Jesus and Horus

[First posted in 2012;  a timely repost in the season of the celebration of the birth of the supposed Jewish Messiah. 

 

Here’s the original Introduction: Jesus we know, but who is “Horus”?  

 

This article is from near death.com/experiences/origen046.html it  will probably be dismissed as a ‘questionable’ source.  We post it along with all the other articles in this website which challenge the divinity claims that founders of Christianity have imposed upon the historical Jesus.  

 

This article discusses too many uncanny similarities in the life of Jesus and some pagan deities for these to be mere coincidences.  Between Christian History books, research on recurring pagan myth stories, and the original revelation of the True God YHWH on Sinai, IF one’s belief in the Christian version of God based on Christian doctrines and scriptures is not shaken a little for one to research further to one’s satisfaction . . . then indeed, they are TRUE and LOYAL CHRISTIANS!  And that’s OK, we believe in freedom of choice and respect religious choices.  We simply urge religionists/believers to check out the roots and claims of accepted and unquestioned belief systems they adhere to.  We are all after seeking the One True God who is no respecter of man-sourced religion.—Admin1]

 

Image from www.eyeofhorus.biz

Image from www.eyeofhorus.biz

 

Jesus as a Reincarnation of Horus

 

Jesus was referred to as the chief cornerstone (i.e., capstone) – a reference to an Egyptian pyramid. The chief cornerstone of the pyramid is same symbol for Horus, the Egyptian god and savior. Like the Egyptian pharoah, Jesus was called a shepherd who rules the nations with a staff. Horus was a popular Egyptian god who was the son of Osiris and Isis. Osiris and Horus were both solar deities. Osiris was the setting sun, Horus the rising sun. Jesus is the rising Son and the morning star. The pharoah was considered to be an incarnation of Horus (also known as “Amen-Ra,” the sun god). In the same way, Jesus is considered to be the incarnation of his heavenly Father. Horus was the lamb of God who took away the sins of the world. Horus had an adversary named “Set”. Jesus’ adversary was “Satan”.

 

The story of Horus can be found in “The Egyptian Book of the Dead (also known as the “Papyrus of Ani”) written over 3,000 years before the birth of Christ.

 

Identical Life Experiences

 

  1. It is written that both Horus and Jesus existed before their incarnations.
  2. Horus was born of the virgin Isis on December 25th in a cave/manger.
  3. Horus’ birth was announced by a star in the East and attended by three wise men.
  4. The infant Horus was carried out of Egypt to escape the wrath of Typhon. The infant Jesus was carried into Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod. Concerning the infant Jesus, the New Testament states the following prophecy: “Out of Egypt have I called my son.” (Matt. 2:15)
  5. He was a child teacher in the temple and was baptized by Anup the Baptizer when he was thirty years old.
  6. He had twelve disciples and performed miracles such as feeding bread to the multitude and walking on water.
  7. He raised one man, El-Azar-us, from the dead.
  8. He transfigured on a mount.
  9. He also had titles such as the “way, the truth, the light, the Messiah, God’s anointed Son, the Son of Man, the good shepherd, the lamb of God, the Word, the Morning Star, the light of the world.
  10. He was “the Fisher,” and was associated with the lamb, lion and fish (“Ichthys”).
  11. Horus’s personal epithet was “Iusa,” the “ever-becoming son” of “Ptah,” the “Father.”
  12. Horus was called “KRST,” or “Anointed One.
  13. He was crucified, buried in a tomb and resurrected.
  14. The adoration of the Virgin and Child is connected with both the adoration of Isis and the infant Horus and the adoration of Mary and infant Jesus. In the catacombs at Rome are pictures of the baby Horus being held by the virgin mother Isis, the original “Madonna and Child.”
  15. Concerning the writing of the Gnostics, C. W. King, a noted English author, says: “To this period belongs a beautiful sard in my collection, representing Serapis,…whilst before him stands Isis, holding in one hand the sistrum, in the other a wheatsheaf, with the legend: ‘Immaculate is our lady Isis,’ the very term applied afterwards to that personage who succeeded to her form, her symbols, rites, and ceremonies” (Gnostics and Their Remains, p. 71).
  16. Osiris, Isis, and Horus are the principal trinity of the Egyptian religions. God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit is the Christian trinity. Dr. Inman affirms the Egyptian roots of the Christian trinity “The Christian trinity is of Egyptian origin, and is as surely a pagan doctrine as the belief in heaven and hell, the existence of a devil, of archangels, angels, spirits and saints, martyrs and virgins, intercessors in heaven, gods and demigods, and other forms of faith which deface the greater part of modern religions” (Ancient Pagan and Modem Christian Symbolism, p. 13).
  17. Dr. Draper says: “For thirty centuries the Egyptians had been familiar with the conception of a triune God. There was hardly a city of any note without its particular triads. Here it was Amum, Maut, and Khonso; there Osiris, Isis, and Horus” (Intellectual Development, Vol. I, p. 191).
  18. Dr. Draper stated: “Views of the Trinity, in accordance with Egyptian tradition, were established. Not only was the adoration of Isis under a new name restored, but even her image standing on the crescent moon reappeared. The well-known effigy of that goddess, with the infant Horus in her arms, has descended to our days in the beautiful artistic creations of the Madonna and Child.” (Conflict, p. 48).
  19. Mrs. Besant believes that Christianity has its main roots in Egypt: “It grew out of Egypt; its gospels came from thence [Alexandria]; its ceremonies were learned there; its Virgin is Isis; its Christ, Osiris and Horus.”
  20. There are two stories connected with Horus that is analogous to stories found in the Old Testament. The hiding of the infant Horus in a marsh by his mother undoubtedly parallels the story of the hiding of the infant Moses in a marsh by his mother. When Horus died, Isis implored Ra, the sun, to restore him to life. Ra stopped his ship in mid-heaven and sent down Thoth, the moon, to bring him back to life. The stopping of the sun and moon by Isis recalls the myth of the stopping of the sun and moon by Joshua.

 

“Osiris, I am your son, come to glorify your soul, and to give you even more power.” – Horus, (Book of the Dead, Ch. 173)

 

“Now is the Son of Man glorified and God is glorified in him.

If God is glorified in him, God will glorify the Son in himself, and will glorify him at once.” Jesus, (John 13:31-32)

 

  

 

Jewish History by a Christian Historian

Image from amazon.com

Image from amazon.com

[First posted in 2012; time for a repost. 

 

This recommended read is:  A HISTORY OF THE JEWS by Paul Johnson.

 

One reviewer, Merle Rubin of Christian Science Monitor says it best:

 “An absorbing, provocative, well-written, often moving book, an insightful and impassioned blend of history and myth, story and interpretation”  (highlights added).

 

I most likely would never have picked out this book if I had wanted to learn about the history of the Jews, and in fact, I didn’t. It was passed on to me by my catholic brother from the library of a retiree I have never met, who enjoys going to estate sales to buy old books.  This book however, is not old but new; he bought it for $17.99 during a visit to the USA, and brought it all the way back to the Philippines.  I find it intriguing that someone would do that for the sister of one of his exercise buddies (a neighborhood walk/aerobics & breakfast club) because this is the 4th book about Jews that I’ve inherited through brother dear.

 

Now about the book:  details included in any book should be read; they help you understand something about the author, such as:

 

 

“This book is dedicated to the memory of Hugh Fraser, a true Christian gentleman and lifelong friend of the Jews.” 

 

That’s a nice tribute, whoever Hugh Fraser was.  “A friend of the Jews” is a good attachment to anyone’s name.

 

The author himself explains his version of Jewish history:  “a personal interpretation”  with the excuse “the opinions expressed (and any errors) are my own,” and he gives a grateful acknowledgment of his Jewish sources.

 

Prologue and Epilogue are bookends that give an idea of what the book covers in between. so excerpts from these two are all we will present here. Reformatted for posting.–Admin1]

 

————————

 

Prologue

 

Why have I written a history of the Jews?  There are four reasons.

  • The first is sheer curiosity.

When I was working on my History of Christianity, I became aware for the first time in my life of the magnitude of the debt Christianity owes to Judaism.  It was not, as I had been taught to suppose, that the New Testament replaced the Old; rather, that Christianity gave a fresh interpretation to an ancient form of monotheism, gradually evolving into a different religion but carrying with it much of the moral and dogmatic theology, the liturgy, the institutions and the fundamental concepts of its forebear.  I thereupon determined, should opportunity occur, to write about the people who had given birth to my faith, to explore their history back to its origins and forward to the present day, and to make up my own mind about their role and significance.  The world tended to see the Jews as a race which had ruled itself in antiquity and set down its records int he Bible; had then gone underground for many centuries; had emerged at last only to be slaughtered by the Nazis; and, finally, had created a state of its own, controversial and beleaguered.  But these were merely salient episodes, I wanted to link them together, to find and study the missing portions, assemble them into a whole, and make sense of it.

  • My second reason was the excitement I found in the sheer span of Jewish history.

From the time of Abraham up to the present covers the best part of four millennia.  That is more than three-quarters of the entire history of civilized humanity.  I am a historian who believes in long continuities and delights in tracing them.  The Jews created a separate and specific identity earlier than most any other people which still survives.  They have maintained it, amid appalling adversities, right up to the present.  Whence came this extraordinary endurance?  What was the particular strength of the all-consuming idea which made the Jews different and kept them homogeneous?  Did its continuing power lie in its essential immutability, or its capacity to adapt, or both?  These are sinewy themes with which to grapple.

 

  • My third reason was that Jewish history covers not only vast tracts of time but huge areas.

The Jews have penetrated many societies and left their mark on all of them.  Writing a history of the Jews is almost like writing a history of the world, but from a highly peculiar angle of vision.  It is world history seen from the viewpoint of a learned and intelligent victim.  So the effort to grasp history as it appeared to the Jews produces illuminating insights.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer noticed this same effect when he was in a Nazi Prison.  ‘We have learned’, he wrote in 1942, ‘to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of those who are excluded, under suspicion, ill-treated, powerless, oppressed and scorned, in short those who suffer.’  He found it, he said, ‘an experience of incomparable value’.  The historian finds a similar merit in telling the story of the Jews:  it adds to history the new and revealing dimension of the underdog.

  • Finally, the book gave me the chance to reconsider objectively, in the light of a study covering nearly 4,000 years, the most intractable of all human questions:
    • What are we on earth for?
    • Is history merely a series of events whose sum is meaningless?
    • Is there no fundamental moral difference between the history of the human race and the history, say, of ants?
    • Or is there a providential plan of which we are, however humbly, the agents?

No people has ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny.  At a very early stage in their collective existence they believed they had detected a divine scheme for the human race, of which their own society was to be a pilot.  They worked out their role in immense detail.  They clung to it with heroic persistence in the face of savage suffering.  Many of them believe it still.  Others transmitted it into Promethean endeavors to raise our condition by purely human means.  The Jewish vision became the prototype of many similar grand designs for humanity, both divine and man-made.  The Jews, therefore, stand right at the center of the perennial attempt to give human life the dignity of a purpose.  Does their own history suggest that such attempts are worth making?  Or does it reveal their essential futility?  The account that follows, the result of my own inquiry, will I hope help its readers to answer these questions for themselves.

 

 

Contents 

  • Part One:  Israelites
  • Part Two: Judaism
  • Part Three:  Cathedocracy
  • Part Four:  Ghetto
  • Part Five: Emancipation
  • Part Six:  Holocaust
  • Part Seven:  Zion

 

Epilogue

 

In his Antiquities of the JewsJosephus describes Abraham as ‘a man of great sagacity’ who had ‘higher notions of virtue than others of his time’.  He therefore ‘determined to change completely the views which all then had about God’.  One way of summing up 4,000 years of Jewish history is to ask ourselves what would have happened to the human race if Abraham had not been a man of great sagacity, or if he had stayed in Ur and kept his higher notions to himself, and no specific Jewish people had come into being.  Certainly the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place.  Humanity might eventually have stumbled upon all the Jewish insights.  But we cannot be sure.  All the great conceptual discoveries of the intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they have been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time.  The Jews had this gift.

 

To them we owe—

  • the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human;
  • of the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person;
  • of the individual conscience and so of personal redemption;
  • of the collective conscience and so of social responsibility;
  • of peace as an abstract ideal
  • and love as the foundation of justice,
  • and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind.

 

Without the Jews it might have been a much emptier place.

Above all, the Jews taught us how to rationalize the unknown.  The result was monotheism and the three great religions which profess it.  It is almost beyond our capacity to imagine how the world would have fared if they had never emerged.  Nor did the intellectual penetration of the unknown stop at the idea of one God.  Indeed monotheism itself can be seen as a milestone on the road which leads people to dispense with God altogether.  The Jews first rationalized the pantheon of idols into one Supreme Being; then began the process of rationalizing Him out of existence. In the ultimate perspective of history, Abraham and Moses may come to seem less important than Spinoza.  For the Jewish impact on humanity has been protean.

  • In antiquity they were the great innovators in religion and morals.
  • In the Dark Ages and early medieval Europe they were still an advanced people transmitting scarce knowledge and technology.
  • Gradually they were pushed from the van and fell behind until, by the end of the 18th century, they were seen as a bedraggled and obscurantist rearguard in the march of civilized humanity.
  • Breaking out of their ghettos, they once more transformed human thinking, this time in the secular sphere.
  • Much of the mental furniture of the modern world too is of Jewish fabrication.

 

The Jews were not just innovators.  They were also exemplars and epitomizers of the human condition.  They seemed to present all the inescapable dilemmas of man in a heightened and clarified form.

  • They were the quintessential ‘strangers and sojourners’.  But are we not all such on this planet, of which we possess a mere leasehold of threescore and ten?
  • The Jews are the emblem of homeless and vulnerable humanity.  But is not the whole earth no more than a temporary transit-camp?
  • The Jews were fierce idealists striving for perfection, and at the same time fragile men and women yearning for flesh-pots and safety.
  • They wanted to obey God’s impossible law, and they wanted to stay alive too.

 

Therein lay the dilemma of the Jewish commonwealths in antiquity, trying to combine the moral excellence of a theocracy with the practical demands of a state capable of defending itself.  The dilemma has been recreated in our own time in the shape of Israel, founded to realize a humanitarian ideal, discovering in practice that it must be ruthless simply to survive in a hostile world.  But is not this a recurrent problem which affects all human societies?  We all want to build Jerusalem.  We all drift back towards the Cities of the Plain.  It seems to be the role of the Jews to focus and dramatize these common experiences of mankind, and to turn their particular fate into a universal moral.  But if the Jews have this role, who wrote it for them?

Historians should beware of seeking providential patterns in events.  They are all to easily found, for we are credulous creatures, born to believe, and equipped with powerful imaginations which readily produce and rearrange data to suit any transcendental scheme.  Yet excessive skepticism can produce as serious a distortion as credulity.  The historian should take into account all forms of evidence, including those which are or appear to be metaphysical.

 

If the earliest Jews were able to survey, with us, the history of their progeny, they would find nothing surprising in it.  They always knew that Jewish society was appointed to be a pilot-project for the entire human race.  That Jewish dilemmas, dramas and catastrophes should be exemplary, larger than life, would seem only natural to them.  That Jews should over the millennia attract such unparalleled, indeed inexplicable, hatred would be regrettable but only to be expected.  Above all, that the Jews should still survive, when all those other ancient people were transmuted or vanished into the oubliettes of history, was wholly predictable.  How could it be otherwise?  Providence decreed it and the Jews obeyed.

 

The historian may say:  there is no such thing as providence.  Possibly not.  But human confidence in such a historical dynamic, if it is strong and tenacious enough, is a force in itself, which pushes on the hinge of events and moves them.  The Jews believed they were a special people with such unanimity and passion, and over so long a span, that they became one.  They did indeed have a role because they wrote it for themselves.  Therein, perhaps, lies the key to their story.

 

“Choose Life” . . . how?

Image from Pixabay

Image from Pixabay

[This was first posted on April 19, 2012,  a timely reminder from the Giver of Life.

 

Just think:  we have to be alive to be able to ‘choose life’ . . . so what does the LORD of LIFE mean by that?  

 

In searching for a suitable image for this article, one showed Moses speaking to the 2nd generation born from the original generation referred to as ‘mixed multitude’ of Israelites and non-Israelites who first stood on Sinai 50 days after leaving Egypt. This 2nd generation plus two surviving from the 1st, Joshua and Caleb, were being addressed for the last time by about-to-die Moses who was reminding them of everything spoken by the God who made a covenant with their parents, the stipulations of which automatically applied to generations belonging to their newly formed nation of Israel.  By this time, they were no longer a “mixed multitude” but all Israelites, for the non-Israelites among them would have been assimilated or eliminated in death resulting from the judgment of God upon the disobedient stiff-necked 1st generation.  That image would have been the one posted except for one problem:  the quote from Deuteronomy “choose life” was attributed to Moses.  Well, what’s the fuss, didn’t Moses say it?  Yes, but let us not forget Moses was merely a mouthpiece of his God, not the originator of the Torah.  We keep reiterating, it is wrong to say “the Law of Moses” or “the Torah of Moses,”  no, No, NO!  Moses is NOT the Law-giver, Moses did not originate the Torah; for if Moses made it all up by himself then one major world religion could indeed claim that Torah is only for the Jews and not for Gentiles.  YHWH the Creator and Revelator on Sinai is the LAWGIVER, the Giver of TORAH and He intended His manual for living, guidelines for life to regulate everyone made in His Image, that is all of humanity.  The Torah is the LAW of YHWH, the LAW-GIVER!  When will all of humanity in whatever religion they’re in ‘get it’? —Admin 1].

 

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In a previous article  — The Tree of Life is the Torah -2  the phrase “Choose Life!” was introduced and left hanging, so to speak. This article picks up where it left off.  

 

Much of the material here is from an excellent article written by Rabbi David Rosenfeld in his series on http://www.torah.org/learning/mlife/LOR5-3.html

 

Rabbi Rosenfeld explains that free will is fundamentally a pillar of the Torah.  Every human being since Adam and Eve has been given this gift which carries a tremendous responsibility. Of all of God’s creatures, including angelic beings, only man is given the privilege to make a choice.  

 

Image from www.123rf.com

Image from www.123rf.com

Now making a choice would require that a minimum of two options are available; otherwise, there is no choice, and freedom of the will is useless and one cannot be held responsible for making the one and only choice given the limitation—although if you REALLY think about that one, having only one choice, you do have another choice—-not to choose that one and only option, get it?  Because even with only one to choose from, your freedom to choose gives you the right to refuse choosing the one and only one available.  So freedom is still yours to exercise if you so wish, only that you don’t have more than one to exercise it on.  Is this getting confusing?  Freedom is yours, option is limited; that does not strip away your freedom.  As our illustration shows:  RIGHT/WRONG and a third is “It depends.”  On what?  One’s decision to exercise his freedom.  But before we lose the focus of this article . . . .

 

 Thank YHWH that in His foresight and wisdom, He made sure that man is not left ignorant of choices available to him during his lifetime in anything relating to what the Creator of man desires for His one and only creation endowed with free will.  Man knows that once he is born and is a living being, his fate at any point is—- death, the end of life, the absence of life.  So since he has no choice regarding his ultimate destiny, what choice does he have except to live?  

 

Deuteronomy 30:15,19:

 See, I have placed before you today life and good, death and evil . . . [and you shall choose life]. 

Deuteronomy 11:26:  

And it is written, ‘See, I place before you blessings and curses.”

 

Rabbi Rosenfeld explains,

“free will is in your hands and anything a person will desire to do of the acts of man he may do, whether good or evil. Because of this matter it is stated, Who would make it that they would [always] have this heart of theirs (that they currently have) [to fear me and to observe all my commandments all the days]’ (ibid. 5:26). This means that the Creator does not force people nor decree upon them to do good or evil. Rather their hearts are in their own hands (lit., ‘are given to them’).”

 

He then explains Rambam’s perspective:  

 

“There is no predestination. Man is free to to choose his actions and his fate, and to become as great or as evil as he wishes. And since it is in our ability to choose, G-d can command us to act properly — and punish us if we do not. Finally, since our actions are our own responsibility, it is up to us to repent our mistakes. We cannot blame anyone else for our failings — even if all sorts of outside factors did in honesty influence us for the better or worse. Ultimately, our decisions were our own; only we will stand judgment for them.”

 

Rambam backs up this same principle with key Scriptural verses, says Rosenfeld:

 

 “In Deuteronomy 30 G-d offers us the choice: good or evil, life or death. The two paths of life are laid out before us. G-d tells us the score,

He ‘urges us’ to follow the path of good,

 He ‘wishes’ that we would, 

but He does not and cannot force us. 

“For the world would be pointless if man had no choice, if we were just following some pre-written script without any say of our own. G-d had to leave our fates up to us. He presents us with the facts and tells us which path He would ‘like us’ to traverse, but beyond that we are left on our own.”

 

 In explaining the language of the first verse quoted, [I have placed before you today life and good, death and evil.”] he notes how striking is the point made:

 

“The choice is not just one of good versus evil. It is life versus death. . . .that by choosing good one earns life and vice versa. But why are life and death mentioned before good and evil? Aren’t they simply the consequences?”

 

Rosenfeld further explains how profound is the thought presented by Rambam:  

 

“Choosing good is not just a matter of making good choices and earning reward. It is being alive. If we just follow our natural inclinations — if we just more or less follow the script — even if to some degree we were given good programming by our parents or environment, we are not really “alive”. We are just passive, allowing ourselves to be drawn wherever the outside world leads us. Perhaps an obedient horse we are, but such is not truly life in a spiritual sense.”

 

“When the Torah instructs us to choose life, the meaning is not simply that we behave. It means that we be alive — that we live with awareness. We must understand the gravity of life and recognize the significance of our actions. And however we decide to live, it must be a conscious decision. ‘We’ took control and made our decision. We exercised our lives and vitality. We understood what life is all about and did something about it.  Passivity — even more or less good passivity — is not life.  Taking control of our fates — understanding the stakes of life and doing something about it — is what life really is.”

 

He gives an example of how we are somehow programmed as children to do what we are told;  gives a sample of a Jewish child who grows up in a religious environment and therefore follows the kosher diet, observes the Sabbath, goes to the synagogue with his parents, prepares for his Bar Mitzvah, etc.  While he has been following what he has been told, everything he has done so far was imposed upon him in his upbringing by his family environment.  

 

The question is:

In the process, did he make any decision for himself, to grow closer to God, or was it routine obedience?

Was there any inner conviction as he grew older and matured to do what is right?  

 

Rosenfeld makes a point that doing right, whether of one’s volition or not, is a good thing, has positive effects on the person; at least physically, a kosher diet makes one healthy, etc.  But the testing comes when the child is exposed to negative influence.

 

 Rosenfeld continues:  

 

Rather, true life is taking control — knowing the stakes of life, recognizing the challenges, and taking a stand. I’m alive when ‘I’ do something, when ‘I’ make a decision. The Torah does not exhort us to choose good but to choose life. Serve Me as a reflection of your inner conviction — because you wanted to, not because you allow yourself to be drawn in some positive direction when the winds happen to be blowing favorably.”

 

“Conversely, a person who sins is not merely doing bad actions. He’s choosing death — and not only as a consequence of his poor choices. He’s consciously choosing to pursue an illusion — the empty enjoyment of the pleasures of this world — as if there is anything of true worth other than following G-d. And this is not merely wrong. It is failing to live. It is allowing oneself to be drawn after whatever excites his fancy. It is living passively; being acted upon by the world at large and whatever it has to offer. It is not taking a stand and choosing, not truly waking up to what life is all about. It is not being alive.”

 

Rosenfeld then gives an example of 2 converts to faith in the God of Israel in the book of Ruth.  Naomi’s daughters-in-law –Ruth and Orpah — both were willing to return with Naomi to Bethlehem. In Naomi’s efforts to discourage them, Ruth insisted on going with Naomi while Orpah was persuaded to return to her people.   

 

His conclusion:  

 

“This, to wrap up, is the theme of the Rambam this week. Choosing, exercising our free will, is not about obeying G-d’s will. It is about being alive. What makes us alive, what give us life and vitality is consciously deciding. It is contemplation, recognizing the significance of life and determining just which path we want to take. And such can make us great — or terrible if we decide wrong. But just letting ourselves be drawn after whatever piques our interest, whatever our friends are doing, or whatever our elders tell us is not truly living. It is as a horse being driven by its rider. Only when we take out and grab the reins are we truly alive.”

 

 

 

     NSB@S6K

logoSig-4_16colors

 

 

 

 

FAQs about Sinai 6000

[Originally posted in 2012;  facts still relevant in 2019. Write us or leave a comment at the bottom of the page of any post; we will endeavor to answer your query or address your comment or engage you in discourse.—Admin1]

 

Q:  What does it mean to be a Sinai 6000 “Affiliate?”

 

A:  Our affiliates are believers who agree with our Statement of Faith or are open to studying with us to learn a different perspective:

  • None are required to be “in community” with Sinaites although all are welcome to join any of the groups who gather together for Torah study.
  • Some are still members of christian fellowships and churches but are interested in studying the Hebrew Scriptures; therefore, they attend bible studies or avail of online exchanges.
  • Some are christian pastors who simply wish to enhance their knowledge and teaching of the Christian “Old” Testament.
  • Our objective is simply to share our resources with others who are genuinely interested in learning other perspectives aside from the only one they have known all their lives.
  • Our core group is based in Baguio City, Philippines; we have opted to remove the names of all affiliates from our website but if there are inquiries about the identity behind initials/authorship of any article, you may inquire at nsbsinai6000@gmail.com.

Q: Where can one go for Torah study?  Contact nsbsinai6000@gmail.com to set up a study, individual, group, online, by Skype/Facetime/Viber, your preference.

 

Update 2019

 

Q: Do you do one-on-one teaching?

A: Yes, any one of our core group will make himself/herself available to teach one or more individuals in Baguio City.  Or if you live elsewhere and wish to do it online, it can be arranged.  Same with online-chat/study.

Please contact “Admin1”:  nsbsinai6000@gmail.com, for any such requests.

THE HALLOWING OF HISTORY

[Originally posted in 2014.  “Hallowing” has nothing to do with “Halloween” except for the word “hallow” which means to “honor as holy or make holy; consecrate”. A bit of trivia since this is being posted on . . . er . . .coincidentally Halloween 2013: “ORIGIN late 18th cent.: contraction of All Hallow Even (Even —the end of the day; evening).  

 

That clear, the topic of this post is WHO is the author of the idea of History? Well of course, who else?  The people whose Scriptures are also their History and whose history begins from the beginning of earthly time.

 

This is from our ‘hallowed’ reliable resource of the best of Jewish minds, put together in one book by ed. Rabbi/Dr. J.H. Hertz, Pentateuch and Haftorahs; reformatting and highlights added.–Admin1].

 

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THE HALLOWING OF HISTORY 

 

Israel is the author of the idea of History.  

 

The Egyptians and Babylonians left behind them annals of events, chronicles of dynasties, and boastful inscriptions of victories; but nothing that can be dignified by the name of historical writing.  It is only in Israel that the whole human scene on earth was conceived as a unity, from its very beginning to the end of time.  Thus Scripture does not begin with the Exodus, or even with the Call of Abraham, but with the Creation of the world and the birth of man.

 

We are, of course, dogmatically told that ‘the writing of history begins, like so many other things, with the Greeks’.  But this is part of the Hellenic myth dominant in academic quarters.  The Greeks could not rise to the concept of universal History without the belief in the unity of mankind; a conception they only learned centuries later through the Septuagint Version of the Hebrew Scriptures.  Furthermore, the universe to the Greeks was not the creation of one supreme Mind, but the confused inter-play of blind natural forces going on forever in a vain, endless recurrence, leading nowhither.  Hence, they could not see any higher meaning in the story of man.  Such also has ever been the opinion of those who share the Greek view of God and the universe, as did the free-thinkers of the eighteenth century.  To them, ‘history is little more than a register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind’ (Gibbon).

 

Not so the Teachers in Israel.  They conceived of God as a Moral Power, and saw Him at work in the world.  They traced the line of Divine action in the lives of men and nations.  They saw in history a continuous revelation of Divine thought and purpose across the abyss of time. In clarion tones they proclaimed that Right was irresistible; and that what ought to be must be and will be.  

 

They taught men to see the vision of ‘the kingdom of God’ — human society based on righteousness—as the Messianic goal of history.  Schiller’s profound utterance, Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weligericht (‘History is the long Day of Judgment’), which would have been unintelligible to a Greek or Roman, is but a striking epitome of Hebrew thought.  And no view of the course of history is worth anything that is not essentially one with the Biblical position.  Froude has eloquently restated it in the noble words: ‘History is a voice for ever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong.  Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or vanity, the price has to be paid at last; not always by the chief offenders, but paid by someone.  Justice and truth alone endure and live.

 

Image from mjbhajewishcultureprogram.wordpress.com

II

Israel, moreover, was the first to conceive of history as a guide to the generations of men, as is done throughout Deuteronomy, and to grasp its vital importance in the education of the individual as of the human group.  

 

A recent historian of British civilization has well put it:

‘The past does not die; so long as spiritual continuity is maintained, the present life of a community is its whole accumulated past; and only by understanding that past can it understand itself or determine its future.  A people unconscious of its history is like a man smitten with loss of memory, who wanders aimlessly, till he comes to grief’ (Wingfield-Stratford).  It is history that preserves men and nations from loss of memory, from loss of spiritual identity.  ‘Man is made man by history.  The Jew is what he is by the history of his fathers, and he would be losing his better self were he to lose hold of his past history.’ (J. Jacobs).

 

 

The field of Jewish history is immeasurably vast; the Jew is met with everywhere, and his story opens very near the beginning of human civilization. And that story has, as no other, left its mark on the souls of men.

‘The first part of Jewish history, the Biblical part, is a source from which, for many centuries, millions of human beings have derived instruction, solace and inspiration.  Its heroes have long ago become types, incarnations, of great ideals.  The events it relates serve as living ethical formulae.  But a time will come—perhaps it is not very far off—when the second half of Jewish history, that when the second half of Jewish history, that people’s life after the Biblical period, will be accorded the same treatment.  The thousand years’ martyrdom of the Jewish People, its unbroken pilgrimage, its tragic fate, its teachers of religion, its martyrs, philosophers, champions—this whole epic will, in days to come, sink deep into the memory of men.  It will speak to the heart and conscience of men, and secure respect for the silvery hair of the Jewish People (Dubnow).

 

III

 

Even a brief history of Jewish history, i.e. a critical estimate of Jewish historians, ancient medieval and modern—cannot here be attempted.  A few words might, however, be added on the task of the Jewish historian at the present day.

 

His primary aim should be neither to lament the past, nor to denounce, nor to idealize it; but to understand it.  He is, therefore, no longer to confine himself to the martyrdoms of the Jewish People, as the medieval chroniclers did; or even exclusively to the strivings of the Jewish spirit in the world of thought—which so largely claimed the attention of Graetz.  Both the story of the martyrdoms and the spiritual strivings are, of course, basic.  But, in addition, the historian today must seek to explain the position of the Jews in the national history of the countries where they dwelt.  This calls, on the one hand, for a detailed study of Jewish communities—their institutions, cultural values, and religious endeavour; and, on the other hand, for a knowledge of the Jew’s social, economic, and political relations to the general population.  In this way alone can we in time hope to understand the ‘cross-fertilization’ of Jewish and non-Jewish ideas and influences in literature, folklore and life.  The truth will then dawn upon the student that Judaism, in addition to being a body of doctrine and faith, a way of life and salvation, is also a civilization, a civilization that has made distinct contributions in every sphere of human life, human thought, and human achievement.

 

IV

‘The history of Israel is the great living proof other working of Divine Providence in the affairs of the world.  Alone among the nations, Israel has shared in all great movements since mankind became conscious of their destinies.  If there is no Divine purpose in the long travail of Israel, it is vain to seek for any such purpose in man’s life.  In the reflected light of that purpose, each Jew should lead his life with an added dignity’ (J.Jacobs).

The WAY of YHVH – TORAH Faith for Non-Jews

[Originally posted in 2013.  This concludes Chapter 5, “THE WAY” of the book we have been featuring in this series:  James Tabor, Restoring Abrahamic Faith.  

We consider this book a “wake-up call” not only for ourselves but our Christian colleagues with whom we attempted to share its contents.  

 

Our former messianic teacher called this book “demonic” . . . if he ever reached Chapter 5, this would explain that reaction.  Unfortunately,  typical of  Christian thinking,  everything that does not conform with Christocentric belief is immediately labeled as “demonic.”  

 

 

Read through and see what you, reader, conclude for yourself. Is it “of YHVH” or of the non-existent Christian devil?—Admin1.]

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 “Until the whole world turns to the principles of the TORAH,

we will continue to suffer all of our collective ills and horrors.  

It is a demonstrable statistical fact that those societies that have incorporated into their laws, their judicial systems, and their general societal values, that basic ethical principles of the Bible, have been more prosperous, inventive, and advanced in areas of human rights.

They also are rated the lowest in the areas of economic and governmental corruption.”

 

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Applying the TORAH to one’s personal and community life in our modern secular setting requires spiritual insight and sensitivity for both Jew and non-Jew that involves a lifetime of deep study and meditation on these principles. However, much instructive help is available.

The Jewish commentary and discussion of these Laws is fascinating and exhaustive. Various conceptual categories have been developed such as-

 
  • “Repairing the World,”
  • “Caring for the Poor,”
  • “Guarding the Tongue,”
  • “Hospitality,” and
  • “Love of Zion,”
 

—around which extensive discussions have developed. The Rabbis have worked through many of the important issues over the centuries and the benefit to the non-Jew of these millennia of accumulated Jewish wisdom is considerable.

But beyond formal study, the ultimate goal is “to write the TORAH on the heart” (Deuteronomy 6:6; Jeremiah 31:33).

When one deeply seeks the principles of TORAH, delighting in it and meditating on it day and night, the essential WAY of TORAH begins to unfold (Psalm 1:2).

The TEN WORDS, the cycle of annual Holy Days (Leviticus 23), the dietary laws (Leviticus 11; Deuteronomy 14:3-21), and many other areas of God’s Law are immediately applicable to our lives and bring great blessings and benefits. Since the TORAH addresses all aspects of human life: social relations; economic justice; health and hygiene; criminal justice; sexual conduct; as well as compassion and care for animals and our planet—it can be seen as a kind of blueprint, framed in an ancient Israelite setting, of the WAY of justice and righteousness for humanity.

Jerusalem vs. Athens

There are really only two compelling visions of human life and its purposes that come down to us from Western antiquity—the early philosophical quest of the ancient Greeks, and the Torah inspired vision of the Hebrews. Scholars refer to this dichotomy as “Athens and Jerusalem.”

 

And yet, when you add it all up, despite the commendable emphasis on rationality found in Greek philosophy, ancient Greek society falls woefully short with its emphasis on—-

  • divinizing and worshipping the forces of nature,
  • its class-restricted ethics,
  • its obsession with the occult and the superstitious,
  • and its focus on astrology and the world beyond.
 

In contrast, within the Torah, one finds a rather remarkable emphasis on the ONE God as the ultimately rational Being beyond nature—

  • a rejection of the occult and astrological forces,
  • an emphasis on caring for
    •  the poor,
    • the disenfranchised
    • and the “stranger,”
  • as well as virtually no emphasis on life after death.
 

The Torah comes across as a rational system, completely oriented to this world, and amazingly grounded in the practical matters of human living. This includes a remarkable emphasis upon health and sanitation that seem to predate, or at least anticipate, the modern post-Enlightenment world.

 

Until the whole world turns to the principles of the TORAH, we will continue to suffer all of our collective ills and horrors. It is a demonstrable statistical fact that those societies that have incorporated into their laws, their judicial systems, and their general societal values, that basic ethical principles of the Bible, have been more prosperous, inventive, and advanced in areas of human rights. They also are rated the lowest in the areas of economic and governmental corruption.

 

The Prophets make it clear that the coming collapse of our human societies, and the judgment that comes upon all nations on the “Great Day of YHVH,” will come as a consequence of our flouting of the WAY revealed in TORAH (see Isaiah 24; chapters 59-66).

Also, the TORAH contains much more than commandments (mitzvot). It also contains a fundamental unfolding narrative. It is from that core foundational story that we learn the fundamentals of the ABRAHAMIC FAITH—

  • who God is,
  • what the WAY of God essentially is all about,
  • and the contours of the historic PLAN of God for the redemption of the world.
 

The Hebrew Prophets go hand in hand with the TORAH. They too come to us in their ancient dress, reflecting the conditions of Israel and Judah from the 8th through 5th centuries B.C.E. But they preserved for us an eternally valid commentary, more often than not cast in the 1st person voice of YHVH Himself.

Anyone who has deeply studied Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Hosea, or any of the Hebrew Prophets, comes away with the impression that the Prophets speak with a voice that is perpetually relevant, indeed, as up to date than the morning papers. Furthermore, large sections of the Prophets directly address the “last days,” as they are called. In that sense important sections of these writings are more for our time and our peoples than for ancient Israel.

In my experience, growing up in a Christian church, the riches that come from a deep study of the TORAH and the Prophets were largely missing. One is reminded of the chilling words of the Nazarene: “Whoever annuls one of the least of these commandments [of TORAH and Prophets] and teaches men so, will be called ‘least’ by those in the Kingdom of God” (Matthew 5:19).

And yet Christian tradition ended up teaching that the TORAH was abrogated and replaced by a New Covenant. This meant that the Bible that Jesus and all his earthly followers used, subsequently called the Old Testament, was seen as a largely obsolete precursor to the New.

The result was that the TORAH as a definitive revelation of God’s WAY was forgotten and in some cases even repudiated. And yet, Jesus, quoting the TORAH, had declared: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of YHVH!” (Matthew 4:4; Deuteronomy 8:3).

The deeply spiritual nurture that comes from a lifetime of study and meditation on the direct words of TORAH and Prophets, has unfortunately been lost to so many in our culture. It is worth noting that none of the writers of the New Testament actually had a New Testament. They were Jews and looked to their Holy Scriptures, the Hebrew Bible, preserved by the people of Israel.

In contrast, the “Christian message” that most hear Sunday after Sunday from their pulpits does not focus on the TORAH  or the Prophets. In the more evangelical churches at least, the single emphasis is on salvation in heaven through “accepting” Christ as Savior.

There is a richness, depth, spiritual insight, and practical knowledge of the Hebrew language preserved in the classical Jewish sources. Devout Jews throughout the world follow a weekly cycle of readings and study of the TORAH and Prophets.

Ironically, the early followers of the historical Jesus, unlike modern Christians, were thoroughly familiar with this practice and, as Jews, participated therein. Jesus himself attended the synagogue regularly on the Sabbath and was even called up to read the sacred Scrolls (Luke 4:16-17). He was thoroughly a part of this Jewish world of TORAH learning and discussion.

James (Ya’akov), the brother of Jesus, and leader of the messianic  community, assumed that the Gentiles drawn to TORAH FAITH would attend synagogue and hear the TORAH and Prophets read each Sabbath (Acts 15:21). An incredible wealth of commentary, both profound and practical, has developed around these TORAH portions. They are the lifeblood of the disciplined study of TORAH and are readily available for interested non-Jews.

When it comes to the matter of non-Jews being drawn toward the TORAH and/or Judaism, there is another important factor that I alluded to above. The Prophets state repeatedly and clearly that those known as Jews from the 5th century B.C.E. onward do not make up all of Israel. In other words, the so-called “Lost Tribes of Israel,” usually spoken of in the Prophets as “the house of Israel” (Joseph/Ephraim), in contrast to “the house of Judah” (the Jews), have lost their Israelite identity and consider themselves Gentiles. Yet, all the Prophets declare that in the “last days” these descendants of Jacob or Israel will return to YHVH the ONE GOD, and to TORAH Faith, recover their identity and unite with Judah (see Hosea 1:10-11; 3:4-5; Jeremiah 3:11-18). Their very birthright and Covenant goes back to Sinai and the revelation of YHVH through His Prophet Moses. The implications of these teachings in the Hebrew Prophets regarding the “Lost Tribes” are explored in [another] chapter.

This may well account for the reason so many thousands of Gentiles in the past few decades have experienced a turning toward TORAH Faith. It is possible that we are witnessing the beginning stages of a significant turn in Jewish history. These peoples tend to come from biblically oriented traditions within Christianity and they sense a connection, through their attachment to the Bible, toward the Jewish people and the Hebraic Faith. Accordingly, many who feel deeply drawn in these directions might very well be sensing the stirrings of their ancient Israelite connections in some mystical way that is beyond our ken.

Timeline: Chronological Table

[First posted in 2013.  This is from our valuable resource: Pentateuch and Haftorahs, ed. Dr. J.H. Hertz.  

Image from www.bibleworks.com

The Chronological Table is provided in connection with the ‘Sedras’ and their ‘Haftorahs’.  For those who are not familiar with those two terms, the term ‘Sedrah’ is a common term for the Weekly Torah portion (sidra or sedra) in Judaism.  Every Shabbat, the reading is scheduled for the Torah portion and followed by the ‘haforah’:

 

THE HAFTORAH

 

The Haftorah (the Eb. term is haptarah, ‘conclusion’) is the Lesson from the Prophets recited immediately after the Reading of the Law.  Long before the destruction of the Second Temple, the custom had grown up of concluding the Reading of the Torah on Sabbaths, Fasts and Festivals with a selection from the ‘Earlier Prophets’ (Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings) or from the ‘Later Prophets’ (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Book of the Twelve Prophets).  We possess no historical data concerning the institution of these Lessons.  A medieval author on the Liturgy states that a little more than two thousand years ago 9168 B.C.E.), Antiochus Epiphanes, king of Syria and Palestine, forbade the reading of the Torah under penalty of death.  The Scribes, thereupon, substituted a chapter of the Prophets cognate to the portion of the Law that ought to have been read.  But whatever be the exact origin of the Haftorah, there is always some similarity between the Sedrah and the Prophetic selections. Even when the latter does not contain an explicit reference to the events of the Sedrah, it reinforces the teaching of the weekly Reading upon the mind of the worshiper by a Prophetic message of consolation and hope.

 

In the commentary from Pentateuch and Haftorahs featured in the three books: Waiqrah, Bemidbar and Dabariym (Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy), we did not include the haftorah reading; only the Torah reading and accompanying background text.—-Admin1.]

 

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Abrahamcirca 1900   B.C.E.
Isaaccirca  1800
Jacobcirca  1750
Josephcirca  1700
Joseph in Egyptcirca 1650
Expulsion of Hyksoscirca 1587
Rameses IIcirca 1300-1234
(According to Mahler)circa 1347-1280
Merneptahcirca 1234-1214
Date of Exoduscirca 1230
Deborahcirca 1150
Jephthahcirca  1110
Samsoncirca 1100
Saulcirca 1028-1013
Davidcirca 1013-973
Solomoncirca .973-933
Jeroboam I and the Division of the Kingdomcirca 933
Ahabcirca 876-853
Elijahcirca 870
Elishacirca 850
Joashcirca 837-798
Jeroboam IIcirca 790-749
Amos and Hosea, Prophetic Activity ofcirca 760-734
Isaiah, call ofcirca 740
Micahcirca 740
Fall of the Northern Kingdomcirca 722
Jeremiah, call ofcirca 626
Josiahcirca 638-609
Capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonianscirca 597
Ezekiel, call ofcirca 594
First Destruction of the Templecirca 586
Obadiahcirca 585
Cyrus takes Babyloncirca 538
First Return of Babylonian Exilescirca 537
Zechariah and the Rebuilding of the Templecirca 520
Ezra and the Second Return from Babyloncirca 458
Maccabean Risingcirca 167
Second Destruction of Jerusalemcirca C.E. 70

 

A Literary Approach to the Book of Jonah

[First posted in 2013.  This is another excellent commentary from A Literary Approach to the Bible, one of our MUST READ, if not MUST OWN books.  Please read all the other articles from this great resource which have already bene posted. Reformatting, highlighting and underscoring added.]

 

Jonah – by James S. Ackerman  Although the Book of Jonah appears among the Minor Prophets in the biblical canon, it differs considerably from all the others as a piece of literature. Whereas the Major and Minor Prophets are essentially collections of oracles, Jonah recounts the adventures of a prophet who struggles against his divine commission. The story rather recalls the prophetic legends in 1 and 2 Kings that focus on Elijah, Elisha, and others. Scholars have struggled with the problem of genre, and there is no consensus. I prefer the general label “short story,” and I will later try to point out elements in the narrative that bring it close to classical satire. The story was probably written during the sixth or fifth century B.C.E., when Jews were struggling to adjust to and recover from the Babylonian Exile.

  • How were they to perceive the nature of God in the light of what had happened?
  • By what means could the community transform its institutions and traditions in order to adapt itself to the changed circumstances?

Drawing on a wide range of biblical allusions, as well as on a bit of Mediterranean folklore (the fish episode), the writer scrutinized some of the answers that were evolving. In doing so, he created a literary masterpiece that has captivated its readers and stirred artistic imaginations from the Midrash to Melville—long after the particular issues faced by the post-Exilic community had been resolved. “Jonah son of Amittai” (1:1) is surely a reference to the eight-century Northern Kingdom prophet briefly described in 2 Kings 14:25 as a popular prophet who, in the context of the Israelite king’s sin, proclaims divine mercy and support for that kingdom. The name means “Dove son of truth,” and the dove has two major characteristics in the Hebrew Bible:

  • it is easily put to flight and
  • seeks secure refuge in the mountains (Ezek. 7:16, Ps. 55:6-8),
  • and it moans and laments when in distress (Nahum 2:7; Isaiah 38:14, 59:11).

Will these characteristics, we wonder, also apply to our hero? And what meaning will the story give to “son of truth”? The formula in 1:1 makes it clear that Jonah is a prophet, but we are surprised and intrigued by the divine command. Prophets had pronounced judgment on enemy nations within the safe confines of Israelite territory. But commanding a prophet to enter a foreign city with a word of judgment from the Lord—given the mistreatment and misunderstanding the prophets suffered when they spoke to God’s own people Israel—is, to say the least, an expansion of the prophetic vocation! Jonah is commanded to “arise… go … and cry against” (1:2); he immediately “rose up to flee” (1:3). Reluctance to serve is a conventional feature of the genre of prophetic call (cf. Jer. 1:6). But Jonah’s total disobedience puzzles us, especially when we learn that his flight is “from the presence of YHWH.” Nineveh and Tarshish are geographic antipodes.

  • Nineveh, to the east,
    • is the later capital of Assyria, the very nation that would destroy and carry off Jonah’s people—the ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom—sixty years later.
    • The Assyrians were renowned for their power and gross cruelty, and allusions in our story recall the Flood and the judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah.
    • Thus we know Nineveh as a city whose power is a threat to Israel’s existence
    • and whose evil is antithetical to God’s will.
  • Tarshish, on the other hand,
    • lies somewhere in the far west and is a place where YHWH is not known (Isaiah 66:19).
    • Jonah, a servant fleeing his master’s sovereignty, also sees Tarshish as a refuge beyond YHWH’s domain.
    • Since the story depicts YHWH as the almighty creator God, it has placed Tarshish at the ends of the earth, where death and chaos begin.
    • Strangely, Tarshish also connotes luxury, desire, delight.
    • C. H. Gordon suggests that “whatever the original identification of Tarshish may have been, in literature and popular imagination it became a distant paradise.”
    • For Jonah, therefore, Tarshish may paradoxically represent a pleasant place of security that borders on nonexistence.

Prophets were thought to be servant-messengers who attended the divine court, “standing before YHWH’s presence” (as in 1 Kings 17:1), just as royal servants stood “before the presence” of their king. Jonah’s flight from YHWH’s presence is described as a series of descents (Hebrew yarad):

  • he “went-down”—to Joppa, into the ship, and into the innermost part of the ship.
  • He then lay down and fell into a deep sleep, the latter term again echoing the yarad descent pattern.
  • This motif—extremely common in Psalms—is continued in Jonah’s prayer, which describes his entering Sheol, the world of the dead (2:2-9).
  • The narrative, therefore, seems to be depicting Jonah’s flight from YHWH’s presence as a descent to the underworld.
  • Our prophet is taking a path that leads to death as he seeks to avoid the road to Nineveh.

The unusual term yarketei hasefina (“the innermost parts of the ship,” 1:5 [AT]) seems to be a word play on yarketei tsafon, which in Psalm 48 is equated with Mount Zion

  • (the city of our God,
  • the final refuge for Israel against the attacking nations)
  • and in Isaiah 14:12-19 is described as God’s dwelling place in the heavens
  • (the antipode of Sheol, the Pit, into which Lucifer has been brought down).

Why is the writer asking us to think of Zion, God’s dwelling place, as we read of Jonah’s descent into the hold of the ship?

  • Is the ship both a mini-Sheol and a mini-Zion,
  • or is there an antithetical relationship?

We are also given clues that this is no ordinary ship that is leaving the Joppa seaport. Jonah pays “her fare” [AT]; and when the storm hits, “the ship thought to be broken up” [AT]. Nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible are “fare” and “thought” used with inanimate objects. What kind of a maw has our hero entered in his descent from YHWH’s presence? The ship’s captain and crew are depicted quite sympathetically.

  • In contrast to our sleeping prophet, they resourcefully pull out all the stops in order to stay alive—praying to their gods, jettisoning their cargo, casting lots.
  • They know that their fate is in the hands of higher powers whose workings they cannot fathom (“if so be that God will think upon us, the we perish not,” 1:6;for thou, O Lord, hast done as it pleased thee,” 1:14).
  • They also do everything possible to save Jonah’s life. Jonah had descended, lain down, and slept. The captain tells him to “arise”; the crew tries to “return” [AT] to dry land.

Describing death, Job says

so man lieth down, and riseth not: till the heavens be no more, they shall not awake, not be raised out of their sleep” (14:12); “so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more. He shall return no more to his house” (7:9-10).

  • Ironically, the captain’s appeal to Jonah (“arise, call upon”) echoes the divine command in 1:2. The captain is appealing to Jonah to “get up” and pray to his God; but by implication he is pointing the way by which Jonah can “arise” from his death descent.
  • The crew are trying to steer the ship to shore, so that he can obey his divine commission; but by implication they are attempting to “return” him to the land of the living.
  • The sailor’s frantic activity highlights Jonah’s inactivity.

Unlike Jesus (see Mark 4:35-41), his sleeping in the storm suggests paralysis rather than faith. We must assume that, in response to the captain’s appeal, he continues to lie low and snore on. Taken out of context, his response in 1:9 sounds like a wonderful confession of faith. But he omits any confession of his disobedience, and his claim to fear YHWH rings hollow when contrasted with the growing piety of the sailors (see especially 1:16). We must join the crew and read the entire statement ironically: how does one escape “the God of heaven, which hath made the sea and the dry land,” by embarking on the high seas? Although Jonah does not mention his flight, the sailors immediately realize what he has done. Some interpreters see 1:12 reflecting growth in Jonah’s character.

  • He now has more compassion for the crew,
  • and, ready to accept God’s judgment for his disobedience,
  • he is willing to give up his life that the crew may survive.

But Jonah’s search for refuge from YHWH has been depicted as a descent toward death. This subconscious death wish is now reinforced by his request to be thrown into the sea. And even at the end of the story Jonah will still be claiming that death is preferable to life. Just as a lion summarily slays the disobedient prophet in 1 Kings 13, YHWH sends a great fish after Jonah: and the verb “to swallow up” never has a positive connotation in the Hebrew Bible. Korah and his followers were swallowed up by the earth/Sheol, as were Pharaoh and his chariots (Num. 16:28-34, Exod. 15:12). Thus YHWH seems to be reinforcing Jonah’s descent pattern—three days and three nights being the traditional time it takes to reach the underworld. Much to our surprise, Jonah prays; and the Hebrew word denotes an appeal for help in which, if appropriate, divine forgiveness is sought. We expect the prayer to be a lament, and indeed the 3/2 stress pattern of the lament genre dominates. The tense of the opening verb is ambiguous, so we don’t know at first whether to read “I cried” or “I cry.” Since laments begin with an appeal for help, we assume that we are reading Jonah’s cry for help. But as we read further, we discover that the prayer is a song of thanksgiving for having been delivered from death’s domain. Scholars have made various attempts to naturalize this part of the story. The majority maintain that Jonah’s prayer is a later insertion. But both in terminology (going down, calling out, steadfast love, vows and sacrifices) and in theme (casting, presence of God, idol worship, divine sovereignty) the song is closely tied to the rest of the story.

 

By setting us up to receive Jonah’s song as a lament, the narrative forces us to question how a prophet heading toward the underworld could sing of his deliverance from Sheol. Jonah has feared drowning; he describes his sinking into the seas as a descent to the city of the dead (2:6). Why, then, does he feel so secure in the belly of the fish which he thinks is delivering him from the belly of Sheol?

 

We know from 1:9 that Jonah is capable of making wonderful statements of faith in a context that turns every word to parody. Both the inner part of the Tarshish-bound ship and the belly of the fish give Jonah the same false, deathlike security. The prayer begins “I cried”—precisely the same action that Jonah had been commanded, by both YHWH and the captain, to carry out against Nineveh and in behalf of the ship. Having refused to cry out to save the others, he changes his tune when he himself faces the prospect of violent death. And when 2:3 continues: “for thou hadst cast me into the deep… I am cast out from thy presence” [AR], remember that it is Jonah who fled from the divine presence and who requested to be hurled into the sea. Jonah regards idolaters (and there is a clever wordplay in 2:8 that associates them with the sailors of chap.1 as deserters of hesed—a term indicating a chief characteristic of YHWH (translated as “mercy”), denoting a loving response performed within a covenant relationship.

 

In some songs of thanksgiving, as in Jonah’s, hesed can be virtually synonymous with God.

  • But the idol-worshiping sailors have forsaken their gods and fear YHWH!
  • It is Jonah who has forsaken his God; and, we will later discover, the main reason for his flight is God’s superabundant hesed (4:2).
  • In case we have missed this subtle contrast, the narrative permits Jonah to conclude his prayer with a promissory note: someday he will perform that which we know the sailors have already accomplished one thousand leagues above (1:16).

It is not strange that Jonah expresses his eagerness to return to theTemple, especially when there is no mention of his repentance or willingness to go to Nineveh?

  • Where is the fear of YHWH that he had owned to in 1:9?
  • Does he perceive his near-death in the waters as sufficient divine punishment?
  • Is he counting on divine hesed to overlook his disobedience and cancel his commission?
  • Is not the piety reflected in this song a bit too cozy?
  • To what extent is the story aligning the Temple with the ship’s hold and the fish’s belly—as yet another deathlike shelter that he hopes will protect him from fulfilling his divine commission?

In the Jonah story there are structural parallels between chapters 1 and 3, as well as between chapters 2 and 4. Chapter 4 also begins with a lament appeal from Jonah, to which YHWH responds with actions and questions. Although YHWH appoints the great fish in chapter 2, there is no verbal response to Jonah’s prayer.

 

The divine response, though muted, is still eloquent: YHWH commands the great fish to vomit; and if the narrative had wanted to achieve any effect other then satire, there are many other Hebrew words for “bringing forth” our hero onto dry land. Again we are disoriented. The fish which we had thought was carrying Jonah to his doom has indeed rescued him. Does Jonah’s deliverance confirm the viewpoint articulated in the prayer? I think not. The prayer closes with “Salvation is of the Lord (2:9)a key theme of the story; and to dramatize this very point, YHWH and the writer deliver Jonah by a means that our imagination cannot naturalize—by simply letting the text say that it is so. We have been subtly prepared for the just-as-miraculous deliverance that will soon take place in Nineveh. The second half of the story seems to return us to the beginning; but there are some differences, and we are asked to account for them. This time God gives the prophet a specific message, and Jonah now goes to Nineveh. We cannot be certain that Jonah’s oracle to the Ninevites is a faithful repetition of God’s words. Because the verbal repetition in 3:2-3 implies that Jonah is now complying with God’s commands, and because he will later turn on the deity for canceling the judgment he had pronounced, we can reasonably assume that “yet forty days…” (3:4) is indeed the divine proclamation. Knowing that Nineveh will be “overthrown” in “forty days”—words that, along with others, recall the unleashing of divine judgment in the Flood and Sodom and Gomorrah stories—Jonah may be more willing to comply. From his foiled flight he has learned that God is unrelenting in carrying out the divine will; thus he can assume that the oracle he brings will indeed come to pass.

 

The response of the Ninevites is unprecedented in the prophetic tradition:

  • Jonah barely enters the city and speaks five Hebrew words (not even introduced by “thus says the Lord”), and thereby instigates the most frantic reform ever heard of.
  • In a scene that is both comic and moving (we can imagine animals and servants in sackcloth; unwatered flocks and nobility “crying mightily unto God”), the sinful city instantly and completely turns itself around.
  • Through Jonah God “has cried unto” [AT]Nineveh; and now Nineveh ‘cries unto” that God.
  • The Ninevites have “turned from” their “evil”; and now God “turns away” from the “evil” that had been planned for the city.

This episode is replete with allusions to Jeremiah 36, in which the king of Judah scorns Jeremiah’s warnings of impending judgment onJerusalem. The narrative suggests a contrast between the bitter experience of the prophets in Jerusalem and the amazing success of Jonah in Nineveh. Had the writer used realistic narrative to depict Nineveh’s repentance, we would have wondered whether the city’s new heart could possibly be genuine and whether the remission of divine punishment was deserved. But the story’s comic exaggeration permits us to accept the amazing transformation as “fact” precisely because we are asked to imagine it as a beautiful fantasy. We will soon learn that Jonah is unwilling to accept what has happened; thus the narrative has driven a wedge between reader and prophet—between the justice we had hoped would fall on the sinful city and the mercy we are made willing to imagine. The story establishes a relationship

  • between the great fish (in which Jonah remains three days and nights)
  • and the great city (which requires three days to traverse).
  • Both function as enclosures, and Jonah perceives them antithetically.

The great fish is aligned with the ship’s hold, Tarshish, and perhaps the Temple in Jerusalem—shelters that offer the illusion of security but in fact result in a deep sleep that brings one down to the city of Death. For Jonah the only negative enclosures are the city of Death, from which he barely escaped in the heart of the sea, and the city of Nineveh, from which he attempted to flee. As readers we begin the story by sharing Jonah’s perception; but the possible Temple/fish/ship/ Tarshish equation, coupled with the amazing conversion of Nineveh, prompts a realignment of these images. The narrative has consistently called Nineveh “the great city”; but in 3:3b the Hebrew reads “and Nineveh was a great city for God[AT]. Jonah made the traditional equation between city of Nineveh and city of Death; but the story suggests that the opposite is potentially true. The key feature of Nineveh’s reversal is its turning away from violence. The larger context, however, is the community’s symbolic association with the world of the dead—although ashes, sackcloth, and fasting. Whereas Jonah’s disobedience precipitated his descent to the world of the dead, Nineveh’s symbolic death is part of a return from its evil way and an appeal to God that it be spared. No prophet within the biblical tradition has ever had such success.

  • Jonah flees his divine commission, and the entire crew ends up worshiping YHWH.
  • He speaks five words in Nineveh, and the whole city instantly turns away from its “evil.”
  • But as God repents of the “evil” that has been planned for the city, this “evil” Jonah “a great evil” (4:1) [AT].

In the context of a petition prayer (the same word used for his activity in the belly of the fish in 2:1) we finally learn why Jonah has fled his divine commission. For the third time he proclaims a statement of faith from Israel’s religious traditions (4:2; see Exod. 34:6, Joel 2:13). The first two, taken out of context, many initially be understood as positive affirmations. The narrative does not permit such a reading this time: I attempted to flee your realm because I knew that, ultimately, you are a merciful God. But why is Jonah so upset? A strong line of interpretation that goes at least as far back as the early rabbis proposes that Jonah is angry because he has been made to look foolish. When the judgment oracle does not come to pass, the prophet and his deity become the objects of taunting abuse. But we find no hint of this in the story. It seems more likely to me that Jonah’s problem is theological. Unlike Israel’s ancient Near Eastern neighbors, who perceived their gods as capricious monarchs, the Exodus-Sinai experience convinced Israel that its God—the creator and redeemer God—was also a just God. Divine justice could sometimes take three or four generations to work itself out; but ultimately, Israel believed, people would receive their just deserts. And there could be no question about what Nineveh deserved.

 

How could God possibly be swayed by one sudden change of heart, blotting out long generations of iniquity? If divine mercy can so easily cancel out divine justice, then life is arbitrary and capricious. Jonah’s theological problem is the reverse of Job’s. Whereas suffering causes Job to probe the caprice of divine sovereignty, the sparing of Nineveh drives Jonah to do the same. For both protagonists YHWH’s rule must be expressed through a well-ordered universe. The story has satirized Jonah as a prophet whose piety is out of sync with his behavior. But Jonah, strangely, is also depicted as a man of faith driven to challenge and disobey God out of a zeal for divine integrity. Echoing the descent theme of chapters 1-2, Jonah would rather die than live in a world where a just God no longer reigns (4:3, 9). In 4:5-11 we find that Jonah has not given up: he camps out east of the city, probably in the hope that Nineveh will falter (can a leopard change its spots?) and that divine judgment will finally fall. The booth the prophet builds for himself reminds us of the shelter images that have that have recurred throughout the story. Israel is commanded to build and dwell in booths annually as an act of worship (“rejoicing”; Deut. 16:13-14, Neh.8:15-17); and the fact that Jonah also “rejoices a great rejoicing” [AT] in his booth suggests an association between shelter and worship. Psalms 31:20 uses the booth as a figure for the divine presence in which those who “fear” God are “hidden” (Hebrew tsafan; compare the yarketei hasefina in which Jonah hides); and Isaiah 4:6 envisions YHWH’s covering Zion with a protective booth to “shade” it from the heat. Is Jonah’s booth a dim reflection of Zion—of the Temple that had been the hoped-for destination of his song? If Jonah has shaded himself with the booth, why does YHWH add the shade of the gourd? And how does that “deliver” (the Hebrew has a wordplay with ”shade”) Jonah from his “grief” (Hebrew “evil,” that is, anger)? We should note that the first half of the story has concluded with a divine “preparation” that functions as a thematic resolution: Jonah had repeatedly “descended,” so YHWH “prepared” a great fish “to swallow” [him] up.” Paradoxically, however, the fish both took Jonah all the way down and spewed him forth toward his commission. The same pattern obtains in chapter 4 if we interpret the three divine “preparations” in verses 6-8 as one interrelated sequence. Jonah has become hot-angry after YHWH had spared Nineveh; now YHWH intends to “deliver/shade” him from his anger by really heating things up. Of the many protective shelters in the Jonah story (Tarshish, ship’s hold, fish’s belly, Temple, booth), three have allusive connections to Mount Zion. Ancient Near Eastern iconography is replete with figures of the tree of life that flourishes atop the divine mountain but is attacked by a serpent. It is possible that gourd and worm are caricatures of tree of life and serpent, appropriate images in a satiric story? Psalms strongly connects Mount Zion with the cosmic mountain; and the Jerusalem Temple—YHWH’s dwelling place on Zion—may contain symbolism associated with the Edenic tree of life. Moreover, the author now introduces the form “Lord God” (4:6)—the divine name in the Eden story. Lord God, it would seem, has reestablished and then destroyed both Zion and Eden in order to “deliver” Jonah from his “evil.” How is this a deliverance?

 

The prophet who in 4:3 would rather die than live in a capricious, amoral universe now asks for death rather than live in a world without divinely provided shelter. Chapter 4 begins with Jonah’s complaint about the divine hesed (mercy). YHWH concludes the story, using the same number of words as Jonah, with a lesson on “pity” (Hebrew hus, perhaps used because of its phonetic associations with hesed). Jonah told that his pity for the withered gourd is misdirected, as he is forced to contrast his feelings for “Nineveh, that great city,” with the pity that God has shown (4:9-11). YHWH, as creator, has the prerogative of showing compassion for the world in its entirety—including creatures that don’t know up from down. Jonah may still seek secure enclosures and perceive all that is outside as life-threatening. But God’s world—even Nineveh—is able to repent its evil. In fact, as the fate of the exposed Nineveh suggests, it is more life-threatening to seek out a secure refuge. The gourd (like Tarshish, Eden, and perhaps Zion) has been blown away; the ship and the fish spew one forth. In a world that offers no eternally secure shelters, Jonah is urged to understand (and perhaps emulate) the divine pity. The Judean community had a very difficult time reestablishing itself inJerusalem after the Exile. The eschatological hopes of Isaiah 40-55 did not come to pass, even after the Temple was rebuilt (see Haggai). The resulting despair and anger are reflected in the book of Malachi, where the primary issue is divine justice: perhaps we Israelites deserved the exile in Babylonia; but how can YHWH hold back judgment on the other nations that deserve it even more? Jonah’s paralysis and withdrawal also seem to result from his anger over divine injustice (see 4:2). He seeks secure shelters that inhibit his fulfilling the divine will and thus separate him from God and humanity; and yet, paradoxically, these same shelters have strong allusive associations with the divine cultic presence, in which the prophet can rejoice and feel protected from the rest of the world. Since the story’s conclusion invites us to side with God over against Jonah, we can guess that one of its targets was the Zadokite priesthood—with its strongTemple Presence theology—which was rising to power soon after the return from the Exile (ca. 538-400 B.C.E.). The prayer sung in the belly of the great fish provides the key to the story’s genre. What appears to be a supplication for help becomes a song of thanksgiving as it is sung by a man descending toward Sheol.

 

When the song’s piety becomes sickeningly sweet or unwittingly perceptive (“Salvation is of the Lord”), the prophet is vomited onto dry land just as he is about to hit the sea bottom. Such a scene is close to farce; since the story is also quite serious, however, I would argue that satire is a more appropriate designation of genre. There is no evidence of cultural contact between the writer and the classical satire that was probably evolving in other parts of the Mediterranean world at the time. But it does seem to give the modern reader the most useful handle on the story. In satire we find incongruous, distorted events; a mixture of literary genres; an image of violence at the heart of the story; journeys as typical settings; and relatively little emphasis on plot or character development. The author of Jonah has skillfully used irony in order to distance us from the hero while also keeping the story on its narrow path between invective and farce.

A Literary Approach to the PSALMS

[Originally posted in 2013.  This is from THE LITERARY GUIDE TO THE BIBLE which we have featured in similar articles that focus on the different literary genres found in the “Old Testament” or as we acknowledge it in its original, the Hebrew Bible or the Tanach/Tanakh.  Other posts from this same MUST READ resource are:

Reformatted and highlighted for this post.]

Psalms – by Robert Alter

 Psalms, together with Proverbs and perhaps the Song of Songs, is distinguished from all other biblical books by its manifestly anthological nature. We know little about how the anthology was made or when most of the pieces included in it were composed. Some rather general inferences, however, about the contexts of these poems can be drawn and may help us get a bearing on the kind of literary activity reflected in the collection.

 

The composition of psalms was common to most of the ancient Near Eastern literatures that have come down to us. (See the essay by Jonas C. Greenfield, “The Hebrew Bible and Canaanite Literature,” in this volume.) From the Ugaritic texts that antedate the earliest biblical psalms by at least three or four centuries, we may conclude that the Hebrew poets did not hesitate to borrow images, phrases, or even whole sequences of lines from the Syro-Palestinian pagan psalmodic tradition, written in a language closely cognate to Hebrew. The borrowing occasionally may have gone in the opposite direction as well: a recently deciphered text from second-century B.C.E. Egypt, composed in Aramaic and written in Egyptian demotic characters, looks as though it might be a pagan, or rather syncretistic, adaptation of Psalm 20.

 

As these two widely separated instances of borrowing in different directions may suggest, psalms were a popular poetic form in the ancient Near East for a very long stretch of time. The biblical collection is composed of poems probably written over a period of at least five centuries. A few late poems, such as Psalm 137 (“By the waters ofBabylon …”), refer explicitly to historical conditions after the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E. Other psalms may well go back to the early generations of the Davidic dynasty, that is, the tenth and ninth centuries B.C.E. It may not be an anachronism, moreover, for the author of the Samuel story to put a psalm of thanksgiving (not one included in the canonical collection) in the mouth of a pre-monarchic figure such as Hannah, Samuel’s mother (1 Sam. 2), though the reference to the king in the last line (v. 10) is obviously anachronistic. It seems plausible enough that psalms quite similar to the ones in our collection were already in use at local sanctuaries such as Shiloh before the cult was unified in Jerusalem; and the recitation of the psalm by Hannah, a woman of the people who in her barrenness had improvised her own simple and touching prose prayer (1 Sam. 1), may reflect an assumption by the writer that the psalm was a profoundly popular form, a vehicle accessible to all for crying out in distress, or, as here, for expressing gratitude to God.

 

Precise dating of most psalms is impossible, though certain features of later biblical Hebrew can be detected in some of the poems. (Some psalms appear to allude to specific historical events, but in ways so teasingly elliptical that scholars rarely agree about what the actual events might be.) In any case, psalm composition through the whole Old Testament period is stylistically conservative; there is a sense of a densely continuous literary tradition, evolving very slowly over the centuries. In narrative, when you read a late book like Esther or Daniel, you at once know you are engaged with a different style, a different set of literary techniques and conventions, from those that inform Genesis or Samuel. On the other hand, you can read two psalms that, for all anyone can tell, may be as far apart in time as Chaucer and Wordsworth, and yet justifiably perceive them as virtual contemporaries in idiom, poetic form, and generic assumptions.

 

Authorship, as with all biblical books except the Prophets, is even more of an unsolvable puzzle than dating. Although the tradition embodied in 1 and 2 Samuel in fact conceives King David as both poet and warrior, scholarship long ago concluded that the superscription “a psalm of David” which heads many of the poems is the work of a later editor, as are the ascriptions of other psalms to Asaph, Ethan the Ezrahite, and so forth. Indeed, it is not at all clear that these superscriptions were intended to affirm authorship, for the Hebrew particle le in these formulas that is usually rendered “of” does not necessarily imply an authorial “by” and might rather indicate “in the manner of,” “according to the standard of,” or sometimes “for the use of.”

 

The sociology of psalm composition also remains a matter of conjecture. It has been proposed that there was a professional guild of psalm-poets associated with the Temple cult in Jerusalem and probably recruited from Priestly or Levitical ranks. Such poets would have composed liturgical pieces for the rites in the Temple and would have also produced supplications and thanksgiving psalms for the use of—perhaps for purchase by—individual worshipers. All this is plausible but undemonstrable. In any event, the popular character of the Psalms, the fact that the psalm-poets never developed the kind of complex and innovative style found in Job or the shrewd intellectuality of the poetry of Proverbs, makes one suspect that psalm composition may not have been exclusively limited to a small professional circle in Jerusalem.

 

The organization of the book is the work of editors in the Second Temple period. That work was completed by the time the Septuagint translation of the Bible into Greek was prepared in the second century B.C.E., because the Septuagint has essentially the same order and chapter divisions as those that have come down to us in the Masoretic text. There is, in the various traditions of late antiquity, a little wobbling as to whether certain individual psalms are actually single poems or conflations of more than one psalm, and so the total number of pieces in the collection wanders between 147 and 150, with the normative Hebrew textual tradition finally settling for the roundness of the latter number. It is highly likely that there were originally competing anthologies of psalms which the later editors then spliced together, occasionally leaving a little duplication between different groups of poems (as in the doubling of Ps. 14 in 53).

 

The oldest of these collections is thought to be the so-called Davidic Psalms (Ps. 3-41, with Ps. 1 and 2 serving as a preface to the whole collection), and the most recent, Psalms 107-150. Tradition divides the poems into five books, marking the end of all but the last with an editorial formula of closure that begins with “blessed” and ends with “amen.” It would appear that this division into five was superimposed on what was initially an assemblage of four small collections in order to effect an alignment with the Five Books of Moses.

For the ancient Hebrew literary imagination, numbers had more of a symbolic than a purely quantifying function, and this piece of editorial symbolism would have borne witness to the centrality that Psalms had come to enjoy in national consciousness by the time of the Second Temple.

Genre

Probably no single aspect of Psalms has received more scholarly attention in recent generations than the issue of genre. The pioneer studies were done early in the century by the German founder of biblical form-criticism, Hermann Gunkel. He discriminated seven general categories of psalms and a variety of mixed types. As might have been expected, his successors tried to refine his divisions and variously multiplied or redivided the categories. The efforts of form-criticism have clearly enhanced our understanding of Psalms because in no other area of biblical literature is genre so pronounced, with such compelling consequences for modes of expression. There are, nevertheless, certain ways in which the form-critics misconceived the phenomenon of genre in Psalms.

 

Gunkel himself, being concerned with dating and development, like so many modern biblical scholars, tended to assume one could plot a curve from simple versions of a particular psalmodic genre, which must be early, to complex versions, which must be late. By this logic, of course, one could demonstrate that Imagist poetry considerably antedated The Faerie Queene, and Gunkel’s evolutionist notions of literary history have been generally rejected by subsequent scholarship. His determination to uncover the so-called life setting for particular psalms has proved more stubbornly contagious.

 

Now, it is obvious enough that some of the Psalms were designed for very specific liturgical or cultic occasions. A particularly clear instance is the pilgrim songs, which appear to have been framed to be chanted by, or perhaps to, worshipers as they ascended the Temple Mount and entered the sacred precincts (Ps. 24) or as they marched around the looming ramparts of Zion (Ps. 48). But there is surely a good deal of misplaced concreteness in the energy expended by scholars to discover in psalm after psalm the libretto to some unknown cultic music-drama. The result in some instances has been to weave around these poems a kind of historical romance under the guise of scholarship, using the tenuous threads of comparative anthropology, as in the persistent conjecture that the psalms referring to God’s kingship were used for an annual enthronement ceremony in which the Lord was reinvested as king. In fact it is by no means self-evident that all the psalms were used liturgically, just as it is far from certain that they were all actually sung, though of course some obviously were, as the indications in the text of musical instruments, antiphonal responses, and the like make clear. Though some of these poems were surely “performed” in various Temple rites, we need to bear in mind that the psalmists, like other kinds of poets, often expressed a strong vision of reality through the imaginative leap of metaphor, and it is surely unwise to seek to reduce all these metaphors to literal cultic facts.

 

The most pervasive form-critical misconception about psalmodic genre is the notion that genre, apart from the occasional mixed type, is a fixed entity. This leaves the critic chiefly with the task of identifying formulaic sameness from one instance of the genre to the next. The evidence of literary history elsewhere and later suggests that, quite to the contrary, writers tend to be restive within the limits of genre, repeatedly find ways to juggle and transform generic conventions, formulaic or otherwise, and on occasion push genre beyond its own formal or thematic limits. We are likely to perceive the poetic richness of Psalms more finely if we realize that there is a good deal of such refashioning of genre in the collection, even when the recurrence of certain formulas tells us that a particular generic background is being invoked. I shall try to make this process clearer through illustration, but first a brief outline of the principal genres of Psalms may be helpful.

  • The usual Hebrew title for the collection is Tehillim, “Praises,” a noun derived from a verb frequently used by the psalmists, hallel, “to praise,” and familiar to Western readers in the form hallelujah (“praise the Lord”). Perhaps this designation was chosen because of the prominence of poems celebrating God’s greatness in the Temple rites, or even because of the sequence of five hallelujah poems (Ps. 146-150) that forms a kind of coda to the collection.
  • In fact, however, the total number of supplications—well over a third of all the poems in the collection—is slightly larger than the number of psalms of praise.
  • These two categories are the two principal kinds of psalms; together they make up more than two-thirds of the collection. Each may reasonably be divided into subcategories. Some supplications have—-
    • an individual character (for example, entreaties to God in the throes of physical illness)
    • and some are collective (pleas for help in time of famine, plague, siege, or exile).
    • Psalms or praise may be—
      • general celebrations of God’s majestic attributes,
      • of his power as Creator manifested in the visible creation,
      • or they may be thanksgiving poems, which, again,
        • can be either individual
        • or collective in character.

 

In addition to these two dominant categories, there are various lesser genres, most of which are represented by only half a dozen or so psalms:

  • Wisdom psalms (there are actually a dozen of these, Psalms 1 and 37 being particularly clear examples, and Wisdom motifs also appear in a good many supplications);
  • monarchic psalms (for example, Ps. 21 and 72);
  • pilgrim songs (in addition to the two mentioned above, the most poignant is probably Ps. 84); historical psalms (essentially, catechistic recapitulations of the major way-stations of early Israelite history, such as Ps. 68 and 78).
  • One might also argue for the profession of faith or innocence (for example, Ps. 23 and 62) as a distinct genre.

 

A brief consideration of the supplication will suggest the range of uses to which a single psalmodic genre may be put. The supplication is essentially a poetic cry of distress to the Lord in time of critical need.

  • It may be short or long;
  • it often refers to enemies,
  • but these may be either actual military adversaries,Psalm 6, in which the enemies bridge the second and the third of these three types, offers a neat generic paradigm of the supplication:
    • or shadowy underhanded types somehow scheming against the speaker,
    • or simply mean-spirited detractors who would crow in triumph were he to succumb to physical illness.

 

For the leader, with instrumental music on the sheminith,

       a psalm of David

Lord, chastise me not in your anger,

   punish me not in your wrath.

Have mercy on me, Lord, for I languish,

   heal me, Lord, for my bones are shaken.

My very life is sorely shaken,

   and you, O Lord, how long?

Return, O Lord, and rescue my life,

   Deliver me for the sake of your faithfulness.

For there’s no praise of you in death,

   in Sheol who can acclaim you?

I am weary from my groaning,

   each night I drench my bed,

      with tears I melt my couch.

My eyes waste away with vexation,

   are worn out from all my foes.

Depart from me, all evildoers,

   for the Lord hears the sound of my weeping.

The Lord hears my supplication,

   my prayer he will grant.

Let all my enemies be shamed, sorely shaken,

   let them turn back, be shamed, at once! 

This supplication begins with a plea that God relent from his fury, making abundant use of verbal formulas that also mark many other instances of the genre: “Have mercy on me,” honeini, a verb cognate with the noun tehinah, “supplication,” in verse 9: “heal me”; “return, O Lord”; and that most imperative formula of the genre, often used elsewhere with repetitive insistence, “O Lord, how long?” The argument that God should save the suppliant because in the oblivion of the underworld none can praise the Lord is a conventional motif shared by dozens of supplications. Equally conventional is the concluding affirmation of the Lord’s responsiveness to the suppliant’s prayer and the evocation—the verbs of the last verse could be construed as either a wish or an actual prediction—of the enemies’ dismay. Another, final instance of convention is the neatly antithetical closural effect in which the evildoers are “sorely shaken,” just as the speaker’s bones and inner being were shaken at the beginning.

 

Psalm 6 thus gives us a clear picture of the supplication in terms of structure, theme, and formulaic devices; and in fact a good many psalms are built on precisely this plan. But more interesting are the repeated divergences—sometimes rather surprising ones—from the paradigm.

 

Psalm 13 begins with an anaphoric series of “how long” and conjures up a desperate image of the suppliant’s imminent demise, yet it concludes on this note:

But I trust in your faithfulness,

   my heart exults in your deliverance.

I sing to the Lord,

   for he has requited me.   (vv. 5-6)

There is nothing optative or predictive about the verbs here: the deliverance is stated, in the surge of faith at the end, as an already accomplished fact. What this means is that the poem, though it is an exemplary instance of the supplication, is retrospectively transformed by the last verse into a thanksgiving psalm. The poetic process at work here is more dynamic, less mechanical, than what is implied by the usual scholarly notion of hybrids or mixed types.

 

Often, when the types are in fact mixed, there is actually a tight interweaving of different generic strands from the beginning of the poem to the end, which produces a mutual reinforcement of different thematic emphases and expressive resources. Thus, Psalm 26 strongly qualifies as a supplication, for the speaker begins by asking God to vindicate him, invokes the malicious enemies from whom he pleads to be rescued, and concludes with a prayer that he will once more be able to walk a smooth way, praising the Lord. But the poem is also formally a profession of innocence; and in the language the speaker uses, proclaiming that he has never sat with the wicked or entered the assembly of evildoers, Wisdom motifs are prominent as well. These introduce a notion of causal logic into the supplication, for one knows from the Wisdom psalms proper (compare Ps. 1), as well from Proverbs, that he who avoids the council of the wicked will, by virtue of the divine scheme of justice, be blessed with length of days.

 

The most intriguing instances of the expansion of the limits of genre in Psalms involve a displacement or reordering of the expected themes. Psalm 39 is a supplication in time of sickness, properly concluding with a plea that God hear the speaker’s prayer, but the sole mention of illness does not occur till the tenth of the psalm’s thirteen verses. Before that, the suppliant stresses his need to stay silent and the impossibility, in his anguish, of doing that, and from silence he moves to a meditation on the terrible transience of all human life. Instead of the formulaic imperatives “have mercy on me,” “heal me,” he implores God, “Let me know my end/and what is the measure of my days, / I would know how fleeting I am” (v. 4). The last note of this somber, moving poem, then, is not an image of frustrated foes but an evocation of the speaker’s own imminent end, the final word in the Hebrew being “I-am-not” (‘eyneni).

 

Psalm 90 pushes still further this realignment of emphases in the genre. By degrees, we learn that the poem is a collective supplication—first, from the allusions to God’s wrath and then, late in the poem, through the use of the formula “return, O Lord—how long?” (v. 13). But before we become aware of the occasion for the plea, which is some unspecified affliction that has befallen the community, the psalm is manifestly one of the great biblical evocations of the ephemerality of mere human existence against the backdrop of God’s eternality, and this, rather than the plea for help, seems its most urgent subject: “For a thousand years in your eyes / are like yesterday gone, / like a watch in the night” (v. 4).

 

One final example should suffice to illustrate the general principle that genre in Psalms is very often not a locked frame but a point of departure for poetic innovation. Psalm 85 is a collective supplication, imploring God to restore Israel to its land after the nation’s defeat and exile. But, quite remarkably, it begins not with a plea but with a series of verbs in the perfect tense, confidently presenting the restoration as an accomplished fact:

You have favored, Lord, your land,

   you have restored Jacob’s condition [others: turned back

      the captivity of Jacob],

you have forgiven the iniquity of your people … (vv. 2-3)

It is only in verse 4 that the poet finally uses the expected imperative “return, God of our deliverance,” followed by the formulaic “will you forever be incensed against us?” But just four brief verses are devoted to such language of actual entreaty, and then, in keeping with the ringing optimism of the initial lines, the last half of the poem (vv. 7-13) is a luminous vision of national restoration, very much in accord with the messianic theme of the literary Prophets, and hardly what one would expect in a supplication:

Faithfulness and truth will meet,

   justice and well-being kiss,

truth springs up from the earth,

   justice looks down from heaven.   (vv. 10-11)

Style

What most characterizes the style of Psalms is its pointed and poignant traditionalism. Figurative language is abundantly used (though occasionally there are poems, such as Ps. 94, that avoid it), but there are few surprises of the sort encountered in the imagery of Job or of the Prophets. Wordplay and other virtuoso effects on invention are less prominent than in other kinds of biblical poetry, and for the most part the power of the poem does not depend on brilliant local effects but builds cumulatively through sequences of lines, or from the beginning of the poem to the end.

 

There are, to be sure, individual lines that are in themselves quite arresting and as such have become part of the Western treasure-house of memorable bits of poetry. But even a single instance of these will suggest the link between the force of such striking moments and the traditionalism of the poetic idiom:

As a heart yearns for channels of water,

   so my soul yearns for you, God.

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.

   O when shall I come to appear before God? (42:1-2)

In a semiarid climate where wadis turn into dry gulches in the summer and the parched, rocky landscape is enlivened by the occasional lush miracle of an oasis, it is understandable that poets should make running water a conventional figure for refreshment, restoration, life itself. Animal imagery is also common enough in Psalms, though it is more often attached to beasts of prey and used to represent situations of menacing violence (for example, in an urgent supplication, such as Ps. 22, the speaker’s enemies are a pack of sharp-toothed curs). It is not so common to compare the soul or inner being (nefesh) to an animal, and in the first line here that simile gives the conventional image of longing for water a small but crucial shock of immediacy. The thirstiness is then spelled out in the second verse with a simple, striking metaphoric equation: the living God equals fresh water, which in fact would be called “living water” in biblical Hebrew. And since, for the Israelite imagination, the living God has chosen for himself in Zion a local habitation where one “appears before God” at the pilgrim festivals, Jerusalem itself, in the implied metaphor of the second half of the line, is conceived as a kind of oasis in the wilderness of the world, the sacred wellspring of water/life/ God.

 

As happens at later points in literary history—there are analogues, for example, in medieval Arabic and Hebrew poetry, French neoclassical drama, English Augustan verse—this is a kind of poetry in which the strength and beauty of the individual poem are usually realized through a deft restatement or refashioning of the expected. Thus the speakers in these various poems represent the state of protection they seek from God or for which they thank him as a shield or buckler, a tower or fortress, a sheltering wing, a canopy or booth, cooling shade; the dangers that beset them are ravening beasts, serpents, arrows, burning coals, pestilence. The poets seem perfectly comfortable with this set repertoire of images, only rarely attempting to reach beyond it. Indeed, the familiarity of the metaphors and of the formulaic locutions through which they are often conveyed is precisely their chief advantage. The counters of poetic idiom have been worn to a lovely smoothness by long usage, and that is why they sit so comfortably in the hand of the poet, or—perhaps more relevantly—in the hand of the ordinary worshiper, in biblical times and ever since, for whom these poems were made.

 

Psalm 91 is a characteristic instance of how a psalmist shapes from the elements of this traditional repertoire a poem with an individual character stamped with the eloquence of faith.

You will dwell in the shelter of the Most High,

   in the shadow of Shaddai abide!

I will say of the Lord: my refuge and fortress,

   my God in whom I trust.

For he will save you from the fowler’s snare,

   from the blighting plague.

With his pinion he will cover you,

   beneath his wings you’ll take refuge,

      his faithfulness, a shield and buckler.

You shall not fear from terror at night,

   from the arrow that flies by day,

From the plague that stalks in the dark,

   from the scourge that despoils at noon.

A thousand at your side will fall,

   ten thousand at your right,

      yet you it shall not reach.

You will soon see it with your eyes,

   the requiting of the wicked you’ll see.

—For you, O Lord, are my refuge!—

   The Most High you have made your abode.

No evil will befall you,

   no illness enter your tents.

For he will order his messengers

   to guard you on all your ways.

They will bear you on their palms

   lest your foot be bruised by stone.

You will tread on cub and viper,

   trample the lion and asp.

“Because he delighted in me, I shall deliver him,

   I shall safeguard him for knowing my name,

Let him but call me and I shall answer—

   I am with him in distress,

      I shall rescue him and grant him honor.

With length of days I shall sate him

   and show him my saving strength.” 

This poem’s imagery is a kind of small thesaurus of the very stockpile of conventional figures we have just reviewed, but the effect of the whole is a strong and moving poetic statement, not a facile rehearsal of the familiar. This power may be due at least in part to the mutual reinforcement that occurs among related images. If there is a hidden nerve center in the poem, it is the verb “cover” (yasekh) in verse 4, a cognate of the noun sukkah, a thatched booth in which one takes shelter from the sun. The poem begins with “shelter” (literally, “hiding place”) and “shadow,” terms of protection that are immediately stepped up into “refuge” and “fortress,” just as the gentle covering of “wings” in the first two versets of verse 4 becomes the weightier “shield and buckler” of the end of the line. This local move participates in a general tendency of biblical poetry toward an intensification or concretization of images and themes both within the line and in the poem as a whole. (See the essay “The Characteristics of Ancient Hebrew Poetry” in this volume.) In a similar fashion, the repeated assertion of shelter in the opening lines becomes a more sharply focused representation of the divinely favored man walking about untouched as thousands fall all around him. This is followed by the active intervention of an agency of protection, God’s messengers or angels, who carry the man on their palms, allowing no sharp stone to hurt his feet—which, in a final intensifying maneuver, in fact can safely trample the most savage beasts. The psalm then ends climactically with three lines of direct discourse by God—who, in the shifting grammatical voices of the poem, was referred to only in the second and third person until this point. The divine source and guarantor, in other words, of all the remarkable safeguarding that has been imaged in the poem, now reveals himself directly, affirming his immediate involvement with the God-fearing man (“I am with him in distress”) and the unswerving resolution to protect him and grant him long life.

 

What often accompanies this traditionalism of poetic idiom in Psalms is a bold simplicity of language. The notion of simplicity, however, must be adopted with caution because it has been used too readily to attribute to these poems a kind of sublime naiveté, to see in them a purely spontaneous outpouring of feeling. In fact many of the psalms show evidence of fairly intricate rhetorical and structural elaboration. The “simplicity” of Psalms is rather the ability of subtle poets, sure in their tradition, to call on archetypal language, to take unabashed advantage of the power of repetition, and, when the occasion seems to require it, to displace figuration by stark literal assertion.

 

Psalm 121, a very different sort of poem about divine protection, displays just these stylistic features:

A song of ascents

I lift my eyes to the mountains—

   from whence will my help come?

My help is from the Lord,

   maker of heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot stumble,

   your guardian will not slumber.

Look, he neither sleeps nor slumbers,

   the guardian of Israel!

The Lord’s your guardian,

   the Lord’s your shade at your right hand.

By day the sun will not strike you,

   nor the moon by night.

The Lord will guard you from all evil,

   he will guard your life.

The Lord will guard your going and coming

   now and forevermore.

The archetypal sweep of the poetic landscape in this brief piece is remarkable. The speaker lifts his eyes to the mountains and, in a characteristic biblical association of terms, moves from mountains to heaven and earth and their Maker. A second binary pair that harks back to Genesis 1 is quickly introduced, day/sun and night/moon. The poem is a powerful realization of the meaning of “guarding” and “guardian,” the terms recurring, with anaphoric insistence, six times in eight lines. Metaphoric elaboration is not allowed to intervene in this process of realization. The only weak candidates for figures of speech in the poem are the minimal synecdoche of the slipping foot in verse 3 and the conventional “shade” for shelter in verse 5, which is immediately literalized in the next line as a protection against sunstroke and moonstroke (the latter perhaps referring to madness supposedly caused by exposure to the moon). The point of the poem is that the Lord is quite literally a guardian or watchman who never sleeps, who always has his eyes open to keep you from harm. The concluding note of benediction on “forevermore” is, it might be argued, a formulaic device for ending a psalm, but here it ties in beautifully with the beginning of the poem because an arc has been traced from the eternity behind mankind when heaven and earth were made to the eternity stretching out ahead. Altogether, the poem is a quintessential expression of the poetic beauty of Psalms in its artful use of a purposefully limited, primary language to suggest a kind of luminous immediacy in the apprehension of the world through the eyes of faith.

 

Structure

Elsewhere in the biblical corpus, the boundaries of poems are often ambiguous. Where the traditional chapter divisions might seem to imply a single poem in Proverbs or the Prophets or the Song of Songs, scholars have often argued for a splicing together of two or three poems or for a collage of fragments from several poems. In Psalms, on the other hand, there are very often clear markers of beginnings and endings in the formulaic devices we have already noted in connection with genre, and in almost all instances the chapter divisions dependably indicate individual poems. Since many of the psalms were, after all, fashioned for public use, it is not surprising that the psalm-poets should by and large favor symmetrical forms in which poetic statement is rounded off or tied up by an emphatic balancing of beginning  and end.

 

The most common expression of this formal predilection is the so-called envelope structure—in fact a structure popular in many biblical genres—in which significant terms introduced at the beginning are brought back prominently at the end. The extreme version of the envelope structure would be the use of a refrain at the beginning and end of a psalm, as in Psalm 8, which opens with the declaration “Lord, our master, / how majestic is your name in all the earth,” then scans creation vertically from heaven to man at the midpoint to the land and sea “beneath his feet,” and concludes by repeating the opening line.

 

A longer and more complicated instance of envelope structure is offered by Psalm 107. This thanksgiving psalm, which reviews God’s mercies in rescuing his people from the trials of exile on land and sea, begins with a formula that occurs in other poems: “Praise the Lord, for he is good, / for his faithfulness is forever.” The division between the first and second movements of the poem (verse 8) is marked by a refrainlike variation on this opening line: “Let them praise the Lord for his faithfulness, / his wondrous deeds for the sons of man.” These words recur verbatim as a refrain marking discrete segments of the poem in verses 15, 21, and 31. The very last verse (43) sums up the imperative to celebrate God’s many bounties in the following words: “He who is wise will heed these things, / he will take note of the faithfulness of the Lord.” The poet thus avoids the regularity of an explicit concluding refrain, but the key concept that began the poem, the faithfulness (or “loving-kindness,” hesed) of the Lord, rings forth at the end, with the order and syntactic relation of the two component nouns changed, and “faithfulness” used in the plural (in the Hebrew), perhaps as a concluding indication of all the different mercies of the Lord that the poem has evoked.

 

The role of the refrain in Psalm 107 points to a more general possibility of structuration in Psalms, the subdivision of individual poems into strophes. This is an aspect of Psalms that we are just beginning to understand, but it may be that there are strophic divisions in many of the longer poems. The perception of such formal poetic structure could in some cases provide a key to otherwise elusive meanings. To cite an extreme instance, Psalm 68 has posed such problems of seeming incoherence that many scholars have embraced W. F. Albright’s suggestion that it is not a poem at all but a catalogue of first lines from no longer extant psalms. J. P. Fokkelman, on the other hand, makes a plausible case for a cogent structure here in formal divisions: going from small to large, he designates them as strophes (a term he uses to designate a cluster of two or three lines), stanzas, and sections.

 

Almost all of the small units he discriminates are marked by a term for God—usually, ‘Elohim—at the beginning of the first line and at the end of the last line, and triadic lines are used to indicate the ends of many of the strophes. The three large sections Fokkelman identifies in the poem (vv. 2-11, 12-24, 25-36) are organized thematically around three different mountains, first Sinai, then Bashan, then God’s new chosen abode, Zion. The atomistic habits of philological analysis have tendered to divert attention from such larger principles of organization, but formal symmetries of this sort may be present in a good number of the longer psalms.

 

In any case, envelope structure is the one clearly discernible structural pattern that recurs with in inventive variations in many different psalms. Beyond that, it is probably not very helpful to attempt a taxonomy of psalmodic structures (chiastic, antiphonal, and so forth), because the evidence of the poems suggests that for the most part structure was improvised in the poet’s impulse to create an adequate form for the subject at hand in the individual poem. Envelope structure, in other words, is an explicit convention of biblical literature, a recognized way of organizing material in both poetry and prose, and it could be exploited with emphatic effect in the closed form of the psalm. Other structures, by contrast, seem to have been tailor-made for particular poems rather than applied as a convention, and so our task as readers is not to attempt to classify them but to observe their varying operations in shaping the meanings of individual psalms. Let me illustrate this point briefly.

 

Psalm 12 is a supplication spoken by someone beset by insidious schemers. What are suppliant stresses is the treacherous use of language by his adversaries, who seem to him in his distress to be virtually all of mankind: “Lies do they speak to each other, / smooth talk, / with a double heart do they speak” (v. 3). In the semantic parallelisms from line to line, “tongue” and “lips”—both of which mean “speech” in biblical idiom—recur, the suppliant praying that the Lord “cut of all smooth-talking lips, / every tongue speaking proudly” (v. 4), while the arrogant are imagined saying, “By our tongues we’ll prevail, / with these lips of ours, who can lord over us?” (v. 5). The poem pivots neatly on verse 6, as we hear, after this characterization of the treacherous language of humankind, God speaking in direct discourse that affirms divine justice, announcing his resolution to rise up and rescue the oppressed from their persecutors. In the balanced antithetical structure of the poem, the duplicity of human speech, to which the first four verses are devoted, is set off by the redemptive emergence of God’s perfect speech in the last four: “The words of the Lord are pure words, / silver purged in an earthen furnace, / refined sevenfold” (v. 7). The point of the neat antithetical structure is to embody in the shape of the poem the speaker’s sense that, all dismaying appearances to the contrary, there is in the very nature of things an ethical counter-weight to the triumphal arrogance of the wicked.

 

Psalm 48, a pilgrim song, works out a tripartite poetic structure for the poet’s perception of the double paradox of the particular and the universal, the historical and the eternal, focused in God’s chosen city, Jerusalem.Zion, concretely imagined here as a distinctive stronghold towering on a Judean promontory, is also “the joy of all the earth” (v. 2), and the poem sweeps impressively from the particular site to a large geographic panorama, and back again to the particular site. After the introductory verses celebrating the bastions of Zion (1-3), the poem moves back in time (vv. 4-8) to the routing of a naval expedition at some unspecified point in the past, within which is recessed the memory of a more distant and archetypal past, since the report of the naval victory uses language alluding to the drowning of the Egyptians as it is described in the Song of the Sea (Exod. 15). Geographically, the poem moves not only down to the Mediterranean shore but to the known ends of the earth, for the invading fleet is said to come from Tarshish (Jonah’s distant destination), in Cilicia, Spain, or who knows where to the west. The last of the poem’s three segments (vv. 9-14) takes us back to Zion, “in the midst of your temple” (v. 9) and once more all around those ramparts that are testimony in stone to God’s protection of his people. Moreover, the safeguarding that he provided in the event just recalled and at the time of the Exodus before it, will continue for all time: thus the pilgrims are enjoined to tell of God’s power to “generations to come” (v. 13), for he who has elected this city will remain “our God forever” (v. 14).

 

Finally, it is well to bear in mind that the architectural metaphor of structure, with its implication of something solid and static, inevitably does a certain injustice to poetic form, which reveals itself to us progressively in time as we read from line to line. The dynamic character of structure in Psalms is particularly evident in those poems where the utterances are organized in an implicitly narrative sequence. Thus Psalm 97 is not just an acclamation of God’s variously manifested majesty, as it might seem to the casual eye, but a vivid narrative enactment of his power as the world’s king. As in victory poems devoted to the Lord of Battles (compare Ps. 18), God is first seen on his throne enveloped in cloud, then sending forth fire and hurling lightning bolts across the earth (vv. 2-4). The very mountains melt like wax before this onslaught of divine effulgence (v. 5), and all peoples then acclaim his greatness; every conscious creature, from idolators to divine beings, does fealty to him (vv. 6-7). Israel is now inserted in this global picture, exulting in its God who is the God of all the world, as his fiery epiphany had just demonstrated. Furthermore, a nice symmetry of envelope structure is superimposed on the entire narrative sequence. The poem begins: “The Lord reigns! / Let the earth exult, / let the many islands rejoice.” To mark the transition of the second half of the poem from all the earth to Israel, the paired verbs of the beginning recur: “Zion hears and rejoices, / the towns of Judea exult” (v. 8). The final verse picks up one of these two verbs, “rejoice,” which as a noun, “joy,” ends the previous verse:

Light is sown for the righteous,

   and for the upright, joy.

Rejoice, you righteous in the Lord,

   and praise his holy name.   (vv.11-12)

Thus the double structure of the poem, narrative and envelope, exemplifies the psalmodic fashioning of specific forms to match specific perceptions. We experience through the significant shape of this psalm a just order in creation, events moving in a sequence that compels appropriate response: Israel, the nations of the earth, the very angels above, are aligned in a hierarchy of correspondences that bears witness to the universal majesty of the Creator.

 

Themes

The Book of Psalms reflects certain distinctive and recurrent thematic concerns. These are not, as one might at first think, coextensive with psalmodic genre but, on the contrary, tend to cut across the different genres. Many of the characteristic themes share the archetypicality we observed in psalmodic imagery, and the power with which these archetypal themes are evoked may explain a good deal about why the poems have continued to move readers, both believers and nonbelievers, in cultural and historical setting far different from those in which the poems were first made. Little will be served by attempting a comprehensive catalogue of the themes of Psalms, but a few representative illustrations may suggest something of this power of timeless reference that so many of the poems possess.

 

One of the most common themes in the collection is death and rebirth. It is equally prominent in the supplication and in the thanksgiving psalm, a fact that makes more understandable the element of fluidity or dialectic interplay noted earlier between these two seemingly opposed genres. The prehistory of the theme might justifiably be viewed as a monotheistic—and metaphoric—reworking of a pagan mythological plot, the death and miraculous rebirth of a god (in the Mesopotamian tradition, Tammuz). Most of the poems draw on a common repertoire of images: the gates of Sheol (the underworld), the darkness of the pit populated by mere shades, or, in an alternative marine setting, as in Jonah’s thanksgiving psalm, the overwhelming breakers of the sea. Illness and other kinds of dangers, perhaps even spiritual distress, are represented as a descent into the underworld from which the Lord is entreated to bring the person back or, in the thanksgiving poems, is praised for having brought him back. The effectiveness of this vestigially mythological plot is that it can speak powerfully to so many different predicaments, in the psalmist’s time and ever since—for those who believe in resurrection, for those who feel the chill threat of literal extinction here and now, for those who have suffered one sort or another of inward dying. Thus in a memorable line by that most psalmodic of English poets, George Herbert, “After so many deaths I live and write,” the metaphor has the virtual effect of literal fact. In much the same way, the poet of Psalm 88, as his language makes evident, has a clear sense that he is conjuring with a metaphor, and yet his tale of descent into death has the force of experiential truth:

For my soul is sated with troubles,

   my life’s reached the brink of Sheol.

I’m counted with those who go down to the Pit,

   I’m like a man with no strength,

Abandoned among the dead,

   like the bodies that lie in the grave

whom you remember no more,

   from your hand are cut off.

You’ve thrust me into the bottommost Pit,

   in darkness, in the depths.

Your wrath lies hard upon me,

   with all your breakers you afflict me.  (vv.3-8)

It goes without saying that whatever themes the various psalms treat are caught in the heavily charged field of relationship between man and God. Thus, longing, dependence, desperation, exultation become elements in the series of remarkable love poems—once more, cutting across psalmodic genre—addressed by man to God. Religious experience attains a new contemplative and emotive inwardness in these poems. The radically new monotheistic idea that God is everywhere is rendered as the most immediately apprehended existential fact:

If I soar to heaven, you are there,

   if I make my bed in Sheol, again you’re there.

If I take wing with the dawn,

   dwell at the end of the West,

there, too, your hand guides me,

   your right hand holds me fast.  (139:8-10)

The hiding of God’s face or presence is one of the greatest terrors the psalm-poets can contemplate, and the cry of many a suppliant in these poems is impelled by the urgency of a desperate lover: “I stretched out my hands to you, / my soul’s like thirsty earth to you” (143:6).

 

One of the most ubiquitous themes in the various genres of Psalms is language itself. There seems to be a development from a formal organizing device to the self-conscious investigation of a theme. That is, as befits poems which may often have been recited in a cultic setting, many of the thanksgiving psalms begin and end with the declared intention of praising, extolling, thanking God, and many of the supplications begin and end by entreating God to hear the plea, pay heed, and rescue. But the poets very often proceed from these formulas of inception and conclusion to ponder the uses and power of the medium of language they employ. The supplication often quite explicitly raises questions about efficacy of man’s speech to God, the possibility of an answering speech from God to man, the tensions between speech and silence, the different functions of language for crying out in anguish and for exploring the enduring enigmas of man’s creaturely condition. (Psalm 39, which we glanced at earlier, strikingly unites all these concerns.) The thanksgiving psalm stresses speech/song as the distinctive human gift for recognizing God’s greatness, a gift that God is some sense almost to need. Psalm 30 is an instructive case in point because it juxtaposes the two kinds of discourse, entreaty and praise, underlining both the efficacy of the former (the speaker in his former plight had “cried out” to the Lord) and the necessity of the latte. Embedded in the narrative structure of this poem are two different instances of direct discourse—what the speaker said to himself in his complacency before disaster overtook him, and a brief “text” of his actual entreaty to God in the time of his distress. The common psalmodic theme that the dead cannot praise God is given special conviction here: to be humanly alive is to celebrate God’s bounties, which is what God has enabled this speaker to do by rescuing him from the underworld.

 

Finally, many of the psalm-poets, especially those who draw on Wisdom motifs, are acutely aware of the contradictory character of language. Psalm12, which we touched on in considering possibilities of structure, nicely illustrates this consciousness of the double nature of speech. There is never any radical skepticism about the efficacy of language in the Bible because God, the cosmogonic language-user and the planter of the linguistic faculty in man, remains the ultimate guarantor for language. But if speech can be used to express true feelings (the supplication) and to name the truth (the thanksgiving psalm), it may also be turned into a treacherous instrument of deception. These two divergent possibilities are often expressed through two opposing clusters of images—language as a weapon, a sharp-edged arrow, or burning coal (compare Ps. 120), and language as a perfect vessel, a beautifully unalloyed substance, “refined sevenfold” (12:7).

 

All in all, the preoccupation with language tells us a great deal about the kind of poetry that has been brought together in the Book of Psalms. The vision of a horizon of “pure speech” suggests a confident effort to make poetry serve as adequate, authentic expression, from the lips of man to the ear of God, and hence the frequent sense of powerful directness, of unadorned feeling, in these poems. But the awareness of language as an instrument, as awareness often made explicit in the texts, reflects a craftsman’s knowingness about the verbal artifices through which the poet realizes his meanings. Both these perceptions about language and poetry need to be kept in mind if we are to be able to gauge the greatness of the poems. The sundry psalms are finely wrought with the most cunning turns of poetic artifice, subtly and consciously deploying and reworking a particular set of literary conventions; and yet in their stylistic traditionalism and archetypal range they often manage to convey the persuasive illusion of a perfect simplicity beyond the calculations and contrivances of art.

A Literary Perspective on the Biblical ‘Canon’

Image from amazon.com

Image from amazon.com

[First posted in 2012.  This is from:  The Literary Guide to the Bible, eds. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. Reformatting and highlights added.]

 

——————

 

The Canon

Frank Kermode

 

This chapter  offers some explanation of the processes by which the Bible came to include the books it does—insofar as that can be done in reasonable space, if indeed at all—and to venture some remarks on the consequences of their transmission to us as a single book. But it is necessary to begin by saying why we have chosen this particular version of the Bible; for there are many differently constituted Bibles, each with its own version of the canon, and it might be thought that our choice is quite arbitrary.

 

  • Most obviously, the Jewish Bible lacks the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.
  • The Jewish Bible in Greek—a collection of great antiquity and authority—differs as to contents, and frequently as to text, from the Hebrew Bible.
  • The Latin Bible of the Roman Catholic tradition contains in its Old Testament books dismissed by the Bibles of the Reformed churches as apocryphal.
  • Those churches include as their Old Testament the books of the Hebrew Bible and the twenty-seven New Testament books.
    • This is the ”Bible” treated in the present book;
    • it is what most people think of when they think of the Bible;
    • it is the collection to which modern literatures mostly refer;
    • and the fact that all Bibles have them, no matter what else they include, gives them an importance greater than that of the disputed elements.

This does not imply a literary judgment on the works excluded, nor does it reflect a belief that all the canonical books are of superior merit.

 

We do not understand all the criteria of canonicity, but we know enough to be sure that modern criteria of literary quality have no relevance to them.  Even the most learned explanations of how the constituent books found themselves together in a canon are highly speculative and have to deal with an intractable mixture of myth and history.

 

Once a sacred book is fully formed, deemed to be unalterable and wholly inspired, it acquires a prehistory suitable to its status and related only very loosely to historical fact or probability.

 

The real history involves all manner of external influences:

 

  • for example, the closing of the Jewish canon must be in some sense consequent upon the waning of Hebrew as a spoken language,
  • and upon the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., when the book rather than theTemple cult became central to religion.
  • Already there were more Jews in the Diaspora than in Palestine, so the time for such a change was ripe, and the Bible already holy, acquired an extra cultic sanctity.

In the case of the New Testament it seems possible that—

 

  • the lack of an appropriate technology prevented its achieving definitive shape until the fourth century.
  • The Christians preferred the codex or leaf-book to the scroll,only in the fourth century did it become possible to produce a codex that would hold all the accepted Christian Scriptures.
    • and during the earlier period these newfangled codices could not contain texts of any great extent;
  • Thus canon formation is affected by what seem on the face of it to be political, economic, and technological forces without immediate religious or literary relevance.

The legendary account of the growth of the Bible tells of—

  • the destruction of the sacred books during the Babylonian Captivity
  • and their reconstruction by the divinely inspired memory of Ezra.

By this time (fifth century B.C.E.) the canon was virtually complete, though Daniel, traditionally ascribed to the sixth century, was added in the second.

At the end of the first century C.E. a final list was established at the Council of Jamnia.

 

A more scholarly account would say that—-

 

  • the importance of the Law after the return from Babylon speeded the process by which all the disparate material in the Pentateuch acquired final form and authority;
  • the other two sections, the Prophets and the Writings, developed at a different pace,
  • and in some instances, notably that of the Song of Songs, there was dispute about a book’s status well into the second century C.E., tradition has it that the Song of Songs was saved by the advocacy of Aquiba, as a religious allegory.
  • Although the proceedings at Jamnia are not nowadays thought to have been concerned with the canon, the learned still appear to accept the date, ca. 100 C.E., as about right for the closure of the canon.
  • It was of course necessary to leave things out as well as let things in, and a distinction was drawn between.  Such was the practice as early as Ezra, who, according to legend, set aside for the use of the wise seventy books apart from the Scripture proper.
    • books which “defiled the hands” because of their sacred quality,
    • and “outside” books which presumably failed this test, though they might still be granted a certain extra-canonical utility.
  • Books thus set aside or hidden away would be apocrypha in the original sense; the word later acquired dyslogistic overtones, and the apocryphal came to mean the false or inauthentic.

It would be wrong to suppose that all the constituent books were submitted to the same impartial examination.

 

  • The Five Books of Moses were naturally of unassailable authority,
  • as were the Psalms
  • and the Prophets.

The invocation of Old Testament texts in the Gospels is evidence, if such were needed, of the reverence accorded the Scriptures in a time before the canon was finally established. One might say that there was a canonical habit of mind before there was finally a canon, and that it was in evidence during the long centuries that separate Ezra from 100 C.E.

 

There is some question whether it is proper to speak of a Jewish canon at all, and insofar as it has to be accepted as corresponding to real historical developments it may be thought of as a fictional construct concealing the historical truth.

Thus the large redactive enterprises carried out on the Torah are concealed by its canonical form, and scholarship has to break it down again into its original components.

 

It is true that revisions of the Old Testament books were carried out in response to external pressures—for example,

 

  • the political needs of post-Exilic Israel,
  • and, in the first century C.E., the centrifugal force of heresy and schism.

But the fact that Judaism reacted to these forces by affirming the cohesion of the Scriptures and, ultimately, by effectively closing the canon is sufficient evidence not only of the significance of the individual books, but of the belief that their power was enhanced by membership in a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

 

The evolution of the New Testament is another story, though hardly less complicated and conjectural.

 

The first Christians already had a Bible—the Jewish Bible in various forms, Hebrew and Greek and Aramaic—and saw no need of another.

 

What was central to their beliefs was transmitted by oral tradition; indeed the authority of that tradition survived into the second century, although most of what to become the New Testament already existed.

 

The power of the oral tradition did not reduce the Christian commitment to the Jewish Scriptures; the faithful lived in the end time, history was coming to a close, and events would all occur “according to the scriptures,” as they had in the life of Jesus. In a sense the oral tradition took its place beside the Scriptures, just as the Jewish tradition of oral interpretation filled out the implications of the written Torah. In the end both were written down, but the Christian writings came earlier, partly because as the years passed it must have seemed important to perpetuate the increasingly fragile oral testimony of the works and sayings of Jesus.

 

One consequent of the growth of Christian Scripture was the transformation of the Old Testament into quite a different book, a sort of unintended prologue to the New Testament. Whether it should be retained at all became a serious question; and the reasons for keeping it were of a kind that had nothing to do with Judaism.

 

The gradual replacement of the oral tradition by writing was the necessary prelude to the establishment of a canon, with all the consequences of that development.

  • Oral tradition is quite different from written;
    • it is variable,
    • subject to human memory (however aided by mnemonics),
    • discontinuous,
    • selective,
    • and affected by feedback from audiences.
    • It would encourage its transmitters to invent
    • and to add interpretations.

It has been suggested that Mark’s Gospel—which we take to be the first of the canonical four—resulted from a conscious rejection of the oral tradition, which it represents as virtually extinct (the women at the tomb fail to transmit an oral message to the disciples) or as corrupted by the false preachers and prophets Mark assails in chapter 13.

 

Neither Paul nor the evangelists wrote with the object of adding to the existing Bible; indeed the only book of the New Testament that claims such inspired status is Revelation, with its threat of damnation to anybody presuming to add to it.

 

  • Paul’s earliest letters belong to about 50 C.E.;
  • the Gospels are of uncertain date, the consensus being that they belong to some time between 60 and 90 C.E., though earlier dates have been proposed.
  • It seems likely that the contents of the New Testament were written over a span of something close to a century,
  • and none of them by writers who supposed they were candidates for entry into a fixed corpus of Scripture.

It is easier to understand why gospels got written (though less easy to see why they took the form they have) than to guess why four, no more and no less, were finally accepted. There must have been many more, and it appears that in the second century there were three versions of Mark available, one public, one reserved for the few, and another used by a Gnostic sect and condemned by the orthodox. Only the public version survives.

 

John was also attractive to Gnostics, and there was accordingly stiff opposition to his inclusion in the canon. Here again we need to remember that “gospel” originally meant not a piece of writing but the good news proclaimed by Jesus; the evangelists wrote down their versions of this news, which were labeled “the Gospel according to X,” and eventually the term came to mean also this new genre.

 

The relation of these new documents to the existing Scriptures was a matter for dispute; the heretic Marcion wanted to do away with the Jewish Scriptures altogether, and to recognize as authoritative only a version of Luke and of some Pauline letters. It was conceivably in response to such ideas that orthodoxy felt it must decide what had authority and what didn’t, settling on four Gospels as part of the New Covenant or Testament.

 

The concept of a new covenant and of its fulfilling or even replacing an older one is immediately indebted to the Eucharist, for Jesus spoke of the cup as the new covenant (he kaine diatheke) (1 Cor. 11:25, Luke 22:20), and ultimately to the covenantal element in Jewish theology.

 

When Paul (2 Cor. 3:14) talks about the Jewish dispensation as the old written covenant now replaced by that of Christ—the letter replaced by the Spirit—he is still thinking of the new testament (this is the Latin translation of diatheke) as unwritten. Indeed the expressions diatheke and testamentum (sometimes instrumentum) were not applied to the new writings until late in the second century, by which time the idea of a body of authoritative Christian writings, including the letters of Paul and the four Gospels, was well established.

 

In the intervening period it is probable that the originals were altered or augmented for the sake of doctrine or inclusiveness; they were not thought of as inspired. Reasons for holding them to be so were provided later. Only when their inspiration became an issue did the discrepancies among the four seem to call for attention.

 

Around 170 C.E. Tatian produced his Diatessaron (“Through the Four”), the first of many attempts to harmonize the Gospels. The idea of producing synopses to expose rather than eliminate the differences and facilitate research into relations and priorities arose many centuries later in modern biblical criticism.

 

Fanciful explanations were available for there being four Gospels, no more and no less:
  • the compass has four points,
  • the cherubim four faces;
  • there are four covenants,
    • associated with Adam, Noah, Moses, and Christ.

The discrepancies among them could be explained as a test of faith. Perhaps the commonsense answer is that of Harry Y. Gamble, that the fourfold Gospels represent “a precarious balance between unmanageable multiplicity on the one hand and a single self-consistent gospel on the other.” At any rate the four came to be canonical.

 

Other books were scrutinized according to criteria on the nature of which there is still much dispute, though it is interesting to note that the tests applied were in part philological. It was noticed, for instance,

 

  • that the Greek of Revelation is not that of the evangelist John, to whom it was attributed;
  • and that the Greek of Hebrews is of a quality sufficient to prove that it was not written by Paul—
  • perhaps, it was proposed, Luke wrote it up from notes.
  • Doubts were entertained concerning 2 Peter and 2-3 John.

These issues never quite died away and were important at the time of Reformation, since sola scriptura requires one to be sure what scriptura really is. Luther at first rejected Revelation and had grave doubts about James. But all these works have survived in the canon.

 

As time passed Christianity also became to a great extent dependent on a book, and although the authority of the oral tradition survived—and continues to survive in the magisterium of the Roman Church—the written word acquired the greater power.

 

There remained the need to close the canon, and the date given for this is 367 C.E., when Athanasius listed the twenty-seven books as the only canonical ones. He actually used the word, and also gave a list of rejected books, which he called apocrypha. Doubts persisted, and there may be argument as to whether the canon can really be said to be closed; but it is not been added to as yet, nor has anything been taken away from it; and it is hard to see how the Gospel of Thomas, discovered in this century, if added to the canon, could partake of the authority acquired by the others over the years.

 

Kanona Greek word originally meaning “rod,” came to signify many other things,

  • including an ethical norm or a rule or criterion.
  • It could also mean a list of books,
  • sometimes—and this is the beginning of the biblical sense—a list of recommended books.
  • By 400 C.E. it meant, for Christians, only those books held to be holy and of authority.

The Jewish canon, even though it was not so called, had similar qualities.

  • It is characteristic of the Jewish tradition that great care taken over the transmission by copying of the sacred text, which was held to be unalterable and without corruption, though, as bibliographers know well, this is humanly impossible.
  • The books contained within the canon or canons are held to be inspired and to be interrelated like the parts of a single book.
  • Their relations with “outside” books are of a quite different order. It is important to understand the extraordinary privilege of these inside books.

Religious and political history would have been unimaginably different if the apocalyptic prophecies of Daniel had been excluded from the Old Testament, or those of Revelation from the New. John Barton has some interesting observations on the overwhelming importance of inclusion in the canon: suppose Ecclesiastes had been turned down, lost, and rediscovered recently among the documents at Qumran—would it not be virtually a different book from the one we have? Canonization can thus, as it were, alter the meanings of books.

 

The doctrine that the Bible is its own interpreter was held in different circumstances by both the rabbis and Luther, and the belief that one can best interpret a text by associating it with another text of similar authority clearly presupposes a canon; the idea of explorable correspondences between every part would be absurd if one had no certainty about the extent of the whole.

If the entire text is inspired—a belief deeply held by the Jews, with their scrupulousness about every jot and tittle, and given formal expression for the Christian canon at the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century—then the most fleeting echo, perhaps only of a single word, is significant. And given that everything is inspired, all possible relations among parts of the text are also inspired.

 

The poet George Herbert had these relations in mind when he wrote, in “The Holy Scriptures,II”:

Oh that I knew how all thy lights combine,
   And the configurations of their glorie!
   Seeing not onely how each verse doth shine,
But all the constellations of the storie.
This verse marks that, and both do make a motion
   Unto a third, that ten leaves off doth lie:
   Then as dispersed herbs do watch a potion,
These three make up some Christians destinie.
 

We can now specify certain characteristics of the mythical or magical view of the canon.

Regardless of innumerable historical vicissitudes, redactions, interpolations, and corruptions, the canonical text is held to be eternally fixed, unalterable, and of such immeasurable interpretative potential that it remains, despite its unaltered state, sufficient for all future times.

This perpetual applicability is established by a continuing tradition of interpretation, as the relevance of old texts to new times always is. Interpretation is controlled by changing rules but is remarkably free, for the canonical book, itself fixed in time and probably in a dead language, has to be made relevant to an unforeseen future. It must prefigure history: hence we have typological interpretations. The book becomes a mythical model of the world: the Torah is said to be identical with the Creation, the Christian Bible becomes the twin of the Book of Nature. And the exploration of these world-books requires interpreters who can study the subtle hidden structures just as physicists and chemists (or their ancestors, the alchemists and astrologers and magician) studied the created world.

It is hardly surprising that the assumptions underlying these views collapsed with the onset of modern scientific philology. From the beginning the canon was seen as a late and arbitrary imposition on the books it contained. Those books should be studied like any other ancient texts, understood in their original senses, and valued for what they told us about the past, so that the work of the interpreter becomes primarily archaeological. It is not the book’s membership in a canon that gives it authority, but its report of or allusion to various historical events and persons. And of course the true as opposed to the legendary history of the formation of the canons supports this commonsense view of the matter, for there is little reason to believe that such a series of accidents, unexplained judgments, decisions taken under who knows what political or ecclesiastical duress, should result in a divinely privileged, exclusively sacred, compilation. For the factitious context of the canon the scholars substituted the larger contexts of history. They knew by what methods the sacred texts had been made closely applicable to modern situations; if the New Testament had not already taught them that lesson, the Dead Sea Scrolls, which applied ancient Scriptures exclusively to the concerns of a particular sect at a moment presumed to be just before the End, must have made it plain. And thus the canon, despite its importance in the formation and continuance of the religious institutions which indorsed it, seemed to crumble away. It was no longer a separate cognitive zone, merely a rather randomly assembled batch of historical texts; really, one may say, no longer a Bible so much as a collection of biblia.

 

Such attitudes are as old as “scientific” biblical criticism, from the beginnings of which in the late eighteenth century it was assumed, by Michaelis among others, that the canon was not uniformly inspired, and that by historical analysis one could even assist religion by finding out which books were inspired and which were not. Later the question of inspiration was dropped, or the word acquired a new sense. It might be difficult for some investigators to devote themselves to pure historical truth when it involved the dissolution of the New Testament into a scatter of fortuitously assembled occasional writings; for in most cases these scholars were Christians, and the New Testament is after all the foundation document of their religion. But there were ways out of that dilemma which did not involve their subscribing to obsolete and false ideas about the canon.

 

In recent years the historical-critical tradition, now well over two centuries old, has been under challenge. That tradition also made hermeneutical assumptions of which its practitioners were not fully aware. For example, they were ready to believe that older views on the canon and the status of the separate books could be dismissed as peculiar to their time and as founded on assumptions now evidently false; but they took it granted that they themselves were exempt from historical “situatedness,” that they could, without interference from their own prejudices (of which they were unaware), transport themselves across history in a pure and disinterested way. As Hans-Georg Gadamer has put it, the historical critic is always seeking in the text something that is not the text, something the text of itself, is not seeking to provide; “he will always go back behind [the texts] and the meaning they express [which he will decline to regard as their true meaning] to enquire into the reality of which they are the involuntary expression.” But it is possible to take an interest in the text and its own meaning; that is literary criticism proper, and Gadamer believes that it has for too long (in these circles) been regarded as “an ancillary discipline to history.”

 

The opposition that has lately developed to “scientific” disintegration of the canon is based on the idea that the Bible still ought to be treated as a “collection with parameters.” Brevard Childs, who uses these words, has studied both Testaments from the point of view of a revived but still moderate belief in canonicity. Childs wants to eliminate the tensions between historical criticism and an understanding of the Bible as canonical Scripture; he wants, not a return to precritical notions of the canon, but attention to its historical integrity; for he thinks it important that the canon was the product of historical interactions between the developing corpus and the changing community, not of some belated and extrinsic act of validation. And when fully formed the canon is not just an opaque wrapping that must be removed so that one can get as the contents and see them as they really were. Of course the constituents have their own histories, and it is good to know about them. But their preservation and their authority are owing not primarily to their usefulness as testimony to historical events. It is their capacity to be applied, their applicability to historical circumstances other than those of their origin, that has saved them alive.

 

Whatever one’s view of the controversy now in progress between defenders of the tradition of historical criticism and practitioners of what is now called “canonical criticism,” it is clear that the latter is not a primitive revival of precritical notions of plenary and exclusive inspiration. Since we are still living in an epoch in which the historical or “scientific” approach is normal, and therefore seems commonsensical or natural, we may tend to dismiss the opposition as merely eccentric. Yet its presuppositions are at least as defensible as those of the “normal” practitioners; both sides make large assumptions, the one believing that events and persons can be made available, as if by magic, to the reader, and the other that historical application can form a body of discrete writing into a whole—as if by magic.

 

This, of course, is a different kind of magic from the old one; yet the old one still exerts its attractions. It remains quite difficult to think of the wholeness of a canon without associating the idea with the wholeness of an organism or the wholeness of a world. We observe in the realm of secular literary criticism the powerful effect of canon formation on the kinds of attention paid to the books included, even though it is impossible to think of secular canons as closed with the same definitiveness as ecclesiastical canons. And it is undeniably attractive to be able to think of the canon as forming an intertextual system of great complexity, to be studied, by a weaker magic than was available in the past though it is still a kind of magic, as a fascinating array of occult relations, a world of words.

 

Goethe, commending Hamlet, said it was like a tree, each part of it there for, and by means of, all the others. Five hundred years earlier a Kabbalist said this of the Torah: “Just as a tree consists of branches and leaves, bark, sap and roots, each one of which components can be termed tree, there being no substantial difference between them, you will also find the Torah contains many things, and all form a single Torah and a tree, without difference between them… It is necessary to know that the whole is one unity.” Moses de Leon and Goethe appear to have had the same thought, though we could make the two statements sound very different by examining their contexts: one of them belongs to what we think of as Romantic organicism, the other to Kabbalistic mysticism and a Jewish tradition that has always accommodated change and variety of interpretation but has always thought of the Torah as an entity, coextensive with the created world.

 

A flatter, more rational version of the holisms of Goethe and Moses de Leon might be thought to suit us better in our own time. It is true that both historically and actually we grant a different form of attention to canonical books, and that secular criticism has seriously entertained notions of the literary canon that might well be thought to give it a kind of wholeness and a high degree of intertextual relations. Examples include the canonical element in the criticism of T.S. Eliot and the stronger holistic claims of Wilson Knight. It is surprising, therefore, that the professional biblical critics should feel a renewed obligation to save their canon. Schleiermacher, usually thought to be the founder of modern hermeneutics, was also a major New Testament scholar; he believed that the study of the constituents of the canon must be carried on by exactly the same methods and with the same object as the investigation of secular texts, but he also remarked that “a continuing preoccupation with the New Testament canon which was not motivated by one’s own interest in Christianity could only be directed against the canon.” It was out of such a conflict of interest that new ways of thinking about the interpretation of ancient texts developed, and new ways of thinking about history in general.

 

Whether the canon in question is Christian or Jewish or secular, we can no longer suppose that there is a simple choice between the historical and the canonical approach, since the two are now inextricably intertwined. It is an empirical fact that each book has its own history; it is also true that the association of many books is a canon was the result of a long historical process and owed much to chance and much to the needs and the thinking of people we know little or nothing about. But it is also a fact that works transmitted inside a canon are understood differently from those without, so that, if only in that sense, the canon, however assembled, forms an integral whole, the internal and external relations of which are both proper subjects of disinterested inquiry. Nor need we suppose that we have altogether eliminated from our study of canonical works every scrap of the old organicist assumptions, every concession to a magical view of these worlds and their profound, obscure correspondences. When we have achieved that degree of disinterests we shall have little use for the canon or for its constituents, and we shall have little use either for poetry.