A poet also has the advantage of a natural tendency to look backward toward greatness. No matter how far human knowledge advances, great poetry is unlikely to supersede Gilgamesh or Confucius, Homer or Isaiah. Rabbinic scholars are similar in temperament: they look back to the greatness of Abraham and his authors. When they couldn't account for lost sources and idioms, the rabbis created a long tradition of speculative interpretation. Yet today we have more historical sources than any poet or rabbi had in the past. Many of these resources are older than the Bible itself and some exhibit equal poetic gifts.
But it was not until J, the first major biblical author, that the Hebrew cosmic theater was transformed into a great narrative. There can be little doubt that J, who wrote in the Phoenician script, also read her Sumerian predecessors in cuneiform. Yet within a century or two after J died, the memory of Sumer was lost. Hebrew authors continued to look back to the famous civilization of “ Shinar ,” yet no one remembered where Shinar was and from where this word for Sumer came. Until the twentieth century, no one knew how to read the cuneiform tablets that were being dug up in Iraq and elsewhere. So when I began to study cuneiform writing, I felt suddenly in the presence of sources that J herself knew. I could envision her as a poet-scholar for her Hebraic audience. More than that, I understood that a poet-scholar must reinvigorate an ancient cosmic stage in danger of being drowned by either religious convention or radical skepticism. In other words, in a time of confusion between natural and supernatural (or unknowable) a new space must be cleared for a boundary that allows their healthy interaction. That is what keeps an audience alert to the intellectual tango of myth with history. The words in J's narrative may reflect roots according to the music of archaic wordplay, and this helps the audience attend to double meanings.
For instance, when the disguised angels come to rescue Lot and his family in Sodom the incommensurate realms of natural and supernatural become enmeshed. It is two scenes in one that the original audience understood, and the play of idioms was their guide. Today we may not know the meanings and resonance of the older layers of ancient Hebrew but we can re-echo them in a poetic usage of English idiom. Thus, I attempt to summon up the original poetic play of J, as an excerpt will illustrate. The Bible was not written in the flattened tones of conventional narrative, and neither did it sound stilted or fitted to one scholar or another's theory.
“Listen, I have two daughters who have not known a man intimately. Let me bring these out for you: handle them as you please. Only leave the visitors untouched , bring no hand to them: I have brought them under my roof's wing.”
Here is Lot in his existential dread. Although the scene is a natural one, with everyone unaware of the supernatural “visitors,” the audience sees two scenes. In one they witness the earthly town of Sodom , and in the other they see through the angels' disguises and experience Lot 's dread of their exposure.
The play of language alerts the audience to the doubled scene. To “handle” Lot 's daughters is opposed by leaving the angels “untouched,” with no “hand” applied to them. But then, the language as I've translated it tells us that Lot considers the angels under his “wing.” Unlike a hand, the ordinary cliché for a roof's wing is transmuted here into a reminder that we are also in the realm of angels.
Yet the Sodomites see only the literal scene, where “hand” and “touch” have no higher poetic resonance:
“He comes here to share our shelter and already he hands down the law. Now you will know…a touch of our contempt.”
What happens next, however, makes the second scene more vivid to the audience once again, through its wordplay:
But from within a hand stretched out, brought Lot toward those visitors in the house. Now they shut him in. They blinded them with light: the people at the door, boys as well as graybeards. They would grope for the door handle vainly.
And it is this supernatural scene, superimposed on the literal one, which accounts for the figure of Yahweh's “hand” becoming visible—in the “reaching out” to Lot and his daughters, once they have been secured in the “grasp” of the angels.
He wavered; the figures grasped his arm, his wife's, the hands of his two daughters—it was Yahweh reaching out to them. They brought him out, stopping only outside the city.
Only when a translator keeps the original audience in mind can the poetics of the original authors be interpreted. Most religious translators overlook the poetry of such scenes as this one in Sodom , while academic translators neglect the creativity of the original Hebraic culture. But in the best translation traces of the original authors are left visible, as in the rich scale of phrasing that characterizes the King James Version, or in the range of cultural context provided by the Anchor Genesis. I learned much from both.
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