Gotham Diary:
Ancient Worthies
1 March 2013
Reading along in Maurice Keen’s Chivalry yesterday, I figured out a way of reading the Hebrew Bible.
Unlike the ancient Greek myths of Olympian gods and nymphs and satyrs, the stories in the Bible are still taken to be true by many living people. This calls for a certain tact that, I find, interferes with reading the Bible. I feel that I must read it respectfully, quite as if I were attending a religious service. This is especially the case as my favored Bible text is the one put out by the Jewish Publication Society. I bought it because it was cool to have the text in Hebrew (which I can’t read), but the English translation turns out to be easily the best that I’ve ever encountered. The King James version is tremendously important in a literary way; spoken English still resounds with its echoes. But it is more than a little archaic and certainly not fluent as a narrative. Other translations are rubbish mostly. So, every time I read from the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh, I open a book intended for pious use. I can imagine a religious Jew taking offense at my possession of it.
My instinct is to leave the Bible alone, because I cannot read it with reverence. But the Bible won’t leave me alone. It is, unavoidably, a foundation stone of the rich culture in which I’ve grown up. References to it, overt and occult, are everywhere. For centuries, many English-speaking households owned no other book than the King James. Not the one I grew up in, however: until recently, Catholics were discouraged from reading the Bible without the counsel of a priest. Had I been a protestant, I’d probably have been familiarized with scripture at an early age, and I wouldn’t have to get acquainted with it now.
To read the book with piety would be fraudulent. But to read it as if I were a medieval knight, looking for stories of valor and derring-do — well, that would be imaginative. I’m not sure what makes the difference here but I can tell that it’s solid. Keen writes,
The stories of the conquest of the Holy Land by Joshua, and of its defence by David and Judas Maccabaeus were a clear foreshadowing, to the knightly mind of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, of the contemporary crusade, and helped to define crusading as the highest expression of chivalrous activity.
So, I read the Book of Joshua yesterday. I can’t say that I read it carefully. The second half of its twenty-four chapters is devoted to the parceling out of conquered Canaan to the twelve tribes of Israel, and only a real-estate lawyer with a command of the local topography could find it interesting. The much less boring first half of the book is quietly gruesome, as town after town falls to Joshua, and king after king is impaled. I noted the stories of Rahab (the harlot in Jericho who assisted Joshua’s spies) and Achan the Judite (stoned, along with his family, for having violated the ban on looting Jericho). I untangled the battle of Gibeon (home of the only Canaanites clever enough to survive the Israelite invasion), through which Joshua commanded the sun and the moon to stand still, from the fall of Jericho, which was effected by shouting. (I never quite figured out the bit about the stones from the bed of the Jordan.) I managed to overlook Joshua’s never seeming to ride a horse, but I can’t say that I came across anything that my imaginary knight might have found edifying. The carnage is pretty impersonal. “They exterminated everything in the city with the sword: man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and ass” (6:21).
Keen writes that Judges, Kings, and Maccabees were frequently translated into the vernacular on their own. When I pulled down the Tanakh, I meant to begin with Judges, but the first verse, mentioning the death of Joshua, reminded me that I’ve never read the first book that follows the Torah. So I began with Joshua. Judges, which I’ve just dipped into, appears to revisit much of the action of early Joshua — Caleb’s daughter, Achsah, asks him add “springs of water” to her dowry in Joshua 15:19 and in Judges 1:15. Jerusalem is a bit of a muddle: it is destroyed in 1:8, but in 1:21 we read that “the Benjaminites did not dispossess the Jebusite inhabitants of Jerusalem; so the Jebusites have dwelt with the Benjaminites in Jerusalem to this day.”
I suppose it ought to be noted that, of courtly romance, the most seminal invention of chivalry, there is not the ghost of an intimation.
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