have thought that he was not Elijah (should the question have arisen during his lifetime), and Jesus could really have said that the Baptist was Elijah, perhaps evoking a higher point of view unknown to the Baptist, or having concluded this after the Baptist’s martyrdom. All that is not our concern. We are presupposing that both Gospel statements represent the redactional viewpoints of Matthew and John respectively, and that John the evangelist rejects and contradicts Matthew’s view. While on John’s treatment of the Baptist, we may note C.H. Dodd’s treatment of another, related problem.20 According to Matt 11:11 par Luke 7:28 (Q), “John the Baptist, though a prophet and more than a prophet, though as great a man as any born of women, is yet not ‘in the Kingdom of God’.” This means that “Either he had never confessed Christ, or having
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once confessed he fell away from his faith”. (Dodd speculates that he fell into a depression during his imprisonment!) This is hinted at by Matt 11:6 par Luke 7:23. Dodd then reads John 1:20 with the bracketed word included: “He confessed [Christ] and did not deny him.” Dodd then concludes, “In other words, the evangelist is claiming the Baptist as the first Christian ‘confessor’, in contrast to the view represented in the Synoptic Gospels that he was not ‘in the Kingdom of God’. It is the Johannine view that has prevailed, and affected the liturgy and the calendar of the church.” Not a small claim for the evangelist. (In the article referred to in note 17, I have tried to explain Matt 11:11, not by positing an apostasy or a depression on the Baptist’s part, but rather by seeing the verse as a creation of the earliest post-pascal Christian community. The anonymous author tried to understand the places of both the Baptist and Jesus in the apocalyptic periodization of salvation history with the help of Dan 4:14 (17): “The Most High is sovereign over the kingdom of mortals; he gives it to whom he will and sets over it the lowliest of human beings.” The Q author applies this to Jesus: “the least in the kingdom of heaven [this is Jesus described in Danielic terms] is greater than he.” Thus the point of Matt 11:11 par is not to say that the Baptist is an apostate, but rather to understand the higher place of Jesus in the divine plan. The verse is Christological, not polemical, in intent.) Although Dodd’s reconstruction rests on two hypotheses, it does help to explain the positive reception of the Baptist in church history. On the other hand, these hypotheses are not strictly necessary to explain the Baptist’s reception as a saint. First, he could be received as a saint of the Old Testament, like Abraham or David. Second, his great role as the patron of monks, so evident in the iconography of the Eastern churches, is based more on his ascetic diet and dress (Matt 3:4) than on his exact position in salvation history.21 4. Before proceeding to our next unit, it might be useful to note two possible broader links of John with the Synoptic tradition. The first concerns the Transfiguration of Jesus (Matt 17:1–9; Mark 9:2–9; Luke 9:28–36). There is no separate, distinct account of the Transfiguration in John’s gospel. It has been cleverly suggested that this is so because in John Jesus is transfigured from beginning to end; that is, his divinity is transparent from the Prologue to the Resurrection (see 20:28). There is much to be said for this view, no doubt, even if one does not push it to the docetic extremes proposed by Käsemann.22 The point to be made here is a different one. It is in analogy with the agony in the garden. Though this episode is not reproduced as such in John, John has nevertheless taken over piecemeal enough of its elements
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for us to be reasonably sure that he knew the tradition. He simply decided to use it in his own way. This has long been recognised.23 Now it can be suggested that his chapters seven and eight contain elements of contact with the synoptic account of the Transfiguration. First, there is the link with the feast of Sukkot, implicit in the synoptic mention of the three tents, explicit in John 7:2. Next, there is the ascent of the [Temple] mount, 7:14. Then, there is the mention of glory, 7:18. The great invitation in 7:37–39 could be understood to encourage a participation in the grace of the Transfiguration in the line of Rom 12:2 and 2 Cor 3:18. The great declaration in John 8:12, “I am the light of the world,” is, in itself, a statement of the Transfiguration. This would have been clearer if the evangelist had written flatly, Christ is the light of the world. But he was writing a gospel, not a textbook. Yet in this famous verse he has stated his interpretation of the meaning of the Transfiguration, and, as we have already seen, of its consequences for those who follow Jesus. This is the main connection, if connection there be, between John 7 and 8, and Matt 17:1–9 and parallels, the synoptic narration of the Transfiguration. The mention of Moses in John 7:19–23, and the absence of any mention of Elijah do not matter in comparison. Perhaps one can see a hint of Elijah in the discussion of whether or not a prophet can arise from Galilee in 7:40–52. The view that no prophet is to arrive in Galilee (v. 52) seems to imply a forgetting, an amnesia, of Elijah and Elisha on the part of Jesus’ opponents, since they were Galilean prophets. (Elijah was from Tishbe in Gilead [modern Jordan] but worked in Galilee.) 5. Another general synoptic phenomenon that seems at first to find no echo in John is the extremely puzzling “messianic secret.” (I have never read an explanation of it that makes much sense.) It is well known that this theme is heavily accented by Mark, less so by Matthew and Luke. But C.K. Barrett, in an important essay on subordinationist Christology, thinks he has found the Johannine equivalent.24 Barrett begins with the view that the theme of the messianic secret in Mark is a theological one. He then asserts that this theme has a historical basis in the fact that although both Jesus and his followers thought that he was more than a mere man, nevertheless he allowed himself to be “addressed as Rabbi, either in transliteration (Mark 9:5; [10:51]; 11:21; 14:45) or in translation (4:38; [5:35]; 9:17,38; 10:17,20,35; 12:14,19,32; 13:1; [14:14]).” So Jesus allowed himself to be addressed by a term, “teacher”, that concealed rather than disclosed the true meaning and character of his mission. It was not false, for he did teach. But the fact included an element of secrecy, of concealment about his work. We see then a “Messiahship veiled behind a cover of artificial Non-Messiahship, or at
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least of speciously denied Messiahship.” “We see ... an undefined authority veiled behind an aversion to the use of all titles.” Barrett finds an equivalent of this paradoxical combination of revelation and concealment, of majesty and humility, also present in John. He discerns two series of texts in John. One is highly Christological: The word became flesh, I am the bread of life, I am the light of the world, before Abraham was, I am, or simply “I am,” the Father and I are one, and other similar texts. The other series emphasises Jesus’ role as secondary, as mediating the Father. Thus Jesus appears as one who is sent (by the Father).25 Then he is dependent; he does not speak or act of himself.26 This series culminates in 14:28 where Jesus says “The Father is greater than I.” Barrett understands these two series as not mutually contradictory but as harmoniously affirming a Christology, a teaching that Jesus Christ is a divine being, as well as a theology, a teaching of the absolute fatherhood of God, with the former at the service of the second.27 The point here is that the second, subordinationist series functions somewhat in the same way as the messianic secret does in the synoptics. It helps to protect the mystery while at the same time helping to prevent its distortion through exaggeration. 6. Our next case makes a small point in a larger whole. It has to do with Jesus’ healings on the sabbath. This subject, well worked over but not, we think, yet exhausted, is important for a number of reasons. Juridically, Jesus’ healings on the sabbath are important in seeing Jesus’ role in the gradual process of the Hellenization or humanization of Jewish law, particularly in the reduction of the frequency of the imposition of the death penalty.28 Historically, it may have contributed to Jesus’ execution as a false teacher (Mark 3:6). Christologically, the key verses (Mark 2:27–28) may tell us something about how Jesus understood himself, his mission, his authority. But our concern now is more modest. It is simply to note one or two aspects of John’s contribution to the development of the gospel tradition on Jesus’ sabbath healings. The tradition begins with two pericopes in Mark 2:23–28; 3:1–6. There Jesus furnishes three arguments for his healing on the sabbath: the precedent of David and his men (1 Sam 21:1–7); a reference to 2 Macc 5:19;29 and a general argument that it is lawful to do good on the sabbath (Mark 3:4). Matthew repeats these two pericopes (Matt 12:1–8, 9–14) and, within them, adds more halachic arguments to support Jesus’ position (12:5–7); the precedent of the priests who offer sacrifice on the sabbath (Num 28:9–10); a reference to the prophetic principle that mercy takes precedence even over sacrifice (Hos 6:6), even though sacrifice was at the heart of the Israelite system of worship; and a reference to the debated issue
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of whether one could lift out a sheep which had fallen into a pit (Matt 12:11). Luke increases the number of those pericopes to four: Luke 6:1–5,6–11 (from Mark 13:10–17; 14:1–6. Now John enormously increases the theological, i.e., christological, significance of the material in his sabbath healing pericopes: 5:1–47; 9:1–41. But he also contributes to the juridicaltheological development (law and theology are not tightly separated in classical Jewish sources) of the arguments specifically justifying healing on the sabbath. In John 7:22–23, he adds the case of allowing circumcision on the sabbath as an analogue to the arguments listed by Matthew. In 5:17 he goes deeper: “My Father is still working, and I also am working.” To the modern reader this may say little. But to someone soaked in Jewish thinking about the sabbath it says a great deal. On the one hand, Gen 1:1–2:3 closely connects sabbath observance with the creation of the world. God himself “rested from all the work that he had done in creation” (Gen 2:3). This connection explains the extreme gravity of sabbath observance. Wittingly to violate the sabbath was thus thought tantamount to denying the existence and creative power of God.30 On the other hand, it had not escaped thoughtful Jewish minds, especially minds effected by Greek natural philosophy, that God needs to sustain his creation in being at every instant, or else it would cease to be. God cannot rest from that work of sustaining his world in being. By invoking the fact that the Father is still working (nonstop!). Jesus not only justifies his Sabbath healing activity, but also turns the tables on the argument that to violate the sabbath is to deny the Creator. In this way, John not only strengthens the synoptic case, but digs down to the roots of the problem. John is not called ‘the theologian’ for nothing.31 7. We come now to the Petrine and anti-Petrine material in Matthew and John. This material is abundant and provides material for a monograph, not part of an article. We can summarize the matter in this way. Matthew inherits from Mark (8:27–30) Peter’s important confession of faith and develops it in a famous ecclesiological set of promises (Matt 16:13–20),32 which makes Peter into a kind of new Aaron, a spokesman for Moses (Exod 4:10–17), and into a judge of final instance when disputes arise in the church. Matthew also retains some anti-Petrine material from Mark (Matt 16:22–23; 26:69–75), as well as material peculiar to his gospel which shows Peter’s impulsive weaknesses, but also shows him in a favorable light (14:28–33). Now for many centuries those in east and west unsympathetic to a Petrine office or ministry in the church have looked to John’s gospel for material which diminishes and disperses Peter’s synoptic role as spokesman for the apostles. (I must pass over Gal 2:11–14, and Luke 22:31–32.) In the synoptics
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Simon Peter and his brother Andrew are the first disciples called by Jesus. In John it is Andrew and an anonymous other who are called first, and then Andrew brings Peter to Jesus (John 1:35–42). This Johannine arrangement has inspired the Greek liturgy to attribute to Andrew the epitheton constans of the first-called. This then led to the legend that Andrew founded the see at Constantinople.33 When we look at the rest of John’s gospel for information on Peter, we can say that on the surface there is much that is favourable to Peter in John and nothing more unfavourable than is found in the synoptics. (John too retains Peter’s threefold denial, but briefly. In general, Luke and John agree to minimise the defects of the disciples.) And in the epilogue in chapter 21:15–17 Peter is both given a chance to exonerate himself after his denial, and is given an important pastoral charge.34 If however we look beneath the surface, we can detect some possible further criticism of Peter. The question is: how far should we go? Should we conclude that the “real” evangelist demonized Peter, regarded him as the real Judas, the real traitor? Or should we be content with something less drastic, more sober, closer to the texts as we actually have them? Let us take a look. In John 6:60–71 Simon Peter is the spokesman of the twelve after many disciples leave Jesus. He makes the beautiful statement of fidelity: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” This does not sound antiPetrine. On the contrary, it seems the Johannine equivalent of Peter’s confession in Mark 8:29 and parallels, a bit developed but not hostile. Moreover, later on, John allows Martha to make an equally fine confession of faith: “I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world” (11:27). This confession may show John’s sensitivity to women disciples. It may relativize the uniqueness of Peter’s confession. It may even be a gentle tease of Luke’s praise of Mary in Luke 10:38–42. It still does not strike the reader as anti-Petrine. But in his book The Christology of the Fourth Gospel, P.N. Anderson argues that Peter’s confession in John “reaffirms Jesus’ sole authority.... Peter is portrayed as figuratively returning ‘the keys of the kingdom’ to the Johannine Jesus.”35 Peter thereby, in v. 68, on this view, himself rejects all claim to a leadership role or authority, and thus rejects Matt 16:17–19. Anderson goes on to oppose what he calls a “Christocracy” to an “institutional model”. He does not actually speak here of church or church government, nor of Petrocracy, nor of a hierarchy but these are implied. (He does speak of church and hierarchy later.) He also speaks of a “pneumatically-mediated, christocratic model” (p. 227). Moreover, Anderson distinguishes in Peter’s confession between v. 68, which
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is praiseworthy, and v. 69, which is reprehensible, because the title there attributed, “Holy One of God”, is Davidic, and implies the expectation that Jesus will set up a kingdom of power, with victory and without suffering, inspired by “Holy War” aspirations (p. 230). It also implies a place for human initiative. All this means that Peter “fails the tests” (p. 230). It is therefore not surprising that Anderson prefers to translate v. 70 thus: “I have not chosen you, the twelve; and one of you is a devil.” (This is a possible translation of the Greek.) The result is that Jesus rejects all twelve and treats Peter as a devil! This is radically anti-Petrine, to say the least. For Anderson, v. 71 is added as a gloss by the compiler or final editor to transform the harshly antiPetrine, anti-Twelve v. 70 into a remark about Judas Iscariot only: “He was speaking of Judas son of Simon Iscariot, for he, though one of the twelve, was going to betray him.” Anderson concludes as follows: The primary concern for the evangelist in the writing of the Gospel is not to set forth an orthodox dogma, nor is it to record in literary form the ‘historical’ account of what Jesus said and did. Rather, it is an ecclesial manifesto which describes the effectual means by which the risen Lord continues to be the shepherd of his flock and the leader of his people, across the boundaries of time and space. It is a matter of christocracy, and this is what the compiler failed to see here ..., as evidenced by his ‘clarification’ of v. 70 in vs. 71.36 Thus for Anderson the accent falls on ecclesiology. John 6 is an “ecclesial manifesto” (later, “a manifesto of radical christocracy,” p. 251). What should we make of this construction? We must sort out its many claims. (a) The manner of reading v. 68b seems unfounded: “You [alone] have words of eternal life.” John’s frequent use of the OT and the later promise of the guidance of the Paraclete (esp. John 16:12–13) implies that the evangelist accepted that there are words of eternal life elsewhere, but of course, as for all early Christian authors, related to Jesus. The idea that in this verse Peter in effect returns the keys of post-pascal church authority to Jesus seems to us an arbitrary fantasy read into or imposed on the text. (b) That v. 69 contains a political-military title which Jesus rejects is also hard to accept, since elsewhere in the gospel innocent people call Jesus “Christ” and he does not reject this much more explicitly royal, Davidic, title (1:70,20,25,40; 3:28; 4:25,29; 7:26,27,31,41; 9:22, 11:27; 17:3; 20:31). The harsh split Anderson makes between vv. 68 and 69 is abrupt. There is no literary hint that one verse is good, the other bad. (c) When we come to v.
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70, however, we must proceed more carefully. The idea that Peter is the devil of v. 70b cannot be rejected out of hand, because it could be based on Mark 8:33 par Matt 16:23, where Jesus refers to Peter as Satan.37 (This argument based on the Synoptics cannot be directly employed by Anderson himself because he holds to the thesis that John did not know the synoptic gospels directly. This makes his discussion more tangled than would otherwise be necessary. We will return to this point.) On the other hand, this synoptic reference does not in itself guarantee that here in John the devil is Peter. Anderson’s argument is rendered less credible by his trying to prove too much. For he also holds that Jesus did not choose the twelve, any of them, not even the beloved disciple. This contradicts John 15:16,19, “You did not choose me but I chose you ... I have chosen you out of the world” (cf. 13:18. “I know whom I have chosen”). These texts help us to understand why translators, while perfectly aware that the Greek of v. 70 could be translated in the indicative, have usually (always?) preferred the interrogative. (d) This brings us to v. 71 which explains the devil of v. 70 as referring to Judas. That this verse could be a late gloss which misunderstood v. 70 or understood it perfectly well and deliberately changed its reference, again cannot be excluded a priori. Glosses happen. The question should rather be: is that the most probable explanation? On the basis of the strongly anti-Judas Iscariot material throughout the gospel, notably 13:21–30 where Satan enters Judas (v. 27), we are inclined to answer in the negative. So v. 71 stems from the evangelist who correctly interpreted his own v. 70. Anderson confuses Peter’s denials (real and shameful enough) with Judas’ betrayal or “handing over” of Jesus. The denials are a result of weakness and cowardice, the betrayal is an active, grave evil which in this case does serious harm to another. Anderson goes on to contrast Matthew’s institutional model of church government, based on power, with John’s family model, based on love, a model which is pneumatic and egalitarian. His sympathies are clear. As Peter is given the keys, the beloved disciple is given the mother of Jesus as his trust (p. 238), part of the family mode. Anderson does grant that his family model was unstable and had already been abandoned by the author of the Johannine epistles. He also grants that the evangelist is not engaged in direct polemic but rather in an intramural, dialectical, subtle effort at correction of the Matthean Petrine material. When he comes to John 21:15–17, Anderson grudgingly concedes that it portrays Peter “as the disciple of primacy” (p. 238). But he prefers to emphasise that these verses also chide Peter “for a lack of ... sacrificial love,” a view not false in itself. But he refuses to take the passage as a late
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submission to Petrine authority by the surviving remainder of the Johannine community, after it had been rent by one or several schisms.38 Rather he takes chap. 21 as part of the total normative gospel, not an appendix which abandons the anti-Petrinism of chapters 1–20. This compels him to forced exegesis which underinterprets chap. 21. But this is as nothing in comparison with his presentation of a detailed critique by John of Matt 16:17–19, in his chap. 10. Such a detailed critique could only have been undertaken on the basis of a direct knowledge of Matthew. His chapter 10 completely undermines Anderson’s view that John did not directly know or use the Synoptic gospels. Having sifted through Anderson’s arguments for extreme antiPetrinism in John and having found them thought-provoking but unconvincing, we may now return to our own study of anti-Petrine material in John. In John 10:11–13, part of the Good Shepherd discourse, Jesus speaks of the hired hand who flees the wolf and leaves the sheep. No name of the hireling is supplied and so the verses could be and are applied to all unfaithful pastors. Should we see a particular allusion to Peter’s denials (18:15–18, 25–27; 13:38) here? A number of suggestions for the concrete identification of the hireling have been made in the history of interpretation: the Jewish opponents of Jesus (John 5:44; 12:43), the Pharisees (7:49; 9:22,34; 12:42); political leaders (11:48); even Caiphas; Judas (12:6); the church fathers often made a postoral application to bad and faithless pastors. None, so far as I can see, made a specific reference to Peter. The tendency of modern commentators is not to allegorise the details (e.g., the wolf as the devil), but to see the hireling as a foil for the good shepherd, Jesus.39 The last potentially anti-Petrine passage that we will examine is John 20:1–10. Alerted by Mary Magdalene, Peter and the beloved disciple (BD) run to the [empty] tomb together. The BD outruns Peter and looks in first, but does not go in (out of courtesy, he waits for the older man, who arrives huffing and puffing?). Peter enters and observes. Then the BD enters, “and he saw and believed” (v. 8). This is not said of Peter. Should we infer that for the evangelist Peter did not believe in the risen Christ? After this, Peter is not mentioned by name in the chapter. Narratively, the reader assumes that he figures among the disciples who receive a visit from the risen Jesus and who are commissioned, given the Holy Spirit, and empowered to forgive and to retain sins, and who later tell Thomas about all of this. There is nothing hostile to Peter in this, unless it be that he is not singled out as he is in Matthew (cp. Matt 18:18 with Matt 16:17–19). But that is not the same as saying he does not believe in the risen Christ.
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Although some commentators see no anti-Petrine implications in v. 8, others see an allusion to a certain rivalry between Peter and the BD, that is, between the later communities that trace their origins to them.40 To be sure, Peter too is a true Easter witness (20:19–25). But the BD is superior to Peter not only in arriving first at the tomb but also in believing first, since Peter remains at that moment at the level of v. 9: “As yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” (To be sure, the plural in this verse presents an obstacle to this reading.) The Johannine community feels sure that, in the BD, it possesses its own guarantor who stands especially close to Jesus. There is no blame levelled at Peter, but the BD is set in a more favourable light, and Peter’s traditional authority or precedence is a bit diminished. This is so, even though v. 8 plays no further role in the Easter story.41 Bulgakov’s view that here Peter is shown to be gravely and permanently defective in faith is however not adequately supported by the text of chap. 20 as a whole.42 Having now surveyed several chapters of the gospel (1, 6, 10 and 20) for anti-Petrine, and thus potentially anti-Matthean, material, it is time to draw the threads together. We have found a real diminishment of Peter’s primary role in chapters 1 and 20, a diminishment but not a total denial of it. There is no demonization of Peter. It is not probable that 6:60–71 or 10:11–13 contain antiPetrine polemic. We accept Brown’s hypothesis that 21:15–17 represents a gentle submission by the faithful remnant of the Johannine community to apostolic authority, at a late stage of the tradition (early second century). 8. In his going beyond the law of talion, the Matthean Jesus teaches: “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also” (Matt 5:39b; Luke 6:29 Q). In John 18:22–23, in the passion narrative, we read: ... one of the police standing nearby struck Jesus on the face, saying, “Is that how you answer the high priest?” Jesus answered, “If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong. But if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?” This firm answer can hardly be described as turning the other cheek. If John does not know the gospel according to Matthew at all or at least not the teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, no tension arises. But, on the hypothesis that he did know this, a tension can be noticed. The tension has been noticed at least since Augustine.43 (A bit later John does pick up the silence motif briefly (19:9), but then Jesus enters into dialogue with Pilate (19:10–11).) For John Jesus remains here the revealer who bears witness to himself, and sets his opponents in the wrong. Jesus speaks out of the awareness that he is sent into the world to bear witness to the truth (18:37). Thus John’s theological intentions here are primary.44 Yet a subsidiary
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intention to correct Matthew’s teaching as impractical or undignified cannot be excluded. 9. It has been noticed that both Matthew and John have ten formal Old Testament quotations.45 Whether this is a pure coincidence or an intentional effort by John to match and best his junior colleague and rival is not certain. For G.N. Stanton, ... the differences are more striking than the similarities. The introductory formulae in John are much more varied. Whereas only one of Matthew’s formula quotations is found in his passion narratives (27.9, the burial of Judas), the first does not occur in John until 12.38. Only half the Johannine quotations are comments of the evangelist. Rothfuchs (1969, p. 176) has correctly noted that whereas the Johannine citations set the ‘world’s’ hostile reaction to Jesus and his work in the light of prophecy, the Matthean quotations portray the person Jesus and the nature of his sending. On this view, the fact that each evangelist has ten fulfillment quotations is a simple coincidence. Yet Matthew and John have one of these ten in common. Both of them share Zech 9:9 at the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem (Matt 21:4–5 and John 12:14–15). In his redaction John makes several improvements over Matthew: Jesus himself finds the donkey, and rides on it, not on both the foal and the colt, as Matthew could lead one to think. The suspicion that John knew Matthew here remains. But the use of the Old Testament by Matthew and John is a larger issue than we can treat in an article. 10. For many decades one spoke of Matt 11:27 par Luke 10:22 as a bolt from the Johannine blue or as a Johannine meteorite that had fallen into the synoptic pond. This view reversed the chronological order. Matt 11:25–30 is a crossroads of biblical traditions. The marginal references in Nestle-Aland’s 27th edition of the Greek New Testament to the Old Testament at this point by no means exhaust the matter. Since at least the beginning of the 20th century, these verses, and esp. v. 27, have played an ever more important role in the study of the development of New Testament Christology.46 Harnack saw in them the start of the road to Nicea.47 All this is more than well known, though the authenticity of v. 27 is still regularly challenged.48 Less commonly realized is the background of part of this verse in Dan 7:13–14,
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perhaps the most important two verses of the Old Testament for understanding the mind of both the historical Jesus and the synoptic gospel tradition. (Nestle-Aland 27 gives no reference to Dan 7:14 here, but it does give one to Matt 28:18, an important internal parallel, and there one finds the reference to Daniel.) And behind Dan 7:13–14 there lies, one has gradually come to realize since the discovery of the royal library at Ugarit (Ras Shamra, Syria) in the late twenties and their decipherment since the early thirties of the last century, a basic Canaanite myth. The scene takes place in heaven, not on earth, both in Daniel and in Ugarit. The vigorous storm god Baal, the model for Daniel’s “one like a son of man,” has just triumphed over the evil God Mot (death) or Yamm (sea). He is presented to the aged and ineffectual (deus otiosus) high god El (in Daniel, the Ancient of Days). Royal power and authority is then transferred to him. It is a heavenly scene of royal succession to the throne. (For a Christian version see 1 Cor 15:24–28, where the mythology is cleaned up and the crown rights of God the Father are maintained intact.) In Matt 11:27 and in 28:18 Jesus claims to have had the divine kingdom transferred to him. This is the Christological significance of these verses, and the sense of Jesus’ unique filial consciousness. Awareness of the Danielic and Canaanite background helps to understand the strong theological implications of all of this. If now we return to the start of the preceding paragraph, we see that so far from being a bolt from the Johannine sky, Matt 11:27 is a/the germ from which all later Christology, including and especially the Johannine, develops. The editions list John 10:14–15 and 17:25 as especially close parallels to Matt 11:27. But that only scratches the surface. W.R.G. Loader sees the “central structure” of Johannine Christology in 3:31–36.49 He summarises this structure in five points: (1) the reference to Jesus and God as Son and Father; (2) the Son comes from and returns to the Father; (3) the Father has sent the Son; (4) the Father has given all things into the Son’s hands; (5) the Son says and does what the Father has told him; he makes the Father known. Loader then finds these five elements in eighteen other chapters of the fourth gospel. (Loader’s effort to relate the central structure to what he calls a Son of Man cluster is less persuasive, but that is not to our purpose.) The five points clarify and unfold what is present in Matt 11:27. Thus we may conclude that the core of Johannine Christology grows out of this verse present in Q, Matthew and Luke. There is obviously no criticism by John of Matthew here. If there were one, it might be stated thus: why did you not develop the implications of your filial Christology yourself? Matthew’s answer might run: a Christology cut off from its apocalyptic roots, which include a lively hope for the future full establishment of God’s kingdom on earth, a kingdom
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whose ethical content includes (social) justice, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit (Matt 6:33; Rom 14:17)—such a Christology runs the risk of becoming an end in itself, something esoteric or at least private and individual (John 14:23), ethically and sociopolitically impoverished. Within the New Testament canon and the liturgical lectionary the dialectical debate can continue across the centuries. In this case, it is clear that John takes from Matthew (Q) and develops the tradition. 11. One of Matthew’s greatest and most influential passages is the great scene of the last judgement, 25:31–46. A striking element of this scene is that it is the Son of Man who does the judging (v. 31), and not God the Father, as is the case in many parallel texts. Here Jesus is portrayed not only as meek and mild, the friend of sinners (he is that too as identified with the needy), but as perfectly just, in a system of binary oppositions. One could read Matt 7:21–23 as giving Jesus the subsidiary role of counsel for the defence in the court of his heavenly father.50 If so, Jesus no longer enjoys that role in 25:31–46. He has become the judge himself. (This severe role of Christ is expressed in the apsidal mosaics at Daphne near Athens and at Cefalu. It caused frightened consciences to turn from Christ to Mary as advocate.) John was probably not happy about this bold Matthean development. And so he writes: “God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God” (John 3:17–18). Thus the judgement occurs without anyone being responsible except the one condemned. But another shuffle occurs in 5:22 which brings us back to Matthew: “The Father judges no one but has given all judgement to the Son.” What should we make of this? These are not the only Johannine statements on judgement. To discuss them all would take us too far afield. Let us content ourselves with two remarks. (1) As can be seen in John 3:16, the predominant accent in John is on salvation, on God’s will to save as many as possible. Yet the tragic note, that some prefer the darkness to the light, is not excluded (e.g., 1:10–11; 14:17). (2) John, with his interest in high Christology based on the Danielic Son of Man, could not let himself be outdone by Matthew in this matter. So the Son has power to judge (5:17). But he uses it mainly to give life (5:16). The two verses (5:16 and 17) should not be separated or played off against one another. 12. Our last case has been reserved for this position because it illustrates so well the positive side of the Matthew–John relationship. It is a
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sort of happy ending that goes beyond Johannine Matthew-tweaking. We begin with a short Q-saying: “A disciple is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully qualified will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40). This verse, fine as it is, was quickly felt to be inadequately formulated, since it implies an eventual equality between disciple and teacher. This might do for the rabbis, and also for the Gnostics, but it would plainly not do for Christians who accepted the permanent lordship of Jesus Christ. As for the Gnostics, in the Gospel of Thomas 13, Jesus says to Thomas, “I am not your master, because you drank and became drunken from the bubbling spring which I have measured out.” The sense of this is that, in the Gnostic soteriology, once the Revealer has ignited the divine spark in the believer’s heart, the believer becomes himself divine and has no further need of the Revealer. This renders superfluous the permanent lordship of Jesus Christ. Matthew therefore quickly corrected the dangerous formulation: “A disciple is not above the teacher, nor a slave above his master (kyrios, lord). It is enough for the disciple to be like his teacher, and the slave like his master (kyrios, lord)” (Matt 10:24–25a). By his two additions and the rewriting of Luke 6:40b, Matthew has made the teaching fit with the Christian conviction of the permanent lordship of Christ.51 (Matthew later reinforces this teaching with his peculiar view that Christians have only one teacher, the Christ (Matt 23:8–10).52 This does not however prevent the presence in the Matthean community of prophets, sages, and scribes who serve as its educated leaders (Matt 23:34; 13:52; 10:40–41).) Now we come to John. He takes up this matter twice. In 13:13 and 16 he first picks up the Matthean addition: “You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right for that is what I am ... a servant is not greater than his master (kyriou), nor is a messenger (apostolos) greater than the one who sent him.” He has dropped any mention of the disciple— the start of the chain of this tradition in Luke (Q?), retained the Christological accent, as one would expect him to do, and, surprisingly, introduced the word apostle, its only appearance in his gospel. (Translators and commentators try to minimise its significance in John. I am not so sure that this is right, but that is not our present concern.) Later John goes further than his predecessors. “You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything (!?) that I have heard from my Father” (John 15:14–15). First, we note with regret that these verses could be twisted back into a Gnostic sense if one were so minded, and if one ignored the context. The following verses make clear that Jesus is still lord. But, next, and far more important, by dropping the slave language, inherited from Matthew, and
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replacing it with friend language, John has made an important contribution to Christian ecclesiology. Too much slave language could have negative side effects: it could keep believers in a state of immaturity, and it lends itself to abuse by leaders of cults and sects. By moving to the language of friendship, John has helped to develop a more adult form of Christianity, without in any way abandoning the lordship of Christ. This is even more important for Christians who live in democratic, semi-egalitarian societies than it was for the evangelist and his readers. With regard to our theme, we can see that here John neither polemicizes against Matthew nor teases him. He rather thoughtfully takes up the Matthean tradition and develops and improves it further, in such a way that, so I would like to think, Matthew would have heartily approved. This is the most positive way that John used Matthew. CONCLUSION The intention of these wide-ranging observations has been to explore (they are no more than explorations, probes) John’s hypothetical but probable use of Matthew. We have seen the full gamut, from flat contradiction (Elijah and John the Baptist), to restrained criticism and diminishment (the primacy of Peter), to subtle nuance and refinement (the light of the world), up to and including acceptance and development (disciples as slaves and friends). There is conflict and polemic within the canon of the New Testament, as F.C. Baur taught. But it is mostly like the conflicts in a good marriage. The partners know how far to go and when to stop.53 And a marriage (and the canon) are not only conflict. There is also some harmony and mutual support. This is a study in what is nowadays, thanks to Julia Kristeva, called intertextuality.54 That is, one looks for John’s relation to his predecessors, the synoptics, and the Hebrew Scriptures. One can also read this study as an illustration of the early reception history of Matthew: how did a community with its own independent traditions, reflections, ecclesiology, eschatology, its own preferences, react to Matthew, from their viewpoint a dangerously popular gospel?55 We have seen that their reaction was one of critical discrimination and sifting, but not of total rejection. For this, by the time of chapter 21, it was too late. This study can also be seen as a contribution to early Christian canonical criticism. Though this point has not yet been explicitly developed, hints have been provided that Matthew is the gospel for hearty extroverts, not above stepping on a few toes, whereas John is the gospel for sensitive introverts, in that sense too a contemplative gospel. The ultimate choice in
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church structure, it has been suggested,56 in the quest for post-apostolic authority and decision making, was and remains between pneumatical, unstructured John and legally organized Matthew, whose firm structure is tempered by appeals to the leaders to be humble (Matt 18 and 23), a form of self-policing, the best kind of policing when it works. John 21:15–17 represents an admission that the Johannine way does not provide enough safeguards and definition to prevent major schisms, and an ultimate submission to the Matthean model. This submission, or capitulation, with due precautions (the stress on love in 21:15–17), means that the gospel of John is usually read in the churches in a Matthean ecclesial frame and in a Lucan liturgical frame (the main liturgical calendar is heavily determined by Luke).57 John continues to provide powerful guidance for theology, christology, pneumatology, for sacraments and spirituality (14:23), but is normally felt to be ethically poorer than Matthew. At first the gospels may seem impractical and unreal, but with time one sees that, when sanely understood and read canonically, so that they mutually qualify one another, their wisdom and respective truth shine forth. As a corrective to romantic idealist interpretations of the gospels, which are impossible to live in the long run, it is also important to read the gospels in the context of Old Testament and rabbinic Judaism, with their Mediterranean earthiness, ethical sobriety, their interest in the rule of law, their love of life, the whole infused by a kind of biblical Stoicism, minus the pantheism. However that may be, we hope to have given the reader a sample of the many-sided dynamics of John’s use of Matthew. NOTES 1. Percival GARDNER-SMITH, Saint John and the Synoptic Gospels (Cambridge: University Press, 1938); this view is then defended by C.H. DODD, Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: University Press, 1963); this view, that John does not know the three synoptic gospels directly, but only synoptic-like traditions, whether oral or written, is held also by R. Bultmann, R.E. Brown, and F.J. Moloney. One could speak of a consensus in the 1950s and 60s, with notable exceptions like C.K. Barrett. On GardnerSmith, see the essay by J. VERHEYDEN, “P. Gardner-Smith and ‘The Turn of the Tide’”, in Adelbert Denaux, ed., John and the Synoptics, (BETL 101; Leuven: Leuven University/Peeters 1992), pp. 423–452. 2. Clement of Alexandria, Hypotyposeis (a lost work), cited in Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History 3.24.7–13, eds. K. Lake, J.E.L. Oulton, and H.J. Lawlor, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926–1932), pp. 46–49. On the patristic views and the whole issue, see D. Moody SMITH, John among the Gospels (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992); also Helmut MERKEL, Die Widersprüche zwischen den Evangelien (WUNT 13); Tübingen: Mohr, 1971.
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3. On the Tübingen school, see Stephen NEILL, The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861–1961 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 1–103; W.G. KÜMMEL, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems (Nashville: Abingdon, 1972), pp. 120–205; I discuss the theological problem in “Social World and Community Leadership: the Case of Matthew 23.1–12,34,” JSNT 39 (1990) 3–21. 4. See note 2 above. 5. See note 1 above. 6. Hans WINDISCH, Johannes und die Synoptiker: Wollte der vierte Evangelist die älteren Evangelien ergänzen oder ersetzen? (Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 12; Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1926). 7. This paragraph represents my reflection on the material presented by D.M. SMITH, John among the Gospels, pp. 29–30. 8. R.H. LIGHTFOOT, The Gospel Message of St. Mark (Oxford: University Press, 1950), pp. 18–19, 33; also, E.K. Lee, “St Mark and the Fourth Gospel,” NTS 3 (1956/57) 50–55, is good on the relation between John and Mark; on how John’s Christology is an outgrowth or radical development of Q, see W.R.G. LOADER, “The Central Structure of Johannine Christology,” NTS 30 (1984) 188–216, esp. pp. 204–208; on the theological issues involved, see J.D.G. DUNN, “John and the Synoptics as a Theological Question”, in Exploring the Gospel of John (D.M. Smith FS), eds. R.A. Culpepper and C.C. Black (Louisville KY: WJK, 1996), pp. 301–313. 9. On John’s relation to Luke, see, among other works, Emile OSTY, “Les points de contact entre le récit de la passion dans Saint Luc et dans Saint Jean,” in Mélanges J. Lebreton, RSR 39 (1951) 146–151; M.-E. BOISMARD, “Saint Luc et la rédaction du quatrieme evangile (Jn, iv, 46–54),” RB 69 (1962) 185–211; Hans KLEIN, “Die lukanischjohanneische Passionstradition,” ZNW 67 (1976) 155–186; J.A. BAILEY, The Traditions Common to the Gospels of Luke and John. NovTSup 7; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1963; F.L. CRIBBS, “St. Luke and the Johannine Tradition,” JBL 90 (1971) 422–450; CRIBBS, “A Study of the Contacts That Exist Between St. Luke and St. John,” Society of Biblical Literature: 1973 Seminar Papers (Cambridge MA: Society of Biblical Literature, 1973), 2.1–93; CRIBBS, “The Agreements That Exist Between Luke and John,” Society of Biblical Literature: 1979 Seminar Papers (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1979), 1. 215–261; Anton DAUER, Johannes und Lukas: Untersuchungen zu den johannisch-lukanischen Parallelperikopen Joh 4,46–54/Luk 7;1–10 — Joh 12,1–81/Lk 7,36–50; 10,38–42 — Joh 20,19–29/Lk 24,36–49 (FB 50; Würzburg: Echter, 1984); M.-E. BOISMARD, Comment Luc a remanié l’Evangile de Jean (Cah RB 51; Paris: Gabalda, 2001); Manfred LANG, Johannes und die Synoptiker: Eine redaktionsgeschichtliche Analyse von Joh 18–20 vor dem markinischen und lukanischen Hintergrund (FRLANT 182; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998). 10. See for example P.N. ANDERSON, The Christology of the Fourth Gospel: Its Unity and Disunity in the Light of John 6 (WUNT.II; Tübingen: Mohr, 1996), esp. pp. 221–251; James Pain and Nicholas Zernov, eds., A Bulgakov Anthology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1976). On the other hand, for W.O. Walker, “The Lord’s Prayer in Matthew and John”, NTS 28 (1982) 237–256, John 17 is a respectful midrash on the Matthean form of the Our Father. This fits to a large extent with my view of the John–Matthew relationship. Cp. Eric FRANKLIN, Luke: Interpreter of Paul, Critic of Matthew (JSNTSS 92; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994). T.L. BRODIE, The Quest for the Origin of John’s Gospel: A SourceOriented Approach (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), undertakes a thorough study of John’s use of Matthew. My article is independent of his study.
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11. B.T. VIVIANO, “The Structure of the Prologue of John (1:1–18): A Note,” RB 105 (1998) 176–184. 12. Rudolf SMEND, Die Bundesformel (ThStud 68; Zurich: TVZ, 1963); Klaus BALTZER, The Covenant Formulary in Old Testament, Jewish, and Early Christian Writings (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971); D.J. McCARTHY, Old Testament Covenant (Richmond VA: John Knox, 1972); Rolf RENDTORFF, Die “Bundesformel” (SBS 160; Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1995), English translation: The Covenant Formula (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark/New York: Continuum, 2001). 13. R.E. BROWN, “Incidents That Are Units in the Synoptic Gospels but Dispersed in St. John,” CBQ 23 (1961) 143–160; reprinted in Brown, New Testament Essays (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1965), chap. II, pp. 192–213. 14. Jean GALOT, “Etre né de Dieu”: Jean 1,13 (An Bib 37; Rome: Biblical Institute, 1969). 15. Hannah ARENDT, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963); ARENDT, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958), esp. pp. 175–181. 16. Rudolf SCHNACKENRURG, The Gospel according to St John (New York: Seabury, 1980). 2:191–192. 17. On Elijah’s role in eschatological hopes, see B.T. VIVIANO, “The Least in the Kingdom: Matthew 11:11, Its Parallel in Luke 7:28 (Q), and Daniel 4:14,” CBQ 62 (2000) 41–54. 18. Rudolf SCHNACKENBURG, The Gospel according to John (New York: Seabury, 1968), 1:288–290; Georg RICHTER, “Bist Du Elias; Joh 1:21,” BZ 6 (1962) 79–92, 238–256; 7 (1963) 63–80; J.A.T. ROBINSON, “Elijah, John and Jesus: An Essay in Detection,” NTS 4 (1957–58) 263–281, repr. in ROBINSON, Twelve NT Studies (SBT 34; London: SCM, 1962), pp. 28–52. 19. Jürgen BECKER, Das Evangelism nach Johannes (3rd ed.; Gütersloh: Mohn/Würzburg: Echter, 1991; 1st ed. 1979), 1.113–114. 20. DODD, Historical Tradition, pp. 295–299. 21. Jean DANIÉLOU, Holy Pagans in the Old Testament (London: Longmans/Baltimore: Helicon, 1956); idem, Jean-Baptiste témoin de l’Angeau (Paris: Seuil, 1964); Sebastian BROCK, “The Baptist’s Diet in Syriac Sources,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 54 (1970) 113–124. 22. Ernst KÄSEMANN, The Testament of Jesus: A Study of the Gospel of John in the Light of Chapter 17 (London: SCM, 1968). 23. See the essay by R.E. BROWN referred to in note 13 herein; also C.H. DODD, Historical Tradition, pp. 65–81. 24. C.K. BARRETT, Essays on John (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), pp. 19–36 = “‘The Father is greater than I’ John 14:28: Subordinationist Christology in the New Testament,” in Neues Testament und Kirche, Festschrift für Rudolf Schnackenburg (Freiburg: Herder, 1974). 25. John 4:34; 5:23,24,30,37; 6:38,39,44; 7:16,18,28,33; 8:16,18,26,29; 9:4; 12:44,45,49; 13:20; 14:24; 15:21; 16:5. 26. 5:30; 7:17,28; 8:28,42; 12:49; 14:10. 27. C.K. BARRETT, Essays on John, pp. 1–18, first appeared in La Notion Biblique de Dieu, ed. J. Coppens (Gembloux: Duculot, 1976). 28. B.T. VIVIANO, “The Historical Jesus and the Biblical and Pharisaic Sabbath (Mark 2:23–28; 3:1–6 parr; Luke 13:10–17; 14:1–6),” paper presented to the task force on the
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historical Jesus of the Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1999, forthcoming in a book on pronouncement stories edited by G.E. Sterling; Sven-Olav BACK, Jesus of Nazareth and the Sabbath Commandment (Åbo/Turku, Finland: Åbo Akademi Press, 1995). 29. Frans NEIRYNCK, “Jesus and the Sabbath: Some Observations on Mk II,27,” in Jésus aux origines de la christologie, ed. Jacques Dupont (Gembloux: Duculot, 1975), pp. 227–270. 30. Mathatias TSEVAT, “The Basic Meaning of the Biblical Sabbath,” ZAW 84 (1972) 447–459. 31. SCHNACKENBURG, John, 2–101, and n. 27, stresses not so much God’s sustaining in being of his creation as his continual moral activity of judging, i.e., rewarding and punishing. In the Letter of Aristeas, no. 210, both ideas are present (Charlesworth, OTP 2.26): “God is continually at work in everything and is omniscient, ... man cannot hide from him an unjust deed or an evil action.” Cf. also Philo, Leg. All. 1.5. For J. Becker, Ev Jn, in loco, the sense is exclusively Christological: because God judges, Jesus judges. Concern for the sabbath has been left in the dust, on this view. Becker’s view seems onesided to the present writer, who still holds that John had an ontological view of God as lord of his creation, shepherd of created being. 32. B.T. VIVIANO, “Peter as Jesus’ Mouth: Matthew 16.13–20 in the Light of Exodus 4.10–17 and Other Models,” in The Interpretation of Scripture in Early Judaism and Christianity: Studies in Language and Tradition, ed. C.A. Evans (JSP 33; Sheffield: Academic Press, 2000), pp. 312–341. An earlier form is available in the SBL Seminar Papers 1998, pp. 226–252. 33. Franz DVORNIK, The Idea of Apostolicity and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew (Cambridge. MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 138–299. 34. On how this material came to be in the epilogue, see R.E. BROWN, The Community of the Beloved Disciple (New York: Paulist, 1979). For a harsh alternative view, see A.J. DROGE, “The Status of Peter in the Fourth Gospel: John 18:10–11,” JBL 109 (1990) 307–311; A.H. MAYNARD, “The Role of Peter in the Fourth Gospel,” NTS 30 (1984) 531–549. 35. P.N. ANDERSON, The Christology of the Fourth Gospel (cf. n. 10), p. 226. Emphasis in the original. 36. ANDERSON, Christology, p. 232. 37. Pietr Oktaba is soon to defend a dissertation on this pericope at the university of Fribourg under my direction. 38. R.E. BROWN, Community. 39. SCHNACKENBURG and BECKER, in loco. 40. For Schnackenburg there is no rivalry here. For BECKER, pp. 722–723, there is some. 41. BECKER, pp. 722–723. 42. PAIN and ZERNOV, Bulgakov Anthology (see note 10 herein). 43. AUGUSTINE, In Joannem, tract. 113.4 (CC 639). 44. SCHNACKENRURG, John (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 3, in loco, on John 18:23. 45. G.N. Stanton, A Gospel for a New People: Studies in Matthew (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1992), p. 363; Wolfgang ROTHFUCHS, Die Erfüllungszitate des Matthäus-Evangeliums (BWANT 88; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1969), p. 176. One could add Dodd’s treatment in his Historical Tradition, pp. 41n, 47, 58n, 155; M.J.J. MENKEN, Old Testament Quotations in the Fourth Gospel: Studies in Textual Form (Kampen, NL: Kok-Pharos, 1996).
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46. See the works by O. CULLMANN, The Christology of the New Testament (London: SCM, 1959); R.H. FULLER, The Foundations of New Testament Christology (London: Lutterworth, 1965); J.D.G. DUNN, Christology in the Making (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1980); R.H. Fuller and Pheme PERKINS, Who Is This Christ? (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983); Walter KASPER, Jesus the Christ (New York: Paulist, 1976), esp. pp. 104–111. 47. Adolf HARNACK, The Sayings of Jesus (London: Williams and Norgate, 1908), pp. 272–310, esp. 300; I have attempted analyses in Study as Worship (SJLA 26; Leiden: Brill, 1978), pp. 182–192 and in my commentary on Matthew, NJBC, in loco; cf. also B.T. VIVIANO, “The Historical Jesus in the Doubly Attested Sayings,” RB 103 (1996) 367–410, esp. pp. 402–405. 48. Paul HOFFMANN, Studien zur Theologie der Logienquelle (NTAbh 111 8; Münster: Aschendorff, 1972), pp. 102–142, esp. p. 118. He is followed by others, while others disagree. For further references, see RB 103 (1996) 403, n. 58. 49. W.R.G. LOADER, “The Central Structure of Johannine Christology,” NTS 30 (1984) 188–216, esp. pp. 191–192 and 196. 50. H.D. BETZ, Essays on the Sermon on the Mount (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), chap. 7, pp. 125–157; J.J. COLLINS, Daniel (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), pp. 274–324, esp. pp. 286–294, on the Canaanite-Ugaritic background, and the excursus, pp. 304–310. On Matt 25:31–46, a recent essay is by Ulrich Luz, “The Final Judgment (Matt 25:31–46): An Exercise in ‘History of Influence’ Exegesis”, in Treasures New and Old, ed. D.R. Bauer and M.A. Powell (Atlanta: Scholars, 1996), pp. 271–310. 51. VIVIANO, Study as Worship, pp. 167–171. 52. VIVIANO, “Social World and Community Leadership” (see note 3 herein). 53. Ernst KÄSEMANN, “The Canon of the New Testament and the Unity of the Church,” in his Essays on New Testament Themes (SBT 41; London: SCM, 1964), pp. 95–107; Hans Kung, The Council in Action (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1963), pp. 159–195. 54. See C.M. TUCKETT, ed. The Scriptures in the Gospels (Leuven: University Press/Peeters, 1997), p. 4, where Tuckett traces the term to Julia KRISTEVA, Semiotiké (Paris, 1969); La révolution du langage poétique (Paris, 1974); Roland BARTHES, S/Z, Essais (Paris, 1970). 55. Étienne MASSAUX, L’influence de l’Évangile de saint Matthieu sur la littérature chrétienne avant saint Irénée (Louvain: University Press, 1950); English translation: The Influence of the Gospel of Matthew on Christian Literature before Saint Irenaeus, ed. A.J. Bellinzoni (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1993). 56. R.E. BROWN, The Churches the Apostles Left Behind (New York: Paulist, 1984). 57. Klaus SCHOLTISSEK, “Kinder Gottes und Freunde Jesu: Beobachtungen zur johanneischen Ekklesiologie”, in Ekklesiologie des Neuen Testaments (FS Karl Kertelge), eds. Rainer Kampling u. Thomas Söding (Freiburg i.Br.: Herder 1996), pp. 184–211, corrects Brown a bit. He argues that John ch. 21 is not simply a capitulation of the Johannine Christians to the overwhelming hierarchy of offices of the Great Church (the Johannine “we” betrays an “official” self-understanding), but a reminder that official preaching must be bound to personal familiarity and love of the unique exegete of God (1:18; 13:23), Jesus Christ (p. 211).
STEVEN J. FRIESEN
Myth and Symbolic Resistance in Revelation 13
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he goal of this article is to examine the use of myth in Revelation 13. I contend that John drew on a range of mythic traditions from Jewish and Gentile sources. Comparisons with the use of myth in other apocalyptic texts and in imperial cult settings lead to the conclusion that John deployed myths in creative and disorienting ways for the purpose of alienating his audiences from mainstream society. In other words, he engaged in symbolic resistance, by which I do not mean hopeless support for a lost cause but rather the dangerous deployment of myths in defense of a minority viewpoint in a particular social context. In order to get to that conclusion, however, I must explain what I mean by myth, lay out comparative material from the mythology of imperial cults in Asia, and then examine the use of myth in Revelation 13. I. R E M Y T H O L O G I Z I N G S T U D I E S
OF THE
BOOK
OF
R E V E L AT I O N
The starting point for the argument is a simple observation: myth has almost disappeared as an interpretive category in studies of the book of Revelation. The last sightings were recorded in the 1970s by Adela Yarbro Collins and John Court.1 One reason the category has gone into hiding is fairly obvious: in colloquial speech, “myth” normally has a pejorative
From Journal of Biblical Literature 123 (2004). © 2004 The Society of Biblical Literature. Note: For printing purposes, the figures as well as the greek text in this essay have been removed.
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meaning, referring to “an unfounded or false notion;” “a person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence.”2 There are also more serious and more subtle reasons for our lack of attention to myth in Revelation. One is that myth has often been portrayed as a primitive attempt at scientific thought. This view of myth grew out of Europe’s colonial encounter with other parts of the world. Myth was not thought to be inherent in the Christian tradition, or at least not a crucial part of the tradition; it belonged instead to the religious life of conquered, “primitive” peoples.3 This imperial, evolutionary view of the world permeated the Western academy and can be seen in such landmarks of twentieth-century biblical studies as Rudolf Bultmann’s project of demythologizing. Demythologization was based on the assumption that myth was a primitive worldview that had been superseded by Western science. According to mythological thinking, God has his domicile in heaven. What is the meaning of this statement? The meaning is quite clear. In a crude manner it expresses the idea that God is beyond the world, that He is transcendent. The thinking that is not yet capable of forming the abstract idea of transcendence expresses its intention in the category of space....4 The waning of interest in myth in studies of Revelation precisely in the late 1970s, however, was due to another, related reason: the growing international dominance of the United States after World War II and the resulting dominance of American academic concerns. Prior to World War II, European scholarship controlled the disciplines of biblical studies and comparative religion. Ivan Strenski argued that fundamental theories of myth from that period—especially those of Ernst Cassirer, Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Mircea Eliade—were constructed on the basis of specific European concerns.5 He showed that their theories of myth all grappled in different ways with primitivist sentiments in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. The theories of myth that they developed responded to contemporary political and nationalistic claims about national identity and the attachment of a particular Volk to their homeland.6 After World War II, dominance in the international economy, politics, and culture shifted from Europe to the United States, and the intellectual center of gravity in NT studies slowly shifted as well.7 Dominant culture in the United States, however, is predicated on the dislocation and/or
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decimation of native populations. So theories of myth that wrestled with European nationalisms and ancestral connections to land were clearly out of place in this country, where discontinuity with native populations and the seizure of their land are crucial aspects of national identity.8 American society and economy have been predicated on the eradication of native populations and their “primitive myths,” and so American scholarship has not generally focused on mythology. In the decades of American dominance in the discipline, studies on Revelation (and NT studies generally) turned instead toward functional descriptions of churches in their social settings, or toward literary analyses of the texts them selves. Neither approach paid much attention to mythology,9 and this seems to involve a fourth factor. Myth has often been portrayed as a static phenomenon that is inherently conservative and discourages people from trying to change unjust conditions in this world. Apocalyptic mythology in particular has been described as having an “otherworldly orientation” that results in the renunciation of responsible historical action, all of which runs contrary to popular notions in the United States about participation in a democratic society.10 Since the abandonment of myth as an analytical category, “ideology” has sometimes been chosen as a framework for such discussions, but I am more suspicious of this category than I am of myth.11 The main problem with ideology as an analytical tool is that it was fashioned in the late nineteenth century for the analysis of modern Western industrial societies in which the organization of religion and society is very different from that of the ancient Mediterranean world.12 A good deal of work has advanced the conceptualization of ideology in the meantime,13 but on the whole ideology has been more helpful in analyzing recent historical periods. A second problem with ideology as a category for our investigation is that it is rarely used with any precision in NT studies,14 even though the meaning of the term is a matter of wide-ranging debate.15 This is disconcerting, because particular theories of religion—mostly pejorative— are implicit in the term, depending on how it is defined. Most popular and classical usages of the term presuppose that ideology, and hence religion, is a set of false beliefs that mystify “real” social relations in such a way as to perpetuate oppression.16 I am quite willing to admit that such theories might provide appropriate starting points for the analysis of Revelation. They should not, however, be a presumed and covert starting point. An overt explanation and defense are necessary. Thus, the value of the concept ideology for analysis of ancient societies such as those that made up the Roman empire is questionable. My
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alternative—focusing on myth rather than on ideology—does not solve all these problems, but it does have certain advantages. One is that the modern term “myth” developed as a way of discussing narratives in societies with nonindustrial economies, which should make it more applicable to the Roman empire and its agrarian society. Another advantage is that the study of myth originated in disciplined cross-cultural and historical studies. Thus, myth should have more potential as a theoretical tool for describing firstcentury topics. This leaves one last preliminary matter: What do I mean by myth? Five descriptive comments about myth are important for my argument. First, myths are “the stories that everyone knows and the stories that everyone has heard before.”17 This axiom includes several points that do not require elaboration: myths are narratives; they are shared by an identifiable group (the “everyone” in the quotation); and the story lines are not new. Second, myths can be distinguished from other stories because they have a special priority for a group of people. Wendy Doniger put it this way: My own rather cumbersome definition of a myth is: a narrative in which a group finds, over an extended period of time, a shared meaning in certain questions about human life, to which the various proposed answers are usually unsatisfactory in one way or another. These would be questions such as, Why are we here? What happens to us when we die? Is there a God?18 Thus, the reason that myths are familiar is that they express a particular value or insight that a group finds relevant across time, and so the stories are told repeatedly. In the case of Revelation, the myths tend to address questions such as, Why do the righteous suffer? What is the ultimate fate of people and institutions? Third, myths often appear to be variants either of other myths from the same social group or of myths told by other groups. This has led some scholars to use myth to refer to an abstract story line that explains the variants (or the cross-cultural comparisons). I prefer to call this abstract story line a “mythic pattern” rather than a myth in order to promote clarity in the discussion and to emphasize the point that the abstracted pattern is a heuristic device created by analysts but seldom (perhaps never) occurring in the wild.19 Fourth, the function of myth in which I am most interested is the way that myths are deployed in particular historical and social settings. A mythic pattern is flexible and is never narrated the same way twice. Sometimes the narrations of the same story line can even contradict each other.20 This
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implies that myths are not static and timeless, nor do they always support dominant social interests. While myths are often deployed to support the status quo, they can also be used to resist dominant discourse or to develop alternative strategies.21 In fact, they are sometimes a crucial component of symbolic resistance. Fifth and finally, myths are part of an interdependent system with three important components: myths, rituals, and social structures. Myths and rituals are “supple, versatile, and potent instruments that people produce, reproduce, and modify, and instruments they use—with considerable but imperfect skill and strategic acumen—to produce, reproduce, and modify themselves and the groups in which they participate.”22 So changes in a myth, a ritual, or a social hierarchy will have repercussions, eliciting modifications in the other two components. In other words, we are dealing with aspects of a discursive system involving “triadic co-definition ... in which a social group, a set of ritual performances, and a set of mythic narratives produce one another.”23 Together, these five points provide a framework for comparing the use of myth in Rev 13 with mythic methods in other apocalyptic texts and in imperial cult settings. Since there is very little discussion in the secondary literature about imperial cult mythology, an overview of myth, ritual, and society in imperial cults of Asia is a necessary first step. II. T H E D E P L O Y M E N T
OF
MYTH
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I M P E R I A L C U LT S
Imperial cult mythology was an important resource for the use of myth in Rev 13. This section provides a survey of the use of myth in imperial cult settings in Asia as comparative material for an examination of Rev 13. The crucial questions here are how myth was used and who used it in these ways. I answer these questions with selected imperial cult from examples Miletos, Aphrodisias, and Ephesos.24 The Miletos example shows how local mythologies were incorporated into imperial cult ritual settings in order to support the social structure of Roman hegemony. This reconfiguration of myth and ritual suggested that divine punishment of evildoers was meted out by Roman imperial authorities. The example comes from the courtyard of the Miletos bouleuterion.25 A bouleuterion was a crucial building in a Greco-Roman city and a quintessential expression of ancient “democracy,” which primarily involved a small number of wealthy elite men.26 Of interest to us are the ruins found about a century ago in the courtyard of the bouleuterion. These ruins came from a structure built later than the rest
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of the complex. Klaus Tuchelt compared these ruins with other structures and showed that the building in the courtyard was a platform for an altar. The platform had decorated walls on all four sides, with access via a wide staircase on the side facing the bouleuterion. The design and ornamentation of the platform altar are of a type widely associated with imperial cult shrines, a type influenced heavily by the Augustan Ara Pacis in Rome.27 Fragmentary inscriptions from the propylon of the bouleuterion allowed Tuchelt to identify the structure in the courtyard as an imperial cult altar.28 The sculptures from the walls of this altar platform provide rare surviving examples of the use of myth in an imperial cult setting. The external walls of the altar platform contained twelve sculptures.29 Only a few pieces of the twelve sculptures were found, so we cannot say what the overall sculptural program might have been. The extant fragments of four identifiable scenes show that local mythology regarding justice and vengeance predominated. Leto and her twins Apollo and Artemis appear in three of the four scenes as examples of local versions of Panhellenic myths.30 One scene is so severely damaged that it is clear only from analogous sculptures that it portrays Apollo with a bow. A second scene appears in two examples: Leto sits on her throne with water nymphs from the Mykale mountain range at her feet (left); Apollo and Artemis (right) stand in her presence.31 A third scene, again quite damaged, portrays Artemis shooting the giant Tityos in order to stop him from raping her mother Leto at Delphi. The rest of the story is not pictured (as far as we know): as punishment, Tityos was pegged to the ground in Tartarus, where vultures feasted on his liver. The fourth scene changes characters but not themes: the twin founders of Miletos, Pelias and Neleus, avenge their mother, Tyro, by killing her evil stepmother, Sidero, even though Sidero had fled to the temple of Hera for protection. Given our incomplete knowledge of the Miletos altar and its sculptures, it is important not to make too much of this evidence. But it is equally important not to make too little of it. If the interpretations of the remains are accurate (and I think they are), we have a good example of local mythology appropriated to support Roman imperialism in a specific setting. New imperial cult rituals were grafted onto the municipal rituals already established for city governance of Miletos, and local myths were used to provide the narrative. By visually “retelling” the mythic stories of Miletos in this ritual setting, their meaning was altered to reflect and to promote a particular social hierarchy. The local stories of vengeance and divine judgment upon evildoers were deployed to support Roman rule and the collaboration of the local elites (the boule¯ ) with Rome.
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An implication of this conclusion is that we should not expect to find a homogeneous, unified mythology of imperial cults. The ways these myths were articulated in Miletos would have been inappropriate or irrelevant in Alexandria, Damascus, or Trier. There might be a consistent mythic pattern that we can discern, but many inconsistent stories were deployed to support Roman imperialism in various places. The south portico of the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias is our second example. It illustrates the reworking of local myth in imperial cult settings, the mythologization of the emperor and imperial violence, and imperial propaganda about the pacification of land and sea. The Sebasteion complex consists of a long narrow courtyard (ca. 14 x 90 m) surrounded by four buildings: a propylon on the small west side; a temple on the east side (raised on a platform and approached by a monumental stairway); and three-story porticoes on the north and south sides. The identification of the Sebasteion as an imperial cult site is secure, for inscriptions on the buildings have dedications, “To Aphrodite, to the Gods Sebastoi, and to the demos of the Aphrodisians.”32 Pieces of another inscription indicate that the temple itself was dedicated at least to Tiberius and to Livia.33 Most of the evidence for the use of myth at the Sebasteion comes from the porticoes, for these were lined with sculptural reliefs on their second and third stories.34 The south portico is more important for the purposes of this study, for the portico’s third floor held a series of forty-five panels that dealt with the emperors in mythic terms, and the second floor displayed a series of forty-five scenes from standard mythic narratives. Together, these provide an impressive example of the use of myth in an imperial cult precinct. From the third floor of the south portico, more than one-third of the panels with imperial figures have been found and their approximate original locations can be determined.35 Four of the eleven extant panels merit discussion in this context. Two of these four panels depict emperors defeating regions on the margins of the empire. In one scene, the victory of Claudius over Britannia (43 C.E.) is portrayed in the following way. The emperor is nude in the style of a hero or god, while Britannia is rendered as an amazon. Claudius has pinned her to the ground. His left hand grasps her hair and pulls back her head, and his right hand holds a spear (now missing) poised for the fatal blow.36 The second panel retells Nero’s victories over Armenia (54 C.E.). On this panel the emperor is also a heroic nude figure and the opponent an amazon. The composition, however, alludes to the specific iconography of Achilles killing Penthesilea, the queen of the amazons.37 A model developed by Bruce Lincoln helps us describe the deployment of myth in these two scenes. His model contained four kinds of stories—
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fable, legend, history, and myth—and compared them in terms of truth claims, credibility, and authority.38 Truth claims Fable Legend History Myth
No Yes Yes Yes
Credibility No No Yes Yes
Authority No No No Yes
Using these categories we can describe at least three ways in which people use myths and related narratives.39 1. Downgrading a myth to the status of history or legend by questioning the myth’s authority or credibility. 2. Mythologizing history, legend, or fable by attributing authority and/or credibility to them so that they gain the status of myth. 3. Reinterpreting established myths in new ways. Returning to the two imperial panels from the Sebasteion, we have clear examples of the mythologization of specific historical events. This is accomplished through stylistic decisions (such as the divine nudity) and through allusion to mythic narratives such as battles with amazons or to the Trojan War.40 The process does not create an allegory, however: in the myths, the amazons die; in history, the neighboring regions lived on, either forcibly absorbed into the empire or subdued and granted limited autonomy at the border. The process of mythologization worked by analogy rather than by allegory, proposing similarities between stories of the emperors and myths and thereby investing one with the authority of the other. Note also that the mythologization of imperial military strength was accomplished in a ritual setting. This combination of new myth and ritual at the Sebasteion enforced the Roman social order. It incorporated the emperors into the myths of western Asia Minor, with particular emphasis on their military victories. Several other panels celebrated the victories of the emperors in mythic terms,41 although it is no longer clear which emperors were displayed. A third panel for consideration interprets the ambivalent results of those victories. The panel depicts an unidentified emperor standing next to a trophy (the armor of his fallen foe displayed on a pole). On the right stands
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a Roman figure, personifying either the senate or the people of Rome, who crowns the conqueror. In the lower left corner, a kneeling female prisoner with hands bound behind the back looks out in anguish at the viewer.42 Here a standard trophy scene is employed in such a way as to highlight the military basis of imperial rule, and to make clear the dire consequences of resistance. A fourth scene from the sculptures of the Sebasteion’s third floor describes the benefits of imperialism—a fruitful earth and secure sea lanes— in mythic terms. The panel is dominated by a standing, nude Claudius with drapery billowing up above his head.43 In the lower left corner an earth figure hands him a cornucopia; in the lower right a figure representing the sea hands him a ship’s rudder. The two great elements traversed by humans—earth and sea—offer their gifts to the divine emperor. In these two scenes history again is elevated to myth, but in a more generalized sense. The scenes appear to refer not to specific historical events but rather to a general process of imperial domination. When we move to the second floor of the Sebasteion’s south portico, we find the reworking of local mythology to support Roman rule.44 The subject matter on the second floor is no longer imperial exploits but rather a selection of Panhellenic myths. Some of the figures and stories are recognizable, such as the three Graces, Apollo and a tripod at Delphi, Achilles and Penthesilea, Meleager and the Calydonian Boar, Herakles freeing the bound Prometheus, and the young Dionysos among the nymphs. Other scenes contain enough detail to indicate specific stories that are no longer recognizable, for example, a seated hero and a dog flanked by an amazon and a male figure with a crown in his hand, and three heroes with a dog.45 The overall arrangement of scenes on the second floor does not appear to be governed by a single strong theme. The reliefs depict instead a range of myths that are perhaps gathered in clusters. One exception where there is clear development, however, is at the east end of the portico near the temple for Tiberius and Livia. Here the three panels from the first room contain overt references to Panhellenic mythology that has special significance for Aphrodisias. The first panel (closest to the temple) has a seated Aphrodite, the principal municipal deity, with an infant Eros on her lap; the male standing next to her is probably Anchises. The central panel from room 1 portrays the flight of Aeneas—the child of Aphrodite and Anchises—from Troy in standard terms except that Aphrodite accompanies him as a figure inscribed into the background of the scene. The meaning of the third panel is uncertain: Poseidon and the other figures might allude to the sea voyage of Aeneas.46
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In spite of the uncertainties, the gist of this deployment is unmistakable. The panels rework established Aphrodite mythology (Lincoln’s third use of myth) to emphasize a special relationship between Romans and Aphrodisians: the local city’s eponymous goddess is portrayed as the ancestor of the Romans through Aeneas. Furthermore, there is a direct connection to the reliefs above these (in room 1 of the third story; this is one of the few places where the panels of the second story intersect with those directly above them). Directly above the flight of Aeneas on the second floor is a third-floor panel with Augustus as military victor, which was flanked by panels of the Dioskouroi. Taken together, then, the reliefs of the first rooms of the second and third stories craft a narrative in which the historical military victories of Augustus and the Romans are incorporated into panhellenic myth, and into local myth (Lincoln’s second use of myth, but not analogical this time).47 It is particularly important that this confluence of myths occurs at the east end of the portico next to the altar area and temple, which was the ritual center of the complex. As the viewer moves closer to the altar and temple—the focal point for rituals in the precincts—imperial mythology and local mythology converge in support of Roman conquest. The inscriptions from the Sebasteion complex allow us to turn our attention from how myth was used to the question of who used myth in these ways. Since the style of this complex was local and not imported,48 the benefactors who built the complex would have been influential in the design. Inscriptions indicate that two local families built and maintained the Sebasteion. The south portico was undertaken by two brothers, Diogenes and Attalos, but Attalos died before construction was finished and so his wife Attalis Apphion financed his share of the project “on his behalf.”49 Attalis was also mentioned as a benefactor of the temples.50 The inscription is heavily damaged, so we assume, but do not know for sure, that Diogenes also financed the temple along with Attalis.51 Sometime later, Tiberius Claudius Diogenes (son of Diogenes and nephew of Attalus and Attalis) paid for repairs of the south portico, probably after earthquake damage.52 The other two buildings of the Sebasteion—the propylon and the north portico—were built by another family. The primary benefactors named in the inscription are Eusebes, his wife Apphias, and his brother Menander. These buildings also required restoration after an earthquake, and other inscriptions inform us that the remodeling was financed by Apphias, her daughter Tata, and Tata’s sons Eusebes and Menander.53 These families would not have designed the reliefs that adorned the Sebasteion, but they would have approved the design, and so we can say at least that the deployment of myth in the precincts represented their interests
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and their general perspective on Roman rule. Four observations help fill out our picture of this class of people who promoted the worship of the emperors in Asia in the first century. First, we note that they were wealthy municipal benefactors over the course of at least three generations. This means that we are dealing with the small percentage of people at the top of the city’s social hierarchy. Second, the two families appear to have been related to each other, so we see the importance of extended family ties among the elite.54 Third, the official titles of Attalis Apphion remind us that many of the same people who financed imperial cult projects also served in religious offices. Fourth, it is significant that the second-generation Diogenes obtained Roman citizenship. We do not know specifically how this came about, but it is indicative of the rising status of the municipal elite and their growing collaboration with Rome. A group of inscriptions from Ephesos provides a larger sample of data regarding those in Asia who promoted imperial cults. The group of thirteen inscriptions commemorated the dedication of a provincial temple in Ephesos for the worship of the Flavian emperors in 89/90 C.E. during the reign of Domitian. The texts come from bases of statues that were once displayed in the precincts of the temple of the Sebastoi.55 Among other things, the inscriptions mention seventeen elite men from throughout the province who provided the statues from their respective cities. Most of the men’s names are preserved (four names are fragmentary or missing), demonstrating that five were Roman citizens and eight were not (the other four are uncertain). These men held important civic offices in their cities, for the inscriptions indicate that their offices included a grammateus of the demos, four to six archons, a strategos, a city treasurer, and a superintendent of public works. These same men also held religious offices: two have offices related to temples, one was a priest of Pluto and Kore (at Aphrodisias), and one was a priest of Domitian, Domitia, the imperial family, and the Roman Senate.56 The careers of these seventeen men demonstrate that those who promulgated imperial cults in Asia also had extensive governmental responsibilities in the cities of the province. The list of seventeen differs from the Aphrodisian material in that all the individuals are male. Since we know of many women involved in imperial cult activities, this gender differential is probably due to the fact that the seventeen are drawn from materials about the initiation of an extremely prestigious provincial temple. In such instances, men tended to hold all the offices. The data are also different because there is no longitudinal data across generations in this source; all thirteen inscriptions were executed between 88 and 91 C.E. Given
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these two differences, the overall picture is quite similar: wealthy men and some wealthy women controlled local government and religion through their collaboration with Roman authorities. The inscriptions from Ephesos also mention another category of individuals whose status was even higher than the people surveyed so far; I refer to this group as the “provincial elite.” These individuals were the high priests of Asia who were active in their cities but who also served in the imperial cults of Asia, representing the region in its provincial and imperial affairs. The temple of the Sebastoi was the third provincial cult in Asia, which was the only province to have more than one such cult at this time, so these high priests and high priestesses were in the highest-level status in the province.57 The inscriptions from Ephesos mention three of these high priests of Asia. One of them, Tiberius Claudius Aristio, is well attested and provides an individual case study of someone who influenced the deployment of myths in imperial cults. Aristio is mentioned in more than twenty inscriptions from Ephesos, which portray him as a major player in Ephesian and Asian affairs for a quarter century. He was, among other things, high priest of Asia (perhaps more than once),58 Asiarch three times, prytanis, grammateus of the demos, gymnasiarach, neokoros of the city, and benefactor of several buildings, including two fountains and a library. Comparison with other high priests of Asia shows that his Roman citizenship was normal for this category of people in Asia: twenty-five of twenty-seven (92.6 percent) high priests of Asia known to us by name from the period 100 to 212 C.E. were Roman citizens.59 The archaeological record thus supplies us with a good deal of information about the deployment of myth in the imperial cult ritual settings in Asia. Narratives of the exploits of the emperors were elevated to the status of mythology, and established myths were retold in ways that supported Roman authority. The examples surveyed here showed particular interest in the deployment of local myths that were related to the identities of the cities where these cults were located, which explains the variety of imperial cults encountered in Asia and throughout the empire. Several themes appear in the imperial mythologies. In the courtyard of the bouleuterion at Miletos, there is an emphasis on divine judgment against evildoers, which is appropriate for an institution that is responsible for the ordering of city life. At the Sebasteion, the military victories of the emperors are portrayed in mythic terms, and then local myths are retold in order to suggest an intimate connection between the conquerors and their Aphrodisian subjects. The Aphrodisian materials also describe the benefits of Roman rule as a fertile earth and safety at sea.
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Gender plays a complex role in these settings. In both locations the mythic materials depict violence against female figures, whether in the stories of rape and abuse from Miletos or the imperial victories from Aphrodisias. The imagery, however, does not encode a simple gendered definition of power with masculine figures dominating female figures. There are powerful positive female figures like Artemis seeking vengeance, or Aphrodite protecting Aeneas in his travels, and also a wicked figure like Sidero. The masculine imagery is clearly dominant, though, reflecting the kyriocentric cultural and political setting of these cults.60 Male hegemony is nuanced through the complications of status, wealth, and family. The archaeological materials also provide information about specific men and women who deployed myth in these ways. They were members of families from the wealthiest stratum of Asian society. These men and women gave significant benefactions and held a variety of religious offices. The male benefactors are more numerous, and the elite men tended to hold the most prestigious priesthoods. The men could also hold governmental offices. This emphasis in the archaeological record on elite families does not tell us much about opinions of the majority of the population. There are few surviving signs of resistance to imperial cults in Asia, and there is a great deal of evidence for popular participation in the festivals and competitions that accompanied the imperial cult sacrifices. It would be irresponsible, however, to imagine that there were no attempts to counter this use of myth in support of imperialism, for no imperial system can control all areas of social experience, nor can it incorporate all the discrepant experiences of those it dominates. There will always be resistance in some form or another.61 The Revelation of John is our best example of such symbolic resistance from firstcentury Asia, and this is the topic of the next section. III. T H E U S E
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R E V E L AT I O N 13
Commentators are nearly unanimous that Rev 13 deals with Roman imperial power and with the worship of the Roman emperors.62 This allows us to examine how the author of Rev 13 deployed myth when dealing with these subjects. Analysis suggests that the author drew primarily on three types of mythic material: traditions about Leviathan and Behemoth; the book of Daniel; and imperial cult mythology.63 He deployed these myths in eclectic and creative ways, combining and inverting them in a fashion that distanced his audience from mainstream society.
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1. The primary structure for the narrative in Rev 13 comes from the mythic pattern of Leviathan and Behemoth.64 Leviathan and Behemoth are two primordial monsters known from several Jewish texts. The oldest of these is Job 40–41, where they are cited as two of God’s most powerful creations. The exact function of the pair in Job is disputed and not germane to this study except as a contrast to later texts that exhibit a more developed stage in the history of the deployment of these mythic creatures.65 Four texts from the early Roman period draw on the story of Leviathan and Behemoth, and the variations among them allow us to describe the mythic pattern at this stage of its development: two enormous beasts from the beginning of history will live, one in sea and one on land, until the end of history, at which time they will become food for the righteous. The earliest of the four variations of this pattern was probably 1 En. 60:7–9, 24, which employs the basic pattern in the context of cosmological revelations.66 This section is found in the third parable of the Similitudes, which was written most likely during the century and a half before Revelation. The preceding second parable (1 En. 45–57) deals with the fate of the wicked and the righteous, the son of man, resurrection, judgment, flood, and Israel’s enemies. Then, in one of the visions of the third parable, Enoch is completely overcome by the sight of God enthroned and surrounded by millions of angels. Michael raises Enoch up and explains about the eschaton. In this section we learn that the two primordial monsters were separated at creation. Leviathan dwells in the abyss of the ocean at the sources of the deep, while Behemoth dwells in a mythic desert east of Eden (1 En. 60:7–9).67 Enoch inquires about them and is taken by another angel on a journey to the margins of creation. Along the way to the edge of existence he learns many valuable mysteries, such as where the winds are kept, how the moon shines the right amount of light, the timing between thunders, and so on. When the meteorology lesson is over and he arrives at the garden of the righteous, Enoch is told that Leviathan and Behemoth are being kept until the Day of the Lord, at which time they will provide food for the eschatological feast (60:24).68 Thus, the deployment of the myth focuses on God’s cosmic, hidden wisdom. Two other references to Leviathan and Behemoth are brief and were written down around the same time as Revelation. The two confirm the general outline found in 1 En. 60, but they focus on different aspects of the mythic pat tern. In 4 Ezra’s third vision, the author chose to emphasize the cosmogonic origins of Leviathan and Behemoth and to downplay the eschatological theme by having Ezra recite to God the days of creation. According to this retelling, the two monsters were created on the fifth day
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with the other living creatures, but Leviathan and Behemoth were kept alive. Since the sea was not large enough to hold both of them, God separated them, leaving Leviathan in the depths and assigning Behemoth to land. The section ends with a mere allusion to the eschaton: the pair are kept “to be eaten by whom you wish, and when you wish” (4 Ezra 6:52).69 Thus, the deployment of the myth in 4 Ezra demonstrates God’s power in creation. In 2 Bar. 29 the same mythic pattern occurs as in 4 Ezra, but the creation theme is muted while the eschatological function of the creatures is highlighted.70 A voice from on high describes the messianic era that follows twelve periods of distress (chs. 26–28). Regarding the two monsters it is said, “And it will happen that when all that which should come to pass in these parts has been accomplished, the Anointed One will begin to be revealed. And Behemoth will reveal itself from its place, and Leviathan will come from the sea, the two great monsters which I created on the fifth day of creation and which I shall have kept until that time. And they will be nourishment for all who are left” (2 Bar. 29:3–4). A period of unprecedented plenty arrives, after which the Anointed One returns to glory and the righteous and wicked are raised to receive their respective rewards (chs. 29–30). The deployment here focuses on the consummation of history rather than its beginning. Thus, these three texts from the late Hellenistic/early Roman period that refer to Leviathan and Behemoth exhibit the same mythic pattern: two unimaginably large creatures exist from primordial times until the end of time; one is confined to the sea, the other to land; when God brings history to its dramatic climax, the monsters will become food for the righteous. Each of the texts deploys the pattern differently. 1 Enoch 60 takes the pattern as an occasion to reveal secret wisdom about the hidden places of the world. 4 Ezra, by contrast, uses the pattern in the context of theodicy, reciting God’s mighty works of creation in order to dramatize the question of why this same God does not seem to be able to establish his people Israel in the land he created for them (4 Ezra 6:55–59). 2 Baruch, however, retells the myth as eschatologically informed exhortation for those who are faithful to Torah. “And we should not look upon the delights of the present nations, but let us think about that which has been promised to us regarding the end” (2 Bar. 83:5). In comparison with these three, Revelation is the only text that introduces a serious deviation from the mythic pattern itself. Either the author was drawing on an otherwise unattested interpretation of Leviathan and Behemoth,71 or he was refashioning an established mythic pattern for new purposes (Lincoln’s third use of myth). In John’s rendering of the mythic pattern, Leviathan and Behemoth have become
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eschatological opponents. The power of the beasts no longer provokes the revelation of wisdom (1 Enoch) or the defense of God’s justice (4 Ezra) or the promise of eschatological reward (2 Baruch). The two monsters are loose in the world, threatening the world and destroying all opponents. The reasons for this deployment will be clearer after examination of John’s other uses of myth.72 The figure of Leviathan (apart from Behemoth) is important for Revelation in another way. While the Leviathan–Behemoth pair organizes the two scenes in Rev 13, a different strand of the Leviathan tradition connects these two scenes to the narrative of ch. 12.73 One of the great mythic patterns shared by Yahwism and the surrounding religious traditions was the story of a deity defeating the sea.74 In Canaan this was a battle between Bawl and Yamm; in Babylon a battle between Marduk and Tiamat, and so on.75 In the texts of Israel it appears as Yahweh’s victory over sea dragons. Over time, this mythic pattern came to be associated in Canaanite and Israelite traditions with several names for sea monsters, including Rahab, Dragon, and Leviathan.76 The author of Revelation could thus draw on two Leviathan patterns to link chs. 12 and 13: Leviathan the mythic opponent shapes the dragon image of ch. 12, and the Leviathan–Behemoth pattern shapes ch. 13.77 To sum up this section, Rev 12–13 is an unusual example of two strands of Leviathan mythology standing side by side, and both strands are employed in a novel fashion. Leviathan as God’s serpentine opponent provides a link between the two chapters. Then the Leviathan–Behemoth pair move beyond their traditional role of food for the eschatological feast to become heaven’s eschatological antagonists.78 John may have come up with this variation himself, since the other known uses of this pattern are quite different. In any event, it is a much more eclectic and eccentric deployment than we have seen either in imperial cult settings or in other apocalyptic texts. 2. The second important mythic resource for Rev 13 is the book of Daniel. While the Leviathan–Behemoth pattern organized the material, Danielic imagery was woven into the story line. Two thematic elements are important here. The first is the way in which the beast from the sea is described by John. The seven heads of the beast from the sea (13:1) could simply be a reference to Leviathan, who was sometimes portrayed with seven heads. John, however, quickly signals other elements in his symbolism. By giving the beast ten horns and the characteristics of a leopard, a bear, and a lion, the author creates a connection to the vision of Dan 7. The seven heads are also the total of the heads of the four beasts of Dan 7,79 and the
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blasphemous names on them (Rev 13:1) may also draw on the arrogant speech of Daniel’s fourth beast (Dan 7:8, 11, 20). This use of Danielic imagery provides us with another strategy for manipulating myth not suggested by Lincoln’s list—the compression of several unconnected texts or images into one new text or image. Compression was apparently one of John’s favorite tactics. One of the most blatant examples is the image of the risen Christ in Rev 1:13–16, which contains more than a half dozen allusions to spectacular figures from different biblical texts. These are forced into one epiphanic figure in Rev 1, who simultaneously encompasses and surpasses all his predecessors. Another example of compression is Rev 7:17–18, which is a paradoxical pastiche of salvation oracles designed to encourage John’s audience. Likewise, John compressed the four beasts of Dan 7 and the Leviathan imagery to produce his own synthesis, a new mythic image as far as we know. By drawing on these particular resources, the new image becomes both an identifiable historical empire and the epitome of opposition to God.80 Thus, John engages in the same strategy as that employed in imperial cults— mythologizing Rome—but he does so with different mythic sources, with a different mythic method (compression of myths), and with different goals. The second thematic element drawn from Daniel is the period of fortytwo months allotted to the reign of the beast from the sea (Rev 13:5; similarly 11:2; 12:6). This time period is related to the various designations in Daniel to the three and one-half weeks of Gentile domination (Dan 7:25; 8:14; 9:27; 12:7, 11, 12).81 By invoking these numbers, John cast the time of Roman rule in mythic terms—but not positive ones. Rather than accepting the dominant mythology of eternal Roman rule accompanied by prosperity,82 Revelation portrays Roman hegemony as a limited time of oppression and opposition to God that will bring judgment. Thus, Rev 13 incorporates some specific features of Daniel into its own narrative.83 John took liberties with the details but gained the Danielic perspective for his text. Roman rule is not eternal; the God of Israel allows a limited period of exaggerated opposition to persist until God brings the hostilities to an end. John’s mythic methods were again more eclectic than known examples in imperial cults or in other apocalyptic literature. 3. A third mythic resource for Rev 13 is the mythology of imperial cults. Three comments are in order on this point. First, John accepted and adopted one aspect of imperial cult mythology, namely, that Roman rule is based on military victory (Rev 13:4). He attempted, however, to persuade his audience to take a different point of view on those conquests. The victory
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was ascribed to satanic authority rather than divine authority. This inversion of imperial cult mythology is accomplished by his creative combination of the Leviathan traditions with details from Daniel. The difference in perspective is dramatic. If we use the Aphrodisian sculptures of imperial coronation as reference points, we could say that imperial cult mythology and ritual attempted to persuade its audience to identify with the figures crowning the emperor, thereby supporting the perpetuation of the imperial social system. Revelation, on the other hand, was an effort to persuade its audiences to perceive themselves—like the bound captives in the sculptures—as victims of Roman hegemony.84 Second, John disagreed with the imperial mythology of peaceful sea and productive earth. In this case he did not try for a change of perspective but rather contested the facts. His argument in Rev 13 is twofold. One way of denying the earth and sea mythology was his hostile deployment of the Leviathan/Behemoth pattern. In John’s narrative, the sea and land became sources of danger and oppression, not peace and plenty. The other part of his argument is the theme of the mark of the beast, which is required in order to participate in economic activity (13:16–17). With this theme John cut through the naïve romanticism of the imperial cornucopia, which suggested that the produce of the earth can simply be gathered and enjoyed under Roman rule. John introduced instead the idea that economic, political, and religious systems regulated who was able to purchase and to profit from the earth’s bounty. In this way Rev 13 exposed a feature of the audience’s experience that was suppressed in the utopian imperial cult mythology. Third, John presented an alternative interpretation about the elite sector of society and their involvement in imperial cults. In dominant urban culture, those who promoted the worship of the emperors were honored with inscriptions, statues, and religious offices. Revelation 13:11–18, on the other hand, denounced these same families by mythologizing them, a strategy that was used only for the imperial family in imperial cult settings and was never used for elite families. According to Revelation, however, the elites of Asia and of Asia’s cities were Behemoth to Rome’s Leviathan. John portrayed respected families like those of Attalis of Aphrodisias and prominent provincial statesmen like Tiberius Claudius Aristio of Ephesos as mythic antagonists of God. According to John, the network of elite families was leading the world to eschatological catastrophe. Along with this mythologization of the social experience of oppression, John also drew in material that would be considered “legend” in Lincoln’s terms. The phenomenon of talking statues was well known in Greco-Roman societies.85 It is doubtful, however, that such practices were widespread.86
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Much of the knowledge of talking statues was generated by the denunciation of religious figures as charlatans (e.g., Lucian’s portrait of Alexander of Abonouteichos) or by magical speculation. John employed this legendary motif, elevated it to mythic proportions, and turned it against the well-to-do of Asia’s cities. Through his use of these two types of materials, John changed the image of imperial cult ritual from piety to chicanery and portrayed Asia’s elite families as charlatans whose authority was satanic in origin.87 John’s use of myth in Rev 13 was extraordinarily creative. He placed distinct Leviathan traditions side by side; he reused the Leviathan/Behemoth pattern in a manner that is unprecedented in our existing sources; he wove Danielic themes into the mix and took liberties with the details; he compressed originally distinct symbols (Leviathan and the beasts of Dan 7) into one monster; and he mythologized social institutions and legendary material. His method was voracious, drawing on a variety of sources. It was also recombinant, producing startling new images and plot twists. IV C O M PA R I S O N , C O N C L U S I O N The deployments of mythology in imperial cult settings and apocalyptic literature dealt with many of the same themes that are found in John’s Apocalypse. The most significant include the administration of justice in particular communities and in the world; the subjugation of nations and peoples; the role of the Roman emperor in these processes; and worship. If there is a common question operative in these themes, it is the question of authority in this world: Who is the king over kings? Imperial cult institutions and apocalyptic texts answered this question differently. Imperial cults in the Roman province of Asia created and deployed myths to show that the (current) emperor was the king of kings. Revelation—written to congregations in this same province—created and deployed myths to show that ultimate authority was not located in this world. In these two sets of materials, then, justice, vengeance, and community come from different thrones.88 Imperial cults and Revelation also trafficked in similar methods in their deployments of myth. One important method was mythologization: both settings elevated known characters and stories to a higher level of authority. Another common method was the modification of established myths. This is not an unusual practice; myths are constantly retold and reshaped. Imperial cults and Revelation, however, dealt in an exaggerated form of the practice, introducing new characters for their respective projects. A third method common to imperial cults and to Revelation was the deployment of myth in
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ritual settings.89 Imperial mythology was appropriate in the obvious settings of imperial temples such as the Aphrodisian Sebasteion and also in other civic institutions such as the bouleuterion at Miletos. Revelation, too, was written for a ritual setting,90 although the group and the affiliated institutions were much different. Revelation was written to be read in the rituals leading up to the Lord’s Supper. At one level, Revelation’s deployment of myth was an attempt to redefine that ritual in the subculture of the saints. The juxtaposition of Revelation and the Lord’s Supper would have given the church’s ritual a distinctly anti-Roman twist. The comparative material from imperial cult mythology also allows us to make observations about distinctive features in John’s use of myth. First, John displayed a preference for eastern Mediterranean stories. John could draw on ancient Near Eastern or Greco-Roman patterns or myths when it suited his purposes,91 and it is the nature of really good myths to defy national and ethnic boundaries.92 The primary resources for John’s text, however, came from the eastern edge of the empire—Israel and its regional neighbors. This marked the text and its audience as marginal to the imperial enterprise rather than central. While imperial cults defined normal society in standard terms from Hellenistic mythology,93 John claimed to reveal truth in themes and characters from a troublesome area at the edge of imperial control.94 To accept John’s mythology required the audience to acknowledge its distance from the imperial center. The focus on eastern Mediterranean mythology was common to other Jewish apocalyptic texts of the early Roman period. John’s confrontational deployment, however, created more dissonance with the values of dominant society. A second distinctive feature in John’s deployment of myth is that he tended to make more dramatic changes in the retelling of established mythic patterns. Imperial cults were concerned with the imposition and maintenance of order in society,95 and so it is not surprising that the associated mythology did not deviate far from the norm. Panhellenic and local myths suited these purposes best because they were already well established. Revelation, on the other hand, pursued disruptive ends, and for these purposes the story lines suffered more serious revisions; the versions of the myths that could be accommodated to normal life were not appropriate to John’s message. The compression of diverse themes, characters, and allusions in Revelation served these ends as well. New versions of myths were supplemented by new relations between myths. In this sense, Revelation can be considered a form of religious resistance literature. Its dreams of destruction were told with a mythic method that disoriented the audience:
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familiar tales took strange turns, colliding with other stories at unexpected intersections. The method dislodged familiar axioms and appealed to experiences that did not fit mainstream norms.96 All of this points to the conclusion that John’s Revelation is a classic text of symbolic resistance to dominant society. John deployed myths in an eclectic, disjunctive fashion, and did so for a ritual setting. The production of new, disruptive mythology for a ritual setting is not conducive to the maintenance of social hierarchies. It was a dangerous deployment in defense of a minority perspective. NOTES An earlier draft of this article was discussed in the Wisdom and Apocalypticism in Early Judaism and Early Christianity Group at the AAR/S13L annual meeting in Nashville (2000). My thanks go to the official discussants—Adela Yarbro Collins and Simon Price— for their helpful critiques and to the anonymous reviewers of this article for their suggestions. 1. Adela Yarbro Collins, The Combat Myth in the Book of Revelation (HDR 9; Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1976); John Court, Myth and History in the Book of Revelation (London: SPCK, 1979). There have also been some recent exceptions. It is significant that they were published in Europe (see below, pp. 282–83): “Symbole und mythische Aussagen in der Johannesapokalypse und ihre theologische Bedeutung,” in Metaphorik und Mythos im Neuen Testament (ed. Karl Kertelge; QD 126; Freiburg: Herder, 1990), 255–77; Peter Antonysamy Abir, The Cosmic Conflict of the Church: An Exegetico-Theological Study of Revelation 12, 7–12 (European University Studies, Series 23, Theology 547; Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995); Peter Busch, Der gefallene Drache: Mythenexegese am Beishiel von Apokalypse 12 (Texte und Arbeiten zum Neutestamentlichen Zeitalter 19; Tübingen: Francke, 1996). I thank Georg Adamsen for these references. 2. Miriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, s.v. “myth,” meanings 2b, 3, http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary (accessed July 9, 2003). 3. Lawrence E. Sullivan, Icanchu’s Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South American Religions (New York: Macmillan, 1988), 7–8. 4. Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 20 (emphasis added). 5. Ivan Strenski, Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History: Cassirer, Eliade, Lévi-Strauss and Malinowski (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987). The strength of this study is the contextualized approach to intellectual biographies, which gives us insight into the development of theories and methods in religious studies. 6. See also Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 74–75. 7. Marcus Borg, “Reflections on a Discipline: A North American Perspective,” in Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of the State of Current Research (ed. Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans; Leiden: Brill, 1994), 29. Borg notes this shift in the 1970s without discussing possible causes or the relation to World War II. Borg’s article focused on Jesus
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studies, but with an eye to larger trends in the study of early Christianity. Note also that Borg wrote about “North American” scholarship, while my analysis suggests that trends in the United States and in Canada should not necessarily be grouped together. 8. Eliade is an interesting exception in this regard. Although his formative years were spent in India and Europe, his theories of myth and religion found quite a following after his move to the United States (more in comparative religion than in biblical studies). I suspect that the interest in his theories in this country was due to the fact that those theories were formed in part as opposition to Marxism in Eastern Europe. Thus, even though the formative influences on him were European, his rejection of Marxism resonated with American anticommunist propaganda. 9. David L. Barr came close to reopening this question, by dealing with mythic patterns and themes under the narratological rubric of “story” (Tales of the End: A Narrative Commentary on the Book of Revelation [Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 1998]). 10. See, e.g., Paul D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology (rev. ed.; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979) 408–11; the quoted phrase is from 408. Notice also the characterization of apocalyptic myth in the following quotation: “The response on the part of the latter [i.e., the hierocratic leaders of the community] was further oppression [of the apocalyptic visionaries], leading the visionaries to even deeper pessimism vis-à-vis the historical order and further flight into the timeless repose of a mythic realm of salvation” (p. 409). 11. The conceptual pair politics/religion has been employed also in discussions of imperial cults or of Revelation, but the results are seldom satisfying. “Politics/religion” tends to polarize society into distinct sectors, one religious and one political. This might be an appropriate approach to examining modern industrial societies, but it simply confuses the issue when imposed on the ancient world. We need to pose only two questions to see the limited value of these categories: Was Revelation a political or a religious text? Were imperial cults political or religious institutions? Politics/religion does not help us explain anything in these cases. 12. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “ideology” first appeared in the philosophical sense of “a science of ideas” in France during the late eighteenth century. Ideology was then redefined for social analysis in the first half of the nineteenth century by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to describe a system of false ideas generated by the dominant class in order to support and to conceal its exploitation of the rest of society (Mike Cormack, Ideology [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992], 9–10). 13. See Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (New York: Verso, 1991), 98–192. 14. Even a fine study like Robert M. Royalty, Jr., The Streets of Heaven: The Ideology of Wealth in the Apocalypse of John (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998) assumes that we know precisely what is meant by this crucial term. 15. Cormack begins his study with four recent definitions of ideology that defy homogenization (Ideology, 9). Eagleton (Ideology, 1–2) begins with sixteen different definitions. 16. In the late twentieth century the pejorative meaning of ideology receded somewhat; see Teun A. van Dijk, Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 2–1. 17. Bruce Lincoln, “Mythic Narrative and Cultural Diversity in American Society,” in Myth and Method (ed. Laurie L. Patton and Wendy Doniger; Studies in Religion and Culture; Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 165.
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18. Wendy Doniger, “Maximyths and Maximyths and Political Points of View,” in Myth and Method, ed. Patton and Doniger, 112. See also Doniger, The Implied Spider: Politics & Theology in Myth (Lectures on the History of Religions n.s. 16; New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 2. 19. An example of a mythic pattern is what Adela Yarbro Collins called the “combat myth,” which is a set of similar characters and themes that occur in stories from several cultures (Combat Myth, 59–61). It is similar to Doniger’s “micromyth” (Implied Spider, 88–92). 20. Doniger, Implied Spider, 80–83. 21. Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 27–37. It is difficult to determine exactly why mythic patterns can be used in so many different ways. It may be because myths are authored by communities in performance, and so they must incorporate a range of viewpoints if they are to be accepted by a range of individuals (Lincoln, Theorizing Myth, 149–50). Or perhaps the subject matter of myths contributes to the flexibility of mythic patterns; since myths deal with insoluble problems of human experience, new versions of the myth are constantly generated in order to attempt yet another (partially adequate) solution (Doniger, Implied Spider, 95–97). 22. Lincoln, “Mythic Narrative,” 175. 23. Ibid., 166. 24. For a broader examination of the evidence for imperial cults in the Roman province of Asia, see my Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John: Reading Revelation in the Ruins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. 25–131. 25. The bouleoterion complex at Miletos is located in the city center on the northeast side of the South Agora. The bouleuterion complex was enclosed by a rectangular wall, 34.84 m wide and 55.9 m deep (exterior measurements). The complex is composed of two parts: a rectangular courtyard in front and the bouleuterion building itself. Inside the building was theater-style seating with eighteen rows of semicircular stone benches. In front of the building the rectangular courtyard had colonnaded halls on three sides. A monumental propylon (Corinthian order) provided entry into the complex from the southeast side, opposite the courtyard from the bouleuterion. For further information, see Klaus Tuchelt, “Buleuterion und Ara Augusti,” IstMitt 25 (1975): esp. 91–96; a city plan is found on p. 100, Abb. 2. 26. Hans Volkmann, “Bole,” KP 1.967–69. Every city had a boule¯ , a council composed of wealthy male citizens. Although the precise duties of the boule¯ could vary from city to city, during the Roman imperial period a boule¯ normally supervised affairs related to the city’s limited autonomy. The members of the boule¯ oversaw the various officials of the city and made recommendations to the ekkle¯sia (which included all male citizens of the city and met less frequently). 27. Tuchelt, “Buleuterion,” 102–40; Homer Thompson, “The Altar of Pity in the Athenian Agora,” Hesperia 21 (1952): 79–82. 28. Excavators discovered the foundations (9.5 m wide by 7.25 m deep) and some fragments of the superstructure beginning in 1899. These could not have been for the altar of the boule¯ since a bouleuterion normally had its altar inside the meetinghouse for rituals that were a part of the council’s governmental activities (Tuchelt, “Buleuterion,” 129). Early excavators thought that this might have been a monumental tomb for a wealthy benefactor of the Roman imperial period (Hubert Knackfuss et al., Das Rathaus von Milet
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[Milet 1.2; Berlin: G. Reimer, 1908], 78–79). Tuchelt, however, showed that this was unlikely. Inscriptions from the Miletos bouleuterion propylon support the imperial cult altar identification, mentioning benefactors of a local imperial cult (Milet 1.2:84–87, #7). Peter Hermann (“Milet unter Augustus: C. Iulius Epikrates und die Anfänge des Kaiserkults,” IstMitt 44 [1994]: 229–34) considered the tomb theory still tenable, but he discussed only the inscriptions and did not deal with the architectural and sculptural evidence. Even though the evidence is fragmentary, Tuchelt’s argument is stronger. 29. There were four scenes on the back wall (visible from the propylon); three scenes on each side wall; and a scene on either side of the staircase (visible from the bouleuterion). 30. On the overlap of local and Panhellenic myths, see Simon Price, Religions of the Ancient Greeks (Key Themes in Ancient History; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 19. Although Delos was named as the birthplace of the twins in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, local tradition in western Asia Minor asserted that the true birthplace was Ortygia, near Ephesos (Strabo, Geography 14.1.20). The intimate connection between Artemis and Ephesos is well known. There were also important oracular shrines of Apollo in the region, with the most prominent centers at Didyma (under the control of Miletos) and at Klaros. 31. Tuchelt, “Buleuterion,” pls. 28–29. 32. From the propylon; see Joyce Reynolds, “Further Information on Imperial Cult at Aphrodisias,” Studii clasice 24 (1986): 111. The north portico inscriptions are described in R. R. R. Smith, “The Imperial Reliefs from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias,” JRS 77 (1987): 90; an inscription that dates to the later rebuilding also calls the emperors Olympians (Reynolds, “Further Information,” 114). A fragmentary inscription from the south portico probably refers to the goddess Livia and to Tiberius; see Joyce Reynolds, “New Evidence for the Imperial cult in Julio-Claudian Aphrodisias,” ZPE 43 (1981): 317–18 #1. 33. Joyce Reynolds, “The Origins and Beginning of Imperial Cult at Aphrodisias,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 206 (1980): 79 #10; eadem, “Further Information,” 110 and n. 12. The four buildings were not completed at one time. Construction probably began during the reign of Tiberius, and there are signs of earthquake damage after that. A second phase of construction began during the reign of Claudius and stretched into the reign of Nero (Smith, “Imperial Reliefs,” 88–98). For a short summary of the building history, see R. R. R. Smith, “Myth and Allegory in the Sebasteion,” in Aphrodisias Papers: Recent Work on Architecture and Sculpture (ed. Charlotte Roueché and Kenan T. Erim; Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplement Series 1; Ann Arbor: Department of Classical Studies, University of Michigan, 1990), 89. 34. The south portico originally held ninety panels: each floor had fifteen rooms, and each room provided for the display of three sculptural panels, yielding ninety panels on the façade (forty-five per floor) (Smith, “Imperial Reliefs,” 95). The north portico was longer, with fifty panels per decorated floor (R. R. R. Smith, “Simulacra Gentium: The Ethne from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias,” JRS 78 [1988]: 51). 35. Smith, “Imperial Reliefs,” 100, 132. 36. Ibid., 115–17, pls. 14–15. 37. Ibid., 117–20, pls. 16–17. 38. Lincoln, Discourse, 20–26. By “authority,” Lincoln means that the narrative is not simply considered true, but is considered to have paradigmatic status as both a model of and a model for reality.
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39. Lincoln provides specific modern examples of these deployments (Discourse, 15–23 and 27–37). 40. There is also in the Nero panel a hint of an allusion to the story of Menelaus retrieving the body of Patroklos (Smith, “Imperial Reliefs,” 118–19). 41. There are four extant panels from the third story that portray winged Nikes. 42. Smith, “Imperial Reliefs,” 112–15, pls. 12–13. 43. Ibid., 104–6, pls. 6–7. The publication identifies the emperor as Augustus, but Smith is now convinced that the figure’s head reflects a standard model of Claudius (personal communication). 44. From the original forty-five panels of the second story, more than thirty have been found largely intact, and fragments of most of the other panels are known. 45. Smith, “Myth and Allegory,” 95–97. 46. Ibid., 97. 47. Ibid., 100. The scope of this article does not allow discussion of the north portico, where the entire second story appears to be devoted to the conquests of Augustus; see Smith, “Simulacra Gentium.” 48. Smith, “Imperial Reliefs,” 134–37; idem, “Simulacra Gentium,” 77; idem, “Myth and Allegory,” 100. 49. Reynolds, “New Evidence,” 317–18, #1. The fragmentary #2 also mentions her. 50. Reynolds, “Origins,” 79, #10. 51. A third inscription tells us that Attalis was a high priestess and a priestess. The text does not give details, but since the stone was a statue base in her honor and was found in the Sebasteion precincts, at least one of these priesthoods, and quite possibly both of them, served the gods Sebastoi. An Aphrodisian from this same time period whose name suggests that he was related to Attalis’s family—a certain Menander son of Diogenes son of Zeno— was a high priest of Claudius and Dionysos (MAMA 8.447, cited in Reynolds, “New Evidence,” 320). 52. Reynolds, “New Evidence,” 317–18, #1. 53. The inscriptions are described in Smith, “Imperial Reliefs,” 90. 54. Reynolds, “New Evidence,” 319–22. 55. Steven J. Friesen, Twice Neokoros: Ephesos, Asia, and the Cult of the Flavian Imperial Family (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 116; Leiden: Brill, 1993), 29–40. 56. Steven J. Friesen, Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John: Reading Revelation in the Ruins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 57–59. 57. For a complete listing of the known high priests and high priestesses, see my database at http://web.missouri.edi/-rehgsf/officials.html. 58. Regarding Aristio’s high priesthoods, see Friesen, Twice Neokoros, 102. 59. Steven J. Friesen, “Asiarchs,” ZPE 126 (1999): 279–80. 60. Kyriarchy is a term developed by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza to describe social systems of inequality. The term “seeks to redefine the analytic category of patriarchy in terms of multiplicative intersecting structures of domination [such as race, gender, class, wealth, etc.]” (see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001], 211; see also pp. 118–24). This allows a more complex analysis of male domination in specific settings, relating gender to other factors relevant to oppression. 61. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 240. 62. For example: Wilhelm Bousset, H. B. Sweete, R. H. Charles, G. B. Caird,
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Robert A. Kraft, G. R. Beasley-Murray, J. P. M. Sweet, Pierre Prigent, Adela Yarbro Collins (Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984]; and “‘What the Spirit Says to the Churches’: Preaching the Apocalypse,” QR 4 [1984]: 82), Jürgen Roloff, Gerhard Krodel, Leonard Thompson (with reservations), J. Ramsey Michaels, Davie E. Anne, David L. Barr. Exceptions tend to be those who identify the beast from the earth as imperial cults as well as something else or something larger (J. Weiss, William M. Ramsay, Eugene Boring, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, G. K. Beale); those who identify the beast from the earth with the papacy or Roman Catholic Church (Carl Zorn, Gerhard Lenski); and those who see Rev 13 pointing to a future revived Roman empire and world religion (Ernst Lohmeyer, John F. Walvoord, Robert L. Thomas). Even those with a futuristic interpretation sometimes cite Roman imperial cults as a formative influence on the text (Leon Morris, G. E. Ladd, Robert H. Mounce). 63. Wilhelm Bousset’s argument that the author of Revelation drew on a stable Jewish tradition concerning the Antichrist has been abandoned. The myth of the Antichrist coalesced in second-century Christian thought on the basis of a variety of traditions about eschatological opponents. See Stefan Heid, Chiliasmus and Antichrist-Mythos: Eine frühchristliche Kontroverse um das Hedige Land (Bonn: Borengässe, 1993); and L. J. Lietaert Peerbolte, The Antecedents of Antichrist: A Traditio-Historical Study of the Earliest Christian Views on Eschatological Opponents (JSJSup 49; New York/Leiden: Brill, 1996). 64. Davie E. Aune, Revelation (WBC 52A, B, C; Dallas: Word, 1997–98), 2:728; Barr, Tales of the End, 108; and others. 65. For contrasting views, see Marvin H. Pope, Job: Introduction, Translation, and Notes (3rd ed.; AB 15; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973), 268–79, 282–87; and David Wolfers, “The Lord’s Second Speech in the Book of Job,” VT 40 (1990): 474–99. 66. E. Isaac, “1 (Ethiopic Apocalypse of ) Enoch,” in OTP 1:7. David Suter dated the parables to the period between the last quarter of the first century B.C.E. and the fall of Jerusalem, with the mid-first century C.E. as slightly more likely (Tradition and Composition in the Parables of Enoch [SBLDS 47; Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1979], 32). Matthew Black thought that at least a Hebrew Urschrift of the parables existed before 70 C.E. (The Book of Enoch or I Enoch: A new English edition with commentary and textual notes by Matthew Black, in consultation with James C. VanderKam, with an appendix on the “astronomical” chapters [72–82] by Otto Neugebauer [SVTP 7; Leiden: Brill, 1985], 187–88). 67. The gender of the monsters is not stable in the traditions. This text is unique in referring to Leviathan as female and Behemoth as male (Kenneth William Whitney, Jr., “Two Strange Beasts: A Study of Traditions concerning Leviathan and Behemoth in Second Temple and Early Rabbinic Judaism” [Th.D. diss., Harvard University, 1992], 76). 68. There are numerous technical problems in the details and integrity of 1 En. 60 that are not strictly relevant here; see Michael A. Knibb, The Ethiopic Book of Enoch: A New Edition in the Light of the Aramaic Dead Sea Fragments (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 2:142–48; Black, Book of Enoch, 225–31. 69. Michael Stone says that this type of allusion is a stylistic feature of eschatological passages in 4 Ezra (Fourth Ezra: A Commentary on the Book of Fourth Ezra [ed. Frank Moore Cross; Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990], 188). 70. Whitney notes that this text and 4 Ezra 6:52 are not dependent on each other but are drawing on the same general tradition (“Two Strange Beasts,” 59).
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71. Revelation avoids the names Leviathan and Behemoth, which perhaps allows more flexibility in the deployment of the pattern. There are rabbinic stories of Leviathan and Behemoth that develop other themes, some of which use the destructive potential of the beasts. These texts are centuries later than Revelation, however, and take us into a different period in the history of the deployment of the story. See Whitney, “Two Strange Beasts,” 129–33. 72. The hostility of the two beasts is perhaps suggested in 1 En. 60:9, where, according to Black, the two beasts have been separated to consume the victims of the Noachian flood (Book of Enoch, 227). It is also possible that the stories of Yahweh’s battle with the Sea were the source for this element of John’s deployment. 73. This article must not venture too far into Rev 12, since space does not permit a proper treatment of the issue of myth in that chapter. I do not accept the argument that Rev 11–13 is drawing on the Oracle of Hystaspes (John Flusser, “Hystaspes and John of Patmos,” in Judaism and the Origins of Christianity [Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1988], 390–453). Flusser’s argument about hypothetical sources is extremely speculative. A much more convincing approach to the mythic background of Rev 12 is found in Richard Clifford, “The Roots of Apocalypticism in Near Eastern Myth,” in The Origins of Apocalypticism in Judaism and Christianity (ed. John J. Collins; vol. 1 of The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism, ed. Bernard McGinn, John J. Collins, and Stephen J. Stein; New York: Continuum, 1998), 3–38. 74. There are various ways of referring to this mythic pattern, or to the larger pattern in which it plays a role: combat myth, Chaoskampf, the Divine Warrior myth, and so on. 75. Clifford, “Roots,” 7–29; Neil Forsyth, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 44–67. 76. Wayne T. Pitard, “The Binding of Yamm: A New Edition of the Ugaritic Text KTU 1.83,” JNES 57 (1998): 279–80; John Day, God’s Conflict with the Dragon and the Sea: Echoes of a Canaanite Myth in the Old Testament (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 71–72; Mary K. Wakeman, God’s Battle with the Monster: A Study in Biblical Imagery (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 56–82. Note, however, that Wakeman’s theories about Behemoth (pp. 106–17) have not been well received (Day, God’s Conflict, 84–86; Whitney, “Strange Beasts,” 39–40). 77. Two aspects of the text make the connection clear. One is the description of the dragon and the beast from the sea as having seven heads, which is an attribute of Leviathan in some texts (Ps 74:13–14; Day, God’s Conflict, 72). The other aspect is the description of the dragon in Rev 12:9 as the ancient serpent, which is a direct allusion to Isa 27:1, “On that day the Lord with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will kill the dragon that is in the sea.” Ntywl (“Leviathan”) and Nynt (“dragon”) are both rendered as dra◊kwn (“dragon”) in the LXX. 78. The theme of feasting appears in Rev 19:17–18, where it is combined with judgment oracles to turn the eschatological banquet into a call to dine on carrion. 79. G.K. Beale’s effort to locate the source of this imagery mostly in Daniel with little or no influence from Near Eastern mythology is unnecessary (The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text [NIGTC; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999], 682–83). Each of the relevant texts deployed this international mythic pattern in its own ways. Moreover, the author of Revelation often conflated various sources for his purposes.
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80. Rick Van de Water’s recent attempt to deny a connection of the beast with Roman power is unconvincing because it focuses primarily on the rebuttal of persecution theories; “Reconsidering the Beast from the Sea (Rev 13.1),” NTS 48 (2000): 245–61. 81. The exact numbers differ, but they are all closely related (John J. Collins, Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel, with an essay “The Influence of Daniel on the New Testament,” by Adela Yarbro Collins (ed. Frank Moore Cross; Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 400. 82. See, e.g., Die Inschriften von Ephesos 2.412 and 7,2.3801 lines 2–1. 83. Another Danielic theme probably lurks in the background. In Dan 3 is the story of an emperor who requires all peoples and nations to worship a gold statue. However, direct allusions to that story in Rev 13 are difficult to isolate. Another motif—the scroll in which are written the names of the faithful (Dan 12:1)—appears in Rev 13:8, but this theme appears throughout Revelation and is not an integral part of ch. 13. For other details suggesting Danielic influences, see Peerbolte, Antecedents of Antichrist, 142–56. 84. I do not claim, nor would I want to claim, that John ever saw this sculpture. His personal contact with particular artifacts is irrelevant to the argument. The carved stone is simply an example of the public mythology of imperial cults. It is a representative piece that brings us closer to the public culture that was familiar to anyone living in an urban setting in this part of the Roman empire. 85. For a summary of texts, see Anne, Revelation, 2:762–66. 86. The only statue I am aware of from western Asia Minor that might have been used in this way is the temple statue from the second-century “Red Hall” at Pergamon, which was dedicated to the Egyptian deities (Wolfgang Radt, Pergamon: Geschichte und Bauten einer antiken Metropole [Darmstadt: Primus, 1999], 200–209). Moreover, Steven J. Scherrer’s argument that Rev 13:13–15 should be taken literally as evidence for imperial cult practice is hardly convincing (“Signs and Wonders in the Imperial Cult: A New Look at a Roman Religious Institution in the Light of Rev 13:13–15,” JBL 103 [1984]: 599–610). 87. John possibly raised legends about Nero’s return to mythic status as well. Most commentators conclude that the wounded head of the beast from the sea (Rev 13:3) and the 666 gematria (13:18) are references to the story that Nero would return and take revenge on Rome. It is also possible that the story of Nero’s return had already taken on mythic proportions before John wrote, since the idea is present in Sib. Or. 5:28–34, 93–100, 137–49; and 4:135–48. 88. Revelation 13 does not provide enough gendered imagery for a comparison with the kyriarchal character of imperial cult mythology. The imperial cult materials have similarities with other parts of Revelation where gendered imagery is more evident (e.g., Rev 12 and 17–18), but the scope of this article does not allow for an exploration of those themes. For some comments on these issues, see Friesen, Imperial Cults, 185–89. 89. Revelation is more clearly written for a ritual setting than are the other apocalyptic texts examined in this article. 90. Barr, Tales, 171–75, 170–80. 91. Yarbro Collins, Combat Myth. 92. Doniger, Implied Spider, 53–61. 93. This is especially evident in the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias (Smith, “Simulacra Gentium,” esp. 77). 94. Most specialists accept that Revelation was written, or at least edited, late in the Flavian dynasty. This was the same dynasty that distinguished itself and bolstered its claims
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to authority by defeating the Jewish revolt against Roman rule. John’s use of the religious traditions of Israel was thus a significant political choice. 95. Friesen, Imperial Cults, 122–31. 96. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 31–32, 240.
HAROLD BLOOM
Afterthought
Q
uests for the historical Jesus always fail, and will go on failing. Wayne Meeks, in his Christ Is the Question (2006), demonstrates that the only historical Jesus who can be recovered is the figure as interpreted by his followers, from ancient times until now. My Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005) argues that neither the New Testament nor the Hebrew Bible accurately can be read as factual history. Were I to rewrite my recent book, I would go further in emphasizing that Jesus Christ necessarily is a fictive creation, as much so as Yahweh, Allah, Krishna, or any other deity. William Blake, the great English Romantic poet and visionary, told us that all religion is a choosing of forms of worship from poetic tales. Now, in 2006, the globe edges steadily towards the catastrophe of terrorism and war between militant Islam and Christians, Jews, Hindus and other organized religions. History seems no help in holding off global disasters that doubtless must come. Once we had warfare between Protestants and Roman Catholics, but the age of struggle between Christians seems forever past. President George W. Bush regards his Iraqi venture as a drive for democracy, but the Islamic peoples see it as a return to the Crusades. Even as I write these paragraphs, cartoons of Muhammad as a suicide bomber are provoking Muslim riots in very diverse locales.
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Wayne Meeks shrewdly remarks “that the identity of Jesus is still open, that the transactive process by which identity is made is still going on.” I would add to Meeks that the identity of Jesus always will remain open, because he is, at best, a more-or-less historical figure. I have just read the new (2006) Second Edition of Fundamentalism and American Culture by George M. Marsden, and I am not sanguine that a single Fundamentalist would be persuaded by Meeks, were they to read him. Since most of them do not bother to read the Bible, they scarcely can be expected to read anything else. Muslims do read the Qur’an, but that ongoing enterprise does not much encourage me either. John Wansbrough’s marvelous Quranic Studies (1977) was republished in a new edition in 2004. I have just reread it, and am at once impressed by the aesthetic splendors that Wansbrough uncovers, and disquieted by the ferocity of Quranic insistence that all truth is sealed forever in its pages. Dante and his contemporaries regarded Islam as a Christian heresy. The Qur’an sees Christianity as a deliberate betrayal of Issa (Jesus) who proclaims himself as another forerunner, with Abraham and Moses, of Muhammad, seal of the prophets, and Allah’s most authentic interpreter. The Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an never will be wholly secularized, and pragmatically that will be the tragedy of our rapidly developing era when regimes as fanatical as Iran each will have its own arsenal of nuclear missiles. I am no prophet nor was meant to be, but I sensibly dread the time that already is upon us. Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales might yet see the end-time of our Earth.
Chronology
Note: Up until the printing of the Gutenberg Bible, all dates are approximate.
B.C.E. ? 1800–1250 1250–1200 1200–1150 1150–1025 1025–930 950–900 930–590 850–800 750 725 720 700 650 625 700–600 600–500
The Creation and the Flood. The Patriarchs and the Sojourn in Egypt The Exodus and the Conquest Joshua The Judges The Monarchy The J Source The Two Kingdoms The E Source Amos, Proverbs 10-22:16 Hosea The Fall of Samaria Micah, Proverbs 25-29, Isaiah 1-31, JE redaction Deuteronomy, Zephaniah Nahum, Proverbs 22:17-24 The Reformation of Josiah Deuteronomy–Kings
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280
600 575 550 587–538 538 525
Chronology
175 165 100 63 6
Jeremiah, Habakkuk Job 3-31, 38-42:6 Isaiah 40-55, Job 32-37 The Fall of Jerusalem and the Exile to Babylonia The Return Isaiah 56-66, Jeremiah 46-52, Ezekiel 1-37, 40-48, Lamentations Job redaction, the P Source, Haggai, Zechariah 1-8, Jeremiah 30-31 Additions to Ezekiel 1-37, 40-48 Nehemiah and Ezra Joel, Malachi, Proverbs 30-31, Lists JEP redaction [Genesis-Numbers], Isaiah 32-35, Proverbs 1-9, Ruth, Obad JEPD redaction, Jonah, Psalms, Proverbs redaction, Song of Songs, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah Ecclesiastes The Hellenistic Period Zechariah 9-14 Isaiah 24-27; Ezekiel 38-39 The Septuagint, a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek Daniel The Maccabean Revolt Esther Pompey takes Jerusalem Birth of Christ
C.E. 26 30 32 44 46 47–48
Baptism of Christ and the beginning of John’s Ministry Crucifixion and resurrection of Christ and Pentecost Conversion of Paul Martyrdom of James Paul and Barnabas visit Jerusalem during famine Paul’s First Missionary Journey
500 475–400 475–350 450 425 400 350 363–330 325 300 250–100
Chronology
49–52 49 50 52–56 53–55 56 56–58 58 59–60 60 61–62 61–63 64–65 65–67 70 75–80 90 93–96 95 95–100 95–115 110–115 125–150 150 160–175 350–400 400
1382 1456
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Paul’s Second Missionary Journey Galatians Thessalonian Letters Paul’s Third Missionary Journey Corinthian Letters Romans Paul is arrested in Jerusalem and is imprisoned by Caesar Paul’s voyage to Rome and shipwreck First Roman imprisonment of Paul Philippians Colossians, Philemon Paul’s release and last travels Paul’s second Roman imprisonment, martyrdom, and death; death of Peter Mark Fall of Jerusalem Matthew Canonization of the Hebrew Bible at Synod of Jamnia Persecutions under Emperor Domitian discussed in Revelation Ephesians, Hebrews, Revelation, Luke, Acts 1 Peter Fourth Gospel Johannine Epistles James, Jude 2 Peter Timothy, Titus Stabilization of the New Testament canon of twenty-seven books Jerome completes the Latin Vulgate, a translation of the Bible based on the Septuagint and translated from the Hebrew The first translation of the Bible into English, by John Wycliffe The Gutenberg Bible is printed from movable type, ushering in the new era of printing
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1516 1532 1535 1537 1539 1560 1582–1610 1611 1885 1901 1924 1931 1941 1945–1949 1952 1961 1966 1969 1970 1976 1978 1982 2002
Chronology
Erasmus finishes a translation of the Bible into Greek Martin Luther translates the Bible into German William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale’s English translation of the Bible Matthew’s Bible is produced, based on the Tyndale and Coverdale versions The Great Bible is produced by Coverdale The Geneva Bible, the first to separate chapters into verses The Douay–Rheims Bible, a Catholic translation from Latin into English The King James Version is completed The English Revised Version is co-issued by English and American scholars The American Standard Version The Moffatt Bible The Smith–Goodspeed Bible The Confraternity Version, an Episcopal revision of the Douay-Rheims Bible Knox’s Version, based on the Latin Vulgate and authorized by the Catholic Church The Revised Standard Version The New English Bible, Protestant The Jerusalem Bible, Catholic The Modern Language Bible The New American Bible, Catholic Today’s English Version The New International Version The New Jewish Version The English Standard Version
Contributors
HAROLD BLOOM is Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale University. He is the author of 30 books, including Shelley’s Mythmaking (1959), The Visionary Company (1961), Blake’s Apocalypse (1963), Yeats (1970), A Map of Misreading (1975), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), Agon: Toward a Theory of Revisionism (1982), The American Religion (1992), The Western Canon (1994), and Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (1996). The Anxiety of Influence (1973) sets forth Professor Bloom’s provocative theory of the literary relationships between the great writers and their predecessors. His most recent books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998), a 1998 National Book Award finalist, How to Read and Why (2000), Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2002), Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003), Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (2004), and Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (2005). In 1999, Professor Bloom received the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism. He has also received the International Prize of Catalonia, the Alfonso Reyes Prize of Mexico, and the Hans Christian Andersen Bicentennial Prize of Denmark. KENNETH BURKE (1897–1993) was a lecturer at many American universities including Harvard, Princeton and the University of Chicago. He is the author of Permanence and Change; An Anatomy of Purpose (1935); The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (1941); A Grammar of Motives (1945); and A Rhetoric of Motives (1969).
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Contributors
ERICH AUERBACH (1892–1957) was Sterling Professor of Romance Languages at Yale University. He is the author of Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages (1968); Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (1984); and Introduction to Romance Languages and Literature: Latin, French, Spanish, Provençal, Italian (1961). GEOFFREY HARTMAN is Karl Jung Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University. He is the author of The Unmediated Vision: An interpretation of Wordsworth (1966); Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (1980); and The Fateful Question of Culture (1997). MARTIN BUBER (1878–1965) was one of the most influential and prolific modern scholars of Judaism and the Hebrew Bible. He is the author of A Believing Humanism: My Testament, 1902–1965, translated, and with an introduction by Maurice Friedman (1967); Israel and Palestine: The History of an Idea (1952); and Moses (1946). FRANCIS LANDY is a Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the author of Beauty and the Enigma: And Other Essays on the Hebrew Bible (2001); Hosea (1995); “Narrative Techniques and Symbolic Transactions in the Akedah” (1989); and “Tracing the Voice of the Other: Isaiah 28 and the Covenant with Death.” (1993). J. DANIEL HAYS is Chair of the Department of Biblical Studies and Elma Cobb Professor of Biblical Studies at Ouachita Baptist University. His works include From Every People and Nation: A Biblical Theology of Race and Grasping God’s Word: A Hands-On Approach to Reading, Interpreting, and Applying the Bible, co-authored with J. Scott Duvall. D.H. LAWRENCE (1885–1930) is a renowned nineteenth-century English novelist and critic. Among his best known works are: Sons and Lovers (1913); and The Rainbow (1915); and Women in Love (1920). FRANK KERMODE has been King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University and Professor of English at Columbia University. He is the author of Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (1971); The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (1979); and an editor of The Literary Guide to the Bible (1987).
Contributors
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HERBERT MARKS has been an Associate Professor in the Comparative Literature, English, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures Departments at the University of Indiana, Bloomington and Director of their Institute for Biblical and Literary Studies. He is the author of an essay on Robert Frost in the Chelsea House Modern Critical Views; co-editor of Samuel and the Deuteronomist: A Literary Study of the Deuteronomic History (1994) and the Norton Critical Edition of the English Bible, vol. 2 (2000) and an editor of Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory (1990). BENEDICT T. VIVIANO, O.P. is Professor of the New Testament at University of Fribourg. He is the author numerous articles and five books including Kingdom of God in History. STEVEN J. FRIESEN is the Louise F. Boyer Professor of Religious Studies at the Univeristy of Texas at Austin. He is author of Imperial Cults and the Apocalypse of John: Reading Revelation in the Ruins and editor of Ancestors in Post-Contact Religion : Roots, Ruptures, and Modernity’s Memory.
Bibliography
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Wilder, Amos N. The Bible and the Literary Critic. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991. ———. Early Christian Rhetoric: The Language of the Gospel. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.
Acknowledgments
“The First Three Chapters of Genesis” by Kenneth Burke. From The Rhetoric of Religion. pp. 201-222. © 1961 by Kenneth Burke. Reprinted by permission. “Odysseus’ Scar” by Erich Auerbach. From Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Willard R. Trask: pp. 7-23. ©1953 by Princeton University Press, 1981 renewed Princeton University Press, 2003 paperback edition. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission. “The Poetics of Prophecy” by Geoffrey Hartman. From High Romantic Argument: Essays for M.H. Abrams. Lawrence Lipking, ed. pp. 15-40. © 1981 Cornell University Press. Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press. Reprinted by permission. “Wrestling Sigmund: Three Paradigms for Poetic Originality” by Harold Bloom. From The Breaking of the Vessels. © 1982 by the University of Chicago Press. Reprinted by permission. “Job” by Martin Buber. From On the Bible: Eighteen Studies by Martin Buber, Nahum N. Glatzer, ed. pp. 188-198, 226-227. © 1968 by Schocken Books Inc. Reprinted by permission.
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“The Heart Determines” by Martin Buber. From On the Bible: Eighteen Studies by Martin Buber, Nahum N. Glatzer, ed. pp. 199–210, 227. © 1968 by Schocken Books Inc. Reprinted by permission. “The Relationship of Lovers” by Francis Landy. From Paradoxes of Paradise: Identity and Difference in the ‘Song of Songs’, pp. 61–92. © 1983 by The Almond Press. Reprinted by permission. “Has the Narrator Come to Praise Solomon or to Bury Him? Narrative Subtlety in 1 Kings 1–11” by J. Daniel Hays. From Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 28, 2 (December 2003) pp. 149–174. © 2003 The Continuum Publishing Group. Reprinted by permission. “Apocalypse” by D.H. Lawrence. From Apocalypse, pp. 190–200. ©1932 by The Viking Press Reprinted by permission. “The Man in the Macintosh, the Boy in the Shirt” by Frank Kermode. From The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. pp. 49–73. © 1979 by Frank Kermode. Reprinted by permission. “Pauline Typology and Revisionary Criticism” by Herbert Marks. From the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, V. 52. No. 1. © 1984 American Academy of Religion. Reprinted by permission. “John’s Use of Matthew: Beyond Tweaking” by Benedict T. Viviano, O.P., pp. 209–237. © 2004 L’Ecole Biblique et Archéologique Française. Reprinted by permission. “Myth and Symbolic Resistance in Revelation 13” by Steven J. Friesen. Journal of Biblical Literature 123, 2 (Spring 2004) pp. 281–313. © 2004 Society of Biblical Literature. Reprinted by permission.
Every effort has been made to contact the owners of copyrighted material and secure copyright permission. Articles appearing in this volume generally appear much as they did in their original publication with few or no editorial changes. Those interested in locating the original source will find bibliographic information in the bibliography and acknowledgments sections of this volume.
Index Aaron, 12, 231 Abel, 3, 47 Abiathar, 153 Abihu, 12 Abishag, 153 Abraham agonism, 12 journey, 35 sacrifice of, 27, 33–37, 39, 42 struggles of, 6, 8–9, 76–77, 79, 98 tales of, 3–6, 10, 45, 47, 209–10, 228, 230 temptation, 36 Abrams, M.H., 64 Absalom death, 38 rebellion, 44 According to the Scriptures (Dodd), 201 Acts, Book of narratives, 222 Paul in, 203–4 Adam, 46, 213 creation of, 3, 5, 8, 13, 18, 20 disobedience of, 28, 30, 214 humiliation, 43 naming of the animals, 25 and Yahweh, 4, 6 Adams, Robert M.
interpretation of the Gospel of Mark, 180–83, 187, 195 Adonijah, 153 Adoniram assassination of, 158 Aeschylus Eumenides, 29 Agrippa, 203 Akiba religion of, 1, 6, 8 Alighieri, Dante, 4, 64, 214, 278 Allah, 277 Ambrose, 64 Amos narrative, 183, 186 Anchor Bible (Speiser) translations in, 74–75, 77–78 Anderson, P.N. The Christology of the Fourth Gospel, 232–35 Andrew disciple to Jesus, 232 Angel of Death and Jacob’s Freudian wrestling match, 8, 15, 71–89 Antioch, 203 Aphrodisias use of myth in, 251, 253–59, 264, 266 Apocalypse, 171–75 295
296
genre, 195 Apology Against a Pamphlet, An (Milton), 214 Aristotle, 84 Nichomachaean Ethics, 30–31 Politics, 19 Arnold, Matthew Sohrab and Rustum, 190 Ashbery, John, 73 Auerbach, Erich, 64, 205, 284 on the contrasts of reality in the Hebrew Bible and in Homer, 33–48 Augustan Ara Pacis, 252 Augustine, 25, 64, 190 Azazel burnt offerings, 28 Babel, tower of, 3 Bacon, Francis parables, 71 Balaam, 4 Balak, 4 Barrett, C.K., 229–30 Barr, James, 200 Barth, Karl, 207, 215 Bathsheba, 148, 153 Barthes, Roland, 181 Baruch and myth, 261–62 Baur, F.C. Tubingen school of, 222–23, 241 Behemoth tradition, 259–61, 264 Benaiah, 153 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 85 Bible, Hebrew (Old Testament), 14 characteristics, 207 chronology, 279–82 criticism, 201, 203
Index
historical structure, 45, 47, 241, 277–78 influence on literature, 48, 65, 74, 80–82, 89, 148, 200, 203, 213 new covenant in, 208–9 prophets in, 49–52, 54, 60–63, 202, 205–6, 208, 224 reality in, 33–48 use of, 221, 233 writers, 207 Binder, Wolfgang, 64 Blake, William, 10, 64, 277 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 76 Bloom, Harold, 65, 283 afterthought, 277–78 introduction, 1–15 on Jacob’s Freudian wrestling match with the Angel of Death, 8, 15, 71–89 Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, 277–78 modern poetry studies, 200 Poetry and Repression, 213–14 on the recoverable historicity of Jesus, 277–78 on the sublimity of the Yahwist or J Writer, 1–15 Boman, Thorleif, 80 Borges, Jorge Luis, 84 Brettler, Marc, 148 Brueggemann, Walter, 6 on 1 King, 150, 154, 158, 162–63 Buber, Martin, 284 and the apocalyptic mode, 57 on Job, 91–99 Moses, 13–14 on Psalm 73, 101–9 Bultmann, Rudolf, 215, 248 Burckhardt, Jacob, 79
Index
Burke, Kenneth, 74, 283 on the first three chapters of Genesis, 17–32 A Grammar of Motives, 23 Cain, 3, 47 Calvin, John, 5 Camp, Claudia V. Wise, Strange and Holy, 149 Caruth, Cathy, 83 Cassirer, Ernst, 248 Cavell, Stanley, 64 Childs, Brevard, 14 Christ is the Question (Meeks), 277–78 Christianity ethics, 223 history, 41, 44, 183, 186, 195, 200–5, 207–9, 277–78 influence on literature, 64 and love, 173–74 martyrs, 172 modern state, 172–74 mythic traditions in, 247–48 normative tradition, 5–6, 8, 10, 114, 223, 240–41 sacrifice, 171 writers, 199, 202, 233, 238 Christology of the Fourth Gospel, The (Anderson), 232–35 Chronicles (1), 9 narrative, 203–4 “Clear Midnight, A” (Whitman), 73 Clement of Alexandria, 222 interpretation of the Gospel of Mark, 183–87 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 1, 73 theology, 23, 52, 59, 64, 84, 213 Collins, Adela Yarbro, 247 Common Era, 3, 9, 74 Corinthians (1)
297
exodus tradition in, 204 narrative, 213, 238 spirituals in, 206, 209 Corinthians (2) narratives, 208, 210, 229 Court, John, 247 Daniel myth in, 159, 262–65 narratives, 237–38 Dante See Alighieri, Dante David the King, 206, 209 affair with Bathsheba, 148, 153 and Goliath, 43 humility, 160–61 last days, 45 reign, 156–57, 163 struggles of, 8, 38, 42, 44, 98 tales of, 3–6, 10, 12, 15, 46, 148, 155, 158–59, 209, 228, 230, 233 triumph of, 6–7 Derrida, Jacques theories, 72 Deuteronomy, 61 death of Moses in, 4 narratives, 151, 163, 212 prohibitions in, 152, 162 prostitution in, 157 writer of, 1 Discourse Concerning... Satire (Dryden), 83 Dodd, C.H., 203, 227–28 According to the Scriptures, 201 Doniger, Wendy, 150 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 85 Dryden, John, 84 Discourse Concerning... Satire, 83 Parallel Betwixt Poetry and Painting, 83 Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern, 83
298
Dubliners (Joyce) James Duffy in, 179–80, 189, 196 Duncan, Robert, 67 Ego and the Id, The (Freud), 85 Eliade, Mircea, 248 Elijah, 107 John’s view of, 221, 226–27, 229, 241 Matthew’s view of, 221, 226–27, 229, 241 Elisha, 229 Ellis, E.E., 203, 210 Elohist, 33, 39, 76, 88 Emerson, Ralph Waldo theories, 72, 85 Emmanuel John’s view of, 221 Matthew’s view of, 221, 224 Enoch, 107 and myth, 260–62 Ephesos use of myth in, 251, 257–59, 264 Erikson, Erik, 83 Esau, 3 trials of, 9, 47, 78–80 Ethics (Spinoza), 31 Eumenides (Aeschylus), 29 Eve and the serpent, 3, 29 Exodus burning bush in, 4 literal translation, 81 Moses in, 4, 211–12, 231 oppression of the Jews in, 4 tales in, 2, 4, 10, 98 Ezekiel, 14 dogmatics of, 91, 93, 209, 214 wheel, 28 Ezra, 1
Index
academy of, 76 myth in, 260–62 Farewell to Arms, A (Hemingway), 190 Farrer, Austin interpretation of the Gospel of Mark, 186–89, 193–95 Fewell, Danna Nolan, 148 Firbank, Ronald, 73 Flaubert, Gustave Temptation of Saint Anthony, 25 Frei, Hans, 202 Fretheim, Terrence, 154, 162–63 Freud, Sigmund, 66, 122 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 85 The Ego and the Id, 85 ego psychology, 82 family romance, 81, 86 Jacob’s wrestling match with the Angel of Death, 71–89 scene of Instruction, 71, 83 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 74–76, 87–88 Totem and Taboo, 86 uncanny concept, 2, 6, 8, 12 Friesen, Steven J., 285 on the symbolism in Chapter 13 of Revelation, 247–75 Frye, Northrop, 64 Fundamentalism and American Culture (Marsden), 278 Galatians, 204, 222, 231 Paul’s denial in, 208, 210 Gardner-Smith, P., 222 Genesis, 9, 127 Abraham in, 6 Covenant in, 24, 26–27, 29–30, 41 Creation in, 3, 18, 22, 24, 31, 60, 231
Index
death and mortification, 20–24, 26, 31 Eden in, 18 Fall in, 22, 28, 30 first three chapters of, 17–32 imagery in, 24–26, 29 narrative style of, 17–31, 33–34, 36, 39–40, 65, 74, 98, 183, 186–87 Order in, 19–20, 24–25, 28–31, 64 redemption, 28 Sabbath, 19 sacrifice in, 27–31 serpent in, 26, 28–29 temptation in, 21, 26, 28–30, 33, 36 tree of knowledge, 19, 26 tropes of exile in, 7 Gillett, Louis, 191 God actualities of, 30–31, 52, 93–94, 96 altars to, 27 angels, 260 authority, 23, 26, 28–29, 33–36, 40, 42–43, 56, 62, 91–92, 98 covenant fidelity, 225 and creation, 231, 260–61 domicile, 248 false representation, 94 goodness, 102–3, 105, 107–9 judgment, 227 justice, 262 man in his image, 18–19, 22, 24, 43, 224, 226 new city of, 206 Order of, 19 origins, 224, 238–39 representation, 17, 41 Spirit of, 208–9 sublime influence of, 47
299
and the suffering of Job, 92–95, 97–98, 102, 104–6 will of, 210 word of, 49–51, 58, 61–63, 66–67, 75, 96 Golden Age, 148 Goliath and David, 43 Gommes, Les (Robbe-Grillet), 181 Grammar of Motives, A (Burke), 23 Greeks concept of God, 34, 45, 47, 76–77, 79–80, 82, 231 manuscripts, 183–84, 191–92, 205, 225 translation of torah, 210, 232, 234 Gunn, David M., 148 Gutwirth, Eli, 124 Hagar, 47, 210 Hamilton, William, 206 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 58, 66 Harnack, Adolf von, 199–200, 237 Hartman, Geoffrey, 284 on the poetics of prophecy of Jeremiah, 49–69 Hartmann, Heinz, 82–83 Hays, J. Daniel, 284 on the narrative skill of 1 Kings, 147–70 Hebrew “archaeology,” 23–24 history, 41 language, 13, 80, 115 writers, 38 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm theories, 72, 84 Heidegger, Martin theories, 72 Hemingway Farewell to Arms, A, 190
300
Herod the Great, 2224 Heschel, Abraham, 58 Hilkiah, 49, 61 Hinduism, 277 Hiram, 158, 161–62 Hitchcock, Alfred, 183 Hitler, Adolf, 28 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 64 Holy Spirit inspiration of Scripture, 222 joy in, 239 and life, 208–9, 235 Homer digressions of, 36 heroes, 37–38, 42–43, 45–47 Iliad, 42 influence, 2, 4, 6, 8–9 Odyssey, 33–48, 52–53, 179, 181, 189, 196 political liar, 39 Hosea prophecies of, 79, 206–7 Iliad (Homer), 42 Interpreter’s Bible, The disorder and domination in, 20, 25 negative in, 18–19 Ishmael, 3 Isaac, 4 and the Akedah, 3 burnt offerings, 28 love for Esau, 9 sacrifice of, 27, 33, 36, 39–40 struggles of, 8–9, 77 Isaiah, 5, 14 answers in, 91, 95–96, 98 prophecies in, 103, 207 songs of, 107 Islam, 277–78 Jacob
Index
agonism, 7, 12, 78–79, 81 Freudian wrestling match with the Angel of Death, 8, 15, 71–89 representations of, 5 return of Canaan, 7 struggles of, 6, 9, 43 tales of, 2–6, 10, 45, 47 transformation to Israel, 81–82 James letter of, 222 James, Henry, 192 Jeremiah covenant in, 208–10 prophecies of, 49–69, 98 prosperity of the wicked, 101 Jesus Christ appearance of, 41, 192 arrest of, 182–83, 185, 193 at Bethany, 184, 186–87 conception and birth, 193, 225 Crucifixion, 28, 172, 193, 203, 211, 214 desertions of, 187–88 disciples, 232–36 in Galilee, 193 healings on the Sabbath, 230–31 ideals, 171–72 identity of, 277–78 John’s view of, 221, 224–30, 236–37, 239–41 and the Last Supper, 193, 266 and the Law, 186, 211, 213 life of, 201–4, 206, 210–11, 225, 238 Luke’s view of, 226, 228–29, 231, 236 Mark’s view of, 182–88, 208, 226–31 Matthew’s view of, 207, 221, 224–29, 231, 236–37, 239–41
Index
Paul’s view of, 27, 201–4, 210–13 recoverable historicity of, 277–78 resurrection, 172, 186, 190, 192–3, 203, 228, 235–36, 263 sermon on the mount, 225, 229, 236 as teacher, 229, 236, 240 transfiguration of, 228–29 Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (Bloom), 277–78 Joab, 153 Job, 5 catastrophe in, 91, 96 faith in, 94–96, 98 myth in, 260 Satan in, 92, 94–95 speeches of, 102 sufferings, 38, 46, 92–95, 97–98, 101, 104–6 John the Baptist in, 221, 226–28, 241 criticism of, 221–23, 228, 241 and Elijah, 221, 226–27, 229, 241 and Emmanuel, 221 Lazarus in, 184, 188 compared to Matthew, 221–46 and the role of Peter, 221, 223, 231–36, 241 use of the myth, 259, 261–67 use of the Old Testament, 221, 233, 237–39, 241 view of Jesus, 221, 224–31, 236–37, 239–41 John the Baptist, 193 John’s view of, 221, 226–28, 241 Matthew’s view of, 221, 226–27, 241 John of Patmos, 172 Jonah
301
evasions of, 51 Joseph agonism, 12 brothers, 3 tales of, 2–3, 5–8, 10, 15, 43, 81, 187 Joseph of Arimathea, 187 Joshua, 212 Josiah, 61, 159 Joyce, James Dubliners, 179–80, 189, 196 Finnegans Wake, 191 Ulysses, 177–83, 189, 191, 196 Jubilees, Book of, 9 Judah, 61–62, 153 civil war, 158 Judaism concept of God, 34, 52 critics, 201 Gnostic, 72, 82 history, 186, 200–3, 277 mythic traditions in, 247 normative tradition, 1, 5–6, 8, 10, 41, 114, 242 oppression of, 4 Orthodox, 72 writers, 74, 200, 260 Judas betrayal of, 187–88, 232–35 kiss of, 182 Jung, Carl psychology, 113–14 J Writer crisis of, 5 humanism, 6 irony of, 3 sublimity of, 1–15, 76 tales of, 1–5, 74, 77, 79–81 Kabbalah versions, 84–85 Kafka, Franz
302
and religion, 1, 9, 74, 79 Kant, Immanuel, 195 Käsemann, Ernst, 228 Keats, John, 73 Kermode, Frank, 284 on the crucial episode in Mark, 177–97 Kierkegaard, Søren, 85 Repetition, 72 theories, 72–73 King James version translations, 33, 49, 82 Kings (1) history in, 151 ironies in, 149, 155, 157, 160 narrative style in, 147–70 prostitution in, 157 story of Solomon in, 147–70 Kings (2) narrative, 156, 159, 163–64 Kraus, Karl, 84 Krinetzki, Leo on Song, 113–15, 121, 136 Krishna, 277 Kristeva, Julia, 241 Kuhn, Thomas, 182 Laban, 79–80 Lacan, Jacques, 83 on language, 62–63 Landy, Francis, 284 on the Song of Songs, 111–45 Lawrence, D.H., 284 on the Revelation of St. John the Divine, 171–75 Leviathan tradition, 259–64 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 248 Leviticus prostitution in, 157 Lindars, Barnabas, 203 Lincoln, Bruce
Index
deployment of the myth, 253–56, 261, 263 Lot, 3 Luke, 182 on Elijah, 226–27 narrative, 193, 203, 223–24, 231–32, 238, 240 view of Jesus, 228–29, 231, 236 Malachi, 227 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 248 Mann, Thomas Tales of Jacob, 81 Mark baptism, 184–85, 189 crucial episodes in, 177–97 on Elijah, 227 ending, 191–94 Jesus’ arrest in, 182–83, 185, 193 narrative, 182–83, 185–89, 193, 223, 230–31 Passion episode, 186, 188, 190, 192–93, 195, 208 structure of, 194 the young man in, 182, 184–87, 190 Marks, Herbert, 285 on St. Paul as a revisionary critic, 199–219 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The (Blake), 76 Marsden, George M. Fundamentalism and American Culture, 278 Martha, 232 Martyr, Justin, 206 Marx, Karl, 30 theories, 72 Marxsen, Willi, 203 Mary Magdalene, 235 Mastema, 9
Index
Matthew, 182 and the Baptist, 221, 226–27, 241 criticism, 221–23, 228, 241 and Elijah, 221, 226–27, 229, 241 and Emmanuel, 221 John compared to, 221–46 and the last judgment, 239 narrative, 192–93, 237 and the role of Peter, 221, 231–36, 241 use of the Old Testament, 221, 237–39, 242 view of Jesus, 207, 221, 224–29, 231, 236–37, 239–41 Meeks, Wayne Christ is the Question, 277–78 Mendenhall, George E., 209–10 Micaiah Ben Imlah, 14 Miletos use of myth in, 251–53, 259, 266 Milton, John, 4, 9, 14 An Apology Against a Pamphlet, 214 Biblical influences on, 82 Paradise Lost, 5, 65, 214 style of, 58, 65–66, 80 Moore, George Foot, 1 Moses and Akiba, 1 baptism, 204–5 birth of, 4 camp, 160 and the Commandments, 12–13 death of, 4, 211 enroute to Egypt, 9 at Mount Sinai, 10–15, 212 second, 207 tales of, 2–3, 10, 45, 98, 208–13, 229, 231
303
Yahweh’s attack on, 4, 81–83 Moses (Buber), 13–14 Moule, C.F.D., 201 Müller, H.P., 113 Muslim tradition, 10, 277–78 Mythic traditions in Christianity, 247–48 in imperial cults, 251–59, 263–66 in Judaism, 247 remythology studies of, 247–51 and the Roman empire, 249–61, 263–66 Nabokov, Vladimir, 84 Nadab, 12 Nathan, 7, 153 Nebuchadnezzar, 61, 160 Nelson, Richard, 150, 160 Nestle-Aland, 237 New Testament criticism, 201–2 gospel narratives in, 186–88, 213, 215, 223, 237, 239, 241, 277–78 language of, 200 polemicism, 222–23 prophecies, 201–2, 204, 206, 209 structure of, 187 studies of, 249 teachings of, 201, 205 writers of, 189, 199, 202–3, 207 Nibelungen (Wagner), 25 Nichomachaean Ethics (Aristotle), 30–31 Nicodemus, 224 Nietzsche, Friedrich fiction of, 2–3, 200 motive for all trope, 6 theories, 72, 76, 79–80, 86
304
Noah, 5–6 covenant with, 207 and the Flood, 3 and the rainbow sign, 27 sacrifice of, 27 tales, 46–47 Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (Stevens), 73 Noth, Martin, 10 Numbers battles in, 4 narratives, 206, 230 writer of, 4 Odyssey (Homer), 179, 181 Achilles in, 37–38, 42 Eumaeus in, 45 Euryclea in, 39, 45 Laertes in, 45 narrative style of, 37–39, 41–42, 48 Odysseus in, 37, 39, 42–43, 45 Patroclus in, 38 Penelope in, 39, 45 reality in, 33–48, 80 similes in, 52–53 speech in, 36 Telemachus in, 179 Theoclymenos in, 179 Trojan War in, 39 Zeus in, 37 Old Testament. See Bible, Hebrew Paradise Lost (Milton), 5, 65, 214 Parallel Betwixt Poetry and Painting (Dryden), 83 Parker, Kim Ian, 148 Pascal, Blaise, 85 P authors, 1, 76 Paul, 6 canonical perspective, 200–4 and the Church fathers, 41
Index
exousia, 208 interpretations of, 22–23, 199–205, 207–13 letters, 203, 215 mission to the Gentiles, 41 prospective stance in, 213–15 as a revisionary critic, 199–219 in Romams, 19, 67, 214 use of scripture, 200, 204–11, 214 view of Christ, 27 Paz, Octavio, 117, 122 Peter, 187–88 and the beloved disciple, 235–36 confession, 232 criticism, 232–33 denial of, 192–93, 232–36 John’s view of, 221, 223, 231–36, 241 martyrdom, 184 Matthew’s view of, 221, 231–36, 241 messages, 190, 203 as Satan, 234 Petrarch, Francesco, 214 Pharisees, 1, 235 Philip, 203 Pilate, 224, 236 Plato, 2, 26, 84, 87 Poetry and Repression (Bloom), 213–14 Politics (Aristotle), 19 Pope, Marvin, 127, 133 Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern (Dryden), 83 Prelude, The (Wordsworth) apocalyptic hope in, 59 death of father in, 54–56 dream in, 53, 63 language in, 58 poets as prophets in, 49–54, 56, 58, 60
Index
similes, 52 Snowdon’s ascent in, 59–60, 65–67 Price, Martin, 84 Protestant, 5 theology, 202, 277 Proust, Marcel A la Recherche du temps perdu, 181 Psalm (19), 82 Psalm (42), 67 Psalm (73), 101–9 answers in, 91 fate of Israel in, 102, 108 meaning of life in, 101 prosperity of the wicked in, 101, 103–4, 108–9 suffering in, 103–7 Psalmist stories of, 82–83, 102, 104–9, 208 Quranic Studies (Wansbrough), 278 Q writer narrative, 223, 228, 238–340 Rad, Gerhard von, 205 Rebecca, 3, 78 Rebekah, 47 Recherche du temps perdu, A la (Proust), 181 Repetition (Kierkegaard), 72 Revelation, 214 author of, 259, 262 Behemoth tradition in, 259–61, 264 of John, 259, 261–67 Leviathan tradition in, 259–64 myth use in, 247, 250–51, 259–65 remythologizing studies of, 247–51
305
Roman power in, 259–61, 263–66 of St. John the Divine, 171–75 structure, 260, 264 symbolism in Chapter 13 of, 247–75 Robbe-Grillet, Alain Les Gommes, 181 Roman Catholics, 277 Roman Empire and Caesar, 171–72 history of, 41, 84, 184, 203, 264 mythology, 249–61, 263–66 Romans narrative, 203–5, 208, 212–13, 229 Paul’s statements in, 19, 67, 210, 214 realism, 47 Rosenzweig, Franz, 5 Ruskin, John and religion, 58 Samuel (1) David in, 156, 230 narratives, 151, 153, 156–58, 163 Samuel (2), 38 author of, 7–9 David in, 159–60 narratives, 151, 153, 158–60, 163 Sarah, 47 struggles of, 77, 210 Saul, 38, 157 Schiller, Friedrich, 36 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 85 Scofield Bible editor, 27 interpretations in, 26 Paul’s statements, 19 Seth, 3
306
Shaffer, E.S., 64 Shakespeare, William, 2–4, 6, 12 Biblical influences on, 82 Hamlet, 58, 66 sonnets, 54 Shklovsky, Viktor, 190 Simon Peter disciple to Jesus, 232 Sirach, 227 Smith, D. Moody, 202, 223 Smith, Joseph H., 86–87 Smith, Morton interpretation of the Gospel of Mark, 183–85, 188–89 Sodom road to, 3, 9–10, 77 Solomon, 4, 6, 12 death, 154 faith, 147–48, 153–55 images of, 7 and Jezebel, 149, 162 possessions, 152, 162 and the Queen of Sheba, 149, 162 reign of, 3, 147, 153, 157, 159, 161, 163 story of, 3, 147–70 Song of Solomon androgyny in, 122–38 Beloved in, 114–38 character and archetype in, 111–22 dominance of woman in, 113, 116, 123, 125, 130, 138 Eden in, 115 family invention in, 115–16 fusion of generations in, 115 imagery in, 115, 122–24, 126, 128–31, 133–36, 138 Lebanon in, 137 lovers in, 111–38 mythological resonances in, 115
Index
psyche in, 115, 117 Song of, 118, 120 spring in, 112 structure of, 118 symbolism in, 124, 126–27, 132 voices and action in, 115 Sohrab and Rustum (Arnold), 190 Speiser, E.A., 7 Anchor Bible, 74–75, 77–78 Spenser, Edmund, 82, 195 Spinoza, Baruch Ethics, 31 Stanton, G.N., 237 Stevens, Wallace, 3, 89 Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, 73 “To the One of Fictive Music,” 117 Strenski, Ivan, 248 Szondi, Peter, 64 Tales of Jacob (Mann), 81 Tamar struggles of, 6, 8 tales of, 3 Temptation of Saint Anthony (Flaubert), 25 Theophilus of Antioch, 206 Thessalonica, 203 Thomas gospel of, 235, 241 Thoreau, Henry David, 64 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud), 74–76, 87–88 “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth), 66 Tolstoy, Leo and religion, 1, 4, 79 Torah, 9, 210, 214 faithful to, 261 “To the One of Fictive Music” (Stevens), 117 Totem and Taboo (Freud), 86
Index
Tree of knowledge and Adam, 4 Trocmé, Etienne, 194 Tuchelt, Klaus, 252 Ulysses (Joyce) Bloom in, 178–81, 189, 196 Man in the Macintosh in, 177–81, 183 narrative in, 180 Virgil, 214 Divine Child, 6 Viviano, Benedict T, 285 on the Gospel of John compared to the Gospel of Matthew, 221–46 Wagner, Richard Nibelungen, 25 Wansbrough, John Quranic Studies, 278 Whitman, Walt, 89 “A Clear Midnight,” 73 Windisch, Hans Überlegenheitstheorie, 223 Wise, Strange and Holy (Camp), 149 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 83
Wolff, Hans Walter, 6 Wordsworth, William, 1 Biblical influences on, 82, 89 The Prelude, 49–60, 63, 65–67 “Tintern Abbey,” 66 Yahweh, see also God attack on Moses, 4, 81–83 history, 206–7, 277 law, 151–52, 155, 210–11 at Mamre, 3, 10, 12–14, 76–77 mind of Jerusalem, 2 promises of, 209–10 self-revelation, 212 and Solomon, 147–70 sublimity of, 1–15, 75–76, 82, 86, 89 writings of, 74, 79, 262 Yeats, William Butler, 87 Zadok, 153 Zechariah, 227 Zedekiah, 61 Zion foundation of, 207 Zipporah rescue of Moses, 81–82
307
