Every December, concert halls and churches throughout the English-speaking world resound with the strains of George Frederic Handel‘s mighty Messiah. For centuries, music lovers have gone home humming the arias and choruses that Handel‘s librettist, Charles Jennens, lifted from the 1611 King James translation of the Bible. For this, we may all shout “Hallelujah!”1
But here and there in the crowd leaving the concert hall, we spy a biblically literate pedant muttering “Bah, humbug,” and fretting that, even if the singers’ diction was impeccable, the audience may have missed what the Bible actually says. For, unfortunately, Handel’s Messiah incorporates and perpetuates numerous mistranslations and misunderstandings of the Hebrew Bible.2
Handel (1685–1759) and Jennens (1700–1773) made an unlikely pair. The former was an expatriate German keyboard virtuoso, composer and impresario who spoke an idiosyncratic patois of German, Italian, French and heavily accented English. Jennens was a leisured English plutocrat and theologian who dabbled in literature.
Together they produced four works—Saul, L’Allegro ed Il Penseroso, Messiah and Belshazzar—and personally got on far better than, say, Gilbert and Sullivan. Still, Jennens could write with fond condescension, “Handel’s head is more full of maggots than ever.” As comeuppance, Jennens himself incurred the sneer of the curmudgeon’s curmudgeon, Samuel Johnson: “A vain fool crazed by his wealth, who, were he in Heaven, would criticize the Lord Almighty.”3 Prescient words, since Jennens was to rewrite the Bible itself in his libretto for Messiah, which premiered in Dublin in 1742.4
Messiah is a pastiche in three acts. Throughout Jennens juxtaposed New Testament verses with Old Testament passages that the church had traditionally viewed as anticipating Jesus, sometimes lightly adapting the text. (For example, Jennens would change the tense and/or pronouns to imply that Jesus Christ was the subject.)5 At the time, European theologians of the Enlightenment were starting to question the Christian approach to Scripture as divine revelation.a With Messiah, Handel and Jennens produced a musical reaffirmation of the conservative view.6
In Part I of Messiah, for example, Old Testament oracles of hope, the overturning of the age, the birth of a child, sudden good news, a new light shining—texts drawn from Haggai, Malachi and above all Isaiah— set up the Nativity of Luke 2:6–14.
Part II begins with the words of John 1:29: “Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world.” There follow numerous Old Testament passages, drawn from Psalms 16 and 22 and Isaiah 50 and 53, about the Lord’s faithful suffering servant, by whose travails the nation was saved. Eventually, “He was cut off from the land of the living,” and all seems hopeless. But the king returns triumphant, as the eternal gates open up (Psalm 24) and the royal figure ascends to Heaven as God’s son (Psalm 2). Jennens then scripture-surfs through the epistles to the Hebrews and the Romans. Part II culminates loudly in the Hallelujah chorus (Revelation 19:6, 15–16), during which it is traditional for the audience to take a seventh-inning stretch.
Part III then treats the resurrection of all flesh, drawing on assorted New Testament texts and, as we shall see, one problematic passage in Job. The final chorus of Messiah, based on Revelation 5:9, 12–14, provides a fitting summary:
Worthy is the Lamb that was slain, and hath redeemed us to God by his blood, to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing. Blessing and honour, glory and power be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb, for ever and ever.
Amen.7
Jennens prepared the libretto first and then submitted it to Handel to supply the music. Jennens had high expectations for his work. He wrote to a friend: “Handel says he will do nothing next Winter, but I hope I shall perswade him to set another Scripture Collection I have made for him, & perform it for his own Benefit in Passion Week. I hope he will lay out his whole genius & Skill upon it, that the Composition may excell all his former Compositions, as the Subject excells every other Subject. The Subject is Messiah.”8
Handel must have been impressed. He composed the music for Messiah in a nigh-inconceivable three weeks.
The translation problems in Messiah are apparent right after the overture. The tenor croons the recitative “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people,” which Handel sets as if there were a comma: “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people.” That is, the people are to take heart. In fact, however, Isaiah 40:1—
And what is the consoling news? According to King James and Jennens, it is that Jerusalem’s “warfare is accomplished.” One immediately thinks of military victory—except that Isaiah 40 is actually proclaiming the end of the Babylonian Exile, not the outcome of a battle. For Hebrew
As the tenor proceeds into his recitative, he strays farther from the original sense: “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness: prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” That’s what Jennens found in the King James Version. But what Isaiah 40:3 really says is
A voice is crying,
“In the wilderness
prepare the Lord’s way;
Straighten in the desert
a paved road for our God.”
In other words, what is “in the wilderness” is the road, not the voice.
To call this a mistranslation would be unfair, however. The same nonliteral reading of this passage from Isaiah is attributed to John the Baptist in all four Gospels (Matthew 3:3; Mark 1:3; Luke 3:4; John 1:23). Rather than a mistranslation, this is an example of a technique of biblical interpretation dating back to the days of the Dead Sea Scroll community and the early church. It is often loosely called pesher: A biblical verse, not necessarily obscure, is interpreted with a twist and parsed as a prediction.10 When John the Baptist appeared out of the desert preaching the Kingdom, the passage in Isaiah came to be understood as “the voice of one crying in the wilderness.”11 And so Christian Bible translators ever since, and Handel and Jennens, have promulgated this nonliteral reading of Isaiah.
We encounter more pesher-style interpretation in the alto recitative, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Emmanuel: GOD WITH US.”12 The text comes from the famous oracle in Isaiah 7:14, which literally says, “Behold, the young woman [Hebrew, ‘
The mistranslation perpetuated by Jennens has its roots in the third century B.C.E., when an anonymous Jewish translator rendered the verse in Greek as “Behold, the virgin (parthenos) will conceive in the womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Emmanuel.” Note the translator’s use of the future tense where none is indicated in the original and his choice of Greek parthenos—which refers to a virgin—for Hebrew ‘
My favorite Messiah chorus—and Mozart’s, too—is not the bombastic “Hallelujah” but “For unto us a child is born,” notwithstanding Handel’s unnatural accentuation of “For.”14 This child’s name, quoted from Isaiah 9:5 (English 9:6), is difficult to interpret, too. Jennens, as well as every Christian translator back to Jerome, understood the seven Hebrew words that make up the name as divine titles: “Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.” But, prior to Christianity, how could a child have been considered God? The academic view is that either Isaiah accords to Judah a measure of divinity as God’s son15 or Isaiah 9:5 actually contains a sentence name suitable to a human: “The mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace counsels wonderfully.”16 The traditional Christian view is that Isaiah simply foretold Jesus.
Sometimes a perfectly accurate translation conveys exactly the wrong impression. Consider the following antiphonal chorus, borrowed from Psalm 24:7–10, which in the context of Messiah celebrates the Resurrection:
Lift up your heads, O ye gates,
And be ye lift up,
ye everlasting doors,
And the King of glory shall come in.
Who is this King of glory?
The Lord, strong and mighty,
The Lord mighty in battle.
Who is this King of glory?
The Lord of hosts:
He is the King of glory.
To a listener in Merrie Olde England, the psalm would have evoked an image of a portcullis (a hanging iron grate in front of a door) being hoisted aloft in order to admit the “King of glory.” One problem: Ancient Israelite gates swung on hinges; they never slid vertically. What, then, did the psalmist have in mind?
Various biblical passages suggest God’s vast proportions: He can hide Moses with his hand (Exodus 33:22–23), he can cup the seas in his palm and weigh mountains in a scale (Isaiah 40:12), etc.17 Other ancient gods are of similar stature; we even have the meter-long footprints of a deity etched into a temple floor at ‘Ain Dara, Syria,b to depict his/her entry into the holy residence.18 The gate’s “head” of Psalm 24:7 is naturally its top; the psalmist is simply telling the Temple’s doorway to enlarge itself before the “King of glory” attempts to enter his house—else he might he crack his noggin on the lintel.19
However transcendent the average listener finds the soprano aria “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” here the Grinchy scholar really grinds his teeth. The text of Job 19:24–25 (English 19:25–26) is quite obscure and possibly damaged. Whereas Jennens penned a confident “and though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God,” the King James itself is tentative, delicately inserting key words (in italics) in a desperate attempt to make some sense of the Hebrew: “And though after my skin, worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see God.”20 The King James translators even provided an alternative rendering in the margin that says the exact opposite: “After I shall awake though this body be destroyed, yet out of my flesh shall I see God.” My own literal rendering of the passage would be: “I know that my avenger lives, and afterward will stand upon the (my) dust, and after my skin (shall be stripped?) from my flesh, I will see God.” That is, Job probably anticipates meeting God after his body has completely decomposed, not a bodily resurrection at the end of time. But I can’t imagine anyone wanting to sing my version.
Okay, that’s enough. I’m done being Scrooge. Please forget everything you’ve read here before you attend another performance of Messiah. Sit back and enjoy the music. Although early critics deprecated Messiah as a gross vulgarization of Christian dogma,21 and though even Jennens complained that Handel had let him down,22 time has validated the composer’s own appraisal: “I did think I did see all Heaven before me and the great God Himself.”23
MLA Citation
Footnotes
See Steven W. Holloway, “Mad to See the Monuments,” BR 17:06; and Bill T. Arnold and David B. Weisberg, “Babel und Bibel und Bias,” BR 18:01.
Endnotes
Handel deserves particular credit for popularizing the Old Testament and its Apocrypha in a string of oratorios: Alexander Balus, Athalia, Belshazzar, Deborah, Esther, Israel in Egypt, Jephtha, Joseph and His Brethren, Joshua, Judas Maccabaeus, Samson, Saul, Solomon and Susanna. It is not surprising that, even in Handel’s day, his work was especially popular among Jews.
Due to the limits of my own expertise, the following comments will be confined to selections drawn from the Old Testament.
Quoted in Peter Jacobi, The Messiah Book: The Life & Times of G.F. Handel’s Greatest Hit (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), p. 30. The rest is juicy, too: “verily an English ‘Solyman [Suleiman] the Magnificent’; who never walks abroad without a train of footmen at his heels, and…with a scented sponge ‘neath his nose, lest the breath of the vulgar herd should contaminate his sacred person.”
Messiah received its American debut in New York in 1770. To alleviate over-crowding, early audiences were exhorted to leave their hoop skirts and swords at home! Nowadays, we just have to turn off our beepers and cell phones.
Thus, the aria “He was despised” is based upon Isaiah 53:3, “He is despised.” The same number contains the words “he hid not his face from shame and spitting,” whereas Isaiah 50:6 really says “I did not hide my face from shame and spitting.” Again, in the recitative “All they that see him laugh him to scorn,” Jennens modified Psalm 22:8 (English 22:7), which reads “All they that see me mock at me.” When the tenor sings “Thy rebuke hath broken his heart, he is full of heaviness; he looked for some to have pity on him, but…neither found he any to comfort him,” the biblical original of Psalm 69:21 has the first person: “my, I, me” for “his, he, him.” The same is true for the tenor aria “Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto his sorrow” (Lamentations 1:2) and for the soprano’s “But thou didst not leave his soul in hell” (Psalm 16:10).
Hamish Swanston, “Handel” in Outstanding Christian Thinkers (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990), pp. 92–98.
For a handy table of scriptural references in Messiah, see Jacobi, The Messiah Book, pp. 104–113.
As Jennens makes clear here, Messiah was conceived as an Easter oratorio. The “traditional” Christmas Messiah is a fairly recent development. Early performances were actually fund-raisers, e.g., “for the relief of the prisoners in the several Gaols, and for the support of Mercer’s Hospital in Stephen Street, and of the Charitable Infirmary on Inn’s Quay.” An early critic quipped that Messiah “has fed the hungry, clothed the naked, fostered the orphan, and enriched…managers of Oratorios.” Jennens was sorely disappointed in what Handel actually produced, however (see the next note).
In other words, “my people” is not vocative but direct object. Likewise the ancient Greek translation. The Vulgate, however, takes Israel as the addressee—despite Jerome’s considerable proficiency in Hebrew.
Technically, pesher is a literary genre, not a mode of interpretation. See Devorah Diamant, s.v. “Pesharim, Qumran,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 5 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp. 244–251.
The nonliteral interpretation of Isaiah 40:3 might go back to John the Baptist himself and even earlier, since the verse was also applied to the Qumran community. See Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1993), p. 284.
See Raymond E. Brown, Birth of the Messiah, pp. 143–153. As Brown notes, a Ugaritic text of the Late Bronze Age also speaks of a g’lmt (=Hebrew ‘
There is an explanation for this, and it is not Handel’s foreign accent. Handel was music’s most notorious kleptomaniac—the current euphemism would be “recycler”—a proclivity that enabled him to work at great speed. (Remember, Messiah was composed in three weeks.) The greatest victim of his plagiarism was, naturally, himself. Thus, the tune that sits so awkwardly with Isaiah 9:5 originally set a 1741 duet No, di voi non vo’ fidarmi (“No, I will not trust you”), where the accented first syllable makes perfect sense.
The king’s sonship is stated most explicitly in Psalms 2:7, a text which also appears in Messiah: “Thou [the king] art my son, this day have I [God] begotten thee.” That is, upon investiture the king became God’s son (cf. also Psalm 89:27–28 [English 89:26–27]). But elsewhere the “sons of God” are lesser deities (Genesis 6:2, 4; Deuteronomy 32:8 [Greek, Qumran]; Job 1:6, 2:1, 38:7). Was the king of Judah the nation’s patron deity ex officio? Psalm 45:7 (English 45:6), by the most natural reading, explicitly calls the king “God.” At any rate, in Isaiah 9:5 the born child might be either a royal child or an adult king upon his anointment. For a recent discussion of divine kingship, see Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), pp. 157–163.
For such a symbolic sentence name, compare Isaiah’s own sons Shear-Yashuv “A Remnant Shall Return” (Isaiah 7:3) and Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz “Plunder Rushes, Spoil Hurries” (Isaiah 8:14).
See Mark S. Smith, “Divine Form and Size in Ugaritic and Pre-exilic Israelite Religion,” Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 100 (1988), pp. 424–427.
See Elizabeth Bloch Smith, “‘Who Is the King of Glory?’ Solomon’s Temple and Its Symbolism,” in Scripture and Other Artifacts, Festschrift for Philip J. King, ed. Michael D. Coogan, J. Cheryl Exum and Lawrence E. Stager (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994), pp. 18–31.
Perhaps the gates are to remove their tops entirely. We may compare Joseph’s interpretations of the dreams of Pharaoh’s steward and baker. To each he promises, “Pharaoh will raise your head.” But in the steward’s case this means restoration to honor (Genesis 40:13). In the butler’s it means decapitation (Genesis 40:19).
In the King James Version, italics are placed not for emphasis but to mark English words without basis in the original Hebrew and Greek inserted for ease of comprehension. For me, one of the most affecting documents in all English literature is the King James preface, “The Translators to the Reader,” in which the committee airs its doubts as to whether it was even possible to render the Bible in English, and whether numerous uncertainties should have been concealed from readers.
Bluestockings objected to performances of sacred text as entertainment in concert halls and even taverns by performers whose personal morals did not necessarily attain to the Anglican ideal. For instance, the contralto and actress Susanna Cibber had conducted a notorious love affair. Nonetheless, a cleric at the Dublin premier is reported to have responded to her rendition of “He was Despised” with the exclamation, “Woman, for this thy sins be forgiven thee!”
Jennens wrote: “His Messiah has disappointed me, being set in great hast…I shall put no more Sacred Works into his hands, to be thus abus’d.” “He has made a fine entertainment of it, tho’ not near so good as he might & ought to have done. I have with great difficulty made him correct some of the grossest faults in the composition, but he retain’d his Overture obstinately, in which there are some passages far unworthy of Handel, but much more unworthy of the Messiah”—by which I hope he meant Christ, rather than his own text.