The Bible as “Literature” – 4 – Other Narratives

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Many of these habits of reticence may be plausibly attributed to an underlying aesthetic predisposition. The masters of ancient Hebrew narrative were clearly writers who delighted in an art of indirection in the possibilities of intimating depths through the mere hint of a surface feature, or through a few words of dialogue fraught with implications. Their attraction to narrative minimalism was reinforced by their sense that stories should be told in a way that would move efficiently to the heart of the matter, never pausing to elaborate mimetic effects for their own sake.

In Homer, we are given, for example, a feast of feasts, these daily rituals of hospitality and degustation having an intrinsic allure for the poet and his audience.

In the Hebrew Bible, we learn precious little about anyone’s menu, and then it usually proves to be for a thematic point.

• Exceptionally, we are offered some details of the repast Abraham orders for the angels (Gen. 18) because his pastoral hospitality (as against Lot’s urban hospitality at the beginning of the next chapter) needs to be underlined.
• We are told specifically that Jacob is cooking lentil pottage (Gen. 26) when his famished brother comes in from the hunt, so that an emphatic pun can be made on the “red red stuff” of the pottage and Esau’s name Edom, the Red.
• David’s daughter Tamar prepares a delicacy calledlevivot (the identifying recipe has not survived) for her supposedly sick half brother Amnon (2 Sam 13:8) in order that another, more ironic pun can be introduced: he is in love, or in lust, with her, is in fact about to rape her, and she offers him a kind of food whose name points to the word lev, “heart.” (For a verb that puns on lev in a related way, see Song of Songs 4:9)

It is the often drastic reticence of the Hebrew writers that led Erich Auerbach, in a famous essay that could be taken as the point of departure for the modern literary understanding of the Bible, to speak of Hebrew narrative as a text “fraught with background.”

Auerbach, analyzing the somber and troubling story of the Binding of Isaac, was thinking chiefly of the way that the stark surface details bring us to ponder unexpressed psychological depths and theological heights; but in more typical biblical tales,  where the perspective is not the vertiginous vertical one between man and God but a broader horizontal overview on the familial, social, erotic, and political interactions among human figures, the crucial consequence of reticence is the repeated avoidance  of explicit judgment of the characters. There is, in the view of the Hebrew writers, something elusive, unpredictable, unresolvable about human nature. Man, made in God’s image, shares a measure of God’s transcendence of categories, images, defining labels. The recourse to implicit judgment opens up vistas of ambiguity—sometimes in matters of nuance, sometimes in essential regards—in our perception of the characters.

Who, for example, is Esau? The midrash, seeing him typologically as the iniquitous Edom-Rome, proposed a black-and-white answer, but the text itself withholds such easy resolution.

• At first Esau figures as an impetuous hairy oaf, strong man with a bow but ruled by the growling of his own stomach; then as a rather pathetic overgrown child weeping to his father over the purloined blessing.
• But when, with the returning Jacob, we meet Esau again after twenty years, he seems full of princely generosity toward his brother; and though prenatal oracle, sold birthright, and stolen blessing have all confirmed Jacob’s preeminence, in their final scene together (Gen. 33)—
  • it is Jacob who repeatedly prostates himself
  • and calls himself “servant” and Esau “master.”
  • Does all this somehow cast a retrospective light of ironic qualification on Jacob’s promised destiny?
  • Does it suggest that we have at least partly misperceived Esau, or rather that he has grown morally during all those years during which Jacob labored and struggled with Laban in Mesopotamia?

As elsewhere, we are left wondering about alternatives, feeling that no clear-cut judgment is possible, because the narrator keeps his lips sealed.

Meir Sternberg, who has devoted the most elaborate analysis to biblical procedures for opening up gaps and fostering ambiguities in the stories, makes the apt distinction that ancient Hebrew narrative is ideological but not didactic. The story of Jacob and Esau is an especially instructive case in point.

The eponymous second name attached to each of the twins, Israel and Edom respectively sets the two up in what one might expect would be a heavily titled political opposition: the covenanted people over against one of its notorious historical adversaries.

But the story itself points toward a rather complicated balance of moral claims in the rivalry, perhaps because the writer, in fleshing out the individual characters, began to pull them free from the frame of reference of political allegory, and perhaps also because this is a kind of ideological literature that incorporates a reflex of ideological auto-critique.

What I have said so far may seem to sidestep a fundamental methodological question that has preoccupied biblical studies for a century and a half: the frequent unreliability of the received text and its accretive evolution through several eras of Israelite history.

It is all very well, many biblical critics would still argue, to speak of unities and internal echoes and purposeful ambiguities in a short story by Faulkner or a poem by Wallace Stevens, because one writer was responsible for the text from beginning to end, down to the very proofreading and to any revisions in later editions. But how can we address the patchwork of the biblical text in the same fashion? By what warrant, for example, could I speak of poised ambiguities in the story of Jacob and Esau when scholarship long ago concluded that the tale is a stitching together of three separate “documents” conventionally designated E, J, and P?

According to a periodically challenged consensus, the first two of these would have originated in the first two centuries of the Davidic monarchy, probably drawing on still earlier folk traditions, and all three were then cut and pasted to form a single text by anonymous Priestly redactors sometimes after the destruction of the First Commonwealth, probably in the sixth or fifth century B.C.E.

I have no quarrel with the courage of conjecture of those engaged in what Sir Edmund Leach has shrewdly called “ unscrambling the omelette,” but the essential point for the validity of the literary perspective is that we have in the Bible, with far fewer exceptions than the historical critics would allow, a very well-made omelette indeed.

Modern biblical scholarship is a product of the post-Gutenberg era, which may be one reason why it is predisposed to conceive authorship in rather narrow and exclusive terms.

Collective works of art are not unknown phenomena, as we should be reminded by the medieval cathedrals growing through generations under the hands of successive waves of artisans, or cinema, where the first-stage work of director, cameraman, and actors achieves its final form in the selection, splicing, and reordering that goes on in the editing room. If in general the literary imagination exhibits what Coleridge called an “esemplastic” power, a faculty for molding disparate elements into an expressively unified whole not achieved outside of art, this power is abundantly evident in the work of the so-called redactors, so that often the dividing line between redactor and author is hard to draw, or if it is drawn, does not necessarily demarcate an essential difference.

One important matter which remains undecided is—

• whatever the redactors exercised any freedom in reworking inherited texts,
• or whether they felt restricted merely to selecting and combining what had been passed on to them.
• If the latter is true, as many scholars have tended to assume, we must conclude at the very least that the redactors exhibited a genius in creating brilliant collages out of traditional materials, though my own suspicion is that they did not hesitate to change a word, a phrase, perhaps even a whole speech or narrator’s report, in order to create precisely the kind of interconnections of structure, theme, and motif to which I have been referring.
• If literary analysis, with the exception of one recent sectarian manifestation that radically disavows all unities, is in one way or another a response to the esemplastic activity of the literary imagination, it will not be surprising that the new literary criticism of the Bible has tended to uncover unities where previous biblical scholars, following the hidden imperative “the more atomistic, the more scientific,” found discontinuities, contradictions, duplications, fissures.

The new literary perspective, let me stress, does not come to restore the seamless unitary character of the biblical text cherished by pious tradition, but it does argue in a variety of ways that scholarship, from so much overfocused concentration on the seams, has drawn attention away from the design of the whole.

Thus, readers of this volume will find that—

• some contributors simply set aside any consideration of hypotheses about the composite origins of the text because they find other issues more productive to discuss;
• other contributors explicitly use scholarly opinion about disparate elements in the text in order to see how once independent units are given new meanings, and contribute to the formation of larger patterns of meaning, by having been placed where they are in the final text continuum.
• In either case, the goal is to lead us toward what the biblical authors and author-redactors surely aimed for—a continuous reading of the text instead of a nervous hovering over its various small components.

Another difficulty, however, remains: quite frequently in the Hebrew Bible we may not have a dependable text to read.

• The oldest texts of single biblical books or parts of books are, as I noted earlier, preserved in the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls, several centuries after the original composition.
• The oldest integral manuscript of the Hebrew Bible is a whole millennium later.
• Ancient witnesses beginning with the Septuagint sometimes provide help in difficult places, but their variants of the Masoretic text often reflect glosses, misunderstandings, or dubious textual traditions.
• There are certainly no grounds for confidence that the Bible we have is exactly the one produced by the original writers, though the degree of textual difficulties varies sharply.
• For long stretches of Genesis, Exodus, and other narrative books, the text seems relatively clean, with only an occasional local problem;
• in Job and in some of the poetic sections of the prophets, there are lines and occasionally even passages that are only barely intelligible.
• Most of these difficulties appear to be textual, though some are merely philological, for poetry—and in the Bible, Job above all—mines lexical resources not used elsewhere, involving terms whose meaning is uncertain.
• Comparative Semitic philology has made impressive progress in recovering many of these lost meanings and, in the case of more common words and idioms, in giving us a more precise sense of denotations and connotations.
• Since literary analysis needs at some level to respond to the nuances of words, the advances in biblical philology over the past several decades have been a necessary precondition for the development of the new literary criticism of the Bible that began to emerge in the 1970s.
• There are words and phrases and verses that will remain dark spots on the map, whether for philological or textual reasons, but by and large the Hebrew text now is more accessible to understanding than it has been for the past two thousand years.

Let me propose that, conversely, the application of properly literary analysis to the Bible is a necessary precondition to a sounder textual scholarship.

At the beginning of his narratological study of Deuteronomy, Robert Polzin argues for “an operational priority to literary analysis at the preliminary stages of research.” If I may unpack that somewhat forbidding social-scientific formulation, the basic methodological issue is this:

before you can decide whether a text is defective, composite, or redundant, you have to determine to the best of your ability the formal principles on which the text is organized.

These are by no means the same for all times and places, as the nineteenth-century German founders of modern biblical scholarship often imagined. One has only to scan the history of a recent literary genre, the novel, to see how rapidly formal conventions shift, and to realize that elements like disjunction, interpolation, repetition, contrastive styles, which in biblical scholarship were long deemed sure signs of a defective text, may be perfectly deliberate components of the literary artwork, and recognized as such by the audience for which it is intended.

There is a distinctive poetics informing both biblical narrative and biblical poetry, and an understanding of it will help us in many instances to make plain sense of a puzzling text instead of exercising that loose and derivative mode of literary invention that goes under the scholarly name of emendation.

A couple of examples should clarify the methodological point.

In Proverbs 7:9, in the introductory movement of the vivid narrative poem about the gullible young man and the dangerous seductress, we are told that he goes out into the streets, where she is waiting to meet him, “At twilight, as evening falls, / in pitch-black night and darkness” [AT]. This line of verse has troubled some textual scholars because it seems a violation of logic. If it is twilight, how can it be pitch-black night? When one adds that the Hebrew word ‘ishon that I have rendered as “pitch-black” usually means the dark, or apple, of the eye and occurs in verse 2 (“let my teaching be like the apple of your eye” [AT]), we have both crux and solution. The ancient scribe, nodding, inadvertently repeated in verse 9 the word ‘ishon, which belonged only in verse 2. Then someone added “in darkness” as a gloss. What must be done to “restore” the text is to erase the whole second verset of this line and attach the first verset to the next line.

But if one considers precisely how lines of biblical poetry are generally constructed, the purported crux dissolves and the whole procedure of emendation becomes gratuitous. For it can readily be shown that in many hundreds of lines in the biblical corpus, the relation between the first verset and the second is narrative: under the umbrella of parallelism or overlapping meaning that covers the two halves of the line, the second action or image follows in time after the first. (For some examples, see the essay “The Characteristics of Ancient Hebrew Poetry” in this volume.)

Our line from proverbs, then, is not a break with logic but a particularly striking instance of a general principle of poetic logic observable in biblical verse: in one instant, we see the young man setting out into the streets at twilight; in the next instant, it is already totally dark, a suitable cover for the seductress as she marks her sexual target. This little temporal jump between versets may even be grounded in a mimesis of nature, for sunsets in the eastern Mediterranean seem to happen very quickly; and we should also note that the seductress’s reference later, in verse 20, to a full moon evidently a couple of weeks off indicates that the action of the poem takes place at the dark of the moon. As for the occurrence of ‘ishon in verse 9, this makes perfect sense in terms of another principle of biblical poetics—the practice of trying together distinct segments of the poem (here, the framing introductory lines and then the narrative body of the poem) through the repetition of some prominent word, whether in the identical sense or in a play on two different senses. Again, this is a formal organizing principle that can be demonstrated analytically in scores of examples. Thus, in reading the poem more fully through an awareness of its poetics, we also come to see why it is absurd to rewrite the text in order to make it conform to a logic alien to it.

Let us consider one example of a supposedly defective narrative text, the first three verses of 2 Samuel 5, which report David’s confirmation as king over all the tribes of Israel after the conclusion of the civil war with the tribes supporting the house of Saul. I will quote the passage in my own rather literal translation because the King James Version at this point makes some misleading choices and also takes a couple of liberties with the Hebrew parataxis.

All the tribes of Israel came to David at Hebron and said. “Here, we are your bone and flesh. Long ago, when Saul was king over us, you wereIsrael’s leader in battle. And the Lord said to you:

You shall shepherd my people

And you shall be ruler over Israel.”

All the elders of Israel came to the king at Hebron, and King David made a covenant with them in Hebron before the Lord, and they anointed David king over Israel. [AT]

The apparent difficulty here is that the last sentence is a repetition of the first. The atomistic solutions of some textual scholars runs along the following lines:

• two traditions, using similar formulations, have been rather clumsily spliced together by the editor;
• in the first tradition, it was the tribes of Israel who came to Hebron,
• in the second tradition, the elders;
• the editorial compulsion to incorporate both traditions introduced both a redundancy and a contradiction in the text.
• This is another instance in which inattention to the organizing literary principles of the text leads to faulty scholarship.
• The Hebrew writers frequently  use a framing technique that in fact biblical scholars have identified and designated resumptive repetition:Our passage proves to be a rather subtle adaptation of this general technique.
  • if the progress of a narrative line is interrupted by some digression or specification, the writer marks the return to the point where the main line was left by repeating the statement made just before the interruption.

In the first instance, a popular movement acclaiming David worthy of kingship is recorded. “All the tribes of Israel” come to him, and their support is represented by quotation of their speech, in which is embedded a quotation on their part of divine speech—appropriately, it has the solemnity of a line of formal verse—that is an explicit promise to David of the role of leader. After these two pieces of direct discourse, the resumptive repetition takes us back to the initial statement before the dialogue and continues with a summary of the political act that was consummated at Hebron. This time, however, the elders rather than the tribes are singled out as agents because, although it may be the prerogative of the populace to acclaim, it is the prerogative of the elders formally to confirm David’s kingship in the ceremony of anointment. We should also note that in the initial report the tribes come to “David” and in the concluding report the elders come to “the king,” who is then immediately referred to as “King David,” both terms being proleptic of the end of the sentence, in this way underscoring the binding force of the anointment.

The actual term king appears in the quoted discourse of the tribes only in retrospective reference to Saul, but God’s words promising that David will be “ruler [nagidI] over Israel” are picked up by the narrator at the end and given an unambiguous political definition when David is anointed “king [melekh] over Israel.”

Thus the technique of resumptive repetition has been joined with a still more common technique of biblical prose, minute focusing through small variations in near-verbatim repetition.

The supposedly composite and redundant text turns out to be a tightly woven unit in which repetition is used to frame the central dialogue and sharpen the political theme.

If the arguments I have been laying out suggest why a literary approach to the Hebrew Bible is fully warranted and in certain ways required by the nature of the material, they omit still another complicating consideration—the diachronic dimension of this literary corpus.

Here, again, there is a difference between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament that is both quantitative and qualitative.

• The New Testament, reflecting a particular portentous moment in history, is the work of a few generations;
• the Hebrew Bible spans nearly a millennium of literary activity.
  • How much did Hebrew literature change over this period, which covers about as much time as elapsed in French literature from the Song of Roland to the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet?

In poetry, the changes are surprisingly minor, having more to do with certain features of grammatical forms and diction than with any underlying shift in notions of poetic style and structure. It is true that the earliest poetic texts, such as the Song of Deborah, exhibit a fondness for incantatory movements and incremental repetition that are not often found in later poems, but the formal system of versification and basic conceptions about the poetic medium do not change substantively over this whole long period.

Job, the supreme poetic achievement of the era after the destruction of the First Commonwealth, probably—

• reflects its historical moment in the abundant borrowing from Aramaic in its vocabulary,
• but poetically it is perfectly continuous with the poetic creations of the First Commonwealth;
• any formal differences are attributable to the individual genius of the poet or to the generic aims of the genre of radical Wisdom literature for which he made his verse a vehicle.

A very late book, Ecclesiastes (fourth or third century B.C.E.) does move toward a new horizon of literary form, but, instructively, it does so by abandoning the system of parallelistic verse for a kind of cadenced prose that incorporates small pieces of verse, a good many of them wry parodies of Proverbs.

In narrative, on the other hand, though there are some strong elements of continuity, new styles and new notions of narrative art emerge in the post-Exilic period.

The golden age of Hebrew narrative was the First Commonwealth era, when the great sequence of works from Genesis to Kings was given its initial formulation. The brilliantly laconic style, with its uncanny ability to intimate psychological and thematic complexities (one has only to think of the story of Joseph and his brothers, or the David story, came to full flowering during this period.

Certain features of this classic narrative art, like the use of thematic key words and refrain-like repetitions, are still observable in a late tale like Jonah, and if the Book of Ruth, whose dating is still disputed, is in late, then it represents an extraordinary archaizing redeployment of the earlier conventions. But from the perspective of literary history, most of the new Hebrew narratives created after 586 B.C.E. are distinctly the products of a postclassical age.  Instead of one dominant form, as in the earlier period, there is a proliferation of forms, perhaps a kind of experimentation with different forms by different writers over nearly four centuries of the post-Exilic period.

Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles—

• represent new strategies for the narrative engagement of history
• through autobiographical writing,
• annalistic recapitulation,
• the buttressing of the report of history through personal observation
• or, alternatively,through the citation of sources.

Jonah, Esther, and Daniel, in quite different ways, depart from the general norm of historical and psychological realism that, despite the occasional intervention of divine agency or miraculous event, governs classical Hebrew narrative.

• Jonah has variously been described as a parable, a Menippean satire, a sailor’s yarn, and it is clear that the writer has stretched the contours of reality with a zestful overtness to suit his ends, not only in the famous instance of Jonah’s descent into the belly of the big fish but also in such details as the dimensions of Nineveh (at three days’ walk, it would be much bigger than Los Angeles) and the animals that are made to fast and don sackcloth.
• Daniel, in its insistent theme of piety (the classic Hebrew narratives are religious but never quite pious in this way), its intimations of an apocalypse, and some of its formal structures, is closely akin to certain texts of the Apocrypha, and very much a work the Hellenistic period. (On connections with the Apocrypha, see the essay on Daniel in this volume.)
• Esther, though it purportedly represents events in the Persian imperial court in Susa, takes place in a fairy-tale never-never land where, for example, a parade of all the fairest maidens of the kingdom is brought to the royal bed night after night, each beauty having been exquisitely prepared for the king’s delectation by being soaked six months in oil of myrrh and another six in assorted perfumes. There is broad comedy here of a sort absent from the earlier narratives, and also a rather simple didacticism one does not find in First Commonwealth writing. The stringent narrative economy of the classical literature has been replaced by a reveling in the sumptuousness of details of milieu, often cast in the form of descriptive catalogues: “Where were white, green, and blue hangings, fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble: the beds were of gold and silver, upon a pavement of red, and blue, and white, and black, marble” (Esther 1:6). We need not invoke a direct influence from the Greek sphere to detect here the beginnings of a Hebrew literature that is heading toward Hellenistic horizons.

We have seen, then, that—-

• there is striking variety in the body of ancient Hebrew literature preserved in the Bible,
• a variety that stems from the long centuries through which it evolved,
• the different genres it represents,
• the divergent aims and viewpoints of its authors.

All that notwithstanding, this is a corpus that bears within it the seeds of its own canonicity.

Earlier, we noted the strong elements of internal allusions in Hebrew Scripture that at many points make it a set of texts in restless dialogue with one another.

In the end, this is something that goes beyond what is ordinarily thought of in strictly literary terms as intertextuality.

Although I think it is inaccurate to speak, as some have done, of a “system” of symbols in the Hebrew Bible, it is clear that the various texts exploit certain recurrent symbols which, however dictated by the topography, geography, history, and climate of ancient Israel, become a unifying way of conceiving the world, of referring the discreet data of historical and individual experience to large interpretive patterns. (This degree of symbolic cohesiveness among the Hebrew texts in turn helped make them assimilable into the new symbolic framework of the New Testament.)

Thus, the act of dividing between heaven and earth, water and dry land, which is the initial definition of God’s cosmogonic power, proliferates into a whole spectrum of antithetical oppositions:

• garden or oasis and wasteland,
• later recurring as Promised Land and Wilderness, o
• r, in another variant, homeland (“the Lord’s inheritance”) and exile,
• in either case often with a necessary rite of passage through water to get from one to the other;
• Israel and the nations;
• and even calendrically, the Sabbath and the six days of labor.
• Or, in a pattern less grounded in nature or history than in a concept,
  • the stark initiating act of creation through divine speech from formlessness, chaos, nothingness (tohu-bohu) lingers in the Hebrew imagination
  • as a measure of the absoluteness of God’s power
  • and also as a looming perspective on the contingency of all human existence
  • and the frailty of all human exercise of knowledge and power.

Although, as we have observed, there is ideological debate among the Hebrew writers, this fundamental perception is shared by all (only Ecclesiastes gives it a negative twist), and it is a central instance in which a persistent set of images also is a persistent vision of reality.

A particularly memorable example is the poem about God as transcendent weigher of all creation, composed by the anonymous prophet of the Babylonian Exile referred to by scholars as Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 40:12-26). It would be a great poem even in isolation, but its actual richness has much to do with its ramified connections with the larger context of the Hebrew Bible.

I will offer my own translation because the King James Version here abounds in errors and does very little to suggest the poetic compactness of the original. Verses 19 and 20, which depict the foolish activity of artisans making idols, are omitted because they involve several textual difficulties and in any case are not essential to the general point I want to illustrate.

Who with his hand’s hollow measured the water,

   the heavens who gauged with a span,

and meted earth’s dust with a measure,

   weighed with a scale the mountains,

      the hills with a balance?

Who has plumbed the spirit of the Lord,

   what man has told him his plan?

With whom did he counsel, who taught him,

   who led him in the path of right and told him wisdom’s way?

Why, the nations are a drop from the bucket,

   like the balance’s dust they’re accounted,

      why, the coastlands he plucks up like motes.

Lebanon is not fuel enough,

   it’s beasts not enough for the offering.

All nations are as naught before him,

   he accounts them as empty and nothing.

And to whom would you liken God,

   what likeness for him propose?

…… 

Do you not know,

   have you not heard?

Was it not told you from the first,

   Have you not understood the foundations of earth?

He’s enthroned on the rim of the earth,

   And its dwellers are like grasshoppers.

He spread the heavens like gauze,

   stretched them like a tent to dwell in.

He turns princes into nothing,

   the rulers of earth he makes naught.

Hardly planted, hardly sown,

   hardly their stem rooted in earth—

when he blows on them and they wither,

   the storm bears them off like straw.

“And to whom will you liken me that I be equal?”

   says the Holy One.

Lift up your eyes on high,

   and see, who created these?

He who musters their host by number,

   each one he calls by name,

Through great strength and mighty power

   no one lacks in the ranks.

The poem not only involves the general idea of God as powerful creator but also alludes to a series of key terms from the first account of creation in Genesis.

The sequence water-heaven-earth in the three initial versets recalls the three cosmic spheres with which God works on the first three days of the Creation.

The reiterated assertion that there is no likeness (demut) that man can possibly find for God is, of course, a sound argument against idolatry, something that explicitly concerns the prophet; but the term also echoes, by way of ironic inversion, the first creation of humankind: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness [demuteinu]” (Gen. 1:26).That is to say, God is perfectly free to fashion a human creature in his own likeness, but it is utterly beyond the creature’s capacity to fashion a likeness for his creator.

In a related way, the background of cosmogony is present in the poet’s assertion that nations and rulers are as naught, or nothing, before God, since one of the repeated pair of terms in these two sets of lines is tohu, the very void out of which the world was first called into being.

Still another ironic crossover between human and divine is effected through an allusion to a different text.

• To God who is enthroned (or simply “seated”) on the rim of the earth, all its inhabitants (the same word in the Hebrew as “he who sits” at the beginning of the line) seem like grasshoppers.
• This simile links up with the fearful report of the majority of the spies sent by Moses to investigate the land (‘erets, the same term that here means “earth”).
  • They were dismayed by the enormous size of “its inhabitants” (the same word as in the line we are considering), calling them “people of vast proportions,” or, more literally, “people of measure” (midot, the same root that is reflected in the verb which begins our poem), “and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight” (Num. 13:33).
  • In short, the grotesque, and inaccurate, simile used by the spies in a reflex of fear here becomes an accurate gauge of the disproportion between creator and creatures, or, indeed, a kind of cosmic understatement.

The essential point, however, is not the prophet’s clever use of allusion but the deep affinity of perception with his predecessors that his use of allusion reflects.

Despite the network of reminiscences of Genesis (to which the mention of the host of the heavens at the end should be added), the dominant imagery of the poem is actually technological, in part as a rejoinder to the paltry technology of idol-making which the poet denounces.

God weighs, measures, gauges, plumbs, but these activities cannot operate in the opposite direction: no man can plumb the unfathomable spirit of the Lord.

To set this for a moment in relation to the poet’s craft, the person who shaped these lines had a sense of familiarity with the concrete activities of quotidian reality, surveying and architecture and the weighing of merchandise, the cultivation of young plants, and the pitching of tents.

The literature of ancient Israel, even in sublime moments like this one, scarcely ever loses this feeling of rootedness in the concrete realities of the here and now.

At the same time, the loftiness of perspective of the poem by Deutero-Isaiah is breathtaking: “He’s enthroned on the rim of the earth, / and its dwellers are like grasshoppers.”

The Hebrew writers in both poetry and prose were deeply engaged by the fate of nations, the destinies of individuals, and the elaborate grid of political institutions and material instrumentalities in which both were enmeshed.

The contrast of perspectives that is the explicit subject of our poem is in the narratives often only implicit; but however closely the human scene is followed, there is always a potential sense, perhaps even hinted at in the challenging terseness of the narrative mode of presentation, that merely human aspirations shrink to nothing under the vast overarching aspect of eternity.

One measure of the centrality of this vision to the Hebrew imagination is that the imagery and theme of our poem by Deutero-Isaiah, especially in the opening five lines, are strikingly similar to the language of the Voice from the Whirlwind, though in other respects Job (who was perhaps even a near-contemporary) reflects a much more unconsoling view of God and man, at the other end of the spectrum of Israelite thought.

Sometime in the latter part of the second millennium B.C.E.,

the spiritual avant-garde of the Hebrew people

began to imagine creation and creator,

history and humankind,

in a radically new way.

This radicalism of vision, though it would never produce anything like unanimity, generated certain underlying patterns of literary expression in the centuries that followed.

In poetry, these were realized technically through a heightening and refinement of formal conventions largely inherited from an antecedent Syro-Palestinian tradition of verse. In the prose narratives, one may infer that these patterns became the very matrix of an extraordinary new kind of representation of action, character, speech, and motive. In both cases, the imaginative recurrence, for all the diversity, to the bedrock assumptions of biblical monotheism about the nature of reality weaves tensile bonds among the disparate texts. This endlessly fascinating anthology of ancient Hebrew literature was also, against all plausible acceptations of the word, on its way to becoming a book.