Sacred Writings

In The New Yorker of January 28, 2019, Adam Gopnik has a brilliant and fascinating article about sacred writings of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. His starting point is Robert Alter's recently released translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. He points out Alter's debt or homage to the King James Version. Then Gopnik goes into a discussion of the origin of sacred writings, and the way they draw from common sources and from each other. 

He points out the difference in looking at sacred texts as literary texts to examine and appreciate rather than as writings to be obeyed. Can the Bible translator straddle that line, I wonder?

Extracted text from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/28/how-to-read-the-good-books:

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A Critic at Large January 28, 2019 Issue How to Read the Good Books From the Torah to the Quran, sacred texts can resist and reward modern readers. By Adam Gopnik

A literary reading can insult holy texts by aestheticizing them.Illustration by Tamara Shopsin

It is a brave critic who gives a bad review to Muhammads meters, a daring one who sniffs at Moses prose or returns Pauls letters. When we enter into sacred texts as readers, rather than as worshipperstreating them, the way we might the Odyssey or Beowulf, as ancient vessels of meaning crafted by people who, like all writers, had their good moments and their misseswe gain much, but we lose much, too. We gain the freedom to read and roam for pleasure. But we forget at our peril that, through most of their history, these have been not books, to be appreciated, but truths, to be obeyed. The peril is double: theres actual peril for those who do imaginative reading in the wrong place and time, and theres also intellectual peril. When reading other peoples sacred texts, we too easily glide past difficulties, or propose aesthetic interpretations, in ways that lead us away from the obvious intentions. By searching around for the good bits, we read past the point, and past their point of view: intending to honor the texts by humanizing them, we insult them by aestheticizing them. When Gods the author, being prettys not the purpose.

Nonetheless, curiosity about what the sacred texts say, and about how we ought to read them even if we dont think them sacred, is a persistent preoccupation of our era, and has produced not a few robust publishing projects. Of these enterprises, one that is genuinely worthy of some Old Testament term of praise is Robert Alters The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, which Norton has just published in a handsome boxed edition, complete with Paul Klee-like semi-abstract jacket art adapted from the tapestries of the late Israeli artist Mordecai Ardon. The translation is divided into three volumes: The Five Books of Moses, The Prophets, and Writings. Most Biblical translations are teamwork; the so-called King James Version of the Bible was produced by forty-seven English churchmen. But Alter has, like Dr. Johnson with his dictionary, tackled the job on his own. The accomplishment, two decades in the making, is almost absurdly impressive. One wants to call it titanic or Olympian or even heroic, but those are the wrong wordspagan words. Alter will have to settle for one of the God-fearing Hebraic terms of praise that stipple his text: righteous or strong or, simply, wise.

In undertaking his translation, Alter recognized that he had a terrific problem. With Homer, we expect and get a fine new translation with each poetic periodGeorge Chapman for the Elizabethan, Alexander Pope for the Augustan, Robert Fagles and Emily Wilson for our timebut with the Hebrew Bible in English we have one huge, unsurpassable masterpiece. The King James Version, which was produced at the Scottish Kings behest under the general leadership of the clergyman Lancelot Andrewes and appeared in 1611, is not just a great translation; it is, along with Shakespeares First Folio, published twelve years later, the bedrock of English literature.

Alters task, as he explains it in a hugely entertaining and irreverent companion study, The Art of Bible Translation (Princeton), was to offer a modern English translation that had some of the solemnity and sublime simplicity of the King James Version, while being more accurate (apparently, the King James committee had an imperfect grasp of Hebrew). It should somehow be at once lucid and properly estranged, sounding more like an ancient language than, as with so many contemporary Christian translations, like a TV evangelists homey English; at the same time, he wanted his version to reflect the sound of good writing in our era. The King James Version was entangled, root and branch, with the art of Shakespeare and Donne and Herbert and the other poets of the greatest age of English verse; it drew on common practices of prosody already in place, even as it inflected all subsequent practice. Alter wanted his translation to echo our own great age of English prose. Joyce and Hemingway are in it, certainly, but he also mentions Philip Roth and Ian McEwan and Saul Bellow and Margaret Atwoodall of them, inevitably, influenced, if at a distance, by the sounds of the 1611 Bible. The effect is not unlike Fagless much applauded versions of Homer: ancient rhetorical simplicity combined with American impatient immediacythe sublime meets the speedy.

So Alter wanted his Bible to be estranged and idiomatic, ancient-seeming and modern-sounding, clearly coming from elsewhere but alive to us now, and all at once. Alter met his terrific challenge with terrific taste. Although he would deny a purpose in any way irreligious, his commentary on his own translation, like the translation itself, is a study in the pleasures of what he calls subtleties of style. He devotes pages and pages to the problems of Hebrew parataxisits rule of connecting phrases with simple ands. This feature, faithfully reproduced in the King James Version, as it is in Alters, is perhaps the single most significant gift that the Bible has bestowed on English composition, inspiring poets from Herbert to Whitman.

But parataxis can be defended on aesthetics alone. Alter cites Molly Blooms sexy monologue at the end of Joyces Ulysses, which he considers the greatest piece of extended prose poetry in the English language of the twentieth century. This meta-literary touch separates Alters translation from the old ones. The translators of the King James Version doubtless had the Hebrew anxiously before their eyes, and produced their ands because they felt that this reflected the divine nature of the original. Alter believes in poetic parataxis, not pious parataxis. He is a writer writing poetry, not a divine divining Gods intent.

The volumes, it must be said, are laid out in a slightly daunting way, with minimal line and paragraph breaks among the parts. This is in keeping with the Hebrew original, but in placesparticularly in Proverbs, where one wants a breath between what are clearly independent thoughtsit can be headache-inducing. Still, one turns the pages eagerly, looking for the good parts (and, yes, for the naughty bits, too). The tests of a Biblical translation are like the tests of a Shakespearean actor. We want to know how the player will handle the heath scene in Lear, the four key soliloquies in Hamlet, Prosperos farewell. With the Bible, we want, above all, to see how the translator will handle the set-piece poems we knowfrom the Psalms and the Song of Songsalong with the Book of Job and the early chapters of Genesis. Get those right and well stick with you, however you handle all the rules on clearing away kidney fat in Leviticus.

Alters work reaches the heights when simple yet strange English is called for, with Hebraic bluntness becoming aphoristic compression. Some of his work in Proverbs clearly surpasses the King James Version. Where the K.J.V. has The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart: and a good report maketh the bones fat, Alter has the memorable and crisp What brightens the eye gladdens the heart, and good news puts sap in the bones, a phrase in itself both odd and brightly idiomatic. Heres what he does in a passage from Lamentations, where, his commentary tells us, his translation follows a Hebrew syntax that inscribes a process of revelation: first we see a woman sitting solitary, then the woman is identified as a metaphor for the city:

How she sits alone, the city once great with people. She has become like a widow. Great among nations, mistress among provinces, reduced to forced labor. She weeps on through the night, and her tears are on her cheek. She has no consoler from all her lovers.

The affecting play of simple words recalls Auden in his elegies, or, in another way, Leonard Cohens song lyrics.

Yet, as English poetry, the K.J.V. cannot be edged aside. Its version of Psalm 22, the sorrowing that will be echoed by Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, begins:

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?

O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.

Should I use a coaster? This becomes, in Alters reworking:

My god, my god, why have You forsaken me? Far from my rescue are the words that I roar. My God, I call out by day and You do not answer, by nightno stillness for me.

Although English has, in the centuries since the K.J.V., lost thou as the intimate or singular form of you, Alters second line is an attempt at capturing a blunter form of address and inserting, as he often does, some alliteration or wordplay to suggest the linguistic life of the original. Yet it remains a bit gnomic: Far from my rescue are the words that I roar? The phrase is more strange than beautiful.

Alter renders perhaps the most famous poetic lines in English with an admirable deference to the K.J.V. and a free hand with the particulars:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. In grass meadows He makes me lie down, by quiet waters guides me. My life He brings back. He leads me on pathways of justice for His names sake. Though I walk in the vale of deaths shadow, I fear no harm, for You are with me.

The lovely, precise play of monosyllables throughout is properly calming; the vocabulary feels plainspoken without feeling updated. Even here, though, the K.J.V. feels more persuasiveHe maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waterswith the stress falling on Gods actions (God makes and leads) rather than on the landscape, the meadows and waters. My life He brings back reflects Alters stubborn insistence that the language of the soul (He restoreth my soul is the K.J.V. rendering) has no place in Hebrew scripture, which talks only of breath and life. But surely soul is now sufficiently generalized in English to mean life force or inherent humanity, rather than being confined to the strictly Christian sense of a particle of eternity, bargained over with God in good and bad behaviors. My life He brings back seems to imply resurrection rather than restoration.

Alters method of peeling down to the strangeness of the original in order to reveal another kind of beauty can be bracing, like seeing a familiar painting with its accumulations of smoke and varnish gone. In the Song of Songs, the baldness of Alters line, its lack of self-conscious ornament, is striking:

Your eyes are doves through the screen of your tresses. Your hair is like a herd of goats that have swept down from Mount Gilead. Your teeth like a flock of matched ewes that have come up from the washing, all of them alike, and none has lost its young. Like a scarlet thread, your lips, and your tonguedesire. Like cut pomegranate your cheekbones through the screen of your tresses.

Something of the lulling Jacobite music is gone; it is difficult to imagine someone reading aloud the Alter version to a lover, as so many have read aloud the K.J.V. rendering. At the same time, its an aesthetic that succeeds in being both far off and near at hand; the incongruous piling on of seemingly unconnected comparisonsnot building a single metaphor of praise but jumping from one to anothergives Alters version the charm of a leaping Cole Porter list song (Youre like a herd of goats! Like a flock of ewes! Like a cut pomegranate!), while the beautifully landed compressions (And your tonguedesire) give the poem a new and harder modern edge. The exposed carpentry of Alters style lets us feel its architecture, reflecting, as he says in an accompanying note, an aesthetic in which the poet pursues the momentum of the object of comparison, half forgetting the thing to which it is compared.

The helpful clarity of that note is typical of the greatest feature of Alters Bible: the commentary, which takes up more than half of nearly every page, seamlessly slides into the translation proper, each claiming equal space in the readers mind. In Alters version, each page of translation and commentary is a whole; its the same voice working the same matter. The notes are not neutral exegesis but richly explanatory and argumentative. Of another passage in the Song of Songs, he writes, Your navel a crescent bowl. Sometimes, as Freud famously said of cigars, a navel is just a navel, despite the inclination of some interpreters to see it as an image of a different body part. Nevertheless, the filling of a receptacle with liquid has a certain erotic resonance. But the intention of the line is more general: just as the crescent concavity of her navel should always be filled, she is never to be arid and empty.... One should note that this poetics has no particular commitment to metaphoric consistency. All of Alters commentary partakes of that tone: witty, allusive, far-ranging, unprudish, and casually erudite.

Its a commonplace that great translations of ancient verse reflect the poetry of their own time. How could they not? Popes Homer read like Homer when it was published, although the idea of reading ancient Greek verse in strict rhymed couplets seems to us a brilliant Augustan period piece. The King James Version reads, in key respects, like poetry from a period when Shakespeare and Donne and Herbert were all writing. Alters translation, which favors originality and clarity over mystery and sublimity, resembles the best pedagogical-critical writing of our day. The experience is of going back to school, where a superb professor is paraphrasing the text from the original as he comments on it: You might say that it says... but that doesnt quite capture it, so perhaps the best equivalent would be... The K.J.V. rose to meet a moment when growing literacy and Protestant feeling made the individual connection with the text matter: it was for men reading on their own or preachers seeking a passage to elucidate. It seems right that, in an age when the center of gravity for serious reading has shifted into the classroom, we would produce a seminar Bible, in the best sensea version of scripture made not to be obeyed or scrutinized for lessons but to be studied and shared through the pleasure of pluralist interpretation and constant cross-referencing. This Bible is aware of how much awareness reading a sacred text demands.

The fact that ancient scriptural style can be defended by reference to the fictional monologue of an Irish woman relating the details of her many-sided sex life in turn-of-the-century Dublin is a sign of the luxuriance of our own culture, which no longer builds high walls, as Catholic Ireland did for so long, between the sacred and the profane. When it comes to the Quran, the adjacent, later holy text, we are in deeper waters, where citing Molly Bloom, or her Islamic equivalents, is unlikely to help us penetrate its meanings or find neat analogues for its beauties. Showing outsiders to Islamic traditions how to navigate this text, as a literary and historical document, is an intimidating challenge, and no more splendidly intimidating book has appeared in the past year than The Qurn and the Bible (Yale), by Gabriel Said Reynolds, a professor of Islamic studies and theology at Notre Dame. Weighing in at nearly a thousand pages of translation and quotation and citation and argument, it is never relieved from the pressures of contemporary perplexities, political and rhetorical.

The study, which presents a complete revised version of Ali Quli Qarais already published translation alongside Reynoldss running commentary on all its intersections with the Bible, is explicitly meant for the nonspecialist English-language reader. Such a reader, approaching from outside the scholarly and scriptural field, can only sense the audacity of his project, the hazards it must navigate. Onto the politics of Islamic fundamentalism is overlaid the exoticizing threat of Orientalism, including the practice of subsuming Islamic sources to Western ones, or the Lawrence of Arabia habit of treating Islamic art as somehow savage even as one savors it. To make the Quran a dependency of the Bible can be seen as a form of colonialism.

Reading Reynoldss introduction makes the newly arrived reader feel as if he were watching a sapper clear a minefield. Every step is considered, and the performance is carefully constrained by parentheses and negative constructions. It seems to me that there is simply no compelling academic reason (theological reasons are of course another story) to refuse categorically the possibility that the Qurn has multiple authors and/or editors, Reynolds writes. He obviously thinks that the Quran has had multiple authors and editors, rather than, as Muslim tradition holds, having been dictated directly by the Angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad, but no positive assertion could be more cautiously wrapped in qualification.

However exhausting a read, Reynoldss book is enormously helpful as a way not just into an unknown text but into another religious tradition. As Jack Miles points out in his God in the Quran (Knopf), the Quran is an extremely hard read for people accustomed only to Jewish and Christian scripture. Neither narrative nor obviously philosophical, it is a series of often disjointed-seeming exhortations and commands and hymns and images, with stories borrowed telegraphically from the Bible and then editorialized on by a divine voice. Lacking an unfolding story, like that of Genesis or the Gospelswith their graphic-novel episodes so easily depicted on the Sistine ceiling or in Paduas Arena Chapelit is a poem meant to be chanted, not a tale meant to be tracked.

Although the Quran is part of an oral tradition of versifying (much of it rhymes, though not in this translation), it is also purposefully opaque, enigmatic in execution, as a divine text should be. It opens with the so-called mysterious letters, which Qarai renders Alif, Lm, Mmbaffling notations that preface most of the key verses of the text, conveying, perhaps, no more than the coded initials of the scribes who first copied the verses, or the mystic message that language cannot touch the actuality of Allah. Alter emphasizes similar effects in the Hebrew Biblethe way in which passages in Lamentations, for instance, are shaped as acrostics. The mystery is essential to the sacredness of the text. Tolkien began his series with an inscription in Orcish, which he did not expect his readers to understand; they were to pay reverence to the occult nature of his imagination even before they entered his books.

The three holy textsTorah, Gospel, and Quranturn out to be tightly interwound, so much so that it is not entirely wrong to see the Quran as a long correction to and commentary on the Jewish and Christian scriptures. There are abbreviated vignettes of Mary and Joseph and Jesus, of the other, earlier Joseph, of Moses and Aaron, and of Jacob and Isaac and Abraham, with echoes of the Psalms and the Gospels found everywhere. Countless are the points of contact, the small adjustments. One crucial early turn involves the Prostration of the Angels, in itself a beautiful title for a poem. In the Quran, adapting the Genesis story of creation, God, rather than Adam, names all the animalsyet the order of animal names is given to Adam before it goes to the angels, who are then asked to bow before Adam, conceding the superiority of man even to the celestial choir:

And He taught Adam the Names, all of them; then presented them to the angels and said, Tell me the names of these, if you are truthful.

They said, Immaculate are You! We have no knowledge except what You have taught us. Indeed, You are the All-knowing, the All-wise.

He said, O Adam, inform them of their names, and when he had informed them of their names, He said, Did I not tell you that I know the Unseen of the heavens and the earth, and that I know whatever you disclose and whatever you conceal?

And when We said to the angels, Prostrate before Adam, they prostrated, but not Iblis [Satan]: he refused and acted arrogantly, and he was one of the faithless.

In Genesis, no angel is asked to bow, and Satans animus toward Adam is left unmotivated.

These are, Reynolds shows, theologically rich distinctions: the Muslim God doesnt delegate a vital task even to his best creation. At the same time, Adam is assigned to a level not of subjection but of near-equality. Man is Gods viceroy, but one wholly dependent on his fathers wisdom. (One recognizes the typical patriarchal organization of tight-knit clan societies, from Genesis to The Godfather: the son is everything and nothing; everything you do you do for him, but you still tell him everything he ought to do.) Similarly, the story of the temptation is transformed: in the Jewish version, the snake who tempts Eve is simply a snake; in the Christian interpretation, it is Satan in the guise of a snake; in the Islamic account, it is Satan himself.

That these stories, of the Garden and the Fall, are told so telegraphically surely indicates that their audiences were familiar with previous versions of them. And yet, Reynolds makes clear, no versions of what we now call the Old or New Testaments existed in Arabic when the Quran was composedthose texts would have been known almost exclusively through oral tradition and storytelling. Theres a strange irony here. The Christian Gospels were written in Greek, a language that Jesus and his followers didnt speak, and certainly couldnt read or write in (if they could read and write at all), and the version of the Jewish scriptures that the Gospels drew upon, the Septuagint, was also in Greekwhich means that the Gospels as we have them emerged from behind a Hellenistic scrim. The Quran, in turn, draws from an overheard version of the Greek texts, probably as passed through North African and Syrian translations, so what we are witnessing is part of a centuries-old game of telephone, played throughout the ancient Middle East in many of its tongues.

It can seem mysterious that Quranic references to the Biblical texts are nonetheless so frequent and so deft, until you stop to think about just how much can be transmitted by shared storytelling, even in a hyperliterate culture like ours, let alone in a bardic oral culture like that of seventh-century Arabia. Suppose we were trying to tell a new adventure story set in an imaginary Arabia that incorporated elements of The Thousand and One NightsScheherazade and the Sultan, Sinbad and his shipwreck, Aladdin and the geniewithout having the actual text at hand. The gist of such tales would be immediately available to us, even if we remembered the details differently or changed the original storytelling sequence.

Honestly, I forget what we were trying to catch. Something like this seems to have happened in the composition of the Quran. Although in many places the alterations appear to be purposeful rebuttals of the Biblical stories, in other places the tales have, it seems, simply been compressed or altered by repetition. As Reynolds points out, Haman, the fifth-century-B.C. Persian villain of the Biblical Book of Esther, is transposed in the Quran back to pharaonic Egypt, where he can bedevil Mosesperhaps to make a specific theological point, perhaps in the spirit of an inspired storyteller redeploying a good villain. The Quran has a story about Jesus that, Reynolds shows, is a variant of one told originally about Alexander the Great.

The Quran accepts both the Torah and the Gospels as having been divinely inspired but considers them now outmoded. Muhammads revelation by way of Gabriel is the true revelation, like a last will and testament superseding its once valid precursors. Had the People of the Book believed and been Godwary, we would have absolved them of their misdeeds and admitted them into gardens of bliss, the Quran says. Had they observed the Torah and the Evangelthe Gospeland what was sent down to them from their Lord, they would have drawn nourishment from above them and from beneath their feet. There is an upright group among them, but what many of them do is evil.

The usual anti-Jewish polemic of the Christiansthat the Jews betrayed their own book, even unto murdering their own prophetspersists in the Islamic scripture: O People of the Book! Why do you deny Gods signs while you testify [to their truth]? O People of the Book! Why do you mix the truth with falsehood, and conceal the truth while you know [it]? The specifically anti-Christian polemic in the Quran, on the other hand, is new, and seems to be that the idea of the divine is robbed of its dignity and omnipotence by being ascribed an actual, human son made of flesh and of the seed of David, and all the rest. Allah just is, and just does. The Christian Jesus is a lesser prophet, then, wrongly promoted by his followers to coequal status with the divine one.

The specificity of the Qurans vision flows from this belief in the absolute and encompassing nature of the divine. The fact that Islam is the Arabic word for submission is represented in anti-Muslim literature as mere slavishness to authority. In truth, it seems to involve a kind of mystical submission to the universe, an all-encompassing pantheism that, oddly, resembles that of the much later Hasidic Chabad: God isnt just up there giving orders and taking nameshes everywhere at once and evident in everything that is.

The one perpetual foundation of Islam, which shines through every page of the annotated text, is the insistence on the absolute divinity of the divineGod is everywhere, all-knowing and all-penetrating, and the essence of holiness is compliance with his will. The God of the Book of Genesis or of Job, who makes bargains or bets, or the God with whom Jesus, in effect, contests in the Agony in the Garden, is a more argumentative, a more anthropomorphic, creature. That God, Yahweh, is imaginable as the benevolent but enraged patriarch whom Michelangelo pictures so effectively on the Sistine ceiling. The resistance of Islam to depictions of the divine arises from the absurdity of depictionthe absurdity is the sacrilege.

It is logical, then, that submission to his authority depends not at all on signs or miracles. The role of miracles in revealing the divine is a great Christian controversy: Mark denied that miracles were in any way necessary to Jesus ministry, while John makes a great deal out of the miracles as proof of divinity. The Quran would regard any such demonstrations as unworthy of omnipotence. Divinity is to be submitted to simply on the basis of its own evident existence, exemplified in humanity itself. This obstinacy of Islamic monotheism, placing it beyond argument or challenge, is perhaps the creeds most impressive feature. It may also be Islams most democratizing and universalizing aspect, helping to explain its extraordinarily rapid spread: all mankind are equally Gods viceroys, all mankind are equally his slaves.

The nonbelieving reader of sacred texts has the advantage of being undisturbed by the countless alienating passages that they contain: why be distressed, such a reader might ask, by the relentlessly patriarchal tone of either the Bible or the Quranor by their tolerance of slavery, or, for that matter, by the tribal genocide regularly urged in Exodus? If one is taking the texts not as divine rule, or even as contemporary moral discourse, but, rather, as inspired ancient poetry, episodes in the history of civilization, one can be serenely unsurprised that they share the values of their time and place. We are not moved to write polemics against paganism when Homer has Odysseus slaughter Penelopes suitors, such massacres being as much a part of Homeric time as banquets and bards.

The troublesome passages are troubling chiefly to those who want truth and beauty and permanent values. Jack Miless book provides a very fine instance of the pleasures, and the hazards, of searching holy writs for goodness. A former Jesuit turned Episcopalian, Miles sets out to show that the Quranic texts are supple, compassionate, and moral in a contemporary way. He has a noble political goal in mind as well: to humanize Muslim texts for American readers, who are too often taught to be afraid of them. Yet his readings seem sometimes simply willful, finding murmurs of humane meaning in passages with other purposes. Throughout, he uses a form of interpretation familiar to any reader of contemporary apologetics for ancient sacred texts. Post-Enlightenment values are projected backward, and, when the text resists them strenuously, the resistance is either elided as inessential or else taken to be evidence of a profound mystery, to be contemplated at length.

In explicating the Quranic story of Joseph and his brothers, for instance, Miles takes Josephs forgiveness of his brothers for selling him into slavery in Egypt as material for a meditation on forgiveness which cites both Beethoven, structurally, and Thomas Mann, thematically. But the plain meaning of the text isnt that Joseph forgives his brothers for not being aware of their actions; it isnt even that Gods will be done, whatever men do. Josephs point is that the clans reward for his being sent to Egypt has turned out to be greater than they could have known when they sent him: no harm, no foul. God sent him to Egypt, Joseph says, and he has set me up as a father to Pharaoh, as lord of all his household and governor of the whole of Egypt. It is not that obeying the divine brings the reward of grace in itself; it is that obeying the divine pays off in power. We are asked to read past this on our way to greater understanding.

The same temptation is evident when Alter defends Gods words after he has allowed all of Jobs children to be murdered as part of what amounts to a pettish bet with the Adversary, Satan. Of Gods boastful and irrelevant remarksbasically, he tells Job to shut up and give him credit for hippos and crocodilesAlter concedes that they dont answer the problem of unjust suffering. For those who believe that life should not be arbitrary there can be no real answer concerning the good person who loses a child (not to speak of ten children), he writes. But Gods thundering challenge to Job is not bullying. Rather, it rousingly introduces a comprehensive overview of the nature of reality that exposes the limits of Jobs human perspective. This, of course, is what every tyrant says to his victimsthat theyre just not seeing the big picture, and that it takes many a broken egg to make an omelette big enough for the tyrant to eat. It is bullying, albeit from an admirably eloquent bully.

The overt content of so many sacred stories, which enjoin obedience for the sake of an ultimate reward, is not really sublimely mysterious. It is the content of every authoritarian story ever told. It is what the Mob boss tells his lieutenants: be loyal and youll get your cut. Just as God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Tony Soprano might have asked Big Pussy to show his loyalty by shooting one of his kidsand then, seeing him actually about to do it, cry out, Cmon, I was only kidding! These are the familiar human fables of submission to authority for the sake of order, of which the contemporary enlightened variants are a tiny and late-arriving exception. We like to believe that we do the right thing because it is the right thing, forgive our enemies because forgiveness is a superior virtue to revenge. My brother is bigger than your brother is not what we mean by grace. But it is what most of human history has meant by it.

Sacred texts teach deference to authority; thats part of what makes them sacred. A credible idea of God implies an idea of power. We moderns prefer sympathy as social glue, modesty as a virtue, and sensual pleasure as a value, and so we search the sacred texts for their rare moments of compassion, as in Lamentations, or avowals of failure, as in Job, or salutes to sex, as in the Song of Songs. Between the authority that the texts sought (and, for us moderns, can no longer claim) and the anarchy that their refutation supposedly invites lies the practice of literary argument. No wonder our versions of the sacred texts should be so interlineated, so discursive, so likely to refer back and forth among other textsso enmeshed in literary commentary. Entangling texts one with another is our way of entrapping a credible idea of the holy, a net for catching God. We approach the divine by arguing about his writings. What we catch with words may seem merely more words. But, as that holy text the Gospel of John insists, in the beginning was the word, so maybe it should be no surprise to find more words at the middle and even at the end. It may be words all the way down, words without end, amen.

This article appears in the print edition of the January 28, 2019, issue, with the headline Sacred Arts.

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986. He is the author of, most recently, At the Strangers Gate: Arrivals in New York.Read more Never miss a big New Yorker story again. Sign up for This Weeks Issue and get an e-mail every week with the stories you have to read. Submit Video

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