Psalmody
My silence on all topics doesn't mean
that I abandoned my intention to read the Bible cover to cover. I am in fact up
to the book of Obadiah. (and I will confess that I forgot there was a Book of
Obadiah.)
It might have been
fun to do a book-by-book bloggery of the Bible--but my instincts were against
it. At very least, I had decided I was not going to do Genesis in that way,
since that's an awful lot of ground to cover. But, thanks to my misfortunes in
re iBlog, if I'm going to talk about what I found on my voyage, it won't be a
detailed diary, but rather some general conclusions and nuggets of
observation--unsatisfying, but maybe less deceptive in the long
run.
My broadest observation
is that the Old Testament, in the King James Version, feels clumsy and dark in
its translation. While folks have picked for centuries nuggets of magniloquence
out of the Bible, they leave behind large numbers of strange lumps, odd and
unhandsome passages of imagery that seem to me can only come from a collision of
the ancient Levant and soggy Stuart
England.
Take Isaiah
1:8:
And the daughter of Zion is
left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a
besieged
city.
Rather
than
Shakespeare or Marlowe, this sounds more like
Mallarmé with a hangover, or what it probably is: somebody translating a
bunch of images without understanding what they meant to the fabric of life.
It's entirely possible that 'cucumbers' in the Hebrew weren't even what we
consider cucumbers, and the translator had no idea what the weight of that image
meant in context. Certainly there's no coupling for us of those three
similes.
(Yes, I know it's
reasonably easy to read the scholarship on such a passage--but that's not what
I'm trying to do here--which is just read the blessed
book.)
Similarly, I found my
rereading of Job and the Proverbs surprisingly unsatisfying. I found that while
my mind drank in what was being said, my ear was rebelling: the still small
voice of the hack writer within me said, during Job, "What is this? A 'let's see
who can praise God the longest' contest?"--and while I plowed through Proverbs,
"There's one and only one Proverb in this book. 'God is great, and if you ignore
him, you'll be sorry.' And the author throws one metaphor after another as if
he's decorating a Christmas tree with a catapult." (Don't ever, ever get on the
wrong side of my inner hack writer.) But it is something i didn't remember,
that, while Job looks like a Platonic dialogue in its structure, it doesn't read
like one: Once again I was reminded over and over again, that I was reading it
at a great remove.
One more general
remark, this time about substance rather than style: The aspect of the Old
Testament that is the history of the Jewish people (and you're assuredly not
going to get a satisfying linear narrative out of the book without an external
scorecard--which may be as it should be), paints a picture of the relationship
between Yahweh and his chosen people as something other than piety and
obedience--and that relationship has an applicability towards the arguments that
the worst of the fundamentalist Xtians have made, advocating a nation 'governed
on Biblical principles.'
While the Old
Testament is filled with figures who make the decision to live under the Law of
God and accomplish great things, any dedication of a people to that law falls
apart in pretty short order. If there's one thing the Bible is immune to (and
this was a pleasant realization) it's the appeal to a Golden Age. If there is
one in the Biblical chronology, the lesson the Bible teaches, in the main, is
that we manage to fuck it up
ourselves.
(One specific part,
conveniently forgotten by two thousand years of European nobility, is that it's
the Israelites and not God who want a king over them. God is put out a bit by
this, thinking that the system of judges He set up was working fine, but the
Jews insist, and muttering 'oh very well," in a sullen tone, God goes to Samuel
and has him choose a king. Divine right of kings my pasty white
ass.)
Two small
observations: Something I did not know (even though it's in the Britannica's
article on Jesus) is that the words of Christ on the
Cross,
My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken
me? is the first line of the 22nd Psalm. It
puts a different spin on those words if Jesus was not expressing his naked
despair, but quoting King David instead. (It even brought to my mind the very
strange idea that Jesus might have
sung
on the Cross. (And not 'Always look on the bright side of life'
either.)
And I was mightily taken
aback when the Bible winked at me. Yep,
winked.
Esther
3:12:
Now when every maid's turn
was come to go into King Ahasuerus, after that she had been twelve months ,
according to the manner of the women (for so were the days of their
purifications accomplished, to wit, six months with oil of myrrh, and six months
with sweet odours, and with other things for the purifying of the
women;)
There! You see
it?
;)
!
I think a monograph
The Emoticons of the
Bible might just be in the
offing!
And I'll close with the one
thing that really brought me up short. I really don't understand this one. It's
Psalm 137, a favorite among many folks. The beginning was even in Godspell, in a
very pretty setting (even though Stephen Schwarz's later work descended into the
realms of the teh annoying).
But
they don't use all of it. Here's
why.
By the Rivers of
Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered
Zion.
We hanged our
harps upon the willows in the midst
thereof.
For there they
that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us
required of us mirth, saying, sing us one of the songs of
Zion.
How shall we sing
the Lord's song in a strange
land?
If I forget thee,
O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her
cunning.
If I do not
remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not
Jerusalem above my chief
joy.
Remember, O Lord,
the Children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, rase it, rase it, even
to the foundations
thereof.
O daughter of
Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou
hast served
us.
Happy shall
he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the
stones.
Now the fact that
there's a psalm in the Bible at all extolling the smashing of baby's skulls
against rocks just plain appalled me --especially one that begins in such a fine
elegiac way.
I'm still reading--but
after reading Psalm 137, it occurs to me that maybe I don't understand this book
at all.
And maybe I read here the
history of the Middle East from antiquity to the present day in its
verses.
I don't
know.
Yet I persist.
Posted: Friday - June 09, 2006 at 09:57 PM