The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible by Sarah Ruden

Author:Sarah Ruden [Ruden, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-03-27T17:00:00+00:00

* * *

*I’m discounting the possibility that they are supposed to be “blessed…in spirit,” as that seems to separate “blessed” too far from its qualifier; and, by qualifying “blessed” at all, the verse would be out of whack with the rest of the Beatitudes.

5

Authorship or Rhetoric or Voice or Something

Ecclesiastes on the Fragile Joys of Life (Ecclesiastes 9:7–11)

Paul on the Love of God Through Jesus (Romans 8:31–39)

Among many other blessed dispensations of the Scriptural tradition is the muted, communal role of most authors (but I should in fact write “authors,” with those qualifying quotation marks): they left their names off, ascribed inspiration to God, edited respectfully, amalgamated, and, as the canon formed much later, weren’t there to plead for themselves or hear what people thought of them and their work.

Take creation stories—the approaches, the tones, the structures and purposes. For contrast, on the one side I can adduce the Greek poet Hesiod and the Roman satirist Juvenal, and on the other the two creation stories in Genesis.

Hesiod is actually the first firmly identifiable author (an individual recording his own thoughts under his own name) in the West. Around 700 B.C.E., he was a farmer in an obscure town (Ascra, in mainland Greece) whose avocation was poetry, and who won a recitation contest on perhaps the only journey he ever took out of his own district (to Chalcis, on the island of Euboea).

Hesiod uses some material that is plainly traditional, and his Theogony or Birth of the Gods sounds in part like an old oral account of the universe’s early history. But in this poem, he does not merely invoke the Muses, as the legendary figure “Homer” does: instead, they meet him while he is pasturing his flock and give him a laurel staff to certify his personal calling. In another poem, The Works and Days, Hesiod grouses in highly personal terms. His hometown, where his father settled as an immigrant, is a total dump. Women will do a man in despite his backbreaking efforts to make a go of a farm. They wag their bedizened bottoms and clean out a chump’s storehouse. And just imagine a pampered young girl in the middle of winter, luxuriating in a warm house and taking a bath, no less—nothing for her to do, nothing for her to worry about!

Hesiod unblushingly integrates his own experiences and attitudes into his version of what the entire world is about from its inception. What had happened to first spread suffering? He has two versions of the same story, one in the largely mythological Birth of the Gods, but the more memorable one in the more intimate Works and Days. In sum, trouble and disease came from womankind, as a punishment for the theft of fire from heaven by Prometheus for human benefit. The gods ganged up to construct Pandora, the slutty, sinister bitch who opened the canister of evils. There was probably an older folktale in which both partners have their motivations, but in Hesiod we see only

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.