The Use and Mis-Use of TaNaKh in English and American Literature
We will use the term “Hebrew Bible” for תנ׳׳ך, and “Greek Bible” for what Christians call the New Testament. As you will see in the quote from ירמיהו, “Old Testament” is not a compliment to the Torah’s antiquity.
Frank Kermode uses his terms:
“From the Scriptures the early Christians could infer the only possible ways in which the career of Jesus could be described. The Old Testament therefore shapes the narratives of the New, which cannot be fully understood without reference to its sacred predecessor” (“Introduction to the New Testament,” in The Literary Guide to the Bible, 378).
“It has been calculated that the last five chapters of Mark contain 57 quotations from, and 160 allusions to, the Old Testament, not to mention 60 places where there is influence from the Old Testament” (Kermode 382).
typology—a Christian method of interpretation in which an element in the Hebrew Bible (called a ‘type’) prefigures one in the Greek Bible (‘anti-type’). In this method, the anti-type is the “fulfillment” of the type.
וכרתיאתביתישראלואתביתיהודהבריתחדשה…לאכבריתאשרכרתיאתאבותם…אסלחלעונםולחטאתםלאאזכרעוד—ירמיהולא.ל-לג
See “The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible.”
Note the sensitivity to terminology in this report by a Commission of the Catholic Church in Rome, 2001.
Psalm, from Greek “twanging of a harp,” came to mean a sacred song or poem.
In Hebrew, these 150 poems of praise are called תהלים. The last five are circle poems that begin and end with הללו-קה, a word that conjoins the imperative “Praise” and a name for Hashem. People also say Amen without knowing it’s a Hebrew wordwith a root in “belief,” or an acronym for א-למלךנאמן.
Psalms; which is such a form as is
both curious, and requires diligence in the making, and then when it is made, can have nothing, no syllable taken from it, nor added to it: Therefore is Gods will delivered to us in Psalms, that we might have it the more cheerfully, and that we might have it the more certainly, because where all the words are numbred, and measured, and weighed, the whole work is the lesse subject to falsification, either
by subtraction or addition.
(Sermon No.1, preached at Lincolns Inne by John Donne)
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To study with a friend:
For each example, I will cite one or more verses that inform the writer’s words. Read the example; read the chapter that contains the verse(s); how does an awareness of the Biblical background deepen your experience of the British or American text?
- Ben Jonson (1572-1637) On My First Son
Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sinne was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy,
Seven yeerestho’wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I loose all father, now. For why
Will man lament the state he should envie?
To have so soonescap’d worlds, and fleshes rage,
And, if no other miserie, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say here doth lye
BEN: JONSON his best piece of poetrie.
For whose sake, hence-forth, all his vowes be such,
As what he loves may never like too much.
See: בראשית לה.ט-כ, וביחוד טז-יט
John Milton (1608-1674) called the hour of Crucifixion “Darkness at Noon.”
See:
תהלים צא. א עד הסוף, וביחוד ה-ז
עמוס ח. ד-י, וביחוד ט,י
2. When Arthur Koestler borrowed the phrase as the title of his novel (published in 1940) about what Stalin did to those who had believed in him— torturing a loyal Communist into a false confession during the purges in the 1930—what meaning comes from Milton and what from the verses in TaNaKh?
The English translation is:
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, [nor] for the arrow [that] flieth by day; [nor] for the pestilence [that] walketh in darkness, [nor] for the destruction [that] wasteth at noonday.
3. What did Bob Dylan mean when he wrote “Darkness at the break of noon” as one of the ways he suffers in an unjust world in his song/poem “It’s Alright Ma” (I’m Only Bleeding)?
Milton described Samson as “Eyeless in Gaza.” See שופטים טז. כא.
4. Why did Aldous Huxley borrow this phrase for his 1936 novel about disillusionment with sophisticated society, and a search for meaning?
In a complex study of marriage and adultery in “The Golden Bowl” (1904), a crack in a golden bowl reveals the treachery of the heroine’s husband and step-mother. 5. Why did Henry James choose this title? See: קהלת יב. ו,ז.
6. James turned to Noah testing the waters— with a bird— for his novel about a woman who wants to go off on her own in “The Wings of the Dove” (1902).
7. See בראשית ד פסוקים א-טזfor the background of the stories of hatred and murder between two families in John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” (1956).
8.In William Faulkner’s”Absalom, Absalom” (1936), one man’s willfulness leads to complex family and communal tragedy. See:
שמואל ב. פרק יח פסוק ה-פרק יט פסוק ה
9. To understand Graham Green’s “The Power and the Glory” (1940) about a “whisky priest” who desperately needs a drink and faith as he flees for his life in a barren place, see: תהלים סג.א-ג.
10. Marilynne Robinson’s choice of “Gilead” as the title of her 2004 novel, and the name of the town where many relationships have to be healed, echoes the verses in ירמיהו ח. כב
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More echoes of Tanakh:
Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
(Leonard Cohen)
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Consider the contrast between how all of these writers borrowed Biblical phrases and how Agnon and Sabato take as titles, respectively, ׳׳תהילה׳׳by Agnon, and ׳׳בואיהרוח׳׳by Sabato.