Auditorium
When I was growing up in fifties Detroit there was a philosophy called Existentialism and, on the periphery of my young ears, it debated the Death of God. It was a dare to divine retribution, I thought. In public, however, the subject was discussed calmly, as if there was an acknowledged boundary of discourse between religion and secular culture. This existential theology embraced a cosmic theater in mind (even if silent, God had to exist) yet it would never establish a public stage that could last.
So in the early nineteen-seventies it was my dream as a poet-scholar to recreate that public stage by restoring the authors of the Bible and their first audience. It takes imagining what that audience knew about its authors to envision a cosmic theater. When the Bible was being written, the authors were living representatives of Hebraic culture, known to their audience by name. Those names are long lost, yet when a pious believer today joins the ongoing biblical audience in time, semblances of the authors are still found in the text: Moses and David, for example, among other biblical characters. Most of us, however, need the complexity of history, and ever since Spinoza discussed the original authors (in 17 th Century Amsterdam ) we have turned to the art of historical interpretation.
Yet the newest translations still get by with avoiding the HHhhh original authors completely. Instead of great writers, the authors are imagined to have been political historians, priests or prophets. All the evidence about ancient cultures, however, points in another direction. Cultures that preceded the Hebraic one by thousands of years had literate poets and writers at their royal courts, in addition to historians and translators. In each kingdom and in most generations, these writers either added poetic interpretations to their own tradition or restored lost history. Consider the lamentation poems for the great Sumerian cities—in particular those of Ur , Abraham's city. These poems were addressed to the gods in the temple and received intimate performance upon the temple stage when the cities revived.
However, the courts of Hebrew kings asked their writers for history in place of myth. What they got were historical narratives uniting the cosmic (in realistic disguise) with the natural world. These powerful narratives were then combined into the early books of the Hebrew Bible as we now know them, beginning with Genesis. It was then, centuries after the Bible's original writers lived, that the division into chapter and verse began, accompanied by the first translations of the Hebrew Bible into Aramaic in the fifth century BCE. Those translations are lost but later ones in Aramaic survive from the third century BCE and are known as targums , a Hebrew word for translations.
The first translators knew that the scrolls were combined from more than one ancient source and author. To recapture the original poetry, a more abstract use of idiom sparked the imagination of these translators, so that the deity no longer “came down from” heaven but rather “made himself present.” The translator into Aramaic, taking on the role of poet-scholar, turned himself into the original poet, allowing the text to come to life again in a modern idiom. In our own day this rarely happens. Religious translators lose the lifeblood of the original by ignoring the art of the authors. On another level, academic translators dampen the electricity of the original by presenting the text as homogeneous, failing to reimagine its idioms. An art that fits the present moment must always be found anew, in order to transform the unique history of the Hebrew Bible into a compelling text. Such an art will place a delicate lens over the past, one that won't allow us to feel as though we have lost the presence of the original authors.
It was as a poet-scholar therefore, that I made my way back to the written alphabet of the original texts and began to study the Phoenician script. One Jerusalem summer thirty years ago, I found myself in the sublet apartment of Raphael Kutscher, a renowned Assyriologist. His specialized books lined the walls of every room and hallway and I became obsessed with them. And in discussions with Chaim Rabin, the foremost philologist of ancient Hebrew, I explored the origins of creatively inspired authorship that were later obscured by priestly self-effacement. What I was learning of biblical origins helped turn me from a poet-translator who had studied with rabbi-translators such as Robert Gordis and Harry Orlinsky into a poet-scholar.
And so I discovered for myself that when the scrolls of the original biblical writers, written in the Phoenician alphabet, were translated into the Babylonian alphabet (what we call Hebrew letters today) many ancient idioms were lost. It is a process that afflicts all living languages to some extent, but only in recent years have we built up enough historical context to reexamine the roots of Hebrew. For example, consider that in a few years from now, university students will no longer know why a blueprint was blue. New idioms continue to enter the language: “Make me a Xerox of that.” Yet an ancient idiom, comparable to the word blueprint, was often translated directly into the new Hebrew script without comprehension. It was then interpreted according to its assumed meaning: a “blueprint” would become simply a “plan.” Many anachronisms like this can be identified in the biblical text today but we can no longer account for their origin. For this, a poet's knowledge of how idioms are mistranslated is necessary.
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