What Did Hannah Ask For?

The Journal of Biblical Literature, which published my note about the phrase זרע אנשים (zera anashim; see my earlier post here) in 1 Sam 1:11, has now published an even shorter note responding to it — by none other than Shalom Paul of the Hebrew University. After Mayer Gruber, now of Ben-Gurion University, he is probably the person second-most responsible for my becoming a scholar and teacher of Bible.

Paul’s note, which sounds critical of my view, in fact confirms it. He emphasizes that the phrase in question is not at all “absurd” (as I characterized it) but is found in Akkadian, Hebrew, and Aramaic with the meaning “human offspring.”

I did not, of course, mean that the phrase was linguistically absurd, but that it was absurd for Hannah to ask for a human child. (As opposed to what, Rosemary’s baby?) The bottom line is that the phrase does not mean “a male child,” as the commentators like to take it, and therefore requires explanation.

It is a great thrill for me to engage in scholarly exchange with the remarkable scholars whose student I once was. And I am glad to remind the scholarly world that — despite the fact that my main focus for the last decade has been my Commentators’ Bible series — I am still primarily a scholar of Bible at heart.

The Bible and Spirituality (Sacred or Secular, Part 3)

This is Part 3 of the series I began with my post “Sacred or Secular—or Both?” I wrote in that first post:

For some people, spirituality involves chanting, movement, incense, drugs, meditation—but for me, the only possible approach to spirituality is through text study … The bottom line is that “critical” (that is, academic) study of the Bible is for me an essential aspect of the path to connect with revelation.

I realize now that this was a bit of an overstatement. The two “peak” experiences that drew me to this conclusion did not directly involve Bible at all, but “Torah” in its more general sense. In both cases—once, studying with friends; the other, in a public setting—I had a very powerful sense of being connected to a source of mental/spiritual energy. Engaging with biblical texts, and with the later Jewish texts that grew out of them, gives me something of that same feeling, albeit in an earthly, not transcendent, way.

Exod 24:17 tells us:

Now the Presence of the LORD appeared in the sight of the Israelites as a consuming fire on the top of the mountain.

Deut 5:4 explains that this was not just an external phenomenon, but a moment of communication:

Face to face the LORD spoke to you on the mountain out of the fire.

I understand esh (“fire”) to be the Biblical Hebrew equivalent for the modern English word “energy.” My ancestors had an encounter with this energy source that is “beyond time and space”—speaking not in New Age terms, here, but in the language of cosmology—and we’ve been talking about it ever since and trying to make sense of that experience. The Bible grew from that spark, and, for some of us, it remains the best, perhaps the only, way to connect to that source of spiritual energy.

Next time, I intend to return to the 1,000-year history of the creation of the biblical books, and to look at that history through the prism of changes in the Hebrew language.

1,000 Years of Biblical Literature

Hello again! I am hoping to resume posting more regularly.

In an earlier post, I discussed at length the fact that, though “the Bible” is a book, it is not one book, but three: a Jewish Bible, a Catholic Bible, or a Protestant Bible. I also pointed out that omitting the Apocrypha from the Protestant Bible leaves a gap of two centuries between the (originally) Hebrew books of the Old Testament and the (originally) Greek books of the New Testament.

That last comment is based on an assumption that was obvious to me but may not have been so to all of my readers—the Bible is an anthology. To speak only of “my” Bible, the Jewish one, it’s an anthology of literature created over a period of 1,000 years.

One reason it’s easy to forget this is because most of us read the Bible in English translation, and each translation is made in the space of a relatively few years, in more or less the same English “voice.” The various books may be translated by different individuals, but there is generally someone (or more usually, I believe, a committee) responsible for smoothing out inadvertent differences in the language of the various books.

They are not always completely successful—more on this, perhaps, in a future post—but in general our translated Bibles all sound as if they were written at more or less the same time (which indeed they were).

The real Bible, though, doesn’t sound like this. Take a moment to remember what 1,000 years of literature looks like. Subtract 1,000 years from 2010 and you get the year 1010—well before The Canterbury Tales (1390s?) and most of the way back to Beowulf (sometime before 1000). The Middle English of Chaucer is quite a struggle for most of us, and the Old English of Beowulf is simply impossible. We can’t read these great works of English literature until they are translated into English for us.

The situation is a little more complicated once we get to Shakespeare. Though some of us first learned these stories from the later, prose versions in Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, the plays themselves are still widely available and regularly performed in their original wording. Shakespeare’s English is close enough to our language that we understand it quite well (or think we do). We no longer say “whether ‘tis nobler in the mind”—we say “whether it’s nobler” or “whether it is nobler” or “whether it would be nobler”—but we adjust our ears to the slight difference. We all understand what it means to be “hoist by your own petard,” even though most people don’t know what a petard is. (The phrase literally means “blown up by your own bomb.”) But how many of us can hear the phrase “caviar to the general” without thinking—mistakenly—of someone in a military uniform? And only specialists (and Jacques Barzun, specialist in everything) know that Hamlet’s “buzz, buzz” means “You’re telling me stale news.”

We would expect the 1,000 years separating the earliest and latest biblical texts to exhibit a similar range—from the most recent and (relatively) easiest to understand back 1,000 years to a text that is more or less incomprehensible. But this expectation is wrong in two ways: (1) The oldest and newest texts are linguistically much closer to each other than Beowulf is to us; and (2) the biblical texts that are easiest to read fall in the middle of the time range, not at its end.

We’ll eventually get to a discussion of the history of Biblical Hebrew, a fascinating and contentious topic. But first—next time—let’s take a look at the oldest extended text in the Bible, the Song of Deborah.