Context is key!
Thanks Jason!
Richard Dreyfuss and Moses
I don’t know if I could possibly listen to this and focus on the text. Denzel Washington’s version
The moody deity
Salon.com has an interview with Robert Wright, author of The Evolution of God. This quote reminded me of James’ discussion of medical materialism. Here the point isn’t so much what is going on medically (!) with God, as taking a look at some non-spiritual, i.e., material, causes or explanations for why God’s moods change so much.
At the very beginning of your book, you describe yourself as a materialist. This raises an interesting question: Can a materialist really explain the history of religion?
I tend to explain things in terms of material causes. So when I see God changing moods, as he does a lot in the Bible and the Quran, I ask, what was going on politically or economically that might explain why the people who wrote this scripture were inclined to depict God as being in a bad mood or a good mood? Sometimes God is advocating horrific things, like annihilating nearby peoples, or sometimes he’s very compassionate and loving. So I wanted to figure out why the mood fluctuates. I do think the answers lie in the facts on the ground. And that’s what I mean by being a materialist.
The Bible through literary eyes
I remember a joke that my recently retired colleague Jacob Needleman once said about a cutting edge new course that was being developed: “The Bible as Religious Text”!
Well, here’s the opposite. A very nice presentation by Robert Alter (UC Berkeley) on the Bible Through Literary Eyes.
The inner lives of biblical characters
The old joke goes that a new course was being offered in a university religion department: “The Bible of Religious Document”. A “new” course because of the more typical “Bible as literature” classes. James Wood thinks biblical characters lack inner lives. Tod Linafelt thinks otherwise in this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
It is hard to deny that in many respects the Bible is the most unliterary work of literature that we have. Saint Augustine, already in the late fourth century AD, confessed that biblical style exhibits “the lowest of language” and had seemed to him, before his conversion, “unworthy of comparison with the dignity of Cicero.” It is easy to see what he means. Biblical narrative especially (things are different with biblical poetry) tends to work with a very limited vocabulary and consistently avoids metaphors and other sorts of figurative language, evincing a drastically stripped-down manner of storytelling that can seem the very antithesis of style.
Then, readers have not traditionally gone to the Bible in search of literary artfulness but rather for its religious value — that is, as a source of theology (What can we learn about God?) or of ethics (What can we learn about morality?). For Augustine, as for so many religious readers after him, the Bible’s theological truths and ethical teachings won out over its literary art or lack thereof.
Linafelt goes on to state that:
What makes Wood’s mischaracterization of biblical narrative so disappointing is the opportunity that is lost, the opportunity to have one of our best and most subtle analysts of fictional narrative go to work on our most ancient example of fictional narrative. For whatever else the Bible is or contains — scripture, ethics, history, lyric poetry — it also represents a genuine precursor to the modern novel.
Jane Smiley, in her book 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel (Knopf, 2005), gives this basic definition: “A novel is a (1) lengthy, (2) written, (3) prose, (4) narrative with a (5) protagonist.” One may nuance the definition, but that is a pretty common one. And classical biblical narrative brings together all those elements, probably for the first time in literary history. Indeed, the Bible contains, in the books of Genesis and Samuel, what is very likely the earliest ever extended prose narratives, presenting protagonists who develop and change over the course of a lifetime and who, contra Wood, demonstrate a genuine sense of a past that impinges on their present.