Idle musings of a bookseller

The adoption, on a continental scale, of an eschatology of monetary-material success represents a radical cut in regard to the Periclean—Florentine typology of social meaning. The central and categorical imperative that to make money is not only the customary and socially most useful way in which a man can spend his earthly life — an imperative for which there is, certainly, precedent in the European mercantile and pre—capitalist ethos — is one thing. The eloquent conviction that to make money is also the most interesting thing he can do, is quite another. And it is precisely this conviction which is singularly American (the only culture, correlatively, in which the beggar carries no aura of sanctity or prophecy). The consequences are, literally, incommensurable. The ascription of monetary worth defines and democratizes every aspect of professional status. The lower-paid — the teacher, the artist out of the limelight, the scholar — are the object of subtle courtesies of condescension not, or not primarily, because of their failure to earn well, but because this failure makes them less interesting to the body politic. They are more or less massively, more or less consciously patronized, because the ‘claims of the ideal’ (Ibsen’s expression) are, in the American grain, those of material progress and recompense. Fortuna is fortune. That there should be Halls of Fame for baseball-players but few complete editions of classic American authors; that an American university of accredited standing should, very recently, have dismissed thirty tenured teachers on the grounds of utmost fiscal crisis while flying its football squads to Hawaii for a single game; that the athlete and the broker, the plumber and the pop-star, should earn far more than the pedagogue — these are facts of life for which we can cite parallels in other societies, even in Pericleian Athens or the Florence of Galileo. What we cannot parallel is the American resolve to proclaim and to institutionalize the valuations which underlie such facts. It is the sovereign candour of American philistinism which numbs a European sensibility; it is the frank and sometimes sophisticated articulation of a fundamentally, of an ontologically immanent economy of human purpose. That just this ‘immanence’ and ravenous appetite for material reward is inherent in the vast majority of the human species; that we are a poor beast compounded of banality and greed; that it is not the spiky fruits of the spirit but creature comforts we lunge for — all this looks more than likely. The current ‘Americanization’ of much of the globe, the modulation from the sacramental to the cargo-cult whether it be in the jungles of New Guinea or the hamburger—joints, laundromats and supermarkets of Europe, points to this conclusion. It may be that America has quite simply been more truthful about human nature than any previous society. If this is so, it will have been the evasion of such truth, the imposition of arbitrary dreams and ideals from above, which has made possible the high places and moments of civilization. Civilization will have endured after Pericles by virtue, to quote Ibsen again, of a ‘life-lie’. Russian or European power relations and institutions have laboured to enforce this ‘lie’. America has exposed it or, pragmatically, passed it by. The difference is profound.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 289–90

This, then, is my surmise: the dominant apparatus of American high culture is that of custody. The institutions of learning and of the arts constitute the great archive, inventory, catalogue, storehouse, rummage-room of western civilization. American curators purchase, restore, exhibit the arts of Europe. American editors and bibliographers annotate, emend, collate, the European classics and the moderns. American musicians perform, Often incomparably, the music which has poured out of Europe from Guillaume de Machaut to Mahler and Stravinsky. Together, curators, restorers, librarians, thesis writers, performing artists in America underwrite, reinsure the imperiled products of the ancient Mediterranean and the European spirit. America is, on a scale of unprecedented energy and munificence, the Alexandria, the Byzantium of the ‘middle kingdom’ (that proud Chinese term) of thought and of art which was Europe, and which may be Europe still.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 281–82

<idle musing>
Fascinating idea—and probably true. I can't think of a single original (nontechnology) idea that has sprung from the United States.
</idle musing>

In short: the Puritan programme of a break with the ‘corrupt ancientness’ and hereditary taint of European history, the great hunger of successive waves of immigrants for a new dispensation free of the terrors and injustice which had marked their communal past, have played a central role in the American imagination and in the rhetoric of American identity. But they do not afford the actual products of American culture a calendar of Arcadian youth, a time of special grace. On the contrary. American culture has stood, from its outset, on giant shoulders. Behind Puritan style lay the sinew of English Tudor, Elizabethan and Jacobean prose. Behind the foundation of American universities lay the experience of Oxford and Cambridge, Aristotelian logic and the mathematics of Galileo and Newton. British empiricism and the world of the philosophes underwrite the Jeffersonian vision of an American enlightenment. Goethe stands behind Emerson as Shakespeare and Milton do behind Melville. It may be, as D. H. Lawrence found, that American culture is ‘very old’ precisely because it has been heir to so much. The New England divines would concur. By the early eighteenth century, William Cowper testified to ‘God’s withdrawal’ from a new world whose conditions of spirit and civil practice were no better than in the old. The idiom of his testimony was that of Jeremiah and the Cataline orations, of Juvenal and the Aesopian satirists of the European reformation.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 270

I was cleaning up some files on my computer today and ran across this. I discovered I had originally posted it in November 2006, but it bears reposting, even though I might word it differently in places if I wrote it today:

<idle musing>
Veneer is a handy thing. You overlay a thin layer of an expensive wood over cheap wood and it looks good. Nobody suspects that the underlying wood is just particle board. No one that is, until you try to put a load on the shelf and it breaks.

It can be the same with people.

Recently I had the opportunity to spend time with someone I hadn’t seen for a while. Others had told me how much this person had changed and how much they had grown in Christ. I was excited to see it; I always like to see what God does in a person.

At first it seemed that it was true. The person acted the part of a Christian; the vocabulary was Evangelical, God was part of the discussion. But, then came a time of pressure. Pop! The shelf cracked and the particle board of old unredeemed self shown through.

Does it have to be that way? Do we have to go through life play-acting? Recent events raise this question even more starkly. Is Christianity just a sop thrown to give us hope after death, while we struggle and fail here on earth? Is there no victory over sin? Does the enemy of our souls have the upper hand?

Scripture says, “No!” Emphatically. Jesus, on the night of his betrayal, was able to say, “I have overcome the world!” Note the tense, not I will, not I am, but I have (perfect, active, indicative in the Greek). Paul was able to say, in Romans 8, “we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (present active indicative in the Greek). John, in I John says, “Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world.”

So, why the disconnect? Why don’t people seem to be experiencing this in their daily lives?

Well, there can be any number of reasons, but I submit that the main one is that most Christians have never really died to self. Evangelical Christianity is big on justification, but short on sanctification. We want big numbers, and frankly, death isn’t a good calling card if you are looking for a large following: “Hi, Jesus loves you and wants to put you to death!” But, that is exactly what Jesus calls us to, “Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Matthew 16.24, Mark 8:34, Luke 9:23, 14.27 (RSV)

Paul develops the theme even more in Romans 6. According to Paul, we died with Christ in baptism and now we are alive in Christ. But, it is in Christ, not in self. As long as we function in self, we function in sin. As long as we seek what we want, when we want it, we are dead to Christ and alive to the world. As long as we live in Christ, we are dead to self and the world. It’s too simple—maybe that’s the problem. We want to make it harder; we want to do it.

The reformation happened almost 500 hundred years ago. Its basic truth was sola gratia, all God and not man. Why is it that we are now trying to do it ourselves? Sola Gratia means just that, by grace alone, or does Galatians 3 not ring true anymore?

O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law, or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh? Did you experience so many things in vain? —if it really is in vain. Does he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you do so by works of the law, or by hearing with faith?

</idle musing>

If, in the Judaic perception, the language of the Adamic was that of love, the grammars of fallen man are those of the legal code. It is the modulation from one to the other, as commentary and commentary on commentary seek to hammer it out, which is one of the centres of The Trial (kabbalistic geometries know of ordered constructs with several centres). Set beside Kafka’s readings of Kafka, ours are, unavoidably, feeble.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 241

To be a guest among other men is a possibility. All of us, I firmly believe are guests of the planet, of its ecology. We did not make our world, we were thrown into it. We are born without knowing why. We haven’t planned it. We are trustees of a dwindling space for survival. We had better learn very quickly that we are guests, or there will be not much left to live in.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 237

Those who have produced canonic texts and textualities by which they organize their politics — be they the Koran, the Scriptures, the Kapital — are not everywhere. And there are many cultures that have, until now, refused textuality, and which are now paying a bitter price for what may be a perfectly natural condition of their being.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 236

There's a marvelous blog called Bob on Books that I read regularly. Normally he reviews books—a wide variety of books, but mainly Christian ones. But sometimes he offers musings on other things. Today is one of those days. Here's an excerpt, but please take the extra couple of minutes to read the whole thing—and maybe even add him to your daily reading!

A good liberal education helps people explore all these questions, and consider whether the answers of others address the questions of the day. I wonder sometimes whether the effort to eradicate what was once a staple of education is a recognition of the dangerous character of such an education. It fosters the asking of hard questions of oneself and one’s society. Questions people ask. Questions cogs do not ask.

I asked the question of how long it would take for people to wake up to what they’ve missed or lost. I suspect some never do, the amusements and distractions of life precluding such awakenings. Others get twenty years into a career only to discover that they have no clue why they are doing what they do other than that it pays well.

It would be fantastically arrogant to suppose that we know that we have evolved into a kind of creature that likes living with those that smell different, look different, sound different. Sit in a railway carriage or bus in a land where you don’t speak a single word of the language. Have you ever noticed the panic that starts growing in your civilized soul, the sense that something is hideously wrong, that your very identity may soon be torn apart? It could be that autonomy is the natural form of the social unit, and that those who would thrust others together may be doing so in the name of a transcendent vision of justice, hope, human fairness, but that they may also be hurrying something very complicated. We don’t know. Human beings do tend to be with their own. Not all. Not the exceptional. But most human beings.

We’re speaking across a statistical mean, but it is a very massive one. Environment is heredity, and heredity is environment. That which you are born into — the privileges, the luck or the misfortune — is both heredity and environment. They cannot be separated. Cautionary rhetoric occludes this complicated recognition of interaction. The dialectic, the osmotic, which relate the mutations conceivable or feasible in this interaction, are radically beyond our understanding.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 235

First published in 1966, Das Dritte Reich des Traums is a neglected classic. In it, Charlotte Beradt summarizes her analyses of some three hundred dreams recounted to her in Berlin 1933–34, That the images, symbols, fantasms which crowd these dreams should so obviously mirror the political changes taking place in Berlin at the time, is not surprising. What is of the very first importance, however, is the degree of depth to which external history penetrates into the subconscious and unconscious. It does not take long to discover that patients dreaming of the loss of limbs or of the atrophy of arms or legs are not displaying symptoms of a Freudian castration—complex but, more simply and terribly, revealing the terrors inflicted on them by the new rules demanding the Hitler-salute in public, professional and even familial usage.

Am I mistaken in feeling that this finding, even by itself, presents a fundamental challenge to the psychoanalytic model of dreams and their interpretation?—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 222–23

Our knowledge of dreams and of dreaming, the material which constitutes the history of human dreams, are wholly inseparable from the linguistic medium. (I leave to one side the epistemologically teasing possibility that a mute or deaf-mute dreamer can somehow provide a pictorial or gestural mimesis of his dreams.) Dreams are told, recorded, interpreted in language. The phenomenology of dreaming is imbedded in the evolution and structures of language. A theory of dreams is also a linguistics or, at the very least, a poetics. No account of any human dream, whether provided by the dreamer himself, by a secondary source or by the dream-interpreter, is linguistically innocent or value-free. The account of the dream, which is the sum total of our evidence, will be subject to exactly the same constraints and historical determinants in respect of style, narrative convention, idiom, syntax, connotation, as any other speech act in the relevant language, historical epoch and milieu. Dreams were no less splintered at Babel than were the tongues of men.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 217

It is a confident guess that despite the Enlightenment and positivism, that despite modern agnosticism and Freud, a great majority of mankind—even in so-called ‘advanced’ and technological societies—continues to attach prophetic, oracular values to its dreams.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 214

In psychoanalysis, on the contrary, dreams feed not on prophecy but on remembrance. The semiological vector points not to the future but to the past. The dynamics of opacity are not those of the unknown but of the suppressed.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 214

Any poetic, philosophic, rhetorical pronouncement worth taking seriously will compact its executive means and meanings. It will resist, it will frustrate to the greatest possible degree, the dissociative, the deconstructive agencies of paraphrase and translation. A major text exposes pitilessly the necessary innocence and arbitrariness of the translator’s assumption that meaning is some sort of ‘packageable content’ and not an energy irreducible to any other medium. Language is, therefore, the adversary of translation. Thus there is more than cautionary allegory in the prohibition which numerous cultures have set against the translation of their sacred texts.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 195

Ted Gossard over at Jesus Community has a good exhortation that I needed to hear today. After quoting Phil 4:4–9 and some comments, he closes with this:

Sometimes Christians along with others see it as their moral duty to focus on all that’s wrong, the mess of the world with the goal of exposing and rooting it out, or at least taking a stand against it. There is surely a time to speak and a time to keep silent (Ecclesiastes 3:7b). But one can become completely absorbed in that, totally occupied with it, so that there’s no time to do what we’re called to do in the passage above. I liked what I heard Dallas Willard say online in a talk, that only after one has worked hard all day, and is collapsing should they turn their attention to the news. That might be an overstatement to make a point. It’s not like we’re to ignore what’s unpleasant. But neither should that be our focus. Instead we’re to concentrate on what’s uplifting and helpful to us. Then hopefully that same spirit and practice can help others as we continue to be helped. In and through Jesus.

Do read the whole thing, though.

The extinction of a language however remote, however immune to historical-material success or diffusion, is the death of a unique world—view, of a genre of remembrance, of present being and of futurity. A truly dead language is irreplaceable. It closes that which Kierkegaard bade us keep open if our humanity was to evolve: ‘the wounds of possibility’. Such closure may, for late twentieth-century mass-media and mass-market technocracy, be a triumph. It may facilitate the imperium of the fast-food chain and the news-satellite. For the lessening chances of the human spirit, it is destructive.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 150–51

Absolute tragedy is very rare. It is a piece of dramatic literature (or art or music) founded rigorously on the postulate that human life is a fatality. It proclaims axiomatically that it is best not to be born or, failing that, to die young. An absolutely tragic model of the condition of men and women views these men and women as unwanted intruders on creation, as beings destined to undergo unmerited, incomprehensible, arbitrary suffering and defeat. Original sin, be it Adamic or Promethean, is not a tragic category. It is charged with possibilities both of motivation and of eventual redemption. In the absolutely tragic, it is the crime of man that he is, that he exists. His naked presence and identity are transgressions. The absolutely tragic is, therefore, a negative ontology. Our century has given to this abstract paradox a tangible enactment. During the Holocaust, the Gypsy or the Jew had very precisely committed the crime of being. That crime attached by definition to the fact of birth. Thus even the unborn had to be hounded to extinction. To come into the world was to come into torture and death.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 129

For it is in and through the process of translation that a language is made eminently self-aware. Translation constrains it to formal and diachronic introspection, to an explicit investment and enlargement of its historical, colloquial and metaphorical instruments. Simultaneously, translation puts a language under pressure of its limitation. It will solicit modes of perception and designation which that language had left underdeveloped, or had altogether discarded. An act of translation draws up a balance-sheet, as it were, for the target-language.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 94

‘Who is it that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?’ I am unable to account wholly rationally for the ways of the man or woman who put the question and who asks me where I was when ‘the morning stars sang together’ or whether ‘the rain hath a father?’

Perhaps this is as it should be. It is the Hebrew Bible, of all books, which most questions man.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 87

How naked would be the walls of our museums stripped of the works of art which illustrate, interpret or refer to biblical themes. How much silence there would be in our western music, from Gregorian chant to Bach, from Handel to Stravinsky and Britten if we excised settings of biblical texts, dramatizations and motifs. The same is true of western literature. Our poetry, drama, fiction would be unrecognizable if we omitted the continuous presence of the Bible. Nor is there any categorical way of delineating that presence. It extends from the immense volume of biblical paraphrase to the most tangential or covert of allusions.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 82

But the possible confusion and, in our present climate of approved sentiment, the inevitable embarrassment which must accompany any public avowal of mystery, seems to me preferable to the slippery evasions and conceptual deficits in contemporary hermeneutics and criticism.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 38

We must read as if the temporal and executive setting of a text does matter. The historical surroundings, the cultural and formal circumstances, the biological stratum, what we can construe or conjecture of an author’s intentions, constitute vulnerable aids. We know that they ought to be stringently ironized and examined for what there is in them of subjective hazard. They matter none the less. They enrich the levels of awareness and enjoyment; they generate constraints on the complacencies and licence of interpretative anarchy.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 34

We must read as if the text before us had meaning. This will be a single meaning if the text is a serious one, if it makes us answerable to its force of life. It will not be a meaning or figura (structure, complex) of meanings isolated from the transformative and reinterpretative pressures of historical and cultural change. It will not be a meaning arrived at by any determinant or automatic process of cumulation and consensus. The true understanding(s) of the text or music or painting may, during a briefer or longer time-spell, be in the custody of a few, indeed of one witness and respondent. Above all, the meaning striven towards will never be one which exegesis, commentary, translation, paraphrase, psycho-analytic or sociological decoding, can ever exhaust, can ever define as total. Only weak poems can be exhaustively interpreted of understood. Only in trivial or opportunistic texts is the sum of significance that of the parts.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 34

The poem comes before the commentary. The poem is first not only temporally. It is not a pre-text, an occasion for subsequent exegetic or metamorphic treatment. Its priority is one of essence, of ontological need and self-sufficiency. Even the greatest critique or commentary, be it that of a writer or painter or composer on his own work, is accidental (the cardinal Aristotelian distinction). It is dependent, secondary, contingent. The poem embodies and bodies forth through a singular enactment its own raison d’étre. The secondary text does not contain an imperative of being. Again the Aristotelian and Thomist differentiations between essence and accident are clarifying. The poem is; the commentary signifies.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 32

Unlike criticism and aesthetic valuation, which are always synchronic (Aristotle’s ‘Oedipus’ is not negated or made obsolete by Holderlin’s, Hoderlin’s is neither improved nor cancelled out by Freud’s), the process of textual interpretation is cumulative. Our readings become better informed, evidence progresses, substantiation grows. Ideally—though not, to be sure, in actual practice—the corpus of lexical knowledge, of grammatical analysis, of semantic and contextual matter, of historical and biographical fact, will finally suffice to arrive at a demonstrable determination of what the passage means. This determination need not claim exhaustiveness; it will know itself to be susceptible to amendment, to revision, even to rejection as fresh knowledge becomes available, as linguistic or stylistic insights are sharpened. But at any given point in the long history of disciplined understanding, a decision as to the better reading, as to the more plausible paraphrase, as to the more reasonable grasp of the author’s purpose, will be a rational and demonstrable one. At the end of the philological road, now or tomorrow, there is a best reading, there is a meaning or constellation of meanings to be perceived, analysed and chosen over others. In its authentic sense, philology is, indeed, the working passage, via the arts of scrupulous observance and trust (philein) from the uncertainties of the Word to the stability of the Logos.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 27–28

We realize, more or less clearly, the degree to which literate ‘common sense’, the acceptable limits of debate, the transmission of the generally agreed syllabus of major texts and works of art and of music, is an ideological process, a reflection of power-relations within a culture and society. The literate person is one who concurs with the reflexes of approval and aesthetic enjoyment which have been suggested and exemplified to him by the dominant legacy. But we dismiss such worries. We accept as inevitable and as adequate the merely statistical weight of ‘institutional consensus’, of common-sense authority. How else could we marshal our cultural choices and be at home in our pleasures?—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 26

The act and art of serious reading comport two principal motions of spirit: that of interpretation (hermeneutics) and that of valuation (criticism, aesthetic judgement). The two are strictly inseparable. To interpret is to judge. No decipherment, however philological, however textual in the most technical sense, is value-free. Correspondingly, no critical assessment, no aesthetic commentary is not, at the same time, interpretative. The very word ‘interpretation’, encompassing as it does concepts of explication, of translation and of enactment (as in the interpretation of a dramatic part or musical score), tells us of this manifold interplay.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 25

The alternatives are not reassuring: vulgarization and loud vacancies of intellect on the one hand, and the retreat of literature into museum cabinets on the other. The tawdry ‘plot outline’ or ‘predigested and trivialized version of the classic on the one hand, and the illegible variorum on the other. Literacy must strive to regain the middle ground. If it fails to do so, if une lecture bien faite becomes a dated artifice, a great emptiness will enter our lives.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 19

Schooling today, notably in the United States, is planned amnesia.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 15

The atrophy of memory is the commanding trait in mid and later twientieth-century education and culture. The great majority of us can no longer identify, let alone quote, even the central biblical or classical passages which not only are the underlying script of western literature (from Caxton to Robert Lowell, poetry in English has carried inside it the implicit echo of previous poetry), but have been the alphabet of our laws and public institutions. The most elementary allusions to Greek mythology, to the Old and the New Testament, to the classics, to ancient and to European history, have become hermetic. Short bits of text now lead precarious lives on great stilts of footnotes.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 14–15

Current literacies are diffuse and irreverent. It is no longer a natural motion to turn to a book for oracular guidance. We distrust auctoritas—the commanding script or scripture, the core of the authoritarian in classical authorship—precisely because of immutability. We did not write the book. Even in our most intense penetrative encounter with it is experience at second hand. This is the crux. The legacy of romanticism is one of strenuous solipsism of the development of self out of immediacy. A single credo of vitalist spontaneity leads from Wordsworth’s assertion that ‘one impulse from a vernal wood’ outweighs the dusty sum of libraries to the slogan of radical students at the University of Frankfurt in 1968: ‘Let there be no more quotations.’ In both cases the polemic is that of the ‘life of life’ against the ‘life of the letter’, of the primacy of personal experience against the derivativeness of even the most deeply felt of literary emotions. To us, the phrase ‘the book of life’ is a sophistic antinomy or cliché. To Luther, who used it at a decisive point in his version of Revelation and, one suspects, to Chardin’s reader, it was a concrete verity.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 11–12

<idle musing>
And we are the poorer for it. We cast aside thousands of years of aggregate experience as recorded, however imperfectly and stumblingly, in books, scrolls, or tablets for the sake of our tiny little microsecond of experience. And then we wonder why things go awry? Fools we are! Why reinvent the wheel all the time; we might just as well be illiterate. Ah, but we are! We may know how to read, but we haven't a clue on what to read or how to read well. We skim and call it reading. We rarely actually read, but when we do, we call it "close reading" or "deep reading" so that people will think some amazing thing is happening. Our predecessors would laugh at us. Hopefully, if we have successors (which is looking less and less likely with each rise in temperature), they too will laugh at us. Heaven knows we deserve it!
</idle musing>

But the principal truth is this: latent in every act of complete reading is the compulsion to write a book in reply. The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 8

<idle musing>
The person who loaned me this book always has a pencil behind his ear. Me, I always have a pen attached to the collar of my t-shirt—yes, always.
</idle musing>

He who passes over printing errors without correcting them is no mere philistine: he is a perjurer of spirit and sense. It may well be that in a secular culture the best way to define a condition of grace is to say that it is one in which one leaves uncorrected neither literal nor substantive errata in the texts one reads and hands on to those who come after us.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 7

To read well is to answer the text, to be answerable to the text, ‘answerability’ comprising the crucial elements of response and of responsibility. To read well is to enter into answerable reciprocity with the book being read; it is to embark on total exchange (‘ripe for commerce’ says Geoffrey Hill). The dual compaction of light on the page and on the reader’s cheek enacts Chardin’s perception of the primal fact: to read well is to be read by that which we read. It is to be answerable to it. The obsolete word ‘responsion’, signifying, as it still does at Oxford, the process of examination and reply, may be used to shorthand the several and complex stages of active reading inherent in the quill.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 6

Even the most obsessed of bookmen can read only a minute fraction of the world’s totality of texts. He is no true reader, no philosophe lisant, who has not experienced the reproachful fascination of the great shelves of unread books, of the libraries at night of which Borges is the fabulist. He is no reader who has not heard, in his inward ear, the call of the hundreds of thousands, of the millions of volumes which stand in the stacks of the British Library or of Widener asking to be read. For there is in each book a gamble against oblivion, a wager against silence, which can be won only when the book is opened again (but in contrast to man, the book can wait centuries for the hazard of resurrection). Every authentic reader, in the sense of Chardin’s delineation, carries within him a nagging weight of omission, of the shelves he has hurried past, of the books whose spine his fingers have brushed across in blind haste.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, pages 3–4

Bicycling Magazine has a new article out about fitness and longevity. In it they link to a fun site, World FitnessLevel that estimates your fitness level and fitness age based on some questions. They also are conducting a study, so you can answer a long list of questions if you wish.

So, given that I ride (indoors in the winter) three times a week and walk three to six plus miles a day with a resting heart rate of about 45 (national average for my age is 72), they say my fitness age is:

What about you? How are you doing?

Marble crumbles, bronze decays, but written words—seemingly the most fragile of media—survive.—No Passion Spent, page 3

Historiography in Israel was driven by the covenant, not by the king. In the rest of the ancient Near East, historiography had the function of promoting and legitimating the king. Divine sponsorship of the king was revealed in the activities of the gods in the human world, and historiography gave voice to that reality. Israelite historiography was more often negative toward the king and focused on divine faithfulness to the covenant (its blessings and curses). Historiography gave voice to that reality as it offered a divinely revealed interpretation of Yahweh’s activities.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 315

<idle musing>
That's the final excerpt from this book. I hope you enjoyed it. Personally, I think it is a vast improvement over the (already very good) previous edition. Monday we start an older book that a friend loaned me about two years back that I finally got around to reading recently. I think you'll enjoy it. It's a bit of a change of pace: George Steiner, No Passion Spent. It's a collection of his essays on literary criticism and other such things.
</idle musing>

As many haye commented, necromancy was not forbidden in Israel on the premise that it did not work but because its efficacy was recognized and deemed illicit and contradictory to normative Yahwistic theology.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 306

The procedure that Job’s friends were suggesting, rather than advising discovery divination, urges Job to appease God through a procedure of blanket confession, thus more in line with Shurpu than with Murshili’s procedure, though all show the importance of appeasement. In this aspect Job’s friends were representatives of a revered ancient Near Eastern wisdom tradition and also, unbeknown to them, the representatives for the case that the adversary was pressing. That is, if they had persuaded Job to follow their advice and make a blanket confession just to appease Deity and be restored to favor, the adversary’s contention would have been confirmed: righteousness was not the issue, only reward. Instead, the integrity that Job maintained (Job 27:1—6) was one that insisted that his righteous standing be considered rather than just his favor restored. If this interpretation is accurate, the book of Job argues pointedly against the theodicy philosophies in the ancient world and represents an Israelite modification. This modification, rather than offering a revised theodicy, seeks to reinterpret the justice of God from something that may be debated to something that is a given. In Yahweh’s speech it is not his justice that is defended but his wisdom. The inference to be drawn from this is that if it is determined that God is wise, then it can be accepted that he is just, even if not all the information to evaluate his justice is available.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 288

Those of you who want to get back to the pure paganism of the pre-Christian world need to remember this about the gods:

The minds of the gods were not easily penetrated.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 287

<idle musing>
If you really want to get back to "pure" paganism, you need to drop those silly Christian ideas about justice. If you've been following this series at all, you have seen how the gods can be very capricious—and you certainly don't want to disagree with them! Unless of course you want to end up like Odysseus and wander for 10 years, lost at sea. Or, like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, fighting the bull of heaven. They won, but I doubt you would! And Enkidu ended up dying for their crimes.

No, pure paganism isn't bothered by the stupid, petty things that Christianity is. Power is what's important and of course using that power! And, of course staying on the good side of the gods! And, as the myths and history both show, that's a tough one. Search the stars, search the entrails, watch the flight of birds, watch for strange portents. our out libations before drinking or eating. Keep you personal god happy! And watch out for the other person who might just have a more powerful personal god than you do!

Me, I'll stick to Christianity. I might not comprehend all that God is doing, but I know he isn't capricious and his love conquers all evil—even the evil inside me!
</idle musing>

Since the ancients typically believed that their suffering was the result of the god’s anger, they naturally sought to appease that anger. Appeasement could theoretically be accomplished by the identification of the offense and the offering of an appropriate sacrifice. A clear example of this procedure is found in the Hittite Plague Prayers of Murshili II. In response to the severe plague that decimated his kingdom over several decades, he asked the gods the reason for the disastrous conditions. The results of divinations eventually allowed him to identify offenses both in the cultic realm and in treaty violations by his father. His plea to the gods shows the appeasement mentality. “If the servant has incurred a guilt, but confesses his guilt to his master, his master may do with him as he likes. But because he has confessed..., his master’s heart is satisfied, and he will not punish that servant. I have now confessed ... the sin; ... restitution has been made twenty fold.... If you demand additional restitution from me, just tell me about it in a dream, and I will give it.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 287

[E]vil was associated with demons rather than with other gods. The gods could be vengeful or malicious (e.g., Ishtar’s response to Gilgamesh’s rejection of her, Erra’s destructive behavior), but the gods were not generally characterized in that way. The gods were interested in justice being maintained in the human realm, but they were not necessarily committed to doing justice themselves. Even so, the retribution principle goes beyond a god doing justice, because it also involves how righteous and wicked behavior that merits the deity’s response is defined. For the gods of the ancient Near East, social order was important, but human ethical or moral goodness was not as highly valued by the deity as cultic conscientiousness.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 286

<idle musing>
Pretty stark contrast to Micah 6:8: "He has shown you, O human, what is good. And what does LORD require of you, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your god." But, it would seem that many who even bother to think about a god and what that god might require of them haven't moved beyond the do ut des (I give in order that you give) principle. In other words, I can do whatever ethically, but if I tick the correct boxes by giving money to the right things, or saying the correct things, nothing bad can happen to me and the god(s) will be fine with me.

I think we see that behavior among some christians, whether on the right or left, who will accept the shortcomings (sins isn't too strong a word here) of their favored candidate—as long as they say the correct things and do certain ritual things that fulfill whatever unwritten or written laws govern the subcommunity to which they belong. Or at least that's the only way I can figure that a certain occupant of a white house in Washington, DC, can continue to be morally corrupt in every imaginable way and still maintain a support base among a large group of christians.
</idle musing>

In Mesopotamia there was significantly more fretting about this [discerning the will of the gods] and more effort extended into the enterprise of learning the will of the gods. The gravity of the concern and the angst that surrounded it are reflected in the prominence of divination in the court and in the reports of the king’s advisors as they attempted to help him discern the will of the gods. If kings lost touch with deity, divine sponsorship could be forfeit and divine authority withdrawn. This system was governed by an agreement that existed between the king and the sponsoring god(s)—a kingship covenant of sorts.

Passive deductive divination does not intrinsically imply beliefs about deity that are contrary_to Israelite theology. Communication by means of celestial or terrestrial omens is not beneath Yahweh's dignity, nor do the Israelites assume the existence of other gods or powers. But, of course, the system does not stop there. Mesopotamians also believed that rituals and incantations could reverse signs. This moves from the realm of knowledge being communicated to power being exercised. Here is where the theology breaks down and the differences emerge.

In passive deductive divination, then, the semiotic and hermeneutical principles mirror what we found for extispicy, and they provide the most likely explanation for why these divinatory practices were forbidden in lsrael. Yahweh could speak (inspired divination), he could choose (provoked simple binary deductive divination), but he did not ”write" his messages in the entrails of animals or in the movement of the heavenly bodies (provoked nonbinary or complex binary deductive divination, nonprovoked deductive divination). Israel believed that they could gain information about divine activity just as their ancient Near Eastern compatriots did, but the list of divinatory means they acknowledged semiotically/hermeneutically acceptable was much more limited.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 249

Thus the king would also be careful to heed the warnings that divination offered. But just as a positive omen would not be understood as a guarantee of success, so a negative omen could often be reversed. “The gods send the signs; but what these signs announce is not unavoidable fate. A sign in a Babylonian text is not an absolute cause of a coming event, but a warning. By appropriate actions one can prevent the predicted event from _ happening. The idea of determinism is not inherent in this concept of sign.” [Hunger and Pingree, Astral Science, 5] Consequently, the evidence suggests that the function of divination was to provide divine endorsement or Warning concerning an action that the king had already undertaken or was contemplating in order to assure the king of the continuing support by the deity.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 245

Divination produced the only divine revelation known in the ancient Near East. Through its mechanisms, the ancients believed not that they could know deity but that they could get a glimpse of the designs and will of deity. “The signs did not cause the future—the gods did—but they revealed what was to come, and the gods left them everywhere.” [Van de Mieroop, Philosophy before the Greeks, 89]—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 243

Deductive divination is no less initiated [than prophecy, etc.] from the divine realm, but its revelation is communicated through events and phenomena that can be observed. Note that in Israelite thinking that which is in the category of inspired divination is allowed—God speaks, but that which is in the category of deductive divination is forbidden—Yahweh does not write that way (e.g., on entrails). The latter type of divination is found in Mesopotamia as early as the third millennium.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 224

It is clear, then, that sensitivity to the poetics of ancient historiography complicates both critical scholars’ dismissal of the validity of biblical historiography and confessional scholars’ apologetic approaches and doctrinal convictions. Critical scholarship needs to rethink its imperialistic and anachronistic imposition of modern standards and values on ancient texts. Confessional scholars need to rethink precisely what constitutes the truth of the text that they seek to defend in light of the text's own poetics and perspectives. In this light N. Winther-Nielsen sounds the death knell for the popular activities of proving and disproving the Bible that have prevailed in academia since the Enlightenment. "All current and past history writing will call on our hermeneutical trust, and the days of confessionalist, positivist, or minimalist absolute ’proof' are gone forever. [N. Winther-Nielsen, "Fact, Fiction, and Language Use" in Windows into Old Testament History]

No amount of empirical information is able to accomplish that end. The extent to which deity is involved in events or outcomes can never be either verified or falsified empirically. Our dogged empiricism betrays us. The texts offer a different sort of testimony that we must respect.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 209

We cannot read the Hebrew Bible as it it were journalistic or academic history such as might be written today. Such reading would compromise the intentions, presuppositions, values, and poetics of the literature and its authors. When we critique the literature, we should critique it in terms of its own guiding criteria rather than expecting it to reflect our own and dismissing it when it does not. When we critique the literature in terms of its emphasis on outcomes rather than events and precise details, it may help us to understand some of what may be considered the foibles of an author like the Chronicler, who, for instance, may have had neither the means nor the inclination to investigate the factual accuracy of some of his sources’ details. The precision of the numbers, for instance, is insignificant—though the general nature of the quantification is not without importance. The integrity of the text is linked to its interpretation of the outcome.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 208

Ancient Near Eastern historiography desired to reveal the king to the people and to the deity. Israelite historiography desired to reveal the Deity to the king and the people. Here we have an important reversal similar to that which has been noted in other chapters. In Israel the historiography purports to be communication from the Deity, whereas in the ancient Near East the royal inscriptions serve as communication to the deity. Consequently, the audience is neither future kings nor the gods——it is the people of the covenant: ”Then you will know that l, Yahweh, am God——there is no other.”—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 207

The historiography of the ancient Near East, whether represented in royal inscriptions or chronicles, king lists or annals, has by all accounts a polemical agenda that is intended to reinforce the royal political ideology. As in the campaign speeches of our day, facts can be useful, but they are not central or essential. The intention of the preserved records is to serve not the reader but the king. The recorder is trying to provide answers to the question: “Why should you consider this king to be a good and successful king?” In most cases it cannot be determined whether concealment and/or disinformation are part of the strategy, but negative information is uniformly lacking. We do receive negative assessments of some kings, but, as we might expect, they come from later dynasties seeking to enhance their own reputations.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 203

Not all cultures think about history the same way. In the ancient world it is difficult to find anyone who could legitimately be identified as a historian or journalist. Their cognitive environment had no need of such professions. In the ancient Near East visible events on earth were reflections of the activity of the gods. Consequently, rather than providing journalists who could seek out eyewitnesses, they needed experts who could interpret what deity was communicating through events (priests and palace officials) and those who could be part of building the documentation that would serve to elevate and legitimize the king (public relations departments for the palace).—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 196

The roles assigned to humans bind them together in their common plight and bind them to the gods in servitude. Egyptian sources offer no explanation for the creation of humans. Sumerian and Akkadian sources consistently portray people as having been created to do the work of the gods—work that is es sential for the continuing existence of the gods, and work that the gods have tired of doing for themselves.

Enki and Ninmah: servants of the gods: “The corvée of the gods has been forced on it.”

KAR 4: “The corvée of the gods will be their corvée: They will fix the boundaries of the fields once and for all, and take in their hands hoes and baskets, to benefit the House of the great gods.”

Atrahasis: “Let him bear the yoke, the task of Enlil,let man assume the drudgery of god.”

Enuma Elish: To bear the gods’ burden that those may rest.“

In Israel people also believed that they had been created to serve God. The difference was that they saw humanity as having been given a priestly role in sacred space rather than as slave labor to meet the needs of deity. God planted the garden to provide food for people rather than people providing food for the gods.The explanation offered in KAR 4 shows that the priestly role of people was included in the profile, but still in terms of providing sustenance for the gods. The shared cognitive environment is evident in that all across the ancient world there was interest in exploring the divine component of humankind and the ontological relationship between the human and the divine. In Mesopotamia the cosmos functions for the gods and in relation to them. People are an afterthought, seen as just another part of the cosmos that helps the gods function. In Israel the cosmos functions for people and in relationship to them. God does not need the cosmos, but has determined to dwell in it, making it sacred space; it functions for people.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., pages 186–87

Every account of human origins seeks to address similar archetypal issues. They mirror what we already found in our discussion of cosmology—the accounts focus on functional issues rather than material ones. Order is established through identity. This may sound like an unusual statement to make since all of these accounts make specific references to the materials used for the creation of humans. But the materials mentioned serve to address archetypal issues (connectivity, relationships, roles) rather than to penetrate material ontology (let alone chemical composition). This is not to say that the ancients were speaking metaphorically rather than literally for this goes far beyond a literary or rhetorical device. The accounts address the topic by using archetypes, which express the most important realities in this cognitive environment. Materials are mentioned for their archetypal significance, not for their physical significance. Blood and flesh of the deity signify connection to deity. Clay or dust signifies connection to the land. The connections described by these archetypes offer information concerning the ancient corporate self-understanding.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 180

In the discussion of cosmology, it is important to observe that the control attributes are not initially set up, established, or invented by the gods. Rather, creation is the process of operating within the parameters of these control attributes, or even manipulating or assigning them. In Enuma Elish Marduk is said to “make his control attributes” (ubašimu parṣišu). This is the only occurrence of parsu as the object of one of the verbs of creation. The parallel in the previous phrase (“rites”) suggests, however, that it should be understood as referring to the control attributes of ritual procedures rather than of the cosmos. The control attributes are carried, gathered, exercised, held in the hand, granted, and organized by the gods, but not initiated by them.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 163

As I noted when discussing the origins of the gods, in the ancient world something came into existence when it was separated out as a distinct entity, given a function, and given a name. For purposes of discussion I will label this approach to ontology as “function oriented.” This is in stark contrast to modern ontology, which is much more interested in what might be called the structure or substance of objects along with their physical properties. In modern popular thinking (as opposed to technical philosophical discussion), the existence of the world is perceived in physical, material terms. For discussion I will designate this approach to ontology as “substance oriented." In the ancient Near East, something did not necessarily exist just because it happened to occupy space. Tobin captures this distinction between a material definition of the cosmos and a functional one based on order. “When the Egyptians contemplated the created universe through their myths and rituals, they would have been aware that the world around them was not simply a collection of material things. The universe was for them an awesome system of living divine beings. . . . Egyptian creation myth emphasized the fact that there was order and continuity in all things and thus gave the optimistic assurance that the natural, social, and political order would remain stable and secure.”(Tobin, OEAE 2:471).—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., pages 148–49

One final consideration in this category that highlights a difference between Israel and the rest of the ancient Near East concerns the issue of disinterested righteousness. If ethical behavior has an exterior foundation, a person behaves ethically because of the consequences—rewards or punishments—that are built into the system, whether by society or by the gods. This is the “Great Symbiosis” that we have identified. Disinterested righteousness is precisely the opposite of the Great Symbiosis. The adversary’s question in Job asked whether Job served God for nothing. Though ]ob’s friends encourage him to take the Mesopotamian path of appeasement (confess anything to restore favor with deity), Job maintains his integrity (see his conclusion in Job 27:2–6); demonstrating that he did possess an abstract interiorized standard of righteousness apart from a system of consequences.

None of the Mesopotamian literature that deals with the pious sufferer shows this dimension of thinking. These individuals can only claim that they have done everything they know to do in terms of ritual and ethical responsibility. They have no basis to proclaim their innocence, only their ignorance and confusion. They make no attempt to call deity into legal disputation—they only plead for mercy. The book of Job therefore stands as stark testimony to the differences in perception between Israel and the ancient Near East as it seeks to demonstrate that there is such a thing as disinterested righteousness.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., pages 119, 126–27

Just read this about a bike/truck collision. I think the author is right on the money. Here's an excerpt:

News stories about drivers who hit cyclists often implicitly absolve the driver and blame the victim. First, there’s almost always a lack of agency coupled with the passive voice: it’s never “a driver hit a cyclist.” Instead, it’s usually something like “a cyclist was hit by a car.” (Yet you never read about how a shooting victim “collided with a bullet.” Go figure.) Then there’s generally some insinuation that it must have been the victim’s fault, often along the lines of “It’s unclear whether the victim was wearing a helmet.”

and a bit later on:

the story quoted above is under 200 words long. There’s not a single mention of the motorist; instead, the victims were “struck by a pickup truck,” as though it were somehow self-driving. The account also contains no fewer than five mentions of the word “helmet,” yet it doesn’t remind people to drive more carefully or cite relevant motor vehicle code, not even once. The helmet exhortation is especially vexing since the little girl only sustained minor injuries. So, what, are we supposed to believe that if she’d been wearing a helmet the driver wouldn’t have hit her in the first place? Or are we supposed to think a child’s bicycle helmet offers meaningful protection against a Tacoma and that the real mitigating factor isn’t the luck that just happened to be on her side?

It’s almost like, in our bizarre logistical and ethical framework, dying while wearing a helmet is preferable to surviving without one. (emphasis added)

In the ancient Near East the divine rest is achieved in part by the gods’ creation of people to work in their place and on their behalf. A. Millard recognized that the biblical viewpoint represented a stark contrast to this picture in that in the Old Testament the people work for their own benefit and provision rather than to meet the needs of God or to do his work for him. They are commanded to participate in the rest of God on the Sabbath, not to imitate it per se, but to keep it in order to recognize his work of bringing and maintaining order. His control is represented in his rest and is recognized by yielding for the day their own attempts to provide for themselves.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 124

The first commandment is not just promoting monolatry; it is getting at metaphysical structures another way. Although it does not say explicitly that no other gods exist, it does remove them from the presence of Yahweh. (The Hebrew preposition "before” used in this verse generally refers to location when it has a person as its object. Therefore we should understand it to say "there will not be for you other gods in my presence.”) lf Yahweh does not share power, authority, or jurisdiction with them, they are not gods in any meaningful sense of the word. The first commandment does not insist that the other gods are nonexistent but that they are powerless; it disenfranchises them. It does not simply say that they should not be worshiped; it leaves them with no status worthy of worship.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 120

If two allegorizers [of the Song of Songs] ever agree on the interpretation of a verse, it is only because one has copied from the other—Othmar Keel, Song of Songs, Continental Commentaries, p. 8

Is it possible that Abraham's Perception of Yahweh/El Shaddai would have been similar to the typical Mesopotamian's perception of his personal deity? The way in which Abraham and his God interact would certainly suit the paradigm of relationship with a personal god in Mesopotamia. Yahweh provides for Abraham and protects him, while obedience and loyalty are given in return. One major difference, however, is that our clearest picture of the personal god in Mesopotamia comes from the many laments that are offered as individuals seek favors from deity or complain about his neglect of them. There is no hint of this in Abraham's approach to Yahweh. In the depiction in the text, Abraham maintains an elevated view of deity that is much more characteristic of the overall biblical view of deity than it is of the Mesopotamian perspective. On the whole, however, it is not impossible, and may even be likely, that Abraham's understanding of his relationship to Yahweh, in the beginning at least, was similar to the Mesopotamian idea of the personal god. In Mesopotamian language, Abraham would have been described as having ”acquired a god." That he was led to a new land and separated from his father's household would have effectively cut any ties with previous deities (located in city and family) and opened the way for Yahweh to be understood as the only deity to which Abraham had any obligation. By making a break with his land, his family, and his inheritance, Abraham was also breaking all of his religious ties. In his new land Abraham would have no territorial gods; as a new people he would bring no family gods; having left his country he would have no national or city gods; and it was Yahweh who filled this void, becoming "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” ”the God of the Fathers.“ But it is only in Israel, Jacobsen observes, that the idea of the personal god made the transition from the personal realm to the national realm. Van der Toorn adds, "Family religion was the ground from which national religion eventually sprang."—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 113

In the polytheistic religions of the ancient world it was not considered obligatory for individuals to worship the state gods. It might be to their advantage and coincide with their self—interests to do so, but the state god would hardly be offended by their worship of their local or ancestral deities. This observation brings considerable clarity to the centuries—long struggle of the Israelites to understand that Yahweh's status as state God excluded the worship of local gods, nature gods, or ancestral gods. Their native mentality would have seen no conflict. They could willingly acknowledge Yahweh as the national God and as the supreme God. but such conclusions would not require sole worship of Yahweh. State religion was an entirely different issue than family religion. The uniqueness of Israel is that here we can see an attempt to merge those two horizons. Every indication is that they were consistently syncretistic throughout the monarchy pergiod, though the prophets had high hopes that the people would repent of their syncretism and adopt covenant faithfulness to Yahweh wholeheartedly.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 104

The basic premise of this belief [that the gods have needs] was that the gods had existed for long ages prior to the creation of humans and with no plan to create such beings, Nevertheless, they needed food, clothing, and housing and, since they were gods, were accustomed to certain amenities. Various myths build different scenarios, but eventually the gods tired of providing for their own needs. The solution was the creation of humans to provide food (sacrifice), housing (temples), and clothing for the gods and to engage in activities that would pamper the gods. This was the religious obligation in the ancient world. As stated in šima milka, a piece of wisdom literature from the second millennium BC, “Do not mock a god whom you have not provided with provisions.“ By taking care of the needs of the gods, people had a role in enabling the gods to continue to bring order to the cosmos.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 98

The gods’ needs were not cared for just so that the people would be graced with good harvests. The temple was the control center for order in the cosmos, and that order had to be maintained. The deity needed to be cared for so that his or her energies could be focused on the important work of holding the forces of chaos at bay. The rituals, therefore, served not simply as gifts to the deity or mechanical liturgical words and actions. The rituals provided a means by which humans could play a role in maintaining order in the cosmos.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 90

We may conclude that the image functioned in the cult as a mediator of the divine presence. It was the means by which humans gained access to the presence of deity. As such it represented the mystical unity of transcendence and immanence, a theophany transubstantiated. Jacobsen therefore sees the functioning image as an act of the deity’s favor: “The image represented a favor granted by the god .thinsp;.thinsp;.thinsp;a sign of a benign and friendly attitude on the part of the community in which it stood.” Berlejung provides a useful summary of our study: “A cultic statue was never solely a religious picture, but was always an image imbued with a god, and, as such, it possessed the character of both earthly reality and divine presence.” From deity to people, the image mediated presence and revelation. From people to deity, the image mediated worship.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., pages76–77

Faithfulness is one of the most frequently affirmed attributes of Yahweh because of his covenant relationship with Israel. In contrast, it is difficult to find any such affirmation for the gods of the ancient Near East. Words that convey loyalty are never used of the gods in that way. The gods have no agreements or promises to be faithful to and no obligations or commitments to fulfill.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 70

Believe in educators carrying weapons in school? Read this and weep.

The videos, instruction, and repetition play a trick on my mind, though. I start to think in terms of students and attackers, those I would protect and those I would kill. The latter are strangers— unnamed, faceless adversaries like the targets. My daydreams are no longer of classroom visits, sporting events, and kids making out in the halls. They are all adventure stories, and I am always the hero. An attacker is never one of my students. I never have to shoot one of my students.

The training encourages this result. Everything about its vocabulary is designed to dehumanize our aim. The instructors’ military language—“soft targets” and “areas of operation” for schools, “threats” for shooters, “tactical equipment” for guns—rubs off. On the final day, a pep talk analogizes students with lambs. We are the sheepdogs, charged with protecting them from the wolves.

I am aware that this is changing my way of thinking. I enjoy how I feel. It is a potent energy, a righteous virtue that seems completely earned. The training reassures me of my decision-making ability.

The other recruits are undergoing the same shift. During downtime we discuss guns: which we plan to buy next, what ammo our districts will provide us, and how that ammo impacts a body. We have become gun nuts almost overnight.

But, when an actual threat happens, it isn't whom they expect:

I drive home in a devastated silence. I thought I knew Jason well, but I had never imagined him perpetrating a threat, or owning weapons. It was like something from TV, where newscasters narrate the steps leading up to a school shooting, how everyone had missed the signs. I imagine the shoot-out it could have been.

Riding through the dense countryside, I finally face the question that I had avoided from the beginning: was this right?

My decision to be armed in school had been made in the aftermath of yet another high-profile school shooting, and I had thought, “This is how I can keep my kids safe.” The training had done its work on me, too, lifting me out of my habit of cynically questioning everything. I felt reassured that of course, this is righteous. But now it was no longer a theoretical question of protecting kids at any cost. The faceless target at the shooting range, so absurd in its proportions, had a face: Jason, whom I wanted so badly to help. (emphasis original)

<idle musing>
Sorry folks, but violence is never a righteous option. You can rationalize it all you want, but like this person, at some point it will stare you in the face and you have to decide whether to be honest with yourself (and God) or not.
</idle musing>

It is very rare for the gods of the ancient Near East to be described as good, though the hope is commonly expressed that the god will do good to the worshiper—that is, act favorably or for their benefit. This is an expression of favor rather than a sense of intrinsic goodness. More than any other attribute, goodness, in the abstract sense, implies correspondence to an independent standard of goodness. The existence of such a standard in the ancient Near East is arguable. Insofar as it exists, it may be different in different cultures, just as in the ancient world it may be considered differently than it would be today.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 69

We can now identify several ways in which one might consider whether a deity is just:

1. Deity is just (inherent quality).
2. Deity administers justice consistently (though actions are sometimes opaque).
3. Deity intends to administer justice but does so imperfectly.
4. Deity is corrupt, with only a secondary interest in administering justice.

In Mesopotamia the discussion hovers between options two and three. In the Hebrew Bible the discussion hovers between options one and two. Yahweh is at times declared to be just. Job calls Yahweh’s justice into question based on his experience (Job 40:8), but the book exonerates Deity in the end.

Another aspect of justice concerns acts of judgment. In Israel much of the prophetic literature is taken up with oracles of judgment, and both in the covenant curses and in the historical literature we see Yahweh as proactive in punishing his wayward people. In Mesopotamia it is more common for the judgment of the gods to be seen in their abandonment of subjects. Loss of the care and protection of the deity would expose the city, king, or individual to evil forces, whose activities would constitute punishment. Nevertheless, many texts speak of the gods imposing punishment on people (often in the form of illness or disease).—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 68

Indeed, as much continuity as Christian theologians have developed between the religious ideas of preexilic Israel and those of Christianity, there is probably not as much common ground between them as there was between the religious ideas of Israel and the religious ideas of Babylon. When we think of Old Testament religious concepts such as ritual sacrifice, sanctuaries/sacred space, priests and their role, creation, the nature of sin, communication with deity, and many other areas, we realize that the Babylonians would have found Israelite practice much more comprehensible than we do.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 13

Like the Israelites who showed a preference for leaders like Jephthah and the later Gideon who used excessive force to battle the external enemies, we demonstrate a preference for the flashy and powerful leadership qualities that our culture prizes, rather than the courageous, servant leadership of the early Gideon who exposed and dismantled the enemy within the gates. If there’s one thing we learn from Gideon it is that messing with people’s idols is an unpopular and potentially life-threatening business! Are our leaders inspiring and equipping us toward a more faithful, undivided witness to the power of the gospel, or are they inadvertently setting up idols in our midst that all of God’s people “whore after” (8:27, 33) or themselves sacrificing family and other God-given gifts to further their own ends (11:39).—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

Israel’s rejection of Yahweh’s rule is not fundamentally an exchange of one divine rule (the rule of Yahweh) for another divine rule (the rule of one Canaanite god or another); rather, their allegiance to the foreign deities (and thus disloyalty to Yahweh) exposes their fundamental drive to chart their own course, realize their own destiny, and set the standard for their own conduct apart from God. Idolatry and autonomy, thus, are intricately intertwined, two sides of the same coin.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

Our time and culture are no less violent than those of ancient Israel. On the one hand, we live in a culture that celebrates and consumes violence in film, video games, and sport. On the other hand, we lament the violence that plagues our city streets, hides behind the closed doors of our homes, enters our schools and claims our children, feeds on racism and other forms of prejudice, wreaks havoc on the global political stage, and dominates our media coverage. Violence breads violence and creates a culture of fear and anxiety; the cycle seems unbreakable. As valuable and worthwhile as they are, anger management seminars, violence awareness, counseling, and diplomatic peace talks cannot eradicate the violence that plagues a society like ours in which everyone does what is right in their own eyes. And like Israel in the settlement period, any hope for change must begin with the people of God, radically committed to the divine king and unswervingly motivated to live out his kingdom principles.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

In this fallen world, allegiance to God and King Jesus does not guarantee life and flourishing this side of eternity, but disloyalty that breeds sin will only in the long run produce disharmony, fear, oppression, misery, death—all those things that are opposed to life and flourishing. Accordingly, Judge’s full-orbed instruction on sin also implies something about the doctrine of salvation. Along with the thrust of the biblical story, Judges communicates (albeit as a subtext) a longing for deliverance that extends as wide and as deep as the pervasive spread of sin. Judges provides a stark and sobering picture of sin and its consequences, and thus stands as a vital source for a multidimensional doctrine of sin, but also implies a cosmic redemption that heals the ills of human immorality, institutional corruption, economic oppression, and societal breakdown—thus, it stands as a vital source for a multidimensional doctrine of salvation.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

At its root, then, sin is a disposition in the hearts of the people of God, and not specific acts that transgress a moral code. That is not to say that actions and behavior are irrelevant. In fact, this disposition of disloyalty to Yahweh manifests itself in actions that transgress Yahweh’s will.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming) (emphasis original)

The stranglehold of sin not only creates a context of widespread immorality, but also produces an environment of uncertainty, division, oppression (economic and other), fear, suspicion, false hospitality, cowardice, and familial and social brokenness. Sin is like a cancer that literally sucks the life out of its host. Not content to be confined or limited, sin, once taken root, spreads in such a way that it saps the energy and life that feeds cells and organs. The result is that the cancer (sin) thrives and grows while the host environment of the cancer deteriorates and eventually dies.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

In the context of the sins of Micah and the Danites, of the atrocity of Gibeah and the resulting disasters (chs. 17–21), the refrain “doing evil in the eyes of Yahweh” gives way to people “doing right in their own eyes.” The moral standard has shifted from divine to human, and the resulting moral relativism leads to chaos. As I have argued throughout this commentary, the people (individually and collectively) doing what seems good in their own eyes is bound up with their rejection of Yahweh as king (“There was no king in Israel”), so again these narratives underscore the connection between divine allegiance and sin.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

It is worth clarifying that we never encounter Israelites (individually or collectively) denying his [Yahweh] existence or alternatively acknowledging his existence but then consciously rejecting his divine authority. Instead, we have plenty of examples of a syncretistic blending of Israelite and Canaanite “religion.” This religious syncretism is quite evident at a number of places, not least in the example of Gideon’s patriarchal household and in Gideon himself. Gideon’s father maintained a shrine to Baal and Ashtoreth (6:25–32), and yet his father must have passed down something of the tradition and history of Israel because Gideon recalls some of them (6:13). Gideon himself rightly acknowledges the rule of Yahweh but then immediately fashions an idol and sets up a shrine that “all Israel whored after” and that “became a snare to Gideon and to his family.” When it comes to dividing divine loyalties, like father, like son. Indeed, according to the pervasive polytheistic cognitive environment of the ancient Near East, paying homage to Yahweh and also serving the local deities would be the most natural thing for the Israelites to do. And yet, Yahweh was unique among the gods of the nations and by virtue of his special relationship with them and his redemptive and preserving deeds on their behalf, Israel was called to be a unique people. Accordingly, there was to be no division of loyalties—service to foreign gods is implicitly a rejection of Yahweh.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

Gideon and Jephthah demonstrate that the endowment of Yahweh’s Spirit to achieve salvation can produce an enduring confidence that is self-serving and opposed to God’s will.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

When we read the hymnic and petitionary literature from the ancient Near East, we discover that the gods are praised for their majesty, glory, beauty, and splendor on the one hand, and for their power, authority, and deeds on the other. These are qualities manifested in exterior ways rather than interior attributes. It is no surprise then that we find little evidence in the ancient Near Eastern literature that the ancients consider their gods to be just, wise, good, faithful, gracious, and so on, though they often express hope that the gods will act in those ways.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 66

Besides the bizarre nature of the events of chapters 19–21, another curiosity of these narratives is worth noting. With one notable exception, not a single individual in this long complex of stories is named. This anonymity serves a number of purposes, but most importantly it universalizes the experience and actions of the characters: “What better way to portray that every Levite, every father-in-law, every host, every single man with that society committed such barbaric atrocities ‘from Dan to Beersheba’ (20:1) than by allowing every perpetrator in the narrative to exist nameless?” [Hudson, “Living in a Land of Epithets,” 59] The one man doing right in his own eyes represents everyman doing right in his own eyes. [footnote: My use of “man” here is deliberate, as the events in chs. 19–21 portray men perpetrated death and destruction, specifically at the expense of women.]—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

The series of Spirit-endowed judges concludes with Jephthah and Samson whose lives and behavior mirror the collapse of Israel. Despite their charismatic endowments, these judges are unable to control the wandering passions of Israel; in fact, they cannot even control themselves. At the end of Judges we are confronted with human frailty, and we are forced to cry out only to God for salvation, because, in the words of James Crenshaw, “he alone can deliver Israel once and for all time, for he does not sleep on Delilah’s knee” [Crenshaw, Samson, 135].—Lee Roy Martin, “Power to Save!? The Role of the Spirit of the Lord in the Book of Judges,” JPT 16 (2008): 50

The irony here is astounding: Israel’s would-be deliverer is bound by the people he is meant to deliver, and they deliver him over to the oppressors from whom he is meant to deliver them. The hand motif emerges in 15:13, and it reinforces the sense of irony. Elsewhere in the book either Yahweh gives the Israelites into the hand of foreign enemies or gives foreign enemies into the hand of Israelite armies or often the judge/deliverer. Here the men of Judah express twice that they intend to bind Samson and give him “into the hands of the Philistines” (vv. 12a and 13a). Here in the final cycle is the first and only time in the book that Israelites deliver a fellow Israelite (let alone their chosen deliverer) into the hands of their enemies. Moreover, the Judahites’ assertion that the Philistines are ruling Israel should not come as a shock at this point, as the narrator expressed this in 14:4 using almost the exact phrasing as in 15:11. However, that Judah is so willing to accept this reality and will go so far as to deliver Samson to the Philistines to maintain Philistine rule is unthinkable and marks an all-time low in the book of Judges.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

The need for two signs of the fleece may point to Gideon’s ineptitude. According to the natural order of things, the wool fleece would have absorbed the moisture from the dew so that when the morning came the sun would have dried the ground, but the fleece would have naturally remained damp. No doubt realizing his blunder, Gideon requests a second sign that would require a miracle. Things are not boding well for Israel’s new leader. All of these subtleties of the text and the broader context should probably give contemporary readers pause before drawing in the fleecing test as a paradigm for discovering God’s will today.—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

Assuming that the perceptions of self as applied to the gods, as in every other area, mimicked humanity, we may then propose the following formula: If ontology were defined in relation to ones function and actions, and if “self” were defined as largely exterior, then personal attributes (whetber divine or human) could only be discerned at the level of one’s actions—that is, they would not necessarily be seen as abstractions.

If the formula holds, the description of a god as good or wise would signify only that the deity was acting in what were perceived to be good or wise ways rather than implying that the inherent essence or nature of the deity was to be good or wise. The affirmation or conviction that a deity consistently acted in good or wise ways, or the observation that goodness or wisdom persisted in all of the deity’s behavior, could suggest that such an abstraction might have been accurate but falls short of suggesting that the ancients would have been inclined to draw conclusions in the abstract realm.

If this assessment is accurate, we should ask whether there is any concept in the ancient world of an inherent essence of the deity—or can we only say that deity is as deity does? A thorough search of the literature suggests that the latter is the case. There is little interest expressed in penetrating the inner psyche of essential nature of any deity.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., pages 65–66

I cannot help but agree with Gregory Wong that the role of Yahweh [in the Song of Deborah in Judges 5], although present, is indeed eclipsed by the role of the human agents. Is this the kind of identity-forming song that would arouse unswerving commitment to Yahweh and his covenant, or would it simply reinforce the ambivalence of God’s people to be the people he was calling them to be? If the rest of the book [of Judges] is any indication, we might be inclined to conclude that this song was of the latter kind. There may be enduring instruction here for contemporary people of faith about the kinds of worship songs we sing—are they theocentric songs that inspire commitment to God and a more faithful witness to him or are they anthropocentric songs that celebrate human achievement and leave us comfortable with the status quo?—David J. H. Beldman, Judges, Two Horizons Old Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, forthcoming)

Cosmically bound. The cosmic gods were bound to particular cosmic phenomena and therefore had little jurisdiction over other cosmic phenomena. Gods who were not cosmic gods would have no jurisdiction in the cosmic realm. Beyond this level of categorization, the gods were also bound within the cosmos. They did not transcend the cosmos but operated only within it. We could perhaps think in terms of a company’s board of directors and CEO. They have a great deal of power within the company (= cosmos), but they have to operate within the national and global economic situation. They run the company, but they are within the economy and subject to its status.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 63

Divine Features

Anthropomorphic. The important aspect of anthropomorphism is not the physical shape but the presumed nature, character, and personality of a god. Many of the features in the rest of the list could easily be viewed as further defining what this entails. In short, in the literary portraits of the gods they were viewed as having all of the same qualities, good and bad, as humans but without as many limitations. They had more power and a longer span of existence than people. They were not better than people; they were simply stronger than people—all shared basic human traits.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 63

"The way you honour a human being is to ask of him an effort. In the hopeless popularization and down-marketing of our crafts we don’t honour the student. We condescend to him and that is a hideous contempt. You honour him by what you ask and demand."—Grammars of Creation, by George Steiner, available here

Calypso, the nymph who keeps Odysseus locked up on her island for seven years, is making a comeback. As are some of the women in the Iliad and Odyssey. But, some feminists are raising a word of warning, see, most recently, this article Is Homer’s Calypso a Feminist Icon or a Rapist? The subtitle says is it all: "‘Odyssey’ translator Emily Wilson called her a ‘passionate model of female power,’ but not every powerful woman deserves praise." Here's the final paragraphs of this excellent article, which you really should take the time to read (otherwise you won't understand the reference to Odysseus):

o quote Mary Beard, “You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure. That means thinking about power differently.” Calypso offers not a hopeful possibility for women but a warning to any woman who climbs the tiers of power without questioning or transforming the asymmetrical system that keeps women as a whole in check. If the structure is not changed, in can waltz Hermes, armed with Zeus’s authoritative command, to overpower you in turn. As long as it is built upon the oppression of others, the same hierarchy that at one moment works for you can now work against you. Unlike Odysseus, we can choose to really see ourselves in the disempowered and by doing so change who we are for the better. That is the challenge for anyone reading the Odyssey today.

While I wholeheartedly embrace the refashioning of myth’s female monsters as our own, I do not want to find feminist empowerment where it should not be, a new female face superimposed upon the same old tale. As much as I love these old Greek stories and always will, we all desperately deserve a new one.

<idle musing>
I would say that the new tale she is longing for is the Kingdom of God as manifested in Jesus. He had all the power in the universe at his fingertips, and he chose to be the servant of all. That's a real role model that we would do well to emulate—male or female. But especially the males!
</idle musing>

There is no such word as “religion” 1n the languages of the ancient Near East. Likewise, there is no dichotomy between sacred and secular, or even between natural and supernatural. The only suitable dichotomy is between spiritual and physical, though even that would be a less meaningful distinction to the people of the ancient Near East than it is to us. In the end, there is a distinction between the heavenly realm and the earthly one, but events in the two were often intertwined or parallel. It would be difficult to discuss with ancients the concept of divine intervention because in their worldview deity was too integrated into the cosmos to intervene in it. For the most part, deity is on the inside, not the outside. The world was suffused with the divine. All experience was religious experience; all law was spiritual in nature; all duties were duties to the gods; all events had deity as their cause. Life was religion and religion could not be compartmentalized within life.—Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2nd ed., page 47