The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (29 page)

In this chapter and in the remainder of my text I normally use the New Jerusalem Bible (London and New York, 1985) for translations of prose passages. Because this translation occasionally employs versions of the Septuagint and other Greek manuscripts to
shed light on the standard Hebrew (that is, the Masoretic) text, it will not satisfy everyone. But I find it to be of all
complete
contemporary translations the most intelligible and, where appropriate, most dignified. Where the NJB has “Yahweh,” I have substituted “Y
HWH
,” to maintain consistency with the Fox translation of the earlier chapters. In one instance, I have altered the NJB text, substituting the variant reading “a portion of meat” (which I think more likely) for “a portion of dates” in 2 Samuel 6:19, the passage concerning the transfer of the ark.

To capture the power of poetic passages, I use in this chapter and, by and large, in the following ones the King James Version, because it remains of all English translations the most beautiful; but I have arranged such passages in poetic stanza form, which the KJV does not employ. I have also substituted the “Y
HWH
” of the original Hebrew for “the L
ORD
” of the KJV, again to keep consistency within my own text. Despite this, I have left “the L
ORD”
in the most famous passages, such as Psalm 23, where I thought any substitution would strike the common reader as strange. Though we can be confident that David’s lament over Saul and Jonathan is authentic, the other psalms I attribute to him I do with less certainty. The psalm associated historically with the transfer of the ark is not Psalm 47, which I use, but Psalm 132. In the poetic passage in which Nathan tells David the story of the poor man and the ewe lamb (2 Samuel 12:1–4), I used the NJB.

I believe the Book of Kings is satirizing Solomon and Rehoboam and have interpreted accordingly. But nowhere could I find an adequate translation of Rehoboam’s rejoinder to the northern nobles, which I have translated myself, though of course with rabbinical assistance.

For those interested in the question of how Hebrew became Hebrew, I recommend two books among the welter of possibilities: Peter T. Daniels and William Bright,
The World’s Writing Systems
(Oxford, 1996), and Angel Saenz-Badillos,
A History of the Hebrew Language
(Cambridge, 1993).

Though I have not brought it out in the main text, the Sinai cave where Elijah hears the “still, small voice” should be identified with the cave in Exodus 33:21–22, where Moshe receives a major theophany—an instance of both continuity and development.

Recent scholarship has cast some doubt on how humble were Amos’s origins, but I have taken the prophet at his word. For the text of his prophecies I have used the NJB, as I have for Hosea’s address and for Isaiah’s prophecy about the vineyard. Thereafter, for Isaiah’s prophecies, as well as Micah’s, I have used the KJV, substituting “Y
HWH
” for “the L
ORD
,” except in familiar passages. For Jeremiah, I have used the NJB because of its greater accuracy.

For the Song of Songs, I have used the splendid new translation by Ariel and Chana Bloch (New York, 1995), which succeeds in rendering much of the poetry and unabashedness of the original.

There are a number of hot-button issues in biblical studies that I do not deal with here, especially the question of how accurate the biblical depiction is of Canaanite human sacrifice, of which we find no record in Canaanite literature. I have taken the Bible at its word, as much as anything because I find in other ancient societies (such as the Celts and the Maya), in which we know human sacrifice was practiced, a similar silence within their oral and written literatures. I think it only too likely that for profound psychological reasons human sacrifice was something that had to be done but could not be spoken of. But whether or not the Canaanites actually engaged in this practice or how often, my general argument is secure, even if we take the biblical descriptions as metaphor.

The “peculiar Jew of the first century” is Saul/Paul of Tarsus
(Romans 8:28). I realize that quoting at this point a man who is thought (at least in the popular mind) to have forsaken Judaism for Christianity may seem provocative; but I am not doing so as an exercise in triumphalism, still less to shore up old and (to me) painfully embarrassing arguments for supersessionism (the idea, now repudiated in most Christian theological circles, that Christianity has somehow “superseded” Judaism). I quote Paul because I could find no one else writing within the Jewish tradition who conveys so succinctly the idea I need to express at this point in my argument.

In the quotation from Joel I have used the KJV for the first line, the NJB for the remainder. The idea of the Outside and the Inside, attributed by many (see, for instance, Charles Taylor,
Sources of the Self
[Cambridge, Mass.: 1989]) to Augustine of Hippo, should most certainly be attributed to Augustine as a
conscious idea;
but there is no denying that it is present as a
phenomenon
in the Psalms.

The attitude of Joseph Campbell toward Judaism may be found throughout his work. See, for instance,
The Power of Myth
(New York, 1988). The premise of Jack Miles’s
God: A Biography
(New York, 1995) that the consciousness that evolves in the Bible is God’s own was first broached, I believe, by C. G. Jung in his
Answer to Job
(Princeton, 1972).

The connection between the modern philosophy (and experience) of personalism and ancient religious faith, which I touch on in this last chapter, runs deep. Two classic works, both available in many editions and translations, contain remarkable explorations of the connection: Martin Buber’s
I and Thou
and Gabriel Marcel’s
The Mystery of Being
. A third writer, Walter J. Ong, also sheds
much light on the connection, especially in two works,
The Presence of the Word
(New York, 1967) and
The Barbarian Within
(New York, 1962). In this last work I would especially draw the reader’s attention to the chapter “Voice as Summons for Belief: Literature, Faith, and the Divided Self.” In this regard, I cannot resist quoting a brief sentence, found scribbled among the notes of the priest-scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin after his death: “A Presence is never mute.”

The
books of the Hebrew Bible are divided into three sections, Torah,
Neviim, and
Ketuvim, the initial letters of which form the acronym
Tanak
, the word by which the Bible is known in Jewish tradition. Here is the canon, or official list, of the Hebrew scriptures, which is universally accepted. It was established by Palestinian Jews in the early centuries of our era, though there was probably essential agreement on the list of included books by the last centuries
B.C
. Besides these books, there are a number of others, generally called apocryphal (by Jews and Protestants) or deuterocanonical (by Catholics and most Orthodox Christians), which lie at the margins of the canon, sometimes included, sometimes rejected. For some of these more marginal texts, we no longer possess a (complete) Hebrew version. Their appearance in some Bibles may be traced to their inclusion in manuscript copies of the
Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, made for Jews of the diaspora in the last centuries
B.C.

T
ORAH
O
R
T
EACHING
(
SOMETIMES
T
RANSLATED
L
AW
)
(also called the Pentateuch, that is, the Five Books

The stories of the Torah are largely contained within the first two books: Genesis, covering the period from the Creation through Avraham to the death of Joseph in Egypt; and Exodus, covering the period from the Egyptian slavery of the Children of Israel through their escape under Moshe to the encounter with God in Sinai. Exodus concludes with a list of ordinances. Leviticus contains the ordinances of the priests of the tribe of Levi. Numbers is so called because it begins with a census of the desert tribes; it continues the narrative of the wanderings of the Israelites in Sinai, though interspersed with groups of supplementary ordinances, and concludes with the first Israelite settlements in Transjordan. Deuteronomy is a code of civil and religious laws, framed as a long discourse by Moshe and concluding with his death.

N
EVIIM
(
OR
P
ROPHETS
)
F
ORMER
P
ROPHETS

This sequence presents the continuous story of Israel from the settlement of Canaan to the fall of Judea and the Babylonian exile. These books are histories, not “prophetic” works (as we would normally think of them), though in the course of their narratives prophets like Samuel are introduced. These books are given the name Prophets because all the great Israelite figures, starting with Moshe and Joshua, were deemed to be prophets in later nomenclature. In most English Bibles, Samuel and Kings are broken up into 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel and 1 Kings and 2 Kings.

L
ATTER
P
ROPHETS

The Twelve
(also called the Minor Prophets, because these books are brief)

The latter prophets comprise all the books of actual prophecy from Isaiah to Malachi. The last twelve were customarily contained on one scroll.

K
ETUVIM
(
OR
W
RITINGS
)

The Torah is unquestionably
the
scripture of Jewish tradition, though the oft-repeated phrase “the Torah (or the Law) and the Prophets” alerts us that these two parts of scripture are viewed as virtually inseparable. But the third part of the Hebrew Bible enjoys less importance, being a diverse collection of texts not easily characterizable by any category other than “Writings.” In this collection, Psalms is meant to have pride of place. The five short books from the
Song of Songs to Esther, known as the Five Scrolls, are read in synagogues on feast days. Chronicles (usually broken into 1 Chronicles and 2 Chronicles in English Bibles) is a summary of Jewish salvation history, even employing word-for-word passages borrowed from Samuel and Kings. It begins with Adam; its ending, narrating the return of Babylonian Jews to the Promised Land, allows the Hebrew Bible to close with the consolation that the prophets foresaw and to offer hope to oppressed Jews of later periods.

Since the twelve minor prophets count as one scroll (or book), the Hebrew Bible contains twenty-four books, pointing up the importance in Jewish tradition of the number twelve and its multiples as signifying completeness or fulfillment. In addition to the twenty-four books, the apocryphal or deuterocanonical books, contained in the Greek
Septuagint and accepted as scripture by Catholics and many Orthodox Christians, are Judith, Tobit, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sira (or Ecclesiasticus), Baruch (who was Jeremiah’s secretary), and the Greek additions to Daniel, namely Daniel 3:24–90 and Chapters 13 (the story of Susanna) and 14
(Bel and the Dragon). Besides these, many Orthodox Christians accept as scripture one or more of the following: 1 Esdras (in the Septuagint Ezra-Nehemiah is called 2 Esdras), 3 and 4 Maccabees, the Psalms of Solomon, and, in some cases, a few other minor works and additions. The order of books in Christian Bibles differs from the order of the Hebrew Bible.