Bible Books
014
Erotica in Holy Writ
The Song of Songs: A New Translation with an Introduction and Commentary
Ariel Bloch and Chana Bloch, Afterword by Robert Alter
(New York: Random House, 1995) 253 pp., $27.50
The introduction to this book is aptly entitled “In the Garden of Delights.” The husband and wife authors understand the Song as “a poem about the sexual awakening of a young woman and her lover.” The woman is very young, barely past puberty. The lovers tryst in an idealized setting—a kind of Eden—where they discover the delights of love. But unlike the Eden story, in which loss of innocence is fraught with consequences, their adventure brings only the joy of discovery. Yet, even in this enchanted garden, there are problems. The lovers meet by night in secret and separate at dawn. It is thus apparent that they are not married. The situation evokes the old dilemma of love without marriage versus marriage without love and which is worse.
Free love appeals to the poetic imagination. Chana Bloch perceives the language of the Song as “restrained and delicate even when it is most sensuous…And because the lovers seem new to love, tender and proud and full of discovery, their words have a kind of purity—a cleanly wantonness.” Keeping talk about wantonness immaculate is no easy task, given the subtle ways that even the most innocent words assume sexual meaning when erotic interests are involved.
The geographic horizons of the lovers extend beyond Jerusalem (the damsel’s epithet “Shulamite” may mean “woman of Jerusalem”), northward to Lebanon, south to Ein Gedi, east to Heshbon and west to Carmel. Yet even these bounds are too strait for the primal urges that engender life and ensure its renewal and continuance. This reviewer still thinks that the lovers are superhuman and that the motto “Love is strong as Death” applies to all life, including plants, animals, humans and gods. The major merit of the recent trend to see the lovers as mortals is that it undercuts the traditional view of the Song as an allegory of God’s love for Israel and the Christian twist to that view, which relates the Song to Christ’s love for the church, the truly chosen.
An erotic poem in Holy Writ has been unthinkable for many readers, which accounts for the persistent contrived allegorizings of the Song over the past two millennia by both Jews and Christians. The Blochs remind us that “women behave with surprising boldness in some of the Bible stories.” But that does not warrant the supposition that a woman of any time could carry on with impunity the torrid extramarital activity envisaged in the Song. “Cleanly wantonness” for females of the species has not been an option in most human societies, early or late. This is but one of several considerations that support the view espoused by this reviewer that the terrific black beauty of the Song is superhuman—the violent virgin goddess of love and war.
Ariel Bloch is professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught Semitic linguistics, Arabic dialectology, Aramaic and a seminar on the Song of Songs. Chana Bloch is professor of English and director of creative writing at Mills College, where she also teaches poetry, Shakespeare and the Bible. Mrs. Bloch has published books of her own poetry and her translation of modern Hebrew and Yiddish poems.
In his afterword, literary critic Robert Alter praises the Blochs’ skills in conveying the “exquisite balance of expression and feeling of the Song.” Previous 015translators, Alter opines, often “fudged the frank sensuality of the original” and had “difficulties negotiating between the extremes of clunky sexual explicitness and the pastels of greeting card poetry, which are equal if opposite violations of the original.” In Alter’s view, the Blochs’ translation offers “a rare conjunction of refined poetic resourcefulness and philological precision” that “brings us closer to the magical freshness of this ancient Hebrew love poetry than any other English version.”
In some instances, however, esthetic considerations take precedence over philological precision. Consider Song of Songs 5:4, rendered “My love reached in for the latch / and my heart / beat wild” (needlessly breaking the short second line into two parts). The commentary explains that “reached in for the latch” is literally “stretched his hand through the hole,” most likely the keyhole. The gentle reader is not informed that “hand” is an ancient circumlocution for the male organ or that “my heart beat wild” is literally “my guts stirred for him.” In any context, the concatenation of “hand” and “hole” and guts in motion would be sexually suggestive.
The extremes between “clunky” sexual explicitness and greeting card niceties are not always so great as supposed. In the world’s oldest writing system—Sumerian—the sign for “woman” is the pubic triangle with a slit. In the Song of Deborah (Judges 5:30) a girl or two as war booty is called “a womb, two wombs,” and in Ugaritic “Virgin Anat” (btlt ‘nt) is also called “Womb Anat” (rhm ‘nt) as well as “Miss Womb” (rhmy—the word for uterus plus the ancient feminine ending—ay). The classic polite term “penis” was originally slang meaning “tail,” like German and Yiddish Schwanz. “Vagina” means “sheath” (for a sword). The post-biblical term for the female organ pot, or potah, means “socket” (for a doorpost). Philological research often reveals that even polite sexual terms lack delicacy.
Any sexual expression of whatever origin tends to become offensive, and only evasive or exotic words are acceptable. With respect to the word sorr (from surr), “navel” (7:3), Mrs. Bloch judges that this reviewer’s rendering, “vulva,” verges on crudeness. (Some people are offended by the suggestive sound of the name of the Swedish automobile Volvo.) My effort to capture the original triple play of the Hebrew—“Your vulva a rounded crater; may it never lack punch”—offers three “howlers” in a single verse and “illustrates how important it is for a translator to be sensitive to levels of style.” The Blochs stick with the traditional rendering—“navel”—since “the anatomical term ‘vulva’ would be out of place in the delicately allusive language of the Song.” “Your navel is the moon’s / bright drinking cup / May it brim with wine” is their translation. Clearly the item intended is our lady’s most private part. The navel is close but still a near miss—whatever one dare call the target. This recalls the testimony of a woman wounded in a razor fight. The judge asked, “Were you cut in the fracas?” She replied, “No sir. Right between the navel and the fracas.”
The word translated “cup” by the Blochs designates not a cup but a mixing bowl or crater, a more capacious receptacle. The attribute translated “bright” relates to the vessel’s roundness, not brightness. And it is not the moon that sips from this bowl.
It is not possible here to summarize the massive evidence that the black beauty of the Song is superhuman, none other than the great virgin goddess of love and war widely worshiped under various names—Inanna and Ishtar in ancient Mesopotamia, Ashtart and/or Anat of the Western Semites, Athena among the Greeks and the violent yet tender black virgin-mother Kali, still dominant in the popular piety of India. An ancient Semitic name of this daunting beauty was ’shry, as the name is spelled in Ugaritic. The root of this name is shr, “black,” relating to genuine blackness, not temporary suntan.
The highlight of the Song of Songs is surely the message that “Love is strong as Death” (8:6–7). Love is the major motivation of sentient souls. In older West Semitic myths from Ugarit, mighty Baal after his resurrection is able to battle his brother Death to a standstill. Baal’s violent yet tender virgin sister Anat earlier pulverized Death and fed him to the sparrows, but Death came back strong as ever. Love is our only answer to Death. The point of the Song (8:7) is well stressed in contemporary doggerel:
Water can push and water can shove,
But water can’t quench the fire of love.
That’s one thing I’m certain of,
Water can’t quench the fire of love.
For all the considerable literary merits of the Blochs’ version of the Song, the verdict stands that the best is yet to be. Meanwhile, as necessary, we face Death with faith, hope and love. These three abide, but love is the greatest.
A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus vol. two: Mentor, Message and Miracles
John P. Meier
(New York: Doubleday, 1994) 1,232 pp., $35
The Historical Figure of Jesus
E.P. Sanders
(New York: Penguin, 1994) 336 pp., $27.50
Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom
Ben Witherington III
(Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994) 436 pp., $35
Public interest in the historical Jesus remains keen. The three books reviewed here will add to this popular interest and at the same time will occupy important places in the academic debate. All three are written at a level and in a style that nonexperts should find engaging.
Of the three, John Meier’s second installment of A Marginal Jew offers the most substantial contribution. This hefty tome, which runs to more than 1,200 pages, continues at the same level of readability and balanced judgment to which his many readers were treated in the first volume. While that volume, published in 1991, treated introductory matters (such as sources and the historical and cultural context into which Jesus was born and in which he grew up), this latest volume examines Jesus’ relationship to John the Baptist, his proclamation of the Kingdom of God and his ministry of miracles. Meier concludes that almost every major aspect of Jesus’ teaching and praxis reflects those of the Baptist, his mentor; that Jesus proclaimed the presence of God’s saving, healing Kingdom; and that Jesus did indeed perform deeds that his contemporaries perceived as miracles, an aspect of his public ministry to which the Jewish historian Josephus bears important witness. Meier’s work is compelling and will be ranked among the very best studies on the historical Jesus produced in the 1990s. The third and final volume of A Marginal Jew will examine Jesus’ death and the factors that led to it.
E.P. Sanders’s The Historical Figure of Jesus is excellent. Written in a conversational style, it offers the nonexpert a lucid and fair assessment of what can be reasonably known about the historical 016Jesus, what he hoped to accomplish, what he thought about himself and what happened to him when he visited Jerusalem. Sanders has attempted to put in popular form the principal findings of his Jesus and Judaism (1985). One who is familiar with the earlier book will notice that Sanders has qualified his views here and there (all to the better, in my opinion). However, Sanders still maintains his controversial view that Jesus was not a preacher of repentance, a position that has been widely criticized. Sanders also doubts that Jesus regarded himself as Israel’s Messiah, at least as this eschatological agent was understood in popular circles. But Sanders does think that Jesus may have thought of himself as God’s viceroy, who would represent God on earth. Believing that the kingdom was about to arrive and that the Temple would be destroyed and replaced with a new, eschatological Temple, Jesus demonstrated in the Temple precincts. This demonstration, in which the tables of the money changers were overturned, provoked the Jewish high priest—who was responsible for maintaining civil order—to seize Jesus and hand him over to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor. Contrary to the apologetic portrait found in the Gospels, Pilate did not waver but summarily executed Jesus.
Ben Witherington’s Jesus the Sage offers readers a fresh treatment of an important aspect of Jesus’ teaching and style of ministry that is in some ways a response to the recent sensationalist claims of certain members of the Jesus Seminar, such as the assertion that Jesus was a Cynic philosopher (see John Dominic Crossan’s The Historical Jesus [1991]). Witherington’s book is not limited to the historical Jesus but is also concerned with the question of the development of Christology. He believes that a major ingredient in New Testament Christology derives from the Jewish wisdom tradition (as seen, for example, in Proverbs, the Wisdom of Solomon and the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach) and how Jesus interacted with it. Witherington is able to show how at many points Jesus’ teachings and activities reflect this wisdom tradition, including the idea of the personification of wisdom. Witherington thinks that Jesus—a “prophetic sage”—may have thought of himself as wisdom personified. Given wisdom’s close association with God, even identity, with God, it comes as no surprise that early Christian theologians, such as Paul and the author of the Gospel of John, began to express Christology in terms of incarnation: In Jesus God walked among human beings. Witherington provides his readers with a wealth of useful background discussion of early Jewish wisdom and how these traditions contributed to Jesus’ self-understanding and to the emergence of Christian theology.
The three books reviewed here are each highly recommended. Their perspectives are different, to be sure. Of the three authors, Sanders is the most skeptical about the gospel portraits—and the most willing to embrace speculative theories as to what Jesus really did. Meier, who offers the most comprehensive treatment, has greater confidence in the reliability of the Gospels, but it is a confidence that arises from a careful, even meticulous, consideration of the evidence. Witherington, who seems to view the Gospels much as Meier does, exposes readers to the theological ramifications of his study of the historical Jesus. These books complement one another and deserve a place on the shelf 017of everyone who is interested in the modern study of Jesus.
The Disappearance of God: A Divine Mystery
Richard Elliott Friedman
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1995) 352 pp., $24.95
One of the little-known mysteries of the Hebrew Bible is that God disappears in it. In the first part of Genesis—the primeval era—God appears in every story. In the patriarchal cycles, God is a primary actor. In the stories of Exodus and Sinai, great divine miracles occur regularly. Yet, as the Bible goes on, God’s appearances become fewer and less miraculous. By the time we get to Kings and Chronicles, God appears hardly at all. When we get to Esther, Ezra and Nehemiah, God is not even part of the story. Why is this? What implications does this disappearance have for Judaism, Christianity and the modern age?
Richard Friedman, author of Who Wrote the Bible? and professor of biblical studies at the University of California, San Diego, explores such issues in his engaging work. Friedman demonstrates the process of disappearance in the Hebrew Bible and points to a parallel process in which humans become more and more self-reliant. The disappearance of God is intertwined with the growing up of humanity. Yet, like a child growing to adulthood, the separation from a nurturing authority figure creates problems. It is hard to be a grown-up. Life poses problems to which grown-ups have no solutions. The disappearance of God in the Bible and the growing pains of humanity make for a tragic story, but one with resonance for both ancient times and modernity.
Classical Judaism and Christianity solved this problem in different ways. For Judaism the sanctity of the Torah took the place of an absent God. In rabbinic tradition a famous story states that “the Law is not in heaven.” Since God gave the Torah at Sinai, it is up to us to live up to it and to decide how to do so. The sacred text is a surrogate for an absent God. In Christianity a different solution was adopted. Since God was absent, his son was sent to take his place on earth. God is made available through an incarnation, Jesus Christ. In Judaism the solution is a divine text; in Christianity, a divine person.
But the mystery does not end there. Friedman picks up the thread of the mystery in the modern age, with the famous announcement of Nietzsche that “God is dead.” Yet Nietzsche, as Friedman explains, went mad, perhaps in part because of the psychic weight of his discovery. Nietzsche stepped across the threshold of morality and reason into a world “beyond good and evil” and ultimately fell into madness. Friedman takes the occasion of Nietzsche’s insanity and makes it into a metaphor for the condition we find ourselves in in the 20th century. Are we, like Nietzsche, on the far side of the threshold of sanity and morality? Are we doomed to lose our capability for reason and goodness because of the “death of God” in our times? Or has this happened and our world already gone mad? The story of the 20th century is not a comforting one, and many would 045agree that our civilization has already lost its moorings.
Is there a modern solution to this problem, comparable to the ones adopted by Judaism and Christianity in the early centuries of the Common Era? Friedman poses a tentative solution, or at least a way towards a solution. He looks at the findings of modern physics concerning the structure and origin of the cosmos, asking whether the physicists have perhaps found traces of God. By considering a curious series of parallels between modern cosmology and medieval Kabbalah (a Jewish mystical movement), he argues that a new concept of God may be inferred, a sense of an unknowable God who is the source of the universe. Everything in the universe—including us—is an emanation of this initial mystery, which the physicists call a “singularity” and the Kabbalists call the Ein Sof (Without End).
By suggesting that we are on the verge of a new solution to the disappearance of God, Friedman gives hope that Nietzsche’s fate need not be our own. Perhaps as a species we have grown up enough, and now we can return to God in a more mature way. At the end of God’s disappearance, there is the possibility of a reappearance, but in a non-traditional, or post-traditional, sense.
Is this a right reading of the Bible and Western history? Are we on the verge of something new? In my view Friedman’s biblical analysis is brilliant, but the modern section is necessarily speculative. I doubt that science can provide a solution to the absence of God in society. It certainly hasn’t done so yet and probably is not designed to do so. Limited to the analysis of observable data, science simply cannot teach us the meaning of life.
The Disappearance of God is an elegant and learned reflection on one of the central mysteries of the Bible and of modern life. Whether or not one agrees with the author’s conclusions, every reader will be challenged and moved to think about our common history and destiny. We have inherited a dilemma about God and human existence. Is it possible to solve the mystery?
Erotica in Holy Writ
The Song of Songs: A New Translation with an Introduction and Commentary
You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.