Monday Monday tekel upharsin

Monday Monday tekel upharsin December 5, 2016

As a defense against the “vintage” Christmas music piped in at the Big Box throughout December, I used to keep a running tally of the still-living artists whose songs were played. Last year, there were 14. The playlist hasn’t changed this year, and now it’s down to 13 and I’m reluctant to keep playing that game because I feel like I somehow jinxed David Bowie. I don’t want to end this miserable year feeling like I’ve done the same to Tony Bennett or Angela Lansbury or Julie Andrews.

So I got some earbuds and loaded up my phone with some random non-Christmas music and hit shuffle. This is what that gave me Friday night:

That’s a song about Noah, a song about Daniel, a random love song that doesn’t fit the pattern, and then a song about Moses.

But then I realized that random love song was from an album titled “Joshua Judges Ruth.”

So now I’m creating a new playlist of First Testament-themed songs. Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” of course. “All You Zombies” from the Hooters. A whole bunch of Bob Marley. Regina Spektor’s “Samson.” U2’s “40.” Vampire Weekend’s “Ya Hey” (and the gorgeous Phosphorescent cover of it). “By the Rivers of Babylon” by Boney M.

Turn, Turn, Turn” has to be on there. And “Dry Bones Dance” by Mark Heard. The Hold Steady’s “Cattle and the Creeping Things.” What am I missing?

Recommendations and suggestions in comments below, please.

Also, which do you think would seem more harshly convicting — having a mystical hand appear to write a divine condemnation on your palace wall? Or just having Johnny Cash stand before you singing, “My friend you been weighed in the balance and found wannnn-ting”?

In keeping with this accidental First Testament theme, Hemant Mehta directs our attention to a viral post from Facebook: “Dollywood Employee, Cleaning Up Wildfire Damage, Finds Charred Bible Page Under Bench.”

JoelAshes

The deadly wildfires that tore through Tennessee recently left much of Gatlinburg in ashes. That gave an eerie resonance to a verse from the book of Joel found on that charred Bible page. Here’s how that verse reads in the King James Version of the page the worker found:

O Lord, to thee will I cry: for the fire hath devoured the pastures of the wilderness, and the flame hath burned all the trees of the field.

Here’s what the same passage looks like in the NRSV:

To you, O Lord, I cry.
For fire has devoured
the pastures of the wilderness,
and flames have burned
all the trees of the field.

The KJV treats it as prose, but the NRSV — like nearly all modern translations — regards it as poetry.

That’s interesting. More interesting, I think, then the sub-Bildad-level notions of selective providence that circulate on Facebook after a natural disaster devastates some properties and leaves others unharmed.

The book of Joel is really short — just three chapters long. Most of the text is poetry, but the first verse — a terse introductory statement — is usually regarded as prose. And then there’s this odd interlude of prose stuck in the middle, a small chunk of verses running from Joel 2:30 through Joel 3:8.

This is one of those places where we English Lit majors tend to take a different view than most biblical studies scholars. Biblical scholars look at something like this and wonder if this interjection of prose indicates the work of a later writer or editor adding to an earlier composition. That’s cool — that’s a legitimate, fascinating and potentially fruitful line of inquiry. Different forms may indicate different authors with different agendas, after all.

But if you’re a Lit major, then this kind of switching back and forth between prose and poetry will have you thinking of Shakespeare. The majority of his plays, and the plays of his contemporaries, were written in poetry — iambic pentameter and all that. But big chunks of dialogue are also written in prose. This was a choice. It meant something for Shakespeare and for his audience. (If you’re interested, here’s a good discussion of that by Kim Ballard for the British Library.)

The writer or editor(s) of Joel also seem to have made a choice. So, OK, why? If the prose section is the work of a later writer/editor, why did they choose to leave this section in prose rather than crafting it into poetry? That seems like a deliberate, meaningful choice intended to communicate … something.

In “conservative” white evangelical circles, textual criticism is sometimes feared and frowned on as a “liberal” rejection of the inerrant, plenary verbal inspiration of the Bible. But this perspective only intensifies the significance of the literary puzzle we have here. If you want to claim that God Almighty literally spoke to Joel son of Pethuel, more or less dictating the three chapters of this book of holy scripture, then this choice of prose and poetry was a choice made directly by God. It seems like that would make one’s need to discern the intent and meaning of this literary choice more urgent and more important. And yet literalist inerrantists tend to be even less receptive to a Lit major’s questions. They tend to be focused on content to the exclusion of form, overlooking how good writers — like the one(s) who gave us the book of Joel — always marry the two.

The choice to present some of this book as poetry and some of it as prose must have meant something to “Joel” and to the original readers and recorders and preservers of this book. I don’t know what that choice meant to them, and I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to know, given how ancient this writing and the world that produced it are, and how distant and alien they now seem to be from our own world and time. Unlike Belshazzar, we can’t summon a Daniel to explain and interpret its clear meaning or application.

A “high view of scripture” insists that this literature is the “Word of God” — that it’s meaning is necessary and authoritative. But that only makes our problem more acute. It doesn’t solve it. The idea that we must, necessarily, always know the clear meaning of the Bible with absolute certainty doesn’t actually supply such certainty. It only makes us more anxious and reluctant to acknowledge that such certainty isn’t available to us.


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