Review – Page 5 – biblicalia

Sonnets to The Unseen

I would approach You, Lord, but don’t know how.
Whatever stepping stones I once discerned
(Cool in the footloose morning, oh how they burned!)
Are well below my touching, lost to me now.
This layered-over life does not allow
For boyish ease forever, I have learned.
And so this crust of soil must now be turned;
The shining task will need a manly plow.
But where to set the blade? where begin?
I cast my eyes to heaven’s nowhere space,
But skyward, Lord, I cannot hope to trace
My way to You. The tilling goes too thin.
Like a plow, a prayer should leave a mark.
I look for You on earth and in the dark.

This is the first sonnet from the Prologue in Christopher Fitzgerald’s Sonnets to the Unseen: A Life of Christ (my copy was published by the author, 2001; it is apparently now published by World Library Publications, but their site is malfunctioning at the moment so I can’t give a link right now; it is available in many places on the web). If I remember correctly, I was originally drawn to this smart little book by the chance reading of an article about the author, in some local paper’s website, covering him as a cancer-survivor who’d written a history of Christ in sonnet format. As Shakespeare’s Sonnets are some of my favorite reading, I sent off an order for the book right away, back in 2001. Now, a meditation on the life of Christ in sonnet form may seem unbearable to some, but it’s really quite effective, being occasionally quirky, and often wondrous. Sometimes it seems we’re eavesdropping on a conversation between God and the author, which is always a delight when it’s done well, as it certainly is here! All this is accomplished with the firm-footed balance of a seemingly newly-gained true maturity (that clarity from illness I mentioned yesterday, perhaps?) that hasn’t yet forgotten the wonder of youth and yet which thankfully doesn’t insist on a false, pretentious, and inappropriate youthfulness, which is unfortunately common trait in literature these days (e.g. the explosion of novelistic solipsism — barf!). And such subject matter he has chosen! Mr. Fitzgerald’s sonnets are a delight to read. I’ll leave you with another, from page 5, in which the playful rhyme belies the serious theme:

Created in Your image? How is that?
We mortals truly are of foolish stuff,
Engaged in one great game of blind man’s buff.
What image is there here worth looking at?
What god equates with bone and body fat,
Which come to nothing, given time enough,
As we our mortal coil ingloriously slough
On taking leave of this our habitat.
If we on earth are in Your image made,
What does that say of You? Forgive me, Lord.
My doubts are such they cannot be ignored.
Because of what I’ve seen of man’s parade
Through each day’s version of the evening news,
This “image” talk serves only to confuse.

❧

In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel

I’ve just finished reading In Search of Pre-Exilic Israel, edited by John Day. For a fine-grained review of the book with summaries of the articles, see Joe Cathey’s review at RBL. These are just a few comments from off the top of my head.

Firstly, I have to admit that I was just a tad, a tiny little bit, disappointed by this book. Perhaps I was, entirely unrealistically I admit, expecting a bit more consistency than I should expect from a series of reworked papers originally delivered in a conference. This is a subject that really should be dealt with in detail, and which would benefit from the kind of consistency in approach that is really only possible in a work written by one author. That evenness of approach is lacking here, but, of course, is only to be expected due to the origins of the papers. If one of the authors of the works contained herein were to write such a book, based on the performances contained in this one, I would nominate, second, and inaugurate John Day for the duty.

In any case, I did find several of the chapters/papers to be especially outstanding in content as well as presentation: those of Ernest Nicholson “Current ‘Revisionism’ and the Literature of the Old Testament”, John Day “How Many Pre-Exilic Psalms are there?”, and W. G. Lambert “Mesopotamian Sources and Pre-Exilic Israel.” Day’s chapter is the prize of the book, I think. It is succint, well-argued, and, perhaps most importantly, not overburdened by too much unnecessary recapitulation of the secondary literature, a common problem in this book. Others that stand out in the Not-As-Stellar-But-Still-Pretty-Nifty Category were Graham Davies “Was there an Exodus?”, William Dever “Histories and Non-Histories of Ancient Israel: the Question of the United Monarchy”, and Katherine Dell “How much Wisdom Literature has its Roots in the Pre-Exilic Period?”

And then there are the rest of the articles, of which I only want to deal with a few in any detail. André Lemaire “Hebrew and West Semitic Inscriptions and Pre-Exilic Israel” suffers from the inclusion of non-provenanced materials from the antiquities market as “evidence.” That’s just tacky. Terry Fenton “Hebrew Poetic Structure as a Basis for Dating” suffers from a non-poet’s approach to poetry: fit the material into the appropriate pattern, everything else is extraneous. B. A. Mastin “Yahweh’s Asherah, Inclusive Monotheism and the Question of Dating” suffers from trying to avoid the explicit connotation in the pronominal suffix attached to Asherah in the Kuntillet `Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom marking it as a noun, not a name. Gary Knoppers “In Search of Post-Exilic Israel: Samaria After the Fall of the Northern Kingdom” is a mixed bag, describing the mass depopulation of most of the northern kingdom, but somehow also trying to ameliorate it for some unknown and unstated reason. Perhaps most egregiously, Bernard Levinson “Is the Covenant Code an Exilic Composition? A Response to John van Seters” takes 54 pages to say “no”. I suppose it’s rather a pet peeve of mine that we are on occasion subjected to the odious original of a thing and then recapitulation of it ad nauseam whenever a response addresses it. Once is enough!

Overall however, the volume is certainly valuable, and I’m glad I’ve read it. I’ve found much of it to be of value, though definitely not as much as I expected. I recommend it to anyone interested or involved in the “maximalist” versus “minimalist” controversy. This book weighs in, a welterweight, in the maximalist corner.

A consistent drawback I’ve noticed shared by this volume with others is that unusual theories, in this case of extraordinarily, unrealistically late datings of the biblical texts, are given validation by interaction, even by refutation. Stupid ideas stupidly posed should rather be ignored. Has anyone taken the time to write a refutation of Velikovsky’s fantasies? Why should some of these other equally unlikely peculiarities be priveleged with response? It’s a waste of preciously valuable time, and original, creative research is thereby left undone because of this dead-ending of attention on second-rate foolishness. It would be refreshing to see the main tendency in biblical studies in general return to study of the primary texts involved, that is, the actual biblical books, rather than an absurd fascination with secondary/tertiary/quaternary texts. The two are not to be equated.

❧

Walking the Bible

I’m pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying PBS’s Walking the Bible. Rather than the typical assortment of discordantly talking heads paired with sonorous narrative and anachronistic dramatizations or stock footage, host Bruce Feiler (author of a book also named Walking the Bible and some others) is producing here a new kind of first person biblical travelogue, and it is entirely refreshing. There are gems here: from Turkey’s Mount Ararat, where a tight-lipped Kurdish mountain guide refuses to divulge the secrets of the mountain, to a leisurely row across Egypt’s Lake Timsah in a boat whose fisherman explains that they call a certain fish “the Moses fish” because, when the waters of the sea were split, the fish were split and so on one side they are grey and one side white. Delightful!

Feiler is a fine host, peppering the program with biblical readings and not uninformed scholarly explanations and conjectures, yet still giving the upper hand to the story in its relation to faith. Such an approach is perfectly in keeping with the goals of this blog and its companion email list. So, I recommend to folks that they catch it on their local PBS station, or if you’re outside of the US, purchase the DVD (available here). Either way, it’s informative, fun, and commercial free! And while it appears that there are only three episodes, the overall quality is quite enough to compensate for the lack of quantity.

❧

Wiesehöfer’s Ancient Persia

In his Translator’s Preface to Pierre Briant’s From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire (Eisenbrauns, 2002), Peter Daniels writes:

After not too many pages, the reader will discover that this is not a connected narrative history of the Persian Empire. Moreover, the reader is expected to be familiar with the narrative sequence of Achaemenid history, with the career of Alexander the Great, and with the entire Greek and Latin literature from which such histories have hitherto been drawn. The reader might find it useful to first turn to Joseph Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia (English translation, 1996) 1-101, for an overview that is thematically and conceptually remarkably similar to this work, and to the Chronological Chart therein for the sequence of events, as far as they can be determined. Only then, I think, can this book (whose aim, superbly realized, is to show just how a historian must evaluate and extrapolate from the available sources) be used with profit.

So that sounds like Wiesehöfer’s volume might be rather useful, I thought, something like a modern-day Olmstead’s History of the Persian Empire, with discussion of sources, etc. That’s what seemed to be implied by Daniels. But no. Daniels is right in that the book is thematically quite similar to Briant’s, but it is so similar and so brief that I simply didn’t find it useful. Aside from the sketchy chronological chart, there is no “connected narrative history of the Persian Empire” therein. I’m disappointed by that.

So, if anyone is thinking to purchase Josef Wiesehöfer’s volume Ancient Persia [note “…from 550 BC to 650 AD” is appended to the title only on the title page] (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004) in order to obtain a connected narrative presentation of Achaemenid history, don’t. If you want a brief overview of various disjointedly presented topics on Persian life from 550 BC to 650 AD, without all that fuss about kings and battles and all that “connected narrative of history” tosh, “bibliographical essays” instead of foot/endnotes, and some not very good b&w photographs, this is a book for you.

❧