Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Lecture 2—Creation and Chaos in Genesis 15 ● When God commands Noah to save the animals, we see destruction linked to renewal, preserving a thread of continuity in the narrative. Earlier, God had created life of all sorts and directed human beings to tend to the well- being of creation. This act is repeated here. ● God directs Noah to tend to the well-being of creation by building an ark, not only to save himself but to preserve and renew all the species of life on earth. The Tower of Babel ‹ In chapter 11, we find the story of the T ower of Babel, which centers on the use and abuse of the power to communicate. As it begins, all people speak the same language, but how will they use the power of communication? As we saw earlier, God used words to bring forth life and harmony. ‹ But in the story of Babel, the power to communicate takes a negative turn. Here, people use speech to help them build a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens. In this context, the story continues the theme of human beings trying to reach beyond their appropriate limits. Their intent is arrogant—to establish a name for themselves. ‹ God then intervenes by disrupting their power to communicate, bringing the project to an end. Here again, the writer plays with language. He refers to the project itself as bab-el, meaning “gate of God” in Hebrew. But the writer comments that the project actually becomes balal, meaning “confusion.” Thus, the attempt to reach the gate of God disintegrates into confusion. ‹ Where has the plotline in Genesis 1–11 taken us? In Eden, people disrupted God’s designs; and at Babel, God has disrupted theirs. Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation16 Suggested Reading Blenkinsopp, Creation, Un-creation, Re-creation. Brueggemann, Genesis. Questions to Consider 1. Stories of creation create the setting for the narratives that follow. How does the focus on creation inform the sections of Genesis considered in this lecture? 2. How is God characterized in each major section of the narrative? Which characteristics of God seem most prominent? Which are most surprising?

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation108 ‹ In its context in Isaiah, this vision of peace in chapter 2 is as confrontational as the lawsuit in chapter 1. Both passages challenge the destructive patterns of behavior that the prophet sees in his own society. Where the lawsuit identifies the need for change, the hope for peace identifies the direction. Isaiah had no reason to think his vision would be realized any time soon, but the image of nations turning swords into plowshares was designed to generate a restless dissatisfaction with the norm. Hope and Purification ‹ The relationship of hope to purification is explored in chapter 6, where Isaiah receives his commission as a prophet. In this vision, he is confronted with the awe-inspiring holiness of God, who is seated on a throne in the temple. Above him are seraphim (Hebrew: “fiery ones”), each with six wings. ‹ The seraphim call out, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory.” As we’ve seen in previous lectures, God’s holiness is his “otherness.” It is the numinous quality that distinguishes God from all other beings. Holiness conveys absolute purity, intense power, and overwhelming majesty. ‹ The doorframes of the temple shake, and the entire sanctuary is filled with smoke. In this liminal moment, the magnitude of God’s presence makes Isaiah aware of his own smallness and vulnerability. God’s absolute purity makes him aware of his own impurity and the impurity of Israel. His uncleanness makes him unfit to stand in the presence of the Holy One, and it threatens to destroy him. ‹ Yet in the vision, Isaiah is not destroyed but purified. One of the seraphim touches Isaiah’s lips with a burning coal and tells him, “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt is removed and your sin is purged away.” The element of hope lies in feeling the heat and being cleansed by it. That experience changes the prophet. When God asks who he should send to the people of Israel, Isaiah replies, “Here I am, send me.” ‹ Isaiah then learns that the experience of fire will take place on the national level. Israel itself will feel the heat of conflict. God sends Isaiah to deliver a message

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  126 LECTURE 19 Ezekiel on Abandonment and Homecoming I n this lecture, we consider the prophet Ezekiel, who was deported from Jerusalem during the first wave of the Babylonian invasion of Judah in 597 B.C. Over the next 10 years, while Jeremiah prophesied in Jerusalem, Ezekiel worked among the people in exile. When Jerusalem was destroyed in 587 B.C., Ezekiel stayed among the exiles in Babylon for another 15 years, an experience that gave him a profound sense of dislocation. Given this sense, we’ll read the book with two themes in mind: abandonment (Ezek. 1–32) and homecoming (Ezek. 33–48). Vision of God on a Chariot ‹ According to the first verse of Ezekiel, one day, when the prophet was 30 years old and was working among the exiles, the heavens were opened and he saw visions of God. For modern readers, the scenes that follow are surreal, even bizarre. But for ancient readers, they were explosive, threatening to overwhelm people with their descriptions of the numinous presence of God. ‹ The prophet’s vision begins when he feels a surge of wind. He sees a cloud glowing with light approach and repeated flashes of lightning. Then he sees four creatures, the likes of which exist nowhere on earth. Each creature has four wings, and under the wings are human hands. Their legs are straight and their feet are like the hooves of a calf. Each creature also has four faces—that of a human, a lion, an ox, and an eagle—each looking in a different direction. ‹ Ezekiel pictures the bizarre creatures pulling a chariot, which serves as God’s throne. In this vision, the chariot has not two but four wheels—one for each creature. And as the creatures rise up from the earth, the wheels rise up along with them. Above the creatures is a dome that shines like crystal and a throne that looks like a jewel. And on the throne is a figure who burns like fire and is surrounded by a rainbow.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation 242 all things. As we said, people often assume that Revelation is all about destruction, but in the narrative, we find God’s identity centered in creation. It is God’s commitment to the world he created that will inform everything that follows. ‹Chapter 5 focuses on the scroll that God holds in his hand, which seems to contain some expression of the divine will. Who is worthy to open the scroll and make its contents known? Here, we are introduced to the other main protagonist in the story, who is Jesus. But instead of using Jesus’s name, the writer brings together the images of the Lion—a warrior, conqueror, and royal figure—and the Lamb—weak, vulnerable, and used in sacrifice. ‹At this point, the themes of power and self-sacrifice are joined with the theme of creation. Revelation depicts the whole created order offering praise to God and the Lamb. The song of praise begins in the center, with the heavenly creatures and the elders. It then moves outward to people of every tribe, language group, and nation. The angels pick up the song and are joined by all the creatures in heaven and on earth, in the sea and underground. Antagonists of Revelation ‹The main antagonists in Revelation are Satan and the beast. Where God is the Creator, Satan is the destroyer. This contrast is essential for the writer’s understanding of evil. He assumes that God created the world to be good. Therefore, evil is like a cancer that has invaded it. To preserve life, the cancer must be destroyed. That is the defining idea here. God is not out to destroy the earth. God is the Creator, who is committed to bringing life. And to do so, God must overcome the evil that has invaded his world to enable life to thrive. ‹Revelation portrays the destructive power of Satan through another image— that of a huge red dragon with 7 heads and 10 horns. In the middle of chapter 12, the writer portrays Satan as a destructive invader. Satan does battle with the angels in heaven, but he is thrown down to earth. Now, this evil infiltrates the political structures of the world to bring destruction. In chapter 13, we meet the beast, who is the chief agent of Satan. Like Satan, the beast has 7 heads and 10 horns, and it rises from the sea to oppress the peoples of the world.

• From Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation (2016)

  Reading Biblical Literature: Genesis to Revelation94 is in the north. This move is audacious, because that village is near Sidon, the hometown of Queen Jezebel. ● In Zarephath, Elijah meets an impoverished widow. This woman is gathering a few sticks to make a fire. All she has left is little flour and oil, with which she plans to make one last loaf of bread. After she and her son eat the bread, they’ll starve. ● In response to this situation, Elijah makes an outrageous request. He tells her to share her bread with him because the God of Israel will replenish her flour and oil. The widow feeds the prophet, and she, in turn, is fed because the flour and oil don’t run out. ‹ Soon, however, the widow’s son becomes ill and stops breathing. The woman assumes that Elijah must have told God about some secret sin of hers and that God is now punishing her by killing her boy. But the prophet carries the boy to an upper room and prays that God will restore his life. The child revives, and the prophet gives him back to his mother. ‹ This story is told with a profound sense of irony. It pictures those who rule Israel investing everything in the cult of Baal, yet outside of Israel, in the region that was supposed to belong to Baal, the God of Israel is at work, giving life to a widow and her son. The ironic turn is subversive, because the widow, the outsider, proves to be more faithful than the insiders, who rule in Samaria. Elijah at the Center ‹ In the second phase of Elijah’s story, the action shifts from the margin of society to the center. In 1 Kings 18, Elijah challenges King Ahab to a contest. He wants all the prophets of Baal and Asherah to meet him on Mount Carmel. There, they will determine whose god can rightfully claim the allegiance of the people. ‹ Here again, Elijah is outrageous. The story pictures 450 prophets of Baal against one lone prophet of God. The contest is a challenge to Baal to send lightning from the sky to ignite a sacrifice. Elijah will ask God to do the same. Whoever answers by fire can truly claim to be God.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Kabbalah was probably more scripturally based than any other form of mysticism. Its ‘bible’ was the Zohar, ‘The Book of Splendour’, which was probably the work of Moses of Leon, but took the form of a second-century novel about the mystical revolutionary R. Simeon ben Yohai, who wandered around Palestine, meeting with his companions to discuss the Torah, which, as a result of their exegesis ‘opened’ directly on to the divine world. By studying scripture, the kabbalist descended into the text and into himself, layer by layer, and found that he was at the same time ascending to the source of all being. The kabbalists agreed with the philosophers that words could not convey the incomprehensible transcendence of God, but believed that even though God could not be known, he could be experienced in the symbols of scripture. They were convinced that God had left hints about his inner life in the biblical text. In their mystical exegesis, kabbalists built on these, creating mythical stories and dramas which broke the peshat text open. Their mystical interpretation found an esoteric meaning in every single verse of scripture that described the mysteries of the divine being. The kabbalists called the innermost essence of God En Sof (‘without end’). En Sof was incomprehensible and was not even mentioned in the Bible or the Talmud. It was not a personality, so it was more accurate to call En Sof ‘it’ rather than ‘he’. But the incomprehensible En Sof had revealed itself to humanity at the same time as it had created the world. It had emerged from its impenetrable concealment like a massive tree sprouting a trunk, branches and leaves. The divine life spread in ever wider spheres until it filled everything that is, while En Sof itself remained hidden. It was the root of the tree, source of its stability and vitality but forever invisible. What the philosophers called God’s attributes – his Power, Wisdom, Beauty and Intelligence – thus became manifest, but the kabbalists transformed these abstract qualities into dynamic potencies. Like the philosophers’ ten emanations, they revealed aspects of the unfathomable En Sof and became more concrete and more comprehensible as they approached the material world. The kabbalists called these ten potencies, the inner dimensions of the divine psyche, sefiroth (‘numerations’). Each sefirah had its own symbolic name and represented a stage in En Sof’s unfolding revelation, but they were not ‘segments’ of God but together formed one great Name not known to human beings. Each sefirah encapsulated the entire mystery of God under a particular heading.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  In 1805, DeWette argued that Deuteronomy (‘D’) was the latest book of the Pentateuch and was probably the sefer torah discovered in the time of Josiah. Hermann Hupfeld (1796–1866), a professor at Halle, agreed with Igen that the ‘Elohist’ source consisted of two separate documents: E1 (a priestly work) and E2. E1, he believed, was the earliest source, followed by E2, J and D, in that order. But Karl Heinrich Graf (1815–69) made an important breakthrough when he argued that the priestly document (E1) was in fact the latest of the four sources. Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) seized upon Graf’s theory because it solved a problem that had long troubled him. Why did the prophets never refer to the Mosaic law? And why was the Deuteronomist, who was clearly familiar with the work of the Yahwist and Elohist, ignorant of the priestly document? All this could be explained if the priestly source (E1) was indeed a late composition. Wellhausen also showed that the four-document theory was too simplistic; there had been additions to all four sources before they had been combined into a single narrative. His work was regarded by his contemporaries as the culmination of the critical method, but Wellhausen himself realized that research had only just begun – and, indeed, it continues to the present day. How would these discoveries affect the religious lives of Jews and Christians? Some Christians embraced the insights of the Enlightenment. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was initially disturbed that the Bible seemed such a flawed document. 23 His response was to promote a spirituality based on an experience that was fundamental to all religion, but which Christianity had expressed in a distinctive way. He defined this experience as ‘the feeling of absolute dependence’. 24 This was no abject servility but a sense of reverence and awe before the mystery of life, which made us aware that we were not the centre of the universe. The gospels showed that Jesus perfectly embodied this attitude of wonder and surrender, and the New Testament described the impact of his personality on the disciples who founded the early church. Scripture was, therefore, essential to the Christian life because it provided us with our only access to Jesus. But because its authors were conditioned by the historical circumstances in which they lived, it was legitimate to subject their testimony to critical scrutiny. The life of Jesus had been a divine revelation, but the writers who recorded it were ordinary human beings, subject to sin and error. It was quite possible that they had made mistakes. But the Holy Spirit had guided the Church in its selection of canonical books, so Christians could put their trust in the New Testament. The scholar’s task was to peel away its cultural shell to reveal the timeless kernel within. Not every word of scripture was authoritative, so the exegete must distinguish marginal ideas from the gospel’s main thrust.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  32 The Sinai revelation was renewed every time a Jew confronted the text, opened himself to it, and applied it to his own situation. Like Ezekiel, the midrashist found that when he had absorbed it and made it uniquely his own, the Word of God tasted sweet as honey and set the world aflame. Like several of the early rabbis, Ben Azzai was a mystic. They liked to contemplate Ezekiel’s account of his vision of God’s ‘glory’ ( kavod ) while performing exercises – fasting, putting their heads between their knees, and whispering God’s praises – that put them into an altered mental state. Then it seemed as though they flew through the seven heavens until they beheld the ‘glory’ on its heavenly throne. But this mystical journey was fraught with danger. A very early story tells how four of the sages tried to ‘enter the pardes ’, a symbolic ‘orchard’ that recalled the paradisal garden of Eden. Ben Azzai managed to arrive at this spiritual state before his death, but two of the other mystics were spiritually and mentally damaged by the experience. Only R. Akiba had the maturity to emerge unscathed and live long enough to tell the tale. 33 R. Akiba himself found the Song of Songs especially conducive to this ekstasis ; it not only signified but actually made the love that God felt for his people a burning reality in the heart of the mystic. ‘The whole of time is not worth the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel,’ R. Akiba declared. ‘All the Writings ( Kethuvim ) are holy. The Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.’ 34 In R. Akiba’s interior world, the Song had replaced the inner sanctum of the temple, where the divine presence had rested on its ancient throne. Other rabbis experienced the Spirit of Yahweh as an electrifying divine presence within and around them. On one occasion, when R. Johanan had discussed Ezekiel’s vision with his pupils, a fire descended from heaven and a bat qol declared that he had a special mission from God. 35 But the Holy Spirit in the form of fire also descended upon R. Johanan and R. Eliezer – just as it descended upon Jesus’s disciples at Pentecost – while they were engaged in horoz, linking the scriptural verses together. 36 At this stage, the rabbis had not yet committed their insights to writing. It seems that they learned the traditions they were accumulating by heart and transmitted them orally, although R. Akiba and R. Meir arranged the material in blocks that made them easier to memorize. 37 It seemed risky to write down this precious lore. A book could be burned like the temple or fall into the hands of the Christians, and would be safer in the minds and hearts of the sages.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Just as the Hasidim looked through the veil of matter to see the divine spark latent within the most commonplace object, so too they learned to penetrate the words of the Bible and glimpse the divinity hidden beneath the surface. The words and letters of the Torah were vessels that contained the light of En Sof, so a Hasid must not concentrate on the purely literal sense of the text but on the spiritual reality it enclosed. 10 He must cultivate a receptive attitude and allow the Bible to speak to him by reining in his mental powers. One day, the Besht was visited by Dov Ber (1716–72), a learned kabbalist who would eventually succeed him as leader of the Hasidic movement. The two men studied Torah together and became immersed in a text about the angels. Dov Ber approached the passage in a rather abstract way and the Besht asked him to show respect for the angels they were discussing by standing up. As soon as he rose to his feet, ‘the whole house was suffused with light, a fire burned all around, and they [both] sensed the presence of the angels’. ‘The simple reading is as you say,’ the Besht told Dov Ber, ‘but your manner of studying lacked soul.’ 11 A commonsense reading, without the attitudes and gestures of prayer, would not yield a vision of the unseen. Without such prayer, Torah study was useless. As one of Dov Ber’s disciples explained, Hasidim must read scripture ‘with burning enthusiasm of the heart, with a coercion of all man’s psychological faculties in the direction of clear and pure thoughts on God constantly, and in separation from every pleasure’. 12 The Besht told them that if they approached the story of Mount Sinai in this way, they would ‘always hear God speak to them, as he did during the revelation on Sinai, because it was Moses’s intention that all Israel be worthy of attaining the same level as he did’. 13 The point was not to read about Sinai but to experience Sinai itself. When Dov Ber became the Hasidic leader, his scholarly reputation attracted many rabbis and scholars to the movement. But his exegesis was no longer dry and academic. One of his disciples recalled that ‘When he opened his mouth to speak words of Truth, he looked as if he was not of this world at all and the Divine Presence spoke out of his throat.’ 14 Sometimes, in the middle of a word, he would pause and wait for a while in silence.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Some Christians embraced the insights of the Enlightenment. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was initially disturbed that the Bible seemed such a flawed document. 23 His response was to promote a spirituality based on an experience that was fundamental to all religion, but which Christianity had expressed in a distinctive way. He defined this experience as ‘the feeling of absolute dependence’. 24 This was no abject servility but a sense of reverence and awe before the mystery of life, which made us aware that we were not the centre of the universe. The gospels showed that Jesus perfectly embodied this attitude of wonder and surrender, and the New Testament described the impact of his personality on the disciples who founded the early church. Scripture was, therefore, essential to the Christian life because it provided us with our only access to Jesus. But because its authors were conditioned by the historical circumstances in which they lived, it was legitimate to subject their testimony to critical scrutiny. The life of Jesus had been a divine revelation, but the writers who recorded it were ordinary human beings, subject to sin and error. It was quite possible that they had made mistakes. But the Holy Spirit had guided the Church in its selection of canonical books, so Christians could put their trust in the New Testament. The scholar’s task was to peel away its cultural shell to reveal the timeless kernel within. Not every word of scripture was authoritative, so the exegete must distinguish marginal ideas from the gospel’s main thrust. The Law and the prophets had been the scripture of the New Testament authors. But Schleiermacher believed that the Old Testament was not as authoritative as the New for Christians. It had different views of God, sin and grace and relied on law rather than spirit. In time, the Old Testament might even be relegated to an appendix. Schleiermacher’s biblical theology gave birth to a new Christian movement known as Liberalism, which looked for the universal religious message in the gospels, discarded what seemed peripheral, and tried to express these essential truths in a way that would engage a modern audience. In 1859, Charles Darwin (1809–82) published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection , which marked a new phase in the history of science. Instead of merely collecting facts, Baconian-style, Darwin put forward an hypothesis: animals, plants and human beings had not been created fully formed but had developed slowly in a long period of evolutionary adaptation to their environment.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  As he delved beneath the literal meaning of a biblical narrative and uncovered its deep philosophical principle, he experienced a shock of recognition. The story became suddenly fused with a truth that was a part of himself. Sometimes he struggled grimly with his books and seemed to make no progress, but then, almost without warning, he experienced rapture, like a priest in one of the ecstatic mystery cults: I . . . have suddenly become full, the ideas descending like snow, so that under the impact of divine possession, I have been filled with Corybantic frenzy and become ignorant of everything, place, people, past, present, myself, what was said and what was written. For I acquired expression, ideas, an enjoyment of life, sharp-sighted vision, exceedingly distinct clarity of objects such as might occur through the eyes as a result of clearest display. 65 In the year of Philo’s death, there were pogroms against the Jewish community in Alexandria. Throughout the Roman empire, there was widespread fear of Jewish insurgency, and in 66 CE a group of Jewish zealots orchestrated a rebellion in Palestine that, incredibly, managed to hold the Roman armies at bay for four years. Fearing that the rebellion would spread among the Jewish communities of the diaspora, the authorities were determined to crush it ruthlessly. In 70 the emperor Vespasian finally conquered Jerusalem. When the Roman soldiers broke into the temple’s inner courts, they found six thousand Jewish zealots there, ready to fight to the death. When they saw the temple catch fire, a terrible cry arose. Some flung themselves on to the Romans’ swords; others hurled themselves into the flames. Once the temple had gone, the Jews gave up and showed no interest in defending the rest of the city but watched helplessly as Titus’s officers efficiently demolished what was left of the city. 66 For centuries, the temple had stood at the heart of the Jewish world and was central to Jewish religion. Once again it had been destroyed, but this time it would not be rebuilt. Only two of the Jewish sects that had proliferated during the Late Second Temple period were able to find a way forward. The first to do so was the Jesus movement, which was inspired by the disaster to write a wholly new set of scriptures. CHAPTER 5 Charity Before the conversion of Constantine in 312, it seemed unlikely that Christianity would survive, as Christians were subjected to sporadic but intense persecution by the Roman authorities. Once they had made it clear that they were no longer members of the synagogue, the Romans regarded the church as a superstitio of fanatics, who had committed the cardinal sin of impiety by breaking with the parent faith. Romans were highly suspicious of mass movements that threw off the restraints of tradition. Christians were also accused of atheism because they refused to honour the patronal gods of Rome and thus endangered the empire.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Because Christ lay at the heart of the Hebrew scriptures, they also expressed the divine economy, but this subtext only became apparent if the Bible was interpreted correctly. Like the cosmos itself, scripture was a text (textus), a tissue made up of an infinite number of interconnecting entities that were ‘woven together’ to form an inextricable whole.7 Contemplating the encoded textus of scripture helped people to understand that it was Jesus who held everything together and explained the deeper significance of the entire economy. The task of the exegete was to demonstrate this, fitting all the clues together like the interlocking pieces of a vast puzzle. Irenaeus compared the scriptures to a mosaic, composed of innumerable tiny stones which, once they had been placed together correctly, formed the image of a handsome king.8 The interpretation of scripture had to conform to the teaching of Jesus’s apostles, which Irenaeus called the ‘rule of faith’, namely that the Logos, which had become incarnate in Jesus, had been implicit in the structure of creation from the very beginning:9 Anyone who reads the scriptures with attention will find in them a discourse about Christ, and a prefiguration of a new calling. For Christ is the treasure hidden in the field, that is, in this world, for the field is the world,10 but he was also hidden in the scriptures, since he was signified by types and parables which could not be understood, humanly speaking, before the consummation of those things that were prophesied as coming, that is, the advent of Christ.11 But the fact that Christ was ‘hidden’ in scripture meant that Christians had to make a strenuous exegetical effort if they wanted to find him. Christians could only make sense of the Tanakh by transforming it into an allegoria, in which all the events and characters of the ‘Old Testament’ became types of Christ in the New. The evangelists had already found ‘types and parables’ of Jesus in the Hebrew scriptures, but the fathers were more ambitious. ‘Every prophet, every ancient writer, every revolution of the state, every law, every ceremony of the old covenant points only to Christ, announces only him, represents only him,’ insisted Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea (260–340).12 Christ the Logos had been present in Adam, the progenitor of the race; in Abel the martyr; in Isaac the willing sacrificial victim; and in the afflicted Job.13 Christians were developing their own distinctive horoz, ‘linking’ people, events and images that had hitherto been separate, in order to reveal what they believed to be the central reality of scripture. Like the rabbis, they were not interested in discovering the intention of the biblical author and seeing a text in its historical context. A good interpretation gave new insight into the divine economy.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Some of the most important biblical authorities insisted that charity must be the guiding principle of exegesis: any interpretation that spread hatred or disdain was illegitimate. All the world faiths claim that compassion is not only the prime virtue and the test of true religiosity but that it actually introduces us to Nirvana, God or the Dao. But sadly the biography of the Bible represents the failures as well as the triumphs of the religious quest. The biblical authors and their interpreters have all too often succumbed to the violence, unkindness and exclusivity that is rife in their societies. Human beings seek ekstasis, a ‘stepping outside’ of their normal, mundane experience. If they no longer find ecstasy in a synagogue, church or mosque, they look for it in dance, music, sport, sex or drugs. When people read the Bible receptively and intuitively, they found that it gave them intimations of transcendence. A major characteristic of a peak religious insight is a sense of completeness and oneness. It has been called coincidentia oppositorum: in this ecstatic condition, things that seemed separate and even opposed coincide and reveal an unexpected unity. The biblical story of the Garden of Eden depicts this experience of primal wholeness: God and humanity were not divided but lived in the same place; men and women were unaware of gender difference; they lived in harmony with animals and the natural world; and there was no distinction between good and evil. In such a state, divisions are transcended in an ekstasis that is separate from the conflicted fragmentary nature of ordinary life. People have tried to recreate this Edenic experience in their religious rituals. As we shall see, Jews and Christians developed a method of Bible study that linked together texts that had no intrinsic connection. By constantly breaking down barriers of textual difference, they achieved an ecstatic coincidentia oppositorum, which is also present in other scriptural traditions. It is, for example, essential to the proper interpretation of the Qur’an. From a very early period, the Aryans of India learned to apprehend the Brahman, the mysterious potency that held the diverse elements of the world together, when they listened to the paradoxes and riddles of the Rig Veda hymns, which fused apparently unrelated things. When Jews and Christians tried to find a unity in their paradoxical and multifarious scriptures, they also had intuitions of divine oneness. Exegesis was always a spiritual discipline rather than an academic pursuit . Originally, the people of Israel had achieved this ekstasis in the Jerusalem temple, which had been designed as a symbolic replica of the Garden of Eden. 1 There they experienced shalom, a word that is usually translated ‘peace’ but is better rendered as ‘wholeness, completeness’.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  She became ‘pleasant and temperate’ to others; ‘an earnest zeal for the works of love’ leads her ‘to forgetfulness of self and indifference of self-interest’. 24 When the bride looked for her groom ‘by night’ in her bedchamber, she showed us the importance of modesty. It was better to avoid ostentatious piety and pray in the privacy of one’s cell because ‘if we pray when others are present, their approbation may rob our prayer of . . . its effect’. 25 There would be no sudden illumination; by dint of regular lectio divina and the practice of charity, monks would make steady, unobtrusive and incremental progress. Eventually, the soul might be permitted to enter the groom’s ‘bedchamber’ and attain the vision of God, though Bernard admitted that he had only had momentary intimations of this final state. The Song could not be understood rationally. Its meaning was a ‘mystery’ that was ‘hidden’ in the text 26 – an overwhelming transcendence that would always elude our conceptual grasp. 27 Unlike the rationalists, Bernard constantly quoted scripture: his commentary on the Song has 5,526 quotations ranging from Genesis to Revelation. 28 And instead of seeing the Bible as an objective academic challenge, Bible study was a personal, spiritual discipline. ‘Today the text we are to study is the book of our experience,’ he told his monks, ‘you must therefore turn your affections inwards, each one must take note of his own particular awareness of things.’ 29 During the thirteenth century, the new Order of Preachers, founded by the Spaniard Dominic Guzman (1170–1221), managed to marry the old lectio divina with the rationalism of the schools. The Dominicans were the intellectual heirs of both the philosophers and the scholars of St Victor. 30 They did not abandon spiritual exegesis, but gave more serious attention to the literal sense and they were systematic academics, whose aim was to adapt Aristotelian philosophy to Christianity. The fathers had compared allegory to the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ of scripture, but for Aristotle the soul was inseparable from the body; it defined and shaped our physical development and relied on the evidence of the senses. So for the Dominicans, the ‘spirit’ of scripture was not hidden beneath the text but found within the literal and historical meaning. In his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) reconciled the older spiritual method with the new philosophy. According to Aristotle, God was the ‘First Mover’ who had set the cosmos in motion; Thomas extended this idea, pointing out that God was also the ‘First Author’ of the Bible.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  5 By the eleventh century, Europe had started to emerge from the Dark Ages. The Benedictines of Cluny, near Paris, initiated a reform to educate the laity, whose knowledge of Christianity was woefully inadequate. Uneducated layfolk could not read the Bible, of course, but were taught to experience the Mass as a complex allegory that symbolically reenacted Jesus’s life: the readings from scripture in the first part of the liturgy recalled his ministry; during the offering of the bread and wine, they meditated on his sacrificial death, and the communion represented his resurrection in the lives of the faithful. The fact that lay people could no longer follow the Latin added to the mystique: much of the Mass was recited by the priest in an undertone, and the silence and the sacred language transported the ritual into a separate space apart, introducing the congregation to the gospel as a mysterium, a power-filled act. By enabling them to enter imaginatively into the gospel story, Mass was the laity’s lectio divina. 6 The Cluniacs also encouraged lay people to make pilgrimages to places associated with Jesus and the saints. Not many could make the long trip to the Holy Land, but, it was said, some of the apostles had travelled to Europe and were buried there: Peter in Rome; Joseph of Arimathea in Glastonbury, and James at Compostela in Spain. During the journey, pilgrims learned Christian values, living for a while like monks: they left secular life behind, were celibate during the journey, lived in community with other pilgrims, and were forbidden to fight or bear arms. But Europe was still a dangerous, desolate place. People were barely able to farm the land, there was famine and sickness and constant warfare, as the nobility engaged in ceaseless battles with one another, devastating the countryside and wrecking entire villages. The Cluniacs tried to impose a periodic truce and some tried to reform the barons and kings. But the knights were soldiers and wanted an aggressive religion. The first communal, cooperative act of the new Europe, as she crawled out of the Dark Ages, was the First Crusade (1095–99). Some of the Crusaders began their journey to the Holy Land by attacking the Jewish communities in the Rhine Valley; at its conclusion, the Crusaders massacred some thirty thousand Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem. The crusading ethos was based on a literal interpretation of Christ’s warning in the gospel: ‘Anyone who does not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.’ 7 Crusaders sewed crosses on their clothes and followed in Jesus’s footsteps to the land where he had lived and died.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Proverbs was a collection of common-sense aphorisms, similar to the two quoted above. Ecclesiastes, a flagrantly cynical meditation, saw all things as ‘vanity’, and appeared to undermine the entire Torah tradition, while the Song of Songs was an erotic poem with no apparent spiritual content. Other Wisdom writings explored the insoluble problem of the suffering of innocent people in a world ruled by a just God. The book of Job was based on an ancient folktale. God gave Satan, the legal prosecutor of the Divine Assembly, permission to test Job’s virtue by afflicting him with a series of wholly undeserved calamities. Job eloquently railed against his punishment and refused to accept any of the conventional explanations of the friends who tried to console him. Eventually Yahweh answered Job, not by referring to the events of the Exodus, but by forcing him to contemplate the underlying masterplan that governed creation. Could Job visit the place where snow was kept, fasten the harness of the Pleiades, or explain why a wild ox was willing to serve human beings? Job was forced to admit that he could not comprehend this divine Wisdom: ‘I have been holding forth on matters I cannot understand, on marvels beyond me and my knowledge.’ 17 The sage acquired Wisdom by meditating on the marvels of the physical world, not by studying Torah. But by the second century BCE, some Wisdom writers were beginning to come closer to the Torah. Ben Sirah, a devout sage living in Jerusalem, no longer regarded Wisdom as an abstract principle but imagined her as a female figure and a member of the Divine Assembly. 18 He depicted her giving an account of herself before the other Counsellors. She was the Word by which God had called all things into being. She was the divine Spirit (ruach), which had hovered over the primal ocean at the beginning of the creative process. As God’s Word and masterplan, she was divine and yet separate from her Maker, present everywhere on earth. But God had commanded her to pitch her tent with the people of Israel and she had accompanied them throughout their history. She had been in the pillar of cloud that had guided them in the wilderness and in the rituals of the temple, another symbolic expression of divine order. But above all, Wisdom was identical with the sefer torah, ‘the law that Moses enjoined upon us’. 19 The Torah was no longer simply a legal code; it had become an expression of the highest wisdom and most transcendent goodness.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Without such prayer, Torah study was useless. As one of Dov Ber’s disciples explained, Hasidim must read scripture ‘with burning enthusiasm of the heart, with a coercion of all man’s psychological faculties in the direction of clear and pure thoughts on God constantly, and in separation from every pleasure’.12 The Besht told them that if they approached the story of Mount Sinai in this way, they would ‘always hear God speak to them, as he did during the revelation on Sinai, because it was Moses’s intention that all Israel be worthy of attaining the same level as he did’.13 The point was not to read about Sinai but to experience Sinai itself. When Dov Ber became the Hasidic leader, his scholarly reputation attracted many rabbis and scholars to the movement. But his exegesis was no longer dry and academic. One of his disciples recalled that ‘When he opened his mouth to speak words of Truth, he looked as if he was not of this world at all and the Divine Presence spoke out of his throat.’14 Sometimes, in the middle of a word, he would pause and wait for a while in silence. The Hasidim were evolving their own lectio divina, making a quiet place for scripture in their hearts. Instead of analysing a text and pulling it apart, the Hasid had to still his critical faculties. ‘I will teach you the way Torah is best taught,’ Dov Ber used to say: ‘not to feel [conscious of] oneself at all, but to be like a listening ear that hears the world of sound speaking but does not speak itself.’15 The exegete had to make himself a vessel for the divine presence. The Torah must act upon him, as though he were its instrument.16 Hasidism aroused fierce opposition from orthodox Jews, who were appalled by the Besht’s apparent denigration of the scholarly study of Torah. They became known as the Misnagdim (‘opponents’). Their leader was Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720–97), head (gaon) of the academy of Vilna in Lithuania. Torah study was the Gaon’s chief passion, but he was also proficient in astronomy, anatomy, mathematics and foreign languages. Even though he studied scripture more aggressively than the Hasidim, the Gaon’s method was in its own way mystical. He relished what he called the ‘effort’ of study, an intense mental activity that tipped him into a new level of consciousness, and kept him at his books all night, his feet immersed in icy water to prevent him from falling asleep. When he did allow himself to doze off, the Torah penetrated his dreams and he experienced an ascent to the divine. ‘He who studies Torah communes with God,’ one of his disciples claimed, ‘for God and the Torah are one.’17

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Reese would be slicing peaches. Daddy Glen would be out of the way, off working on the lawn mower. I swatted at mosquitoes and hoped my face wasn’t sunburning. I was tired of Shannon, tired of her mama’s endless simpering endearments, tired of her daddy’s smug contempt, and even more tired of my own jealousy. I stopped. The music coming through the cottonwoods was gospel. Gut-shaking, deep-bellied, powerful voices rolled through the dried leaves and hot air. This was the real stuff. I could feel the whiskey edge, the grief and holding on, the dark night terror and determination of real gospel. “My God,” I breathed, and it was the best “My God” I’d ever put out, a long, scared whisper that meant I just might start to believe He hid in cottonwoods. There was a church there, clapboard walls standing on cement blocks and no pretense of stained-glass windows. Just yellow glass reflecting back sunlight, all the windows open to let in the breeze and let out that music. Amazing grace…how sweet the sound…that saved a wretch like me …A woman’s voice rose and rolled over the deeper men’s voices, rolled out so strong it seemed to rustle the leaves on the cottonwood trees. Amen . Lord . “Sweet Jesus, she can sing.” Shannon ignored me and kept pulling up wildflowers. “You hear that? We got to tell your daddy.” Shannon turned and stared at me with a peculiar angry expression. “He don’t handle colored. An’t no money in handling colored.” At that I froze, realizing that such a church off such a dirt road had to be just that—a colored church. And I knew what that meant. Of course I did. Still I heard myself whisper, “That an’t one good voice. That’s a churchful.” “It’s colored. It’s niggers.” Shannon’s voice was as loud as I’d ever heard it, and shrill with indignation. “My daddy don’t handle niggers.” She threw wildflowers at me and stamped her foot. “And you made me say that. Mama always said a good Christian don’t use the word ‘nigger.’ Jesus be my witness, I wouldn’t have said it if you hadn’t made me.” “You crazy. You just plain crazy.” My voice was shaking. The way Shannon said “nigger” tore at me, the tone pitched exactly like the echoing sound of Aunt Madeline sneering “trash” when she thought I wasn’t close enough to hear. I wondered what Shannon heard in my voice that made her as angry as I was. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was the shame we both were feeling, or maybe it was simply that Shannon Pearl and I were righteously tired of each other. Shannon threw another handful of flowers at me. “I’m crazy? Me? What do you think you are?

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  35 He wrote an influential commentary on the Pentateuch, which rigorously elucidated its plain meaning, but in the course of his study he had encountered a numinous significance that entirely transcended the literal sense. In the late thirteenth century, a small group of mystics in Castile took this further. Their study of scripture had not merely introduced them to a deeper level of the text but to the inner life of God. They called their esoteric discipline kaballah (‘inherited tradition’), because it had passed from teacher to pupil. Unlike Nahmanides, these kabbalists – Abraham Abulafia, Moses de Leon, Isaac de Latif and Joseph Gikatilla – had no expertise in Talmud but they had all been interested in philosophy before deciding that its attenuated God was empty of religious content. 36 Instead, they explored a hermeneutic method, which they may have learned from their Christian neighbours. Their mystical midrash was based on the Talmudic story of the four sages who entered the ‘orchard’ (pardes). 37 Because R. Akiba alone had survived this perilous spiritual experiment, the kabbalists claimed that their exegesis, which they called pardes, derived from him and was the only safe form of mysticism. 38 They found that their method of studying Torah carried them daily to ‘paradise’. 39 PaRDeS was an anagram for the four senses of scripture: peshat, the literal sense; remez, allegory; darash, the moral, homiletic sense; and sod, the mystical culmination of Torah study. Pardes was a rite of passage which began with peshat and rose to the ineffable heights of sod. As the original Pardes story made clear, this journey was not for everybody but only for a properly initiated elite. The first three forms of midrash – pardes, remez and darash – had all been used by Philo, the rabbis and the philosophers, so the kabbalists implied that their new spirituality was in line with tradition, while at the same time suggesting that their own speciality – sod – was its fulfilment. Their experience probably seemed so self-evidently Jewish that they may have been entirely unaware of any conflict with the mainstream. 40 The kabbalists created a powerful synthesis. 41 They revived the mythical element in ancient Israelite tradition, which the rabbis and the philosophers had downplayed or tried to eradicate. They were also inspired by the Gnostic tradition, which had surfaced again in various mystical movements in the Muslim world with which they were probably familiar. Finally, the kabbalists drew upon the ten emanations envisaged by the philosophers in which every element in the chain of being was connected. Revelation no longer had to bridge an ontological abyss, but occurred continuously within each individual, and creation had not happened once in the distant past but was a timeless event in which we could all participate.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Its ‘bible’ was the Zohar, ‘The Book of Splendour’, which was probably the work of Moses of Leon, but took the form of a second-century novel about the mystical revolutionary R. Simeon ben Yohai, who wandered around Palestine, meeting with his companions to discuss the Torah, which, as a result of their exegesis ‘opened’ directly on to the divine world. By studying scripture, the kabbalist descended into the text and into himself, layer by layer, and found that he was at the same time ascending to the source of all being. The kabbalists agreed with the philosophers that words could not convey the incomprehensible transcendence of God, but believed that even though God could not be known, he could be experienced in the symbols of scripture. They were convinced that God had left hints about his inner life in the biblical text. In their mystical exegesis, kabbalists built on these, creating mythical stories and dramas which broke the peshat text open. Their mystical interpretation found an esoteric meaning in every single verse of scripture that described the mysteries of the divine being. The kabbalists called the innermost essence of God En Sof (‘without end’). En Sof was incomprehensible and was not even mentioned in the Bible or the Talmud. It was not a personality, so it was more accurate to call En Sof ‘it’ rather than ‘he’. But the incomprehensible En Sof had revealed itself to humanity at the same time as it had created the world. It had emerged from its impenetrable concealment like a massive tree sprouting a trunk, branches and leaves. The divine life spread in ever wider spheres until it filled everything that is, while En Sof itself remained hidden. It was the root of the tree, source of its stability and vitality but forever invisible. What the philosophers called God’s attributes – his Power, Wisdom, Beauty and Intelligence – thus became manifest, but the kabbalists transformed these abstract qualities into dynamic potencies. Like the philosophers’ ten emanations, they revealed aspects of the unfathomable En Sof and became more concrete and more comprehensible as they approached the material world. The kabbalists called these ten potencies, the inner dimensions of the divine psyche, sefiroth (‘numerations’). Each sefirah had its own symbolic name and represented a stage in En Sof’s unfolding revelation, but they were not ‘segments’ of God but together formed one great Name not known to human beings. Each sefirah encapsulated the entire mystery of God under a particular heading. The kabbalists interpreted the first chapter of Genesis as a parable of the emergence of the sefiroth.