The Hebrew Bible, that thunderous, juicy compendium of sacred law, poetry, history, and novella, is supremely a reader’s book, a book for reading and even a book about reading. Not only has it generated well over twenty centuries’ worth of after-the-fact riposte, elucidation, and elaboration by poets, scholars, and religious leaders—one of these commentaries is called the New Testament—but the Bible itself may be said to be a work insistently self-glossing. Thus, even within the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy refines the laws of Exodus and retells the events of Numbers, while later on Isaiah, Amos, and the Psalmist spin allegories upon the history retailed in the Mosaic books.
More uncannily still, almost like some strange modernist masterpiece, the Bible from time to time records the experience of itself being read, going so far as to divulge the reactions of a number of different readers and auditors. In the Book of Nehemiah we learn, heart-stirringly, of the returned exiles from Babylonia gathering in the “open place” in Jerusalem, “men and women and all who could understand,” to hear Ezra, aloft on a wooden pulpit, recite to them from the Book of the Law, while the priests interpreted and clarified the words “and caused them to understand the reading” so that the people, understanding, wept.1 Not the smallest lesson contained in this episode of mass exaltation is its reminder to us that the Bible is very likely the first legal and sacred book in human history intended not for a royal and/or priestly caste but for all—for, as we would say, a general audience.
At a different pole is Jeremiah’s report of King Jehoiakim, sitting in his winter house “in the ninth month” with a fire burning in the brazier, reading the Book of Jeremiah itself and, as he reads, hacking out each column of the scroll with his penknife and throwing it into the flames “until all the scroll was consumed in the fire.” The reader, reading about how the book he is reading was burned to cinders, can almost see behind the flickering flame of the Hebrew letters the singed and blazing words of a Prophet who himself describes God’s word as a fire shut up in his bones. (Just to punish Jehoiakim, Jeremiah proceeded to rewrite the whole scroll from memory, “and there were added to them besides many similar words.”)
And what of the Prophet Habakkuk, commanded by the Lord to inscribe his visions on a stone tablet, in letters so plain that “he that reads it may run”? For anyone who credits biblical providence, here quite clearly is an instance of Holy Writ anticipating (and meeting) the needs of the harried New Yorker.
Yet the unhappy truth today is that this book, once as well-known and well-studied as the alphabet, is no longer much read at all, except by specialists and by that ever-smaller section of the general public who are believing Christians and Jews and thus in varying degrees take to heart the instruction of Moses to speak of it “when thou sittest in thy house and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.” To make matters worse, these two interested parties, the biblical scholars and the devout, have on the whole been working at cross-purposes. Believers read and understand the Bible as God’s revealed word, while for the last 150 years or more, biblical scholarship has been dominated by the historical-critical approach which treats the Bible not as a unified revelation but as a composite document, consisting of reworked legends from the Near Eastern background and of histories written and edited by various schools of priestly scribes laboring centuries apart.
Now in recent years a body of critics and scholars have sought to consolidate what we might call a third way of reading the Bible, neither as sacred writ nor as anthropological source book but as great literature. These critics mean to reintroduce the Bible to the general, which today means the unbelieving, public by presenting it as an artistic masterpiece, one which we can understand and best appreciate with the tools of literary criticism—that is, by examining vocabulary and diction, images and figures of speech, narrative modes, means of creating character and incident, tone, pace, viewpoint, play of ideas. In thus proceeding the literary approach aims more or less consciously to restore to the Bible an integrity—no longer of revelation but of artistic intent—which was shattered by the efforts of the historical-critical school to separate the text into its supposedly original components.
It is one sign of the success and vitality of this approach (which is not without its debt to more traditional modes of exegesis) that in the last months, two significant anthologies of literary criticism of the Bible have been published, both of them aimed at the common reader.
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The idea behind Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible2 is captivating. If the Bible today is best understood as a work of literature, who better to grasp and convey its graces than a writer? Creative writers, after all, have an attitude toward reading like the attitude of an athlete toward food—they read in training—yet at their best (as poets from Dryden to W.H. Auden, Randall Jarrell, T.S. Eliot, and Joseph Brodsky have demonstrated) they can make splendid and surprising critics of other writers, bold, lavish, eccentric, single-minded, contrary, and free. For this reason alone one opens Congregation anticipating a mine of rough diamonds, for here a congeries of 20th-century American poets, critics, and storytellers, Jewish but for the most part untutored in biblical scholarship, confront their Judean counterparts from the 10th, 5th, and 2nd centuries B.C.E.
No such luck. Congregation proceeds through the Hebrew Bible methodically, with each biblical book assigned to a different writer. Thus we have a chapter on Genesis by Isaac Bashevis Singer, on Exodus by Harold Bloom, and so on, all the way through Chronicles, with contributions by figures as diverse as Mordecai Richler, Richard Howard, Anne Roiphe, Elie Wiesel, and Herbert Gold. (There are exceptions: some especially popular books, like Jonah and Psalms, seem to have found two different suitors on their dance cards, while wallflowers like Obadiah and Zephaniah never make it onto the floor.) As it turns out, however, the truly fresh and provocative chapters in Congregation are those contributed not by the ingenues on the biblical scene but by professional literary critics. Of these, the most striking (in different ways) are by Harold Bloom and Cynthia Ozick. Each of these writers excels at exposing and analyzing both the aesthetic and the intellectual facets of the text; the difference between them is that Harold Bloom is stimulating but wrong while Cynthia Ozick is beautiful and right.
Bloom’s essay is largely devoted to a discussion of the book of Genesis—except that, since Isaac Bashevis Singer had already nabbed that assignment for himself, Bloom calls his chapter “Exodus.” The essay is a vivid, quirky, and thoroughly mistaken portrait of the so-called “J” writer, to whose pen historical critics ascribe the livelier portions of the Pentateuch. Bloom characterizes “J” as a sublime and basically irreligious narrator who revels in ambiguity and conflict, and who enjoys rather uneasy relations with the God, Yahweh (or Jahweh—hence “J”), Whom he “invents” in the Pentateuch. This God is a figure approvingly described by Bloom as
incommensurate yet rather agonistic, curious and lively, humorous yet irascible, and all too capable of suddenly violent action. But J’s Yahweh is rather heimlich also; He sensibly avoids walking about in the Near Eastern heat, preferring the cool of the evening, and He likes to sit under the terebinths at Mamre, devouring roast calf and curds.
For this critic, romantic in sensibility and rather old-fashioned in his frame of reference, who exalts irony and rebellion and decries the “normative,” the high point of the Pentateuch is not the lawgiving at Mount Sinai but Jacob’s all-night struggle with God at Jabbok, an event which does indeed piercingly exemplify one aspect of the Israelite soul, that of the incorrigible overreacher. (Israel, after all, means “God-fighter.”) But there is another aspect, that of the worshipper marked by a loving if sometimes quarrelsome submission to God’s will, which Bloom either underestimates or simply dislikes, and so ignores. This leads him into blockheaded critical blunders, as in his assertion that the story of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22 must be a changeling version, supplanting an original version (by “J,” of course) in which Abraham would surely have argued himself blue in the face to avoid slaughtering his own son on Mount Moriah.
But the Abraham of the Bible is a more complex, generous, and diffident organism than Bloom’s Abraham. A man living before the birth of Israel and its divine covenant and, with God, still working out all the rules, still molding and manipulating the wet clay of the Law, Abraham is indeed invigorated by (in Bloom’s words) a “shrewd courage and humanity,” yet like all biblical heroes he is also self-denying in the crunch. This Abraham may pester and browbeat God out of annihilating a foreign city, but he is the same Abraham who, after winning a lost battle for four neighboring kings, refuses to accept any war booty for himself, only what is due “the men who went with him.” And it is this same Abraham who either out of an inborn attitude most succinctly expressed in the Bible by Job—“the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord”—or out of gut-trust that God will by whatever means fulfill His promise to multiply Isaac’s seed, offers up wordlessly his son, his only son, even Isaac, whom he loves.
Obedience, chafing, revolt, ardent submission, backsliding, and repentance: these are the choppy currents of biblical man’s relation to God. To glorify the sassy, ironic, and rebellious in Scripture and foist off its heartfelt assents on some inferior interpolating author (“E” rather than “J”) is to leave us with half a story, and the easier half at that. Anyone interested in human character cannot but be transfixed by such gritty and subversive episodes as Jacob’s nocturnal tussle with the angel of God, or David’s dispatch of the warrior Uriah, whose wife he has made pregnant; but the reader who loves the Bible’s words must also relish its brimful, telling silences. The fullest and most mysterious biblical moments we know are all expressions of that union with the divine experienced by Abraham on Mount Moriah, Moses in the cleft of the rock, Ruth on the highway to Judah.
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It is to the last of these figures that the novelist Cynthia Ozick devotes the most profound and attentive chapter in Congregation. The story of the Book of Ruth everyone knows. In a familiar biblical pattern, a Judean family journeys down to Moab to escape famine at home. The man dies, his two sons die, leaving a widowed and childless Naomi with her two Moabite daughters-in-law, Orpah and Ruth. Naomi sets back for Judah, dispatching to her own land a reluctant Orpah; but Ruth, fired by love for the God of Israel and His people, in a large, sweet, and fateful vow (“whither thou goest, I shall go,” and “your God shall be my God”) cleaves her fate to Naomi’s, and returns with her to Bethlehem. There Ruth becomes her mother-in-law’s plucky provider (treating her, say the townsmen, better than seven sons) and wins the love of their rich kinsman Boaz, whom Miss Ozick describes as endowed wih “a tenderness sweetly discriminating, morally meticulous, widehearted, and ripe.” From their union is engendered the royal house of David.
Cynthia Ozick interprets the Book of Ruth as a tale of “normality” versus “singularity,” of natural instincts and natural kindness versus metaphysical vision. She sympathetically characterizes Orpah as a “loving young woman of clear goodness” and “fine impulses” who, having already done more than her daughterly duty by Naomi, turns back on the highway tearful and disconsolate but ready to go and make for herself a homely new life with a Moabite husband and Moabite gods. There is a price to be paid for this, however. “What Orpah gains by staying home with her own people is what she always deserved: family happiness. . . . What Orpah loses is the last three thousand years of being present in history. Israel continues; Moab is not.” In contrast to this robust and generous normality stands Ruth, afflicted not only with an almost supernatural concentration of loyal love but with an “insight, cognition, intuition, religious genius” which leads her, “like a second Abraham,” from home, family, country, and gods to the unknown land of the invisible One God.
Much has been written about this small, full, golden harvest tale of ripe grain and of love for a God universal yet dearly particular; nothing better, perhaps, than this essay of Cynthia Ozick’s. Indeed, one is tempted to follow Miss Ozick’s lead and suggest that the Moabite Ruth is not just a “second Abraham,” but a second emblem of Israel itself, a figure whose choices and utterances pattern more than one key moment in sacred Israelite history. For if it is in words duplicating the Lord’s command to Abraham that Boaz describes Ruth as having left “thy father and thy mother and the land of thy birth and . . . come to a people whom thou knewest not before,” it is in an echo of Israel’s acceptance of the Law at the foot of Mount Sinai that Ruth answers Naomi’s commands with her eloquent, “All that thou sayest to me, I will do.” And it is in a poignant reflection of the Prophets’ personification of Israel as a now-faithful, now-faithless wife that Boaz praises Ruth for not “going after the young men.”
Cynthia Ozick speculates whether this young woman of “religious genius,” gifted with Abraham’s “power of consummate clarity,” might not have discovered monotheism even on her own, in Moab. And if she had, would the Moabites then have become God’s chosen people? An intriguing thought; yet religious epiphany in the Bible is never homegrown but is rather reserved for those who leave their own land and venture they know not where. Besides, Ruth’s is a story told by Israelites, and in the ancient world it was Israel alone—a mongrel nation composed of Chaldeans, Arameans, semi-Egyptians, and even Moabites—whose religious genius found expression in the troth plighted at Mount Sinai and reaffirmed by the wilderness-crossing, God-choosing Ruth.
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There are a number of other interesting chapters in Congregation, notably one by the poet David Shapiro on the dry, barbed, and utterly delectable prudentialism of Proverbs, the most quoted and today probably the least liked book of the Bible. And many good points are made along the way—by Elie Wiesel on the Prophet Ezekiel, by the deconstructionist critic Geoffrey Hartman on the Book of Numbers. But for the three or four perceptive essays and the dozen intriguing aperçus scattered wide across Congregation, there are many more pieces that are quite bad, and bad in exactly the same way. Unfamiliar on the whole with the Bible and its traditions, and short on Jewish memory, many of the contributors to Congregation, instead of responding wholeheartedly to the texts before them, or even wreaking creative havoc on them, tend to resort to the same totems of modern alienation, Jewish-style: Kafka, Freud, the Holocaust. The ongoing invocation of the last item on this list functions as a kind of double-whammy, providing justification for self-pity on a world-historical scale and frequently for the writer’s own announced defection from an inadequate religion and an immoral God.
Depending on one’s point of view this is either the funniest or the most alarming feature of Congregation. From James Atlas’s description of God as a “petulant dictator,” from Mordecai Richler’s announcement (after Randolph Churchill) that “God is a shit,” it is but a short step to the wistful notion, embraced by some of these authors, that there must be a finer religion out there—cozier, more progressive, more genteel—that better fits their image of themselves as moderns, as Americans, as liberals, as writers. The awful confession is made outright by Francine Prose in a rather candid and thoughtful essay on the Prophet Malachi; voicing her own shock at the “brutality” of the “Old Testament” and its God, Miss Prose takes it upon herself to speak for many Jewish readers who “are all, in a sense, Christians—that is their concept of the divine is closer to the Christian than the Hebrew.”
What can one respond to this? It seems somehow inadequate to point out that, along with the Christian “concept of the divine,” Miss Prose and other contributors to Congregation seem also to have fully assimilated the age-old Christian slander of the God of the “Old Testament” as a petty, irrational, and vindictive deity. Do the eyes of such readers simply glaze over when they light upon the wildly rapturous, unbearably tender outpourings of this God Who typically personifies Himself now as a mother giving suck to her babe, now as a doting father teaching his firstborn to walk, now as a deceived but ever-true husband entreating his errant wife to return to his care? Miss Prose, to her credit, finally acknowledges that such moments of delicate solicitousness do occasionally interrupt God’s tyrannical ravings; others, however, make less scrupulous readers than she.
Antipathy not only to the Jewish God and His religion but to the Jewish Bible takes various other forms in this book as well. At its ugliest we have Gordon Lish’s mannered and braggart desecration of the “bible” (sic) as “an alien object, uncongenial to me at its least, pestilential at its worst,” a work “no Jew should want any part of.” On a somewhat different front is Anne Roiphe’s expression of “pity” for the childlike absolutism of the Book of Nehemiah, whose edicts she compares with the Nuremburg laws before dismissing Nehemiah’s manly sobriety altogether in favor of a harangue on the evils perpetrated by Ariel Sharon and Richard Nixon. But politics in these discussions is as nothing compared with the place accorded to Narcissus. Many of the authors here, lacking the patience to attend to a text dimly remembered or hotly resented, simply use their allotted space to recall overbearing mothers, distant fathers, lonely childhoods, randy adolescences. Some of the resulting memoirs are engaging—Robert Pinsky evokes his bootlegging grandfather in Long Branch, New Jersey, Phillip Lopate tells a raunchy and haunting tale of a Delilah-like mother—some dull; some authors make an effort to connect their musings to Scripture, some cannot be bothered. In any case the net effect is altogether less of a “congregation” than of a roomful of long-winded analysands.
With the exception of a half-dozen insightful chapters, then, this collection would seem to bear a sad message—that the Bible no longer speaks to “contemporary writers,” at least if they are secular American Jews, that they do not know its stories and evidently cannot bear to hear its melodies. If this loss of the Bible as an essential part of the Western artist’s genetic code applies widely to writers today, it may help in some measure to account for the frailty of our literary culture. At any rate, from this particular assembly it would seem that with a few happy exceptions we can no longer look to our artists for a proper aesthetic understanding of the Bible.
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Do the professional critics serve us better? For an answer we may turn to the second book under consideration, The Literary Guide to the Bible, edited by the distinguished critics Robert Alter and Frank Kermode.3 Like Congregation, this new volume too sails through the Bible sequentially, with each book assigned to a different critic or scholar; unlike Congregation, it covers, under Kermode’s aegis, the New Testament as well as the Hebrew Bible, and it also includes a third section of essays devoted to such general subjects as the formation of the canon and Bible translations. A massive book, looking, with its cream and gold-tooled cover, like nothing so much as a Sunday School Prize Day award, The Literary Guide to the Bible clearly represents at once a statement of principia and a crowning achievement of the literary approach to Scripture which, as readers of COMMENTARY have ample reason to know, Robert Alter has done so much to pioneer and promote.4
As we have seen, this approach seeks to present to the sophisticated modern reader a Bible which is neither revelation nor primitive folklore but the creative masterpiece of a literary artist nonpareil in the manipulation of character, narrative, and imagery, and in the mastery of psychological realism. (For an audience immune to merely aesthetic blandishments, moreover, Alter and Kermode in their introduction pitch us a Bible which “we somehow must understand if we are to understand ourselves.”) To a critic who finds he cannot live by Clarissa and Tom Jones alone, the bargain must be an irresistible one, for there can hardly be a more vast and demanding subject for literary inquiry than this work which encloses history, law, story, poem, and moral philosophy in a vessel designed for the glorification of God and so complex that its prosody has yet to be cracked.
But if the Bible is the ideal quarry, what sort of literary criticism befits the Bible? Since a literary approach necessarily sacrifices much in the way of the highest religious feeling, it would seem fair in compensation to hold it to a correspondingly exigent standard of clarity, sensibility, and intellectual cogency. All the more so, one might add, when, as in the present instance, the criticism is intended for consumption by the common reader.
At their best, the essays included in The Literary Guide admirably fulfill this mandate. To confine ourselves for the moment to those addressing the Hebrew Bible, Robert Alter’s introduction is characteristically delicate and acute, particularly in its close readings from the stories of Ruth and Jephthah. The biblical scholar Joel Rosenberg—one of the finest of a younger generation—offers a lofty, original account of the larger psychological and political themes played upon in the Books of Samuel, and also contributes an essay on Jeremiah and Ezekiel which is graced by a high imaginative warmth and concentration. Luis Alonso Schokel of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, in a beautifully written chapter on Isaiah, is raptly attentive to the sound and shape of the poetry, to the “formal perfection and . . . particularity of style” which marks this most “classical” of biblical poets. Jack Sasson presents a practical, objective, and workmanlike introduction to the Books of Ruth and Esther, attending to sociological background, grammar, and vocabulary, while Shemaryahu Talmon is wonderfully pithy in his exposition of the post-exilic books of Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles. In the general section, Gerald Hammond’s essay on English translations of the Bible, though it underestimates the loss incurred in even the most faithful rendition, is learned, amiable, plain, and particular, revealing as much about the Bible’s Hebraic core as it does about the linguistic trains of thought and theological leanings that brought William Tyndale and the revising committee of the King James Version to their respective choices.
In addition to all this, The Literary Guide addresses with patience and tact those drier but central portions of the Bible which literary critics have heretofore tended to ignore in favor of the more readily accessible passages of narrative and poetry. Thus, David Damrosch discusses the cultic laws of Leviticus as a vision of wholeness at the center of a tale of human fragmentation, while David Gunn analyzes the “more static, administrative prose” of Joshua’s lists of tribal allotments and border settings as a kind of ideal or monitory enactment of Israel’s conquest of Canaan, between whose lines can be read the actual history of a failure fully to possess the land.
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Thus, The Literary Guide to the Bible at its best. But unfortunately not all is up to so high a standard. Typical of the Guide at its worst—that is, at its most academic and least literary—is Robert Polzin’s chapter on Deuteronomy, the fifth and final book of the Pentateuch.
Deuteronomy presents itself as a monologue, spoken (and recorded) by Moses as he and the Israelites, camping on the borders of the Promised Land and planning its conquest, reexamine and renew their covenant with God. But in fact, Polzin claims, the book was composed not at this time but during the first millennium B.C.E., by and for a people already in exile from Israel and hoping to regain it. Hence, the book relies for its effects on the knowing hindsight of both author and audience; in Polzin’s view, the narrator of Deuteronomy “infiltrates” the speeches he is reporting, entering into a kind of extended dialogue or, better, running argument with the main protagonists of his tale. Leaning upon the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of multiple voices, and also on Erving Goffman’s analysis of “framebreaks” in language, Polzin gives us a Deuteronomy characterized above all by a “plurality of viewpoints”: Moses, the purported narrator, versus the actual narrator; the narrator versus the figure of God; one view of God and Israel versus another.
A reader sympathetic to the literary approach cannot but be disappointed by such an angle on Deuteronomy, for, despite the interesting questions he raises, Polzin fails to appreciate the book on its own stated terms—as Moses’s selective and idiosyncratic “memoir”—and so ends by giving us a reading as fractured as any produced by the historical-critical school. This is all the more disappointing since Deuteronomy is of intense interest both as a piece of stunningly realistic self-revelation and as a piece of legal and religious revisionism, and one might expect a literary approach to deal sensitively with each of these aspects.
A great hero’s highly emotional and subjective recounting of a story already told in the earlier books of the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy also contains that hero’s anxious and insightful advice as to how Israel should finish the task which God has condemned him to leave undone.
In the book of Numbers, Moses is banned by God from entering Canaan after he angrily strikes the rock at Meribah. The punishment shocks the reader but Moses takes it like a man, unprotesting, unlamenting. In Deuteronomy, however, addressing himself not to God but to his own people, Moses gives full voice to all his pent-up grief and resentment, constantly returning to this cruel sentence which, he now insists, is punishment not for his own impulsive deed but for the treachery and transgressions of the worthless Israelite rabble:
But the Lord was angry with me for your sakes, and swore that I should not go over the Jordan, and that I should not go into that good land, which the Lord thy God gives thee for an inheritance: but I must die in this land, I must not go over the Jordan; but you shall go over, and possess that good land.
In these broodingly obsessive, emphatic repetitions we hear the voice of a man fixedly pressing into his own mind the reality of an unbearable fate while hoping against hope that “I must not go over” will somehow yet be transformed into “I shall go over.” As Moses’s soliloquy rises and falls, the patience and resignation of “the meekest man on earth” erupt into fury and a kind of scolding anticipatory anxiety at the certain knowledge that his people, who do not deserve “that good land,” will defile it and be cast out; and then, catching himself mid-curse, in the next breath Moses reassures Israel wonderingly of the constancy of God’s ineffably pitying heart, which turns to jelly at any transient symptom of repentance or distress.
A literary rendering of Deuteronomy, even one (or especially one) which assumes a post-Davidic author, should chart these tempestuous shifts of emotion. Yet Polzin, although quite explicit about who he believes is speaking in Deuteronomy, is not very forthcoming about what is actually said. This applies to the non-narrative parts of the book as well. The majority of Deuteronomy, as the name suggests, is taken up with the giving of a second Law (the first having been nullified by Israel’s apostasy with the Golden Calf), and if it is a biblical scholar’s job to understand how the second Law differs from the first, it is the literary critic’s task to demonstrate how the revision of Israelite history and law that takes place in Deuteronomy is variously informed by the character or intentions of Moses. Here, too, Polzin disappoints.
One example of a historical revision is Moses’s retelling, in Deuteronomy, of the episode of the Golden Calf, a retelling in which he omits any mention of the several spontaneous and deep-reaching acts of Israelite contrition described in Exodus. One example of a revised law is the mandate to free one’s slave in the seventh year: in Exodus the commandment is merely stated (and of course anchored in the command to remember Israel’s bondage in Egypt), while in Deuteronomy Moses further dictates that a master, remembering the slave’s trusty service, must free him gladly and gratefully, sending him away full-handed, loaded with gifts of sheep, grain, and wine.
Each of these revisions is compelled by a different aspect of Moses’s character and purpose, as revealed in Deuteronomy. In the one, accusatory resentment colors his telling of the episode of the Golden Calf, reining in the drama of transgression and passionate repentance; in the other, a merciful nature warms and further psychologizes the laws of Exodus and Leviticus, imploring us not only to do right but to do it abundantly and feelingly. This latter aspect of Moses’s temperament, insistently inquiring as to the heart’s inner disposition, is something many people think of as being foreign to Judaism, but in fact it is wholly characteristic not only of him but, after him, of the Prophets. (In Christian Scripture, when Jesus suggests that he follows Moses in giving thought the same weight as deed, he does so as a prelude to making anger equivalent to murder, lust to fornication.)
Finally, Polzin neglects to provide the reader with a feeling for the simple and limpid Hebrew prose which makes Deuteronomy perhaps the easiest-to-read book of the Bible, or to show how this child-pure diction both serves the didactic purpose of impressing God’s commands permanently upon the forgetful hearts of future generations and also beautifully reflects the dying Moses’s understanding of Torah as a thing “not hidden from thee, neither is it far off” but “very near to thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart that thou mayest do it.”
Polzin’s failure, then, is precisely a failure to address the most obvious literary qualities of Deuteronomy—its form, its style, its means of revealing character and motive. Nor is he the only author in The Literary Guide who understands the word “literary” not in any traditional sense but as a shorthand for an essentially academic undertaking which may do much to advance certain theories of “narratology” and redactional heuristics currently in vogue in university circles, but little to enlighten the ordinary educated reader in search of meaning.
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To be fair, exercises like Polzin’s are more common in the section of The Literary Guide devoted to the Hebrew Bible than in that on the New Testament. The latter, written largely by British academics of an older school, is on the whole more plain-spoken, more concrete, and more sensitive to the texture of an individual writer’s prose—and in some cases, one suspects, also more closely guided by religious belief or traditional piety. This, however, raises problems of its own.
A critical guide to the Bible produced by Jewish and Christian scholars, and packaging “Old Testament” and “New Testament” in one volume, necessarily involves us in the question of the relation between these two sacred books. Jews, of course, do not accept the authority of Christian Scripture, in whose Gospels Judaism is said either to have been “fulfilled” in Christ or superseded by him, and in whose Pauline Epistles Mosaic law is deemed the “curse” of a “blinded” people, a “ministration of death, written and engraved in stones.” Christians saddled with such a teaching have for their part never satisfactorily resolved their relation to the book their Fathers annexed or to a people represented in Church and New Testament typology as at best Esau to their Jacob, Ishmael to their Isaac, stone to their heart of flesh.
The literary scholar may consider such religious and historical vexations outside his area of concern, but he is nonetheless bound to think about what it means for these two radically dissimilar Scriptures to be combined, as they are for Christians, in one book. Notwithstanding its many echoes and reworkings, the New Testament ushers in a doctrine, a vision of time and history, a conception of human and divine nature, and, not least, a body of literary forms (extended parable, pastoral epistle, hagiography, sermon) so arrestingly foreign that they would seem to call for a whole new critical vocabulary. In this respect, the King James Version of the Hebrew and Christian Bible, which many of the contributors to The Literary Guide take as their standard, is a deceptive text, for in its steep and sonorous prose are ravishingly blended two very different voices and imperatives, the products of two different languages and two different cultures. The reader of the King James Version turns the page from Malachi to Matthew without any sensation of a leap into the new or the unknown. It is the task of the literary critic to restore an “innocent” discomfort.
Some if not all of these questions of literary definition The Literary Guide amply and lucidly addresses. Within the context of the New Testament Gospels themselves, Frank Kermode and, most splendidly, John Drury offer sensible, imaginative expositions of the different perspectives and concerns which shape the various accounts of Jesus’s teachings and doings. Thus Drury subtly contrasts Mark’s “grim simplification” and “tough, polemical little utterances which subvert the mind’s accustomed order” with Luke’s more genial neoclassicism, his “lessons in adaptability and social responsibility,” his richly worded parables, as “full of domestic detail as a Dutch painting.” This is literary criticism of a high order, so simple, so humane, and so interesting that it seems to have been infused with Luke’s own “wisdom of daylight.”
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The Epistles of Paul are a thornier subject altogether, though once again well-dealt with here. But still one misses some sense of the whole, some sense of what is indeed new about the New Testament. A reader who has not studied that work but who comes equipped with the conventional preconceptions about the difference between the Christian and the “Old Testament” ethic may, in fact, be surprised by what he finds in the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles. The portrait of Jesus that emerges (for all the variety in the accounts) is of a man marked by an extreme and isolating self-denial; a man ravenous for love, but who insists on persecution and martyrdom; a man who rebuffs his own, whether mother, brothers, or countrymen, and instead gathers outcasts and pariahs; a man wound tight with a cryptic and caustically sharp wit released in occasional “inappropriate” outbursts of levity (when his goody-goody disciples reprove a woman for anointing their master’s head with oil that could have been sold for alms to the poor, Jesus retorts, “Ye have the poor always with you, but me ye have not always”).
The gospel revealed in the life of Jesus is a gospel of individualism and inwardness, of self-conquest, watchfulness, impatience, radical inversion: leave your mother and father and children, give away your wealth and possessions, seek persecution, renounce the flesh, hate the world, worship God not in a likeminded community but secretly in your closet. Where the first and abiding command of the Jewish God is “Be fruitful and multiply,” Jesus—and how much more so Paul—exalts chastity on the very ground that married people and families put too much store in the world, relying on human continuity and thinking above all to provide for their own. “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother. . . . He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me.”
Compared with these high subversive paradoxes (“Resist not evil”; “love your enemies, do good to them which hate you, bless them that curse you”), the commands of the Hebrew Bible seem cheerful, pragmatic, reasonable, sociable, almost mundane, an effort not to vanquish human nature but to temper and govern it, to strengthen those institutions Jesus would level. And yet anyone who reads Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount must also feel that though it were impossible to live up to such an ideal, it would be ignoble, almost less than human, not to try.
For a New Testament version of the kind of familial tenderness that suffuses the Prophets, the canny worldliness and knowing ironical affection for human-nature-as-it-is that we find in the Pentateuch and the Books of Samuel, we must go first (as John Drury shows) to Luke’s parables and then, strangely enough, to Paul’s letters. These run a gamut from the hot-tempered and unfair to the diplomatic to the insinuatingly sweet and homely. An example of the last is Paul’s epistle to Philomen upon returning a runaway slave, now saved in Christ: “For perhaps he therefore departed for a season, that thou shouldest receive him forever, not now as a servant, but above a servant, a brother beloved. . . . If thou count me therefore a partner, receive him as myself. If he hath wronged thee, or oweth thee ought, put that on mine account. . . .” One almost feels that Moses himself would approve.
It was, of course, Paul who expanded and fortified Jesus’s teachings into a proselytizing church, and he did so in part by transvaluing Judaism’s values, by using against the Jews a deliberately reduced understanding of the Law, and by inventing a new method of biblical exegesis that would convert the Hebrew Bible into fodder for his own religion. This method, which we call typology, consists of reading the Jewish Bible as an extended prophecy of Christianity. Its simplest aspect is shown in the Gospel of Luke when the risen Jesus, walking to Emmaus with his disciples, “beginning at Moses and all the Prophets expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.” Paul expanded the field by interpreting not only prophetic utterances but also actual Israelite heroes and historical events as symbolic prefigurations of Christ. Thus, in Paul’s Epistles, Moses and the pagan high priest Melchizedek become forerunners of Jesus, and all the patriarchs and matriarchs of Genesis are transformed into patterns of Christian fidelity, while contrariwise Jesus is depicted, for example, as an apotheosis of the Passover lamb. Typology is Paul’s and Christianity’s invention. It is quite different from the Hebrew Bible’s own internal methods of exegesis, in which Samuel or Ezra might resemble Moses, or the return from Babylon may be understood as a second Exodus from Egypt, but neither Moses nor the Exodus could conceivably be regarded as a promise, necessarily partial and incomplete, of later and greater things to come.
Gabriel Josipovici, in a brilliant and severe essay on the Epistles to the Hebrews and the Catholic Epistles, deems Jesus’s and Paul’s reading of the Hebrew Bible “an act of colonization,” reducing its ambiguity and rich detailing of “often confused and contradictory lives . . . to moral exemplars.” This is perhaps too harsh a verdict. It might also be said that the sometimes enriching, sometimes draining act of appropriation and transformation that went into Paul’s invention of Christianity was in certain respects an artistic enterprise. Moreover, this significant revamping of a dominant local culture is not without its Near Eastern precedent, as we are reminded by Jonas C. Greenfield’s essay in The Literary Guide on the Israelite uses of Canaanite literature. Much as Paul unfairly mocks the Jews for worshipping “stone tablets,” so Israel’s God mocks the pagans for bowing down to wood and stone. As in any other act of creation, the result is new: Israel, borrowing polytheism’s trimmings, brought into being such unprecedented forms as universal law and prose epic; Jesus and Paul, transforming Judaism’s national religion into an individual one, required correspondingly new modes of thought and literary expression.
The view of the Hebrew Bible as a typological forerunner is at once inimical to Judaism and inescapable to Christianity, which necessarily depends upon a progressive view of history and revelation, a slow, steady spread of light, in contrast to the dispossessions and reconquests, the apostasies and returns of the Jewish national story. The alternative to typology, one scholar observes in The Literary Guide, would be to throw out the “Old Testament” altogether (as indeed the Gnostics recommended) and go it alone. It is obviously too late for that; but how far is the “progressive” project to be taken?
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Some of the theological implications behind the packing of Hebrew Bible and Christian Scripture into one Genesis-through-Revelations portmanteau are spelled out by Gerald Bruns in a very stimulating essay entitled “Mid-rash and Allegory.” Bruns writes, following Origen, that “The Old Testament is to be read as a midrash of the New, just as the New Testament is a midrash upon the Old. This midrashic circle gives the theological structure of promise and fulfillment.” Such a statement, not all that uncommon in the New Testament portion of The Literary Guide, is sonorous but treacherous. The New Testament does in some respects function as a running commentary upon the Hebrew Bible (and as much more), but one cannot imagine how the Hebrew Bible can in good faith be read as a “midrash” upon Christian Scripture, nor can one imagine Jews feeling comfortable with the proposition either that Christianity is a fulfillment of their “promise” or, since we are dealing with a “midrashic circle,” that Judaism is a fulfillment of the promise of Christianity.
From this false assertion of “interdependency,” to borrow another scholar’s word, follows Bruns’s claim that the Bible is concerned not with the past but with the prophetic future, and that therefore “what is at issue with respect to the Scriptures is not what lies beyond the text in the form of an original meaning but what lies in front of it where the interpreter stands. The Bible always addresses itself to the time of interpretation; one cannot understand it except by appropriating it anew.” The trouble with this proposition is that central to both Hebrew and Christian texts are such imperatives as memory, historicity, the fixing of tradition, and the transmission of ultimate though history-bound truths. Jesus and Paul may have been violent in their uses of the Jewish Bible (so were the Prophets radical in their readings of the Pentateuch), but each would have been appalled by the notion that Scripture is whatever the latest comer wishes to make of it. Under such thin, black ice one spies the unlikely confluence of Christian exegesis and literary deconstruction, a school of thought according to which readers are virtually mandated to manipulate texts for their own creative purposes, innocent of anything so transitory or incomplete as authorial intent.
Still, a reading like Bruns’s, while it diminishes the ambiguity and autonomy of the Hebrew Bible, does impose a steady, whole view of the text which, even if it is misleading, serves at least to remind us of what the literary approach at its finest can yield. Just such a steady view tends sometimes to be missing from The Literary Guide. Although it contains a slew of interesting and sensitive essays, at moments this book does not so much repair the atomization of Scripture brought about by historical scholarship as substitute another, academic form of fragmentation in its stead. (How could it do otherwise, seeing that Edmund Wilson may be invoked on the jacket cover, but Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, and Erving Goffman hold sway within?) In this crucial respect the volume at times falls short of realizing its stated aim of teaching us how to read a work which “we somehow must understand if we are to understand ourselves.”
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In a chapter on Psalms in Congregation, Allen Mandelbaum cites a talmudic description of King David, awakened at night by the north wind as it blows through his window and causes his lyre to play. “If David’s lyre is seen as played upon by a force beyond himself,” writes Mandelbaum, “then even he, David, becomes not the singer but the sung.” This beautiful trope, emblematic of the artistic and religious vocation—the poet as an instrument played by God—applies also in some measure to an aesthetic response to Scripture. Reading the Bible, even “as literature,” calls for a yearning, full-hearted, and alert receptiveness to language, logic, and imagery; it calls for the faculty resonantly captured by King Solomon when he asked of God only “a listening heart” to judge. It is just such a ready and reverent responsiveness which in The Literary Guide to the Bible, despite its many excellences, is regrettably sometimes subordinated to theory or obscured by jargon—and which in Congregation shines forth as no more than short, brilliant days between dark nights of egotism.
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1 With a few slight variations I will be using throughout the Koren (“Jerusalem”) Bible for quotations from Hebrew Scripture, and the King James Version for quotations from the New Testament (and for the spellings of all proper names).
2 Edited by David Rosenberg, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 526 pp., $29.95.
3 Harvard University Press, 678 pp., $29.95.
4 Alter's seminal articles in these pages on biblical topics include: “A Literary Approach to the Bible” (December 1975); “Biblical Narrative” (May 1976); “Character in the Bible” (October 1978); “Joseph and His Brothers” (November 1980); “The Voice from the Whirlwind” (January 1984); “Scripture and Culture” (August 1985).
