A Literary Bible

"A breathtaking translation of the Hebrew Bible..." That's part of the blurb on the back cover of David Rosenberg's A Literary Bible. But the reality is that, if you're looking for a copy of the Tanakh, this isn't what you'll want. It's not a Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) and it's barely a translation in any consistent or meaningful sense. Another blurb on the inside flap informs us that this "artful translation restores... the essence of imaginative creation of the Bible." That description might be more to the point - imaginative it surely is - if anyone knew what the sentence actually meant.

Rosenberg is a former chief editor at JPS (the Jewish Publication Society) and co-author of a provocative book, along with Harold Bloom, that suggests that the J source which underlies the Torah is the work of a woman (Bloom now wants to identify her as Bathsheba!) I'm not qualified to pass judgment on his poetic abilities, though we will come back to that issue, but potential readers should note that, despite claims and appearances, this is not a translation of the Hebrew Bible. Whole books are missing - perhaps they weren't literary enough. Deuteronomy and all the historical books (except 2 Samuel) have been omitted, along with much more, and of those that do appear, most have been gutted. Rosenberg's Genesis has no chapter 1, his Psalms is a short selection, and so it goes. To muddy the waters even more, Rosenberg has included his version of the apocryphal book of Judith.

So why has Rosenberg published his Literary Bible. "I never found [the Bible's] literary depth adequately conveyed to the secular reader." (xi) This is a volume aimed not at the "average" reader, as so many dull contemporary translations are, but the "secular" reader, whoever she or he might be.

"[I]t's critical to grasp the failures in modern Bible translation." (xii) "I did not seek to embellish or alter the originals." (xiii)

Say what?! The prose sections have all the flow and beauty of the NASB (i.e. none you'd notice), while the poetic sections embellish and alter the originals with gusto.

While delivering his elite literary opus, Rosenberg is not above taking an uncharitable sideswipe at his peers. James Kugel is described as a "conventional" scholar with a "tin ear", while Robert Alter stands "consumed by his own writing style."

You might hack your way through the attempts at prose translation with some success, but when it comes to the rest, you may need a further translation. Euphemistic descriptions from the dust jacket include "re-speaking," "a deeply mediated translation," an "audacious work of art," and "genre-bending."  A sampler from Psalms:

Psalm 1: "he steps from his place at the glib café"
Psalm 6: "let all my enemies shiver / on the stage of their self consciousness"
Psalm 58: "Lord, cramp their fingers / till the arms hang limp like sausage"
Psalm 73: "material cars of pride / and suits of status", "cynical megaphones"
Psalm 137: "to an orchestra of trees / we lent our harps / silently leaning"

Over in Job you'll find "plastic children," "a tie in a railroad track," "Western Union boys," "cold as a camera," "the supermarket," "Leningrad," "yesterday's newspaper," "Stalin's house," "Martin Bormann," "Mercedes-Benz," "repossessed cars".

Art? Very probably. A radical paraphrase for The Hamptons set? Quite possibly. A case study of living Reception History? Who knows...

I'm reminded of Leslie Brandt's Psalms Now. Brandt didn't pretend to translate, but to restate. That seems to be a completely legitimate thing to do, as long as everyone is clear on what is happening.I don't recollect Brandt hawking his book as a 'translation' though.

If you plan to acquire A Literary Bible, you may want to find a place for it next to the poetry and post-modern literature, and far, far away from your NRSV.

A literary Bible probably deserves a literary critic, and that I ain't, so there's a review by Frank Kermode online at the New York Times for those interested.

Ron Fraser on Christchurch

Dimwitted morons who are keen to find cause for disasters are two a penny, but apocalyptic control freaks have to be at the very bottom of the barrel. The Christchurch earthquake has continued to dominate news in New Zealand as the confirmed death toll rises. Bodies are still being pulled from the rubble, but the Bible-quoting carrion birds are already busy at work.

Meet Ron Fraser, a hack writer from an obscure high-demand sect known as the Philadelphia Church of God. On the sect's web site Ron relates the Christchurch tragedy to the PCG's idiotic doctrine of British Israelism and the lavish hagiography this group has built around a drunkard and moral reprobate called Herbert Armstrong.

It is not by dint of pure circumstance that Australia and New Zealand have been subject to great catastrophe over recent months. It is by design! Believe it or not! It is by the specific design of Almighty God... as our heavenly Father, He knows how to deal with His children!

Ron's god is a divine child abuser, and he knows how to bash and maim his offspring...

He inspired one of the basic laws of effective child rearing to be embedded in Scripture: “The rod and reproof give wisdom: but a child left to himself brings his mother shame” (Proverbs 29:15). That same principle applies to the way the Creator of humankind deals with His offspring (Genesis 1:27) when they go astray.

Yes, Ron's PCG god is also a real bastard.

God declares of the Anglo-Saxon nations that we are like sheep that have gone astray (Isaiah 53:6). Out of an overwhelming love for these people, the Eternal God simply reproves them by increasing the punishment on them for breaking His law. Much of that punishment comes in the form of so-called natural catastrophes. God will continue to bring such penalties on His people simply to draw their attention to the reality that they are out of step with His will. And He will do this till repentance occurs and they turn to their God for His help.

Ron's god is obviously pretty thick. All this punishment meted out to draw our attention to how we're out of step with his will hasn't exactly been successful. You'd think the old boy would attempt a more effective strategy. But no, he seems completely unable to progress beyond being a violent thug.

Why this succession of calamities on Anglo-Saxon nations? To gain the attention of the people — that they might question whether their own selfish way of life may be the reason for such catastrophes befalling them.

"Anglo-Saxon nations." That's the clue that clueless clots think their god is, like themselves, a respecter of persons; a heavenly child-beater who takes especial delight in knocking the stuffing out of his racial favorites.

I've got news for Ron, New Zealand isn't much of an "Anglo-Saxon" nation. I've yet to meet either Angles or Saxons walking down the main street in any New Zealand city - including Christchurch. Ron would passionately deny that his sect is racist, oh goodness gracious no! - but the proof-texted excuses simply don't wash. The PCG god is anything but color-blind.

But whenever has fact got in the way of a self-serving fantasy? Ron's god is a monstrous, petulant, nasty, brattish brute with acute anger management problems. Knock down some buildings, kill some babies, all in a righteous day's work. Just as well 'he' doesn't exist. Ron's god is an evil impostor, a rip-off for the spiritually, ethically and intellectually challenged.

Just like British Israelism itself. A nonsensical, jingoistic doctrine that largely died out decades ago, but still clings on in bacteria-infested puddles of not-so-true believers. Harmless you say? After reading Ron Fraser I beg to differ.

Christchurch...

There's a sense of shock throughout New Zealand this afternoon at news of yet another huge quake that has hit the South Island city of Christchurch, just six months after the previous devastation. This time it appears there are multiple fatalities.

The human dimension is the part that grips one with live feed of traumatised people and locals phoning in to talk radio stations. Australians sometimes refer to this country as "the Shaky Isles," but truth to tell we tend to pay little attention to the earth's intermittent rumbling. Living in Wellington over a decade ago I got used to the occasional shake. Wellington was always high risk, but no one considered Christchurch in the same league.

Moments like these put our daily worries and preoccupations into perspective. A sobering day that will enter the history books of this nation.

Re-creating a nicer Yahweh

Tim Bulkeley is attempting to get to grips with Deut. 7:2. Tim quotes the verse in a range of translations - NRSV, NIV, NLT, KJV and the notorious Young's Literal. Just to be different, here it is in the Revised English Bible:

... and when the LORD your God delivers them into your power for you to defeat, you must exterminate them. You must not make an alliance with them or spare them.

Seems pretty clear. Tim at first seems to agree.

God told the Israelites to exterminate the Canaanites, the argument goes, so God is not loving and forgiving but a genocidal maniac  like Slobodan Milošević only worse because God should have known better. Deuteronomy 7:2 is a prime example, and it hardly matters which translation you read, they are all as bad as each other...

The expression "the argument goes" is, however, a flashing red light that indicates that Tim wants to slip out of the obvious but uncomfortable implication of the text. The problem is, the verse is anything but ambiguous. What to do, what to do... It can't mean what it clearly means, can it? And so Tim grabs his apologetic glasses and sets out to redeem Yahweh from all evil.

...in the verse we can see something strange is happening… God apparently says “Exterminate the Canaanites [the verse before helpfully specifies several different nations that are to be specifically included] and while you are at it, make sure you do NOT make treaties with them. Either one part or both parts of this verse are not intended to be taken literally... (At least) one of the two things God says in this verse is not to be taken literally. It is difficult to see how “do not make a treaty with them” could be understood any other way, so perhaps it’s “Exterminate them!” that is non-literal. In fact such expressions are common among sports fans, and even in talking about the more aggressive board games, in our world should alert us to the possibility that this language is not literal.

Something strange? Not nearly as strange as this explanation. My response was a comment referring Tim to the story of the Gibeonites in Joshua 9. Here you have the threat of extermination and the prospect of a treaty together, and there's nothing non-literal in either. The people of Gibeon are understandably reluctant to be murdered ('ethnically cleansed' if you prefer) by Yahweh's servants, so they send a delegation to Joshua in order to make a treaty. In doing so they present themselves as coming from far off, well outside the extermination zone. Joshua enters into an agreement with them only to discover shortly thereafter that they're not from a distant land after all, and he has been tricked.

If you're anything like me you send up a silent cheer for the Gibeonites. Okay, it's probably not history, but perhaps an etiology explaining why the Gibeonites were able to coexist within the dominant Yahwist culture of a later time. This much is certain though, the Gibeonites in this narrative didn't regard the threat of genocide as merely a little boastful sports banter, an aggressive game of checkers, or harmless metaphor.

Wise Gibeonites!

Tim responds:

You choose to read suspiciously, I choose not to. Except where the text provides clues or directions why should I read Deut 7:2 as a response to Josh 9?

I suppose, if it was worth replying, I could note that Tim reads naïvely with an agenda of his own, but as I recollect he's previously accused me of doing that (yup, I'm suspicious and naïve: no wonder I'm confused!) I could also note that I was suggesting that Joshua 9 illustrates the thrust of the verse in Deuteronomy. I certainly wasn't suggesting the latter was a direct response to the former, just an exemplar (though a pretty darn good one!)

Special pleading won't make the problem of a genocidal Yahweh go away. The only honest way through, in my opinion, is to front up to the evil of these passages in a way not dissimilar to Thom Stark's proposal. Yahweh cannot - and should not - be rescued by the Bible College cavalry.

[T]he archetypal liberation story is also an archetypal liquidation story, that of a divinely inspired fanaticism which commands ethnic cleansing, extermination and genocide. What is happening in the "Holy Land" today, as I write, looks like an enactment of the mythical commandment of Yahweh in Deuteronomy 7...

 Even before the entry into the promised land, Yahweh's servant Moses orders the extermination of the Midianites and is furious when only the Midianite men are killed and the women and children are kept as booty. Moses orders the killing of all except 32,000 virgins, who are to be retained as sex slaves, and the married women and boys follow their menfolk to the death camps. Such stories are told without qualms.

That final quote comes not from an atheist or anti-Christian, but from British Quaker David Boulton (The Trouble With God, p.96-97). Elsewhere he can even refer to "The monster tribal god Yahweh-Elohim" (p.164). Is Boulton just reading naïvely from a hermeneutic of suspicion, or is he a braver soul by far than those quivering evangelicals who want to remake Yahweh in their own image.

Rapture ruptured

Jim West posted this clip featuring the marvellous Barbara Rossing speaking on the Rapture, providing the sage counsel to those who expect to be whisked away that they "really seriously need to watch this."

Jim is right, as he is about just about everything (excepting those things which he's wrong about... the extensive list of which is expected to be published in three expensive leather-bound volumes by a specialist publisher with offices in Leiden, sometime in 2013).

It's good to hear the responsibility for this dippy doctrine being sheeted home to its creator, the mad Irishman John Nelson Darby, and to be reminded about its negative effect on kids and feeble-minded politicians. It's easy to ignore this stuff, or regard it with distant contempt, but that overlooks the danger this nonsense poses and its uncritical acceptance by so many people who deserve to know better.

The Denominational Hit Parade 2011

I have spent the night wailing and entreating Providence on behalf of that last bulwark of orthodoxy, the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, with the news that this elect body of doctrinal purity has slid, slipped, sloughed down, arse over teakettle, from America's tenth largest denomination, to end up, face in the St Louis sludge, at number thirteen.

The Catholics are numero uno, followed by the Southern Baptists, Methodists, Mormons and something called "The Church of God in Christ".

Kicking in a number six is the National Baptist Convention, followed by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), another body also calling itself the National Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God and the Presbyterians.

The Missouriites might take comfort that, off the top ten list and languishing at unlucky thirteen, they're at least ahead of the Anglicans/Episcopalians, who barely retain two million members against the LCMS' 2.3 million.

Of course, now that Matthew Harrison has ascended to the presidency of the Synod, fortified by old-time confessionalism and the certitudes of a conservatism far beyond that of his predecessor, we're doubtless going to see the Synod rebound, hammering on the gates of hell and sweeping all before it. Just hold your breath and click your heels three times...

An orchard in Edem

After mentioning Nicholas King's translation of the Septuagint earlier this week, I thought I'd share some gems from his LXX, all from the first three chapters of Genesis.

The Genesis world - click to enlarge

"Let there be a firmament in the middle of the waters." (1:6). King notes of 'firmament': this strange word comes to us from Latin, as a direct translation of the Greek word, which means something like 'firmness', 'strength', or 'solidity', referring to the solid dome of the sky, the bit between earth and heaven, or the solid bit that separates the lower waters from the upper waters. In Genesis, humankind literally lives under a solid dome.

"And God said, 'Let the waters bring forth creepy-crawlies...' " (1:20)

"And the heaven and the earth were completed, and all their array." (2:1). Says King of 'array', this is an attempt to capture one of the meanings of... kosmos, which in the New Testament often means 'world', but also 'beauty' and 'adornment' and 'ornament'... There is of course a connection with 'cosmetics'.

"And the Lord God planted an orchard in Edem in the East..." (2:8). No, not Eden and not a garden. (The NETS is virtually identical.)

"And God threw a trance on Adam..." (2:21). (NETS: cast a trance.) King comments, the Greek means, literally, 'ecstacy'...

"And Adam called his wife 'Life'..." (3:20). King notes: The Greek for 'life' is the lovely name Zoë..." Adam and Zoë? Now there's a fresh thought. (NETS also names the woman 'Life', but without the cool footnote.)

King's LXX is a delight, and with the additional notes included is much more fun to read than the worthy but stolid NETS version. Unfortunately it's not available through Amazon, I had to order my copy through the UK publisher, but it was worth the bother.