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The Bible may be read in myriad ways—not the least of which is as a collection of great stories, some of the best writing of all time. The following books consider how the Bible came to be understood as a work of literature and how this great book has, over the centuries, inspired others.
The Great Poems of the Bible: A Reader’s Companion with New Translations
James L. Kugel
(New York: Free Press, 1999) 352 pp., $23.00 (hardback)
When I first opened this collection of some of the most famous poems of the Bible, I turned immediately to Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” This, I thought, would be the ultimate test of the book. How could the author possibly improve on the beloved King James Version of this poem? Why would he even bother to try?
And there I read: “The other translations in this book are my own, but I did not wish to forgo here the well-known, and altogether stunning, translation of Psalm 23 that appears in the King James (or ‘Authorized’) Version of the Bible.”
I offer my apologies for doubting the author, a former poetry editor for Harper’s and a professor of Hebrew literature at Harvard University. Kugel only enhances the poem with his extended essay on the differences between the familiar English translation and the meaning of the original Hebrew. He explains how this psalm differs from others (here the psalmist neither asks for anything nor offers thanks; he has no need to, as the first line suggests, for the Lord is his shepherd). The last line of the psalm—“I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever”—inspires a discourse on biblical evidence for the belief in resurrection.
That’s only one chapter. David’s lament over the death of Saul, the Song of Deborah and 15 other poems receive similar treatment; for these the author has indulged in fresh translations.
The Legends of the Jews
Louis Ginzberg
Translated by Henrietta Szold
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998) 7 vols., 3,305 pp., $104.70 (paperback)
“In the beginning”—the first words of this collection—will resonate with all readers. But the sentence continues: “two thousand years before the heaven and the earth…” If the Bible is history, then this is prehistory: Heaven and earth are created only 6 pages later; woman won’t surface for another 60 pages.
Each biblical story—from the Creation to the Book of Esther—is retold in greatly expanded detail in Louis Ginzberg’s famous seven-volume collection of the midrash (rabbinic elaborations on the Hebrew Bible). These extrabiblical stories fill in the gaps in the biblical narrative and explain away seeming contradictions. When Ginzberg began the project early this century, his stated goal was “to gather together from the original sources all Jewish legends, in so far as they refer to Biblical personages and events.”
The first volume appeared in 1909. It would take another 30 years before the mammoth collection was complete. In the 1950s the Jewish Publication Society produced a stripped-down one-volume abridged edition. Now Johns Hopkins has reprinted the original text with a new introduction by James Kugel of Harvard University.
Volumes 1 through 4 contain the stories. The fifth and sixth volumes include extensive notes, which enumerate the rabbinic sources for each story. Volume 7, an essential index to the legends, quickly gives a sense of the riches found in the preceding volumes. Here, for example, Moses merits more than 350 listings, including “Moses, the precocity of,” “Moses, things not known to,” “Moses, parents of,” “Moses, king of Ethiopia,” “Moses, visit of, to Paradise and Hell,” “Moses made use of written and oral sources for the compilation of Genesis,” and “Moses, body of, never decayed.”
Moses and the Angels
Ileene Smith Sobel
Paintings by Mark Podwal
Introduction by Elie Wiesel
(New York: Delacort Press, 1999) 65 pp., $16.95 (hardback)
Interweaving the biblical account with stories from the midrash (rabbinic tales that expand on the Bible), Ileene Smith Sobel retells the story of Moses for older children. The resulting narrative may startle some readers (the midrash is often audacious), but many will find much satisfaction in the imaginative ways Sobel fills the gaps in Moses’ life. She writes, for example, that to gain the hand of Jethro’s daughter Zipporah, Moses had to pull a sapphire rod from the soil; this mysterious rod, which came from the Garden of Eden, had already devoured everyone else who tried to uproot it. Moses succeeds, but Jethro is so startled that he casts Moses into a pit. Zipporah keeps Moses alive for seven years by secretly bringing him food each day; at last, Jethro gives his blessing to the marriage. Sobel’s text is enriched with vivid paintings by illustrator Mark Podwal.
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In Queen Esther’s Garden: An Anthology of Judeo-Persian Literature
Vera Basch Moreen
(New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2000) 408 pp., $45.00 (hardback)
Moses may be called Musa in these Eastern stories, but the basic tale of his encounter at the burning bush develops much the way it does in the Hebrew Bible.
Produced by the Jewish Diaspora community of Iran between the 8th and 19th centuries, the poems and prose accounts gathered here may be new to most BR readers, but many of the stories will be well known. Most of the texts are poetic rewritings of biblical accounts, often with a Persian twist. In the epic poems of the 14th-century Jewish Persian poet Mowlana Shahin-i Shirazi (Our Master, the Royal Falcon of Shiraz), Moses is modeled on the great heroes of Iranian epics, as in this description of Moses’ rod turning into a snake: “Made bold by God’s command the prophet wheeled / Like a male lion upon that fierce creature, / grasped its tail; and instantly it turned / Into a staff again.”
In “The Courtship and Marriage of Esther and Ardashir (Ahasuerus)” by the same poet, the king’s search for a new wife is reminiscent of classical Persian romances. The king’s eunuch, Hegai, extols Esther’s beauty before the king: “There is a tender idol, exalted in beauty / And learning; the likes of her has never been seen / In the world, no, not even among the houris / Of Paradise. Should you but see her cheeks / One night, and only in a dream, / You would never again look at moonlight. / Compared to her full moon, the moon / Is but a crescent; next to her stature / The cypress appears bent. / Rest tranquil, only take her into your arms, / And see what a fountain you will drink from!”
Author Moreen, of Swarthmore College, has written a brief introduction to each section (biblical epics, religious poems, historical and mystical texts, etc.). Extensive notes point out parallels to both Persian and Jewish sources, such as the midrash. But it is the 045texts themselves, rather than the commentary, that are the focus of the anthology.
The Book of Heaven
Edited by Carol Zaleski and Philip Zaleski
(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000) 448 pp., $35.00 (hardback)
A contemplative fish, in Rupert Brooke’s poem “Heaven,” foresees the end-time: “Somewhere, beyond Space and Time, / Is wetter water, and slimier slime.” In “The Hobo’s Last Lament,” an anonymous poem from 1917, a poor dying wayfarer sings of a different world to come: “I am going to a better land, / Where everything is bright, / Where beef-stews grow on bushes, / And you sleep out every night; / And you do not have to work at all, / And never change your socks, / And streams of goodly whiskey / Come trickling down the rocks.” For this hapless hobo, heaven combines the freedom of the hobo life with the comforts of a land of plenty.
As this anthology makes celestially clear, the heavens that have been pictured by mortal (and ichthyous) authors are as various as the writers themselves. More than 80 poems and prose accounts—by Homer, Dante, Lord Byron, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Louis Ginzberg and others—attempt to describe passages to heaven, the topography of the celestial sphere, encounters with God, utopias and the Last Judgment.
The Bible may be read in myriad ways—not the least of which is as a collection of great stories, some of the best writing of all time. The following books consider how the Bible came to be understood as a work of literature and how this great book has, over the centuries, inspired others.
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