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.