Baldness came upon Gaza

Baldness shall come upon Gaza. It shall be forsaken. [Jer 47.5 MT / 29.5 LXX; Zeph 2.4] The writer, after having unconsciously rested a night on the site of ancient Gaza, as the smoothest place that could be chosen whereon to pitch a tent, was for the first time aware of the literal interpretation of the prophecy, when he saw it on the spot. Detained for a day till camels could be procured, (the plague being then prevalent in Gaza,) the author spent it in traversing the sand hills on which the manifold but minute remains of an ancient city are yet in many places to be seen. Though previously holding to the interpretation given above, and not imagining that any clearer illustration could be given, and ignorant or forgetful, at the time, of any historical testimony that the site of modern differed from that of ancient Gaza, it was impossible for him to doubt that a city had once stood where innumerable vestiges of it are to be seen. The debris of ruins recognised at first sight by every traveller in the East as clearly indicating the site of an ancient city, are abundant, but most minute. Innumerable fragments of broken pottery, pieces of glass, (some of which were beautifully stained,) and of polished marble, lie thickly spread in every level and hollow place, at a considerable elevation and various distances, on a space of several square miles. These obvious indications of the site of an ancient city, recurring over a wide extent, are so abundant, that the number of different places in which they profusely lie cannot be reckoned under fifty,—which not unfrequently are surmounted by sand on every side. They generally occupy a level space, far firmer than the surrounding sand, and vary in size from small patches to more open spaces of twelve or twenty thousand square yards. The successive sand hills, or rather the same oblong sand hill, greatly varied in its elevation, and of an undulated surface, throughout which they recur, extends to the west and west-south-west from the sea nearly to the environs of modern Gaza.

Before approaching Gaza, unconscious where the ancient city stood, it might well be asked what is meant by baldness coming upon it. But having traversed the place on which it stood, and beholding it as it rises naked and bare above the plain, the writer could not fail to see that its perfect baldness shows how truly that word of the Lord rests upon it. On his first visit, he looked in vain for any fragment of ruin one cubic foot in size, for any shrub, or plant, or blade of grass, to relieve or interrupt the perfect baldness that has come upon Gaza. He saw nothing but a jackal freely coursing over its bare surface. The sand of the desert is nowhere more smooth and bare; and the dark spots, where nothing but the vestiges of ruins lie, are so flat and level, that they form no exception to its baldness.

Alexander Keith. Evidence of the Truth of the Christian Religion. 39th edition. (London: Longman, Greens and Co, 1872), pp 378-379

The Reverend Doctor Keith offers an intriguing interpretation. Those familiar with life in seaside communities would be well-aware of the ability of the encroaching sands to choke the life out of arable soils and garden plots, rendering an area “bald” of vegetation, particularly when there is no human intervention to prevent such sandy encroachment. The processes are as active today as they were in the times of Rev Dr Keith and the Prophets Jeremiah and Zephaniah. As Gaza, like various other cities in the area, had been destroyed at various times in the past, it will likely have suffered its ruins to be covered by windblown sands more than once. In the word of the Lord given to the Prophets, then, we see merely a description of typical or even guranteed results, such that they would hardly require prognostication or a vivid imagination to invent: Gaza rebels, is emptied of people, and the beach sand covers all, just as before, just as will happen again. This perspective of seeing the Lord’s hand in stereotyped processes with repeated historical exempla is something to be developed. There does appear to be quite a number of these tropes in the prophetic literature especially, some of which are mirrored in literature external to the Bible (like the Mari prophecies, which I described here). Collecting and comparing those themes or tropes would be enlightening.

The impossible dream

Iyov has tagged me, and we await the same time, too, though in keeping with our different religious traditions. For me, the “impossible” dream whose fulfillment I await, the fulfillment of which men never will accomplish, is the remaking of all, and the death of death itself:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”

Make it soon. Make it new.

The Pearl

I know the ways of learning; both the head
And pipes that feed the press, and make it run;
What reason hath from nature borrowed,
Or of it self, like a good housewife, spun
In laws and policy; what the stars conspire,
What willing nature speaks, what forc’d by fire;
Both th’ old discoveries, and the new-found seas,
The stock and surplus, cause and history:
All these stand open, or I have the keys:
        Yet I love thee.

I know the ways of honour, what maintains
The quick returns of courtesy and wit:
In vies of favours whether party gains,
When glory swells the heart, and mouldeth it
To all expressions both of hand and eye,
Which on the world a true-love-knot may tie,
And bear the bundle, wheresoe’re it goes:
How many drams of spirit there must be
To sell my life unto my friends or foes:
        Yet I love thee.

I know the ways of pleasure, the sweet strains,
The lullings and the relishes of it;
The propositions of hot blood and brains;
What mirth and music mean; what love and wit
Have done these twenty hundred years, and more:
I know the projects of unbridled store:
My stuff is flesh, not brass; my senses live,
And grumble oft, that they have more in me
Than he that curbs them, being but one to five:
        Yet I love thee.

I know all these, and have them in my hand:
Therefore not seeled, but with open eyes
I fly to thee, and fully understand
Both the main sale, and the commodities;
And at what rate and price I have thy love;
With all the circumstances that may move:
Yet through the labyrinths, not my grovelling wit,
But thy silk twist let down from heav’n to me,
Did both conduct and teach me, how by it
        To climb to thee.

George Herbert. The Pearl. Matt. 13. 1633

A book that can wait

The earliest confession of Christian faith — κυριος Ιησους — meant nothing less radical than that Christ’s peace, having suffered upon the cross the decisive rejection of the powers of this world, had been raised up by God as the true form of human existence: an eschatologically perfect love, now made invulnerable to all the violences of time, and yet also made incomprehensibly present in the midst of history, because God’s final judgment had already befallen the world in the paschal vindication of Jesus of Nazareth.

David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (Eerdmans, 2003), page 1

There are several problems here:
1.) It is a stretch to call κυριος Ιησους “the earliest confession of Christian faith.” A title and name do not a confession make.

2.) It is not “Christ’s peace” that suffered rejection upon the Cross, but Christ Himself. Nor was this “peace” raised up, but Christ Himself was. A work in which an “Eastern Orthodox theologian” loses focus on Christ on page 1 is not promising.

3.) “…an eschatologically perfect love, now made invulnerable to all the violences of time, and yet also made incomprehensibly present in the midst of history…” — buzzwordy blather. That “incomprehensibly present” is a classic. How would you comprehend it to note its presence were it incomprehensibly present? Incomprehensible polysyllabic pseudo-postmodern piffle is more like it. I can see how this book gained so much attention, now!

4.) “…because God’s final judgment had already befallen the world…” — uh, no, it hadn’t, nor has it yet, but it will someday, when there’ll be no mistaking that it is God’s final judgment.

5.) “…in the paschal vindication of Jesus of Nazareth.” — Wrong. In the theology of the Orthodox Church “Jesus of Nazareth” didn’t need “vindication,” being God and Man. The statement smacks of adoptionism.

Five strikes in one sentence on the first page. This book can wait.

The Boundless Garden

This boundless, magnificent garden formed by the deep furrows of the waves, bordered by the caves and rocks of the sea, its surface mirroring the dome of heaven, is no ordinary garden. Just as Yannios’s garden-plot, softly caressed by the sea-breezes which crease it into seductive, innumerable lines, as on the forehead of some king’s lovely bride displaying a capricious temper, so the liquid garden of the sea, the unpredictable sea, displays a childish temper and obstinacy, at times furious and at other times seductive. The sea is the garden, and Yannios’s donkey, plunging ‘its feet among the coll petals which waved and rustled around its hooves’, is no ordinary donkey but a little boat: when he tethers it to a post, he is actually securing it in some spot of the harbour, and when he untethers it he is taking it into the sea in order to harvest his ‘vegetables’, ‘cauliflowers and melons’, ‘the fruits of his labour’, fruits de mer, as the gastronomically-informed French would have it.

Homer is invoked from the beginning of the story with his comparison of the waves of the sea with the waves of undulating wheat in an unharvested field. Elsewhere Homer has compared the foamy waves of the sea with a flock of little white sheep. Although not of the same etymology, the affinity between skáros, the sleeping quarters for a flock of sheep, and skarí, the name usually given to a large boat, evokes in modern Greek a common homophonic derivation between terms referring to the worlds of both land and sea. A similar analogy can be seen between skáfos (skiff) and skáfi (wash-tub), confirming the ancient association where the lines between the two elements are blurred. This correspondence can also be seen in Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’ (oinops pontos), and in the representations on Attic vases of Dionysos sailing on a boat whose mast is a grape-covered vine seemingly growing out of the ship’s hull. The land enters into the sea and the sea into the land. Papadiamadis takes this correspondence one step further by turning the sea into the land. In a horizontal sense, the expanse of the sea is the garden and in a vertical sense the dome of heaven is mirrored in the sea; the sun at the end of its laborious course plunges through this dome to rest at the bottom of the sea, and the moon grows ever more radiant over it and the distant light of the Pleiades sparkle in its unexplored depths.

This is an ancient, primeval garden that dates ‘from the beginning, from the creation of the world’, and contrary to the assertion of Bacon according to whom nature is an open book in which everyone can read the history of creation, this primeval Homeric garden is ‘an open book written in hieroglyphic characters’ that ‘you cannot read . . . unless you are a seer’. The antiquity of the garden is further emphasized by the hieroglyphic characters in which it is described as well as the cryptic sayings of Homer, who is then conjured again become those ‘hieroglyphs’, literally ‘sacred engravings’, are compared with the ‘”emblems of sorrow”, the cracked lines engraved on the naked skulls of the dead, of which it is said that although they indicate the fate of the dead person, you cannot read them unless you are a seer . . . and anyhow it is too late then, since the dead man’s life is over.’ Unless this passage is read in an eschatological way it is totally devoid of meaning. How can anyone read the engravings on the skull while the person is alive? The engravings, like the hieroglyphic characters, have no useful purpose since the reveal the fate of the dead person post mortem, when nothing can be done about their life. It is the same with the scriptural garden. Death cannot be read in the garden of Eden which is full of life. But in the fallen garden, which is marked by death, the remnants of this once living garden can be read eschatologically, for the emblems of sorrow are there for all to see and interpret.

Yannios’s hardships have revealed to him the meaning of exile from the living garden; the garden that he finds in the sea is but a vestige of the original garden of life; it is a garden that is harvested with toil, with the sweat of one’s brow, that yields its once living fruits as dead ‘vegetables’—all the sea-urchis, oysters, octopuses—as a reminder that in the fallen garden it is necessary to consume dead matter in order to live. And it is this garden which is rife with the ’emblems of sorrow’ for the seer who knows how to decipher their meaning, one which is inhabited and epitomized by the solitary, sorrowful figure of a woman, her head covered with the black scarf of mourning, whose body is coated with weeds and scales as with a coat of skin (see Genesis 3:21), the ‘oyster-covered bride with shells for eyes’, who becomes unmarried Yannios’s ‘unbedded’ companion, the once living garden that will threaten to engulf the life of a drowning child and spew it out as dead matter. It is for all these reasons that the book, albeit open, retains its eschatological meaning hidden within its sacred engravings, and must be read as signs of the Kingdom of God, of our exile from this Kingdom which will be given back to us. For the unfortunate Yannios, who has suffered so much in this exile from the lost garden, the meaning of the earthly garden has already been revealed as in ‘a book written in shining capital letters, clear, intelligible . . . .’

An explanatory endnote from editor Lambros Kamperidis on Alexandros Papadiamandis’ short story “Black Scarf Rock,” in The Boundless Garden: Collected Short Stories, volume 1 (Limnia, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey, 2007), available here.

The stories of Alexandros Papadiamandis are brimming with what has been called “bright sadness.” What else is there to say, but, “read them”? Though we will not enjoy in this volume (except vicariously through such notes as above) the elaborate intermillennial wordplay of Papdiamandis’ Greek which defies labeling much less translation, we can still appreciate his mastery of the short story format. These stories are certainly gems. Whether we call them pearls from the deep or peas from Yannios’ boundless garden, they are beautiful. This collection is a labour of love for those involved, and their loving selection of the best of Papadiamandis’ myriad stories is appreciated, leading more of us to love this author.

The volume is beautifully printed on smooth, creamy paper, a delight to the touch as well as the eyes, and the softcover is a gently textured thick paper, something like watercolor paper, actually. Publisher Denise Harvey has done a wonderful job in not only producing a beautiful selection of stories in translation, but a beautiful book. This first volume of English translations of Papadiamandis’ stories is also volume seventeen of Harvey’s Romiosyni Series, a series of apparently English works (whether translations or originals) involving the history, culture and ethos of post-Byzantine Greece. I’ll certainly be looking for more of the volumes of the series, myself, if this volume is any indication of the quality of the others. My thanks to all involved.

Redemption

Having been tenant long to a rich Lord,
      Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
      And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancel th’ old.
In heaven at his manor I him sought:
      They told me there, that he was lately gone
      About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possession.
I straight return’d, and knowing his great birth,
      Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
      In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts:
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
      Of thieves and murderers: there I him espied
      Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.

George Herbert, 1633