Despair

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 The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  But the rabbis also valued the spoken word for its own sake. Graduates of Yavneh, who had managed to learn these oral texts by rote, were called tannaim, ‘repeaters’. They spoke the Torah aloud and developed their midrash in conversation. The House of Studies was noisy with lively discussion and clamorous debate. But by 135 the rabbis felt the need for a more permanent written record. In an attempt to drag the Jews into the modern Graeco-Roman world, the emperor Hadrian announced that he intended to plough the ruins of Jerusalem into the ground and build a modern city on the sacred site. Circumcision, the training of rabbis and the teaching of Torah were all forbidden by law. The hard-headed Jewish soldier Simeon bar Koseba led a revolt against Rome and when he managed to oust the Tenth Legion from Jerusalem, R. Akiba hailed him as the messiah. R. Akiba himself refused to stop teaching and, it is said, was executed by the Roman authorities. Eventually Bar Koseba’s rebellion was brutally quashed by Hadrian in 135. 38 Thousands of Jews had died; the new city was built, though the temple ruins remained; Jews were forbidden to reside in Judah and were confined to the north of Palestine. The academy at Yavneh was disbanded and the rabbinic cadre dispersed. But the situation improved under the emperor Antoninus Pius (158–161), who relaxed the anti-Jewish legislation, and the rabbis regrouped at Usha in Lower Galilee. The disastrous outcome of the Bar Koseba rebellion had horrified the rabbis. A few radicals, such as the mystic R. Simeon ben Yohai, continued to campaign against Rome, but most withdrew from politics. The rabbis were now wary of messianism and discouraged the practice of mysticism, preferring a disciplined life of study to dangerous flights of the spirit. At Usha they settled the canon of the Hebrew Bible, by making a final selection of the Writings ( Kethuvim ) of the Second Temple period. 39 They chose the more sober historical works and rejected apocalyptic fantasies, selecting Chronicles, Esther, Ezra and Nehemiah; and from the Wisdom genre: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs and Job, but not Ben Sirah. The Bible, which now consisted of the T orah , N eviim (‘Prophets’) and K ethuvim , became known as the TaNaKh . Between 135 and 160 the rabbis also started to create an entirely new scripture, which they called the Mishnah, an anthology of the traditions that the rabbis had collected at Yavneh, arranged according to the scheme of R. Akiba and R.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Zimzum (Hebrew, ‘withdrawal’) The process in Lurianic Kabbalah (q.v.), whereby En Sof (q.v.) shrank into itself at the beginning of the creative process in order to make room for the cosmos. CHAPTER 1 Torah In 597 BCE , the tiny state of Judah in the highlands of Canaan broke its vassalage treaty with Nebuchadnezzar, ruler of the powerful Babylonian empire. It was a catastrophic mistake. Three months later, the Babylonian army besieged Jerusalem, Judah’s capital. The young king surrendered immediately and was deported to Babylonia, together with some ten thousand of the citizens who made the state viable: priests, military leaders, craftsmen and metal workers. As they left Jerusalem, the exiles would have taken one last look at the temple built on Mount Zion by King Solomon ( c .970–930 BCE ), the centre of their national and spiritual life, sadly aware that in all likelihood they would never see it again. Their fears were realized: in 586, after yet another rebellion in Judah, Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem and burned Solomon’s temple to the ground. The exiles were not ill-treated in Babylon. The king was comfortably housed with his entourage in the southern citadel, and the rest lived together in new settlements by the canals and were allowed to manage their domestic affairs. But they had lost their country, their political independence, and their religion. They belonged to the people of Israel and believed that their god Yahweh had promised that if they worshipped him exclusively, they would live in their land forever. The Jerusalem temple, where Yahweh had dwelt among his people, was essential to his cult. Yet here they were in an alien land, cast out of Yahweh’s presence. This must be a divine punishment. Time and again, the Israelites had failed to keep their covenant agreement with Yahweh and had succumbed to the lure of other deities. Some of the exiles assumed that, as the leaders of Israel, it was up to them to rectify the situation, but how could they serve Yahweh without the temple that was their only means of making contact with their god? Five years after his arrival in Babylon, standing beside the Chebar canal, a young priest called Ezekiel had a terrifying vision. It was impossible to see anything clearly because nothing in this stormy maelstrom of fire and tumultuous sound conformed to ordinary human categories, but Ezekiel knew that he was in the presence of the kavod, the ‘glory’ of Yahweh, which was usually enthroned in the inner sanctum of the temple. 1 God had left Jerusalem and, riding on what seemed to be a massive war chariot, had come to live with the exiles in Babylon. A hand stretched towards Ezekiel holding a scroll, which was inscribed with ‘lamentations, wailing, and moanings’. ‘Eat this scroll,’ a divine voice commanded him, ‘feed and be satisfied by the scroll I am giving you.’

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  Many of them were laymen, who made a dedicated effort to live like priests, observing the purity laws in their own homes as though they dwelt in the temple. They were opposed by the more conservative Saducees, who interpreted the written texts more stringently and did not accept the newfangled ideas about personal immortality. People focused on the temple because it provided them with access to God; if it failed, religion lost its point. There was a desperate search for a new way of entering the divine presence, for new scriptures and new ways of being Jewish. 46 Some sects completely rewrote the older texts. The author of the First Book of Enoch imagined God rending the earth and the Mosaic revelation asunder on Mount Sinai to begin again with a clean slate. The author of Jubilees, which was widely read well into the second century CE, was distressed by the cruelty of some of the earlier writings and entirely revised the JEP narrative. Had God really tried to exterminate the human race in the Flood, commanded Abraham to kill his own son, and drowned the Egyptian army in the Sea of Reeds? He decided that God did not intervene directly in human affairs and that the suffering we see all around us was the work of Satan and his demons. Before the first century CE, there was no widespread expectation that a messiah, an ‘anointed one’, would arrive to put the world to rights. 47 Despite occasional references to such a figure, this was still a peripheral, undeveloped idea. The apocalyptic scenarios of the Late Second Temple period usually imagined God establishing the new order, without human assistance. There were a few sporadic references to concepts that would later become crucial. There was mention of a Davidic king who would inaugurate the ‘kingdom of God’ and ‘sit forever over the goyim in judgment’. 48 Another text spoke of a ruler who would ‘be called son of God and . . . son of the most high and bring peace to the world’ 49 – clearly a nostalgic harking back to Isaiah’s prophecy of Immanu-El. But these isolated notions did not yet form a coherent vision. This changed after Palestine was conquered by the Roman general Pompey in 63 BCE and became a province of the Roman empire. In some ways, Roman rule was beneficial. King Herod, the protégé of Rome who reigned in Jerusalem from 37 to 4 BCE, rebuilt the temple on a magnificent scale and pilgrims flocked there to celebrate the festivals. But the Romans were unpopular and some of the prefects, notably Pontius Pilate (26–36 CE), went out of their way to insult Jewish sensibilities.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  This was an entirely new departure. In the past, some interpreters had favoured the study of the literal sense of the Bible but they had never believed that every single word of scripture was factually true. Many had admitted that, if we confined our attention to the letter, the Bible was an impossible text. The belief in biblical inerrancy, pioneered by Warfield and Hodge, would, however, become crucial to Christian fundamentalism and would involve considerable denial. Hodge and Warfield were responding to the challenge of modernity but in their desperation were distorting the scriptural tradition they were trying to defend. The same was true of the new apocalyptic vision that gripped conservative American Protestants in the late nineteenth century. This was the creation of an Englishman, John Nelson Darby (1800–82), who found few followers in Britain but toured the United States to great acclaim between 1859 and 1877.34 He was convinced, on the basis of a literal reading of Revelation, that God would shortly bring this era of history to an end in an unprecedentedly terrible disaster. Antichrist, the fake redeemer whose coming before the end had been foretold by St Paul,35 would initially be welcomed and would deceive the unwary. He would then inflict seven years of tribulation, war and massacre upon humanity, but eventually Jesus would descend to earth and defeat him on the plain of Armageddon outside Jerusalem. Christ would then rule on earth for a thousand years until the Last Judgement brought history to a close. The attraction of this theory was that true believers would be spared. On the basis of a chance remark of St Paul, who suggested that at the Second Coming Christians would be ‘taken up in the clouds’ to meet Jesus,36 Darby maintained that shortly before Tribulation, there would a ‘rapture’, a ‘snatching’ of born-again Christians, who would be whisked up to heaven and would thus escape the sufferings of the end time. Bizarre as it sounds, this Rapture theory was in line with aspects of nineteenth-century thought. Darby spoke of historical eras or ‘dispensations’, each of which had ended in destruction; this was not dissimilar to the successive epochs that geologists had found in the strata of fossils in rocks and cliffs – each one of which, some thought, had ended in catastrophe. In line with the modern spirit, Darby’s theory was literal and democratic. There was no hidden truth, accessible only to a learned elite. The Bible meant exactly what it said. A millennium meant ten centuries; if the prophets spoke of ‘Israel’ they meant Jews not the Church; if Revelation prophesied a battle outside Jerusalem, that was exactly what would happen.37 This reading of scripture would become even easier after the publication of The Scofield Reference Bible (1909), which became an instant bestseller. Cyrus I. Scofield explained the Rapture theory in detailed notes – a gloss, which for many Christian fundamentalists has become almost as authoritative as the Bible itself.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  INTRODUCTIONHuman beings are meaning-seeking creatures. Unless we find some pattern or significance in our lives, we fall very easily into despair. Language plays an important part in our quest. It is not only a vital means of communication, but it helps us to articulate and clarify the incoherent turbulence of our inner world. We use words when we want to make something happen outside ourselves: we give an order or make a request and, one way or the other, everything around us changes, however infinitesimally. But when we speak we also get something back: simply putting an idea into words can give it a lustre and appeal that it did not have before. Language is mysterious. When a word is spoken, the ethereal is made flesh; speech requires incarnation – respiration, muscle control, tongue and teeth. Language is a complex code, ruled by deep laws that combine to form a coherent system that is imperceptible to the speaker, unless he or she is a trained linguist. But language has an inherent inadequacy. There is always something left unsaid; something that remains inexpressible. Our speech makes us conscious of the transcendence that characterizes human experience. All this has affected the way we read the Bible, which for both Jews and Christians is the Word of God. Scripture has been an important element in the religious enterprise. In nearly all the major faiths, people have regarded certain texts as sacred and ontologically different from other documents. They have invested these writings with the weight of their highest aspirations, most extravagant hopes and deepest fears, and mysteriously the texts have given them something in return. Readers have encountered what seems like a presence in these writings, which thus introduce them to a transcendent dimension. They have based their lives on scripture – practically, spiritually and morally. When their sacred texts tell stories, people have generally believed them to be true, but until recently literal or historical accuracy has never been the point. The truth of scripture cannot be assessed unless it is – ritually or ethically – put into practice. The Buddhist scriptures, for example, give readers some information about the life of the Buddha, but have included only those incidents that show Buddhists what they must do to achieve their own enlightenment.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  The Bible A Biography Current and forthcoming titles in the Books that Changed the World Series: Plato’s Republic by Simon Blackburn Machiavelli’s The Prince by Philip Bobbitt Darwin’s Origin of Species by Janet Browne Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man by Christopher Hitchens The Qur’an by Bruce Lawrence Machiavelli’s The Prince by Philip Babbitt Homer’s The Iliad and the Odyssey by Alberto Manguel On the Wealth of Nations by P.J. O’Rourke Clausewitz’s On War by Hew Strachan Marx’s Das Kapital by Francis Wheen The Bible A Biography KAREN ARMSTRONG Copyright © 2006 by Karen Armstrong All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or permissions@groveatlantic.com. First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd. Printed in the United States of America ISBN: 978-1-5558-4924-5 (e-book) Designed by Richard Marston Atlantic Monthly Press an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. 841 Broadway New York, NY 10003 Distributed by Publishers Group West www.groveatlantic.com In Memory of Eileen Hastings Armstrong (1921–2006) CONTENTS Introduction 1 Torah 2 Scripture 3 Gospel 4 Midrash 5 Charity 6 Lectio Divina 7 Sola Scriptura 8 Modernity Epilogue Glossary of Key Terms Notes Index INTRODUCTION Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. Unless we find some pattern or significance in our lives, we fall very easily into despair. Language plays an important part in our quest. It is not only a vital means of communication, but it helps us to articulate and clarify the incoherent turbulence of our inner world. We use words when we want to make something happen outside ourselves: we give an order or make a request and, one way or the other, everything around us changes, however infinitesimally. But when we speak we also get something back: simply putting an idea into words can give it a lustre and appeal that it did not have before. Language is mysterious. When a word is spoken, the ethereal is made flesh; speech requires incarnation – respiration, muscle control, tongue and teeth. Language is a complex code, ruled by deep laws that combine to form a coherent system that is imperceptible to the speaker, unless he or she is a trained linguist. But language has an inherent inadequacy. There is always something left unsaid; something that remains inexpressible.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  The tragedy of Rome’s collapse had convinced Augustine that this original sin had sentenced the human race to eternal damnation. Even after our redemption by Christ, our humanity was impaired by concupiscence, the irrational desire to take pleasure in creatures rather than in God. The guilt of original sin was transmitted to Adam’s descendants through the sexual act: when our reasoning powers were swamped by passion, God was forgotten, and men and women revelled shamelessly in one another. The image of rationality dragged down by a chaos of sensation reflected the plight of Rome, source of order in the West, brought low by the barbarians. This interpretation of the third chapter of Genesis is unique to Western Christianity; neither the Jews nor the Greek Orthodox, who did not experience the fall of Rome, have subscribed to this tragic vision. The collapse of the empire plunged Western Europe into centuries of political, economic and social stagnation and the trauma convinced the more educated Christians that men and women were indeed permanently damaged by Adam’s sin. They could no longer hear what God said to them, and this made it well-nigh impossible to understand the scriptures. Europe had become a pagan wilderness. From the fifth to the ninth centuries, the Christian tradition was confined to the monasteries, the only places that could provide the stability and quiet necessary for the study of the Bible. The monastic ideal had been brought to the West by John Cassian (360–435). He had also introduced Western Christians to Origen’s threefold interpretation of scripture according to the literal, moral and allegorical senses, but added a fourth: the anagogical or mystical sense, which revealed a text’s eschatological significance. When, for example, the prophets had described the future glories of Jerusalem, this referred anagogically to the heavenly Jerusalem in Revelation. Cassian taught his monks that the study of scripture was a lifelong task. In order to appreciate the ineffable realities that lay hidden behind the veil of human words, they must rectify their fallen nature – training their powers of concentration, disciplining their bodies in fasts and vigils, and cultivating a habit of inwardness. 1 Lectio divina (‘sacred study’) was also central to the Rule of St Benedict of Nursia (AD 480–543). Benedictine monks spent at least two hours every day studying the scriptures and the writings of the fathers. Scripture, however, was not experienced as a book: many of the monks would never have seen the Bible as a single volume but read it in separate manuscripts; much of their biblical knowledge came to them at second hand in the liturgy or the works of the fathers. The Bible was read aloud during meals and the Psalter chanted at regular intervals throughout the day in the Divine Office. The rhythms, imagery and teaching of the Bible became the substratum of their spirituality, built up incrementally and undramatically day by day, year by year, in silent, regular meditation. There was nothing formal or systematic about lectio divina.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  They were opposed by the more conservative Saducees, who interpreted the written texts more stringently and did not accept the newfangled ideas about personal immortality. People focused on the temple because it provided them with access to God; if it failed, religion lost its point. There was a desperate search for a new way of entering the divine presence, for new scriptures and new ways of being Jewish. 46 Some sects completely rewrote the older texts. The author of the First Book of Enoch imagined God rending the earth and the Mosaic revelation asunder on Mount Sinai to begin again with a clean slate. The author of Jubilees, which was widely read well into the second century CE , was distressed by the cruelty of some of the earlier writings and entirely revised the JEP narrative. Had God really tried to exterminate the human race in the Flood, commanded Abraham to kill his own son, and drowned the Egyptian army in the Sea of Reeds? He decided that God did not intervene directly in human affairs and that the suffering we see all around us was the work of Satan and his demons. Before the first century CE , there was no widespread expectation that a messiah, an ‘anointed one’, would arrive to put the world to rights. 47 Despite occasional references to such a figure, this was still a peripheral, undeveloped idea. The apocalyptic scenarios of the Late Second Temple period usually imagined God establishing the new order, without human assistance. There were a few sporadic references to concepts that would later become crucial. There was mention of a Davidic king who would inaugurate the ‘kingdom of God’ and ‘sit forever over the goyim in judgment’. 48 Another text spoke of a ruler who would ‘be called son of God and . . . son of the most high and bring peace to the world’ 49 – clearly a nostalgic harking back to Isaiah’s prophecy of Immanu-El. But these isolated notions did not yet form a coherent vision. This changed after Palestine was conquered by the Roman general Pompey in 63 BCE and became a province of the Roman empire. In some ways, Roman rule was beneficial. King Herod, the protégé of Rome who reigned in Jerusalem from 37 to 4 BCE , rebuilt the temple on a magnificent scale and pilgrims flocked there to celebrate the festivals. But the Romans were unpopular and some of the prefects, notably Pontius Pilate (26–36 CE ), went out of their way to insult Jewish sensibilities. A number of prophets tried to mobilize the population to revolt.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  When the Israeli army occupied the West Bank, the Sinai peninsula, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights during the June War of 1967, Zionists saw this literal fulfilment of a scriptural imperative as proof positive that the end time had begun. There could be no question of returning the new territories to the Arabs in exchange for peace. Radical Kookists began to squat in Hebron and built a city at nearby Kiryat Arba, even though this contravened Geneva Conventions that forbade settlement in territories occupied during hostilities. This settlement initiative intensified after the October War of 1973. Religious Zionists joined forces with the secular right in opposition to any peace deal. True peace meant territorial integrity and the preservation of the whole land of Israel. As the Kookist rabbi Eleazar Waldman explained, Israel was engaged in a battle against evil, on which hung the prospects of peace for the entire world.58 This intransigence sounds perverse, but it was not unlike that of secularist politicians, who also habitually spoke of wars to end all wars and of the grim necessity of going to war to preserve world peace. In another vein, a small group of Jewish fundamentalists formulated a biblical version of the genocidal ethos of the twentieth century, comparing the Palestinians to the Amalekites, a people so cruel that God commanded the Israelites to kill them without mercy.59 The same tendency was also evident in the movement founded by R. Meir Kahane, whose reading of scripture was so reductionist that it became a deadly caricature of Judaism, giving a biblical rationale to ethnic cleansing. The promise to Abraham was still valid, so the Arabs were usurpers and must go.60 ‘There are not several messages in Judaism,’ he insisted. ‘There is only one . . . God wanted us to live in a country on our own, isolated, so that we have the least possible contact with what is foreign.’61 In the early 1980s, a small group of Kookists plotted to destroy the Muslim shrines on the Haram al-Sharif, which had been built on the site of Solomon’s temple and was the third holiest place in the Islamic world. How could the Messiah return when this holy place was polluted? In a literal interpretation of the kabbalistic principle that events on earth could influence the divine, the extremists calculated that by risking all-out war with the entire Muslim world, they would ‘force’ God to send the messiah to save Israel.62 Not only could the plot, had it been implemented, have had fatal consequences for the Jewish state, but Washington strategists believed that in the context of the Cold War, when the Soviets supported the Arabs and the United States Israel, it could even have sparked a third world war.63 Yet this nihilistic project was not out of place in a world where the great powers were prepared to expose their own people to nuclear annihilation in order to defeat the enemy.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  The Jewish people had not yet succumbed to this enthusiasm for the literal: in 1492 they had suffered a disaster, which made many turn to the mystical consolations of Kabbalah. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of Aragon and Castile, had conquered the kingdom of Granada, the last Muslim stronghold in Europe. Jews and Muslims were given the option of conversion to Christianity or deportation. Many Jews chose exile and took refuge in the new Ottoman empire where a significant number settled in Palestine, which was now an Ottoman province. In Safed in northern Galilee, the saintly mystic Isaac Luria (1534–72) developed a kabbalastic myth that bore no resemblance to the first chapter of Genesis, and yet by the mid-seventeenth century Lurianic Kabbalah had a mass following in Jewish communities from Poland to Iran.33 Exile had been a central preoccupation for Jews since their deportation to Babylonia. For the Spanish Jews – the Sephardim – the loss of their homeland was the worst disaster to have befallen their people since the destruction of the temple. They felt that everything was in the wrong place and that their entire world had collapsed. Snatched forever from places that were saturated in memories essential to their identity, exiles can feel that their very existence is in jeopardy. When exile is also associated with human cruelty, it raises urgent problems about the nature of evil in a world supposedly created by a just and benevolent God.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  The Bible A Biography Current and forthcoming titles in the Books that Changed the World Series: Plato’s Republic by Simon Blackburn Machiavelli’s The Prince by Philip Bobbitt Darwin’s Origin of Species by Janet Browne Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man by Christopher Hitchens The Qur’an by Bruce Lawrence Machiavelli’s The Prince by Philip Babbitt Homer’s The Iliad and the Odyssey by Alberto Manguel On the Wealth of Nations by P.J. O’Rourke Clausewitz’s On War by Hew Strachan Marx’s Das Kapital by Francis Wheen The Bible A Biography KAREN ARMSTRONG Copyright © 2006 by Karen Armstrong All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003 or permissions@groveatlantic.com. First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd. Printed in the United States of America ISBN: 978-1-5558-4924-5 (e-book) Designed by Richard Marston Atlantic Monthly Press an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. 841 Broadway New York, NY 10003 Distributed by Publishers Group West www.groveatlantic.com In Memory of Eileen Hastings Armstrong (1921–2006) CONTENTS Introduction 1 Torah 2 Scripture 3 Gospel 4 Midrash 5 Charity 6 Lectio Divina 7 Sola Scriptura 8 Modernity Epilogue Glossary of Key Terms Notes Index INTRODUCTION Human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. Unless we find some pattern or significance in our lives, we fall very easily into despair. Language plays an important part in our quest. It is not only a vital means of communication, but it helps us to articulate and clarify the incoherent turbulence of our inner world. We use words when we want to make something happen outside ourselves: we give an order or make a request and, one way or the other, everything around us changes, however infinitesimally. But when we speak we also get something back: simply putting an idea into words can give it a lustre and appeal that it did not have before. Language is mysterious. When a word is spoken, the ethereal is made flesh; speech requires incarnation – respiration, muscle control, tongue and teeth. Language is a complex code, ruled by deep laws that combine to form a coherent system that is imperceptible to the speaker, unless he or she is a trained linguist. But language has an inherent inadequacy. There is always something left unsaid; something that remains inexpressible.

• From The Bible: A Biography (2007)

  People focused on the temple because it provided them with access to God; if it failed, religion lost its point. There was a desperate search for a new way of entering the divine presence, for new scriptures and new ways of being Jewish.46 Some sects completely rewrote the older texts. The author of the First Book of Enoch imagined God rending the earth and the Mosaic revelation asunder on Mount Sinai to begin again with a clean slate. The author of Jubilees, which was widely read well into the second century CE, was distressed by the cruelty of some of the earlier writings and entirely revised the JEP narrative. Had God really tried to exterminate the human race in the Flood, commanded Abraham to kill his own son, and drowned the Egyptian army in the Sea of Reeds? He decided that God did not intervene directly in human affairs and that the suffering we see all around us was the work of Satan and his demons. Before the first century CE, there was no widespread expectation that a messiah, an ‘anointed one’, would arrive to put the world to rights.47 Despite occasional references to such a figure, this was still a peripheral, undeveloped idea. The apocalyptic scenarios of the Late Second Temple period usually imagined God establishing the new order, without human assistance. There were a few sporadic references to concepts that would later become crucial. There was mention of a Davidic king who would inaugurate the ‘kingdom of God’ and ‘sit forever over the goyim in judgment’.48 Another text spoke of a ruler who would ‘be called son of God and . . . son of the most high and bring peace to the world’49 – clearly a nostalgic harking back to Isaiah’s prophecy of Immanu-El. But these isolated notions did not yet form a coherent vision.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  9 [image file=image_rsrc2PR.jpg] Two weeks later we were back home with Daddy Glen. Nothing had changed. Everything had changed. Daddy Glen had said he was sorry, begged, wept, and swore never to hurt me again. I had stood silent, stubborn, and numb. He had gotten down on his knees in front of Alma, Wade, their kids, and Mama, pulled Reese and me into his embrace, and vowed that he couldn’t live without our love. Mama had knelt on the floor with him and made him swear an oath never to raise his hand to me again. I had looked into his wet features and had known, without question, what was going to happen. Mama would forgive him, though she would watch him close and make him earn her trust again. He would be good, he would be careful. But after a while, Daddy Glen would begin to talk about the accident a little differently. He would remember things that had happened around that time, things I had said, looks I had given him. One day, maybe months from now, there’d be something I’d done that would make it all seem justified. Then Daddy Glen would take me into the bathroom again, crying that it hurt him more than it could ever hurt me. But his face would tell the truth, his hands on my body. He would show me just how much he hurt when Mama left him in that parking lot, and then when he beat me, we would both know why. But Mama wouldn’t know. More terrified of hurting her than of anything that might happen to me, I would work as hard as he did to make sure she never knew. I set my teeth and tried to ignore everything but what was right in front of me. I talked to no one and kept my face buried in books. At night, I lay in bed with my clasped hands pushing up against the tender place between my legs, listening to the radio and trying not to think. My shoulder had healed quickly under Mama’s patient, watchful care, but I felt as if something inside me would never be all right. I woke up so angry my throat hurt. My teeth felt ground down to the nerves. I would go look in the mirror, expecting to see blood in my mouth, but there was nothing, only my teeth small, white, and sharp. Mama kept me close to her. She even let me get up at dawn to sit with her during her most private moments, the hour when she sipped coffee and watched the sun rise.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Mama’s chin was sharp, shining now against other car lights, now against the lights from the dash. I watched the tears on her face when she looked back at me. I closed my eyes, opened them. Everything seemed spongy and strange, but I couldn’t care anymore. The cool air rushing in the window was damp and sweet. If there really was a God or even magic, that air would blow through me and out again. It would go back down that road to the hospital, sweep up the dirt, and throw it in Daddy Glen’s eyes. It would make him see who he was, what he had done. That doctor would come out on his way home, see him there, and know who he was. The wind would tell him, the moon, or maybe even God. That doctor would know, and he would start his car, knowing. He would slam that car into gear and roar across that lot. The grille would stop just inches from Daddy Glen’s terrified face. “You son of a bitch,” that doctor would scream. “You ever touch that child again and I’ll grind you into meat and blood!” Daddy Glen would weep tears of blood. Jesus, maybe, would come into his heart. He’d follow us out to Alma’s and get on his knees before the whole family. “I have sinned,” he’d say, and hold his hands out to me, beg my forgiveness and cry my name. Mama would say no. My aunts would say no. My uncles, Reese, the minister, everyone in the world would stand up and say no. But I would pull myself up from my sickbed. I would look right into his eyes, into the lamps of his soul. Yes, I would say. Yes. I forgive you. Then probably I would die. I almost laughed, my shoulders shook. The pain was hot and took the story away so fast I made a little sound. I swallowed hard, determined not to cry. Mama reached over for me. Her face looked old, very old and tired. It made my heart hurt to see her look that way. I couldn’t hurt her, I couldn’t. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Don’t, honey, don’t. You didn’t do anything wrong.” Her lips were swollen where she had bitten them, and I felt my own lips swollen and cracked against my teeth. “I love you.” My voice was so soft I didn’t think she heard me. But hers came back to me, quick and low. “I love you too.”

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “No concussion, the doctor says.” He took the little notebook out of his pocket, opened it. “You’re a little shocky, need to be careful for a while. Some of your people are out there. I got the doctor talking to them.” “Mama?” My voice was a hoarse croak. “I an’t talked to your mama yet. Your aunts are here, though. We’ll let you see them soon.” He flipped pages, took out a pen, and looked at me. “Now, we need to know what happened, Ruth Anne. I know you’re not feeling too good, but I want you to try to talk to me.” His mouth softened, as if he were trying to look comforting. “You tell me what happened and we can work on getting you home soon.” He put the point of the pen to the paper. I closed my eyes. Mama hadn’t talked to him. I felt suddenly so tired I could barely draw breath. “They call you Bone, don’t they?” I said nothing. “Bone, I want you to know that no one is gonna hurt you. No one is gonna be allowed to hurt you. We can see that you’ve been through enough. Just tell me who beat you, girl. Tell me.” His voice was calm, careful, friendly. He was Daddy Glen in a uniform. The world was full of Daddy Glens, and I didn’t want to be in the world anymore. “Honey,” the sheriff said again. I hated him for calling me that. He didn’t know me. “We’re gonna have to know everything that happened.” No. My tongue swelled in my mouth. I didn’t want anyone to know anything. Mama, I almost whispered, but clamped my teeth together. I couldn’t tell this man anything. He didn’t care about me. No one cared about me. I didn’t even care about myself anymore. “Ruth Anne.” He leaned forward, his face close to mine, his whispery voice too big in my ear. “I want to help you. I want you to tell me what happened, girl. I’ll take care of everything. I promise you. You’ll be all right.” No. He thought he knew everything. Son of a bitch in his smug uniform could talk like Santa Claus, promise anything, but I was alone. “I want to go home,” I said. “I want my mama.” Sheriff Cole put his hand on mine and sighed. “All right. All right, girl.” I looked at him, remembering what Raylene had said that night on the landing when I told her how much I hated people who looked at us like trash. What must it be like to be Sheriff Cole? What made him who he was? I’d think about that sometime, but not now. I didn’t want to think at all right now.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  He held one hand to his cheek and watched as I hiccuped and cried into her neck. “You son of a bitch,” she cursed him, and ran water to wash my face. “She’s my girl too,” he said. “Someone’s got to love her enough to care how she turns out.” His face was sullen, swollen and empty, like he had woken up from a long, long sleep. “I don’t want to hear it,” Mama yelled, pushing him out the door. She put me on her lap and washed my face, my neck, the backs of my swollen thighs. “Oh, my baby,” she kept saying. I lay still against her, grateful to be safe in her arms. The air felt funny on my skin, and I had screamed so hard I had no voice left. I said nothing, let Mama talk, only half hearing what she was whispering. “Baby,” she called me. “Oh, girl. Oh, honey. Baby, what did you do? What did you do?” What had I done? I had run in the house. What was she asking? I wanted her to go on talking and understand without me saying anything. I wanted her to love me enough to leave him, to pack us up and take us away from him, to kill him if need be. I held on to her until she put me to bed, held on to her and whimpered then. I held on to her until I fell into a drugged, miserable sleep. I woke up to the sound of them talking, their words echoing through the closed door of the bedroom. I heard everything he said, heard Mama crying in his arms. Daddy Glen told her I had called him a bastard, that I had come running through the house knocking things over and called him that name. He cried and swore he hadn’t meant to beat me so bad, he didn’t know what had made him do it. He sobbed and then beat his fists against the mattress so hard the springs squeaked. “She told me she hated me,” he said, “told me I would never be her daddy. And I went crazy, Anney. I just went crazy. Do you know? Do you understand how much I love you all, love her? “And—oh, God, Anney! They laid me off today. Just put me out without a care. And what am I going to do to feed these girls now?” Reese lay on the bed with me, her fingers in her mouth, her eyes enormous. She said nothing. I lay still, listening to Daddy Glen’s lies, wondering if he thought he was telling the truth. I kept looking into Reese’s face, her baby face, smooth and empty and scared. The sound of Mama crying grew softer, faded. In the stillness that followed I heard Daddy Glen whispering, heard a murmur as Mama replied. Then there was a sigh and the creak of their bed as he comforted Mama and she comforted him. Sex.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  He spoke once more, drowning me out. His voice was very calm, very soft. “Kill me, Anney. Kill me.” I tried to reach her with my right hand but the pain made me gasp. “Mama,” I pleaded, but she still wasn’t looking at me. “Lord God, Lord God, Lord God.” Her cry was low, sibilant, painful. She was holding him, his head pressed to her belly. His bloody hairline was visible past the angle of her hip. “Mama,” I whispered. “Help me, God,” she pleaded in a raw, terrible voice. “Help me.” I could see her fingers on Glen’s shoulder, see the white knuckles holding him tight. My mouth closed over the shout I would not let go. Rage burned in my belly and came up my throat. I’d said I could never hate her, but I hated her now for the way she held him, the way she stood there crying over him. Could she love me and still hold him like that? I let my head fall back. I did not want to see this. I wanted Travis’s shotgun, or my sharp killing hook. I wanted everything to stop, the world to end, anything, but not to lie bleeding while she held him and cried. I looked up into white sky going gray. The first stars would come out as the sky darkened. I wanted to see that, the darkness and the stars. I heard a roar far off, a wave of night and despair waiting for me, and followed it out into the darkness. 21 [image file=image_rsrc2PR.jpg] Aunt Alma has a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings, with a few wedding invitations, funeral announcements, and baby pictures pasted down beside page after page of headlines. “Oh, we’re always turning up in the news,” she used to joke when she’d show people that book. Her favorite is the four-page spread the Greenville News did when Uncle Earle’s convertible smashed into the barbershop across the street from the county courthouse a few months before it burned down. There are pictures of the front end of the car propped up on a barber stool just a few feet short of splintered silvered mirrors, another of Earle sitting on the curb leaning forward with his head in his hands, and a series of the barber picking through the remains of his shop with the help of a highway patrolman and Granny Boatwright. The barber looks funny, holding up his shaving brush and cup in fingers that blur a little so that you can see he must have still been shaking. HE DIDN’T COME IN FOR A SHAVE, the headline reads under the picture of the car on the stool. BOATWRIGHT captions the close-up of Earle’s numb face.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Come on, Bone,” she whispered. “We’re going home.” She thanked Uncle Wade in a tired voice. Her hair was limp and her face scrubbed clean. She was still wearing that pullover sweater, but she’d added a loose white shirt and changed back to her waitress flats. “Don’t talk,” she told me. “Just get Reese’s shoes and come on.” She lifted Reese without disturbing Aunt Alma and carried her out to the car. I followed her, holding on to her right side while Reese leaned into her left shoulder. At the car, she paused and looked up into the dark night sky. In the light from the house, her face was all hollows and angles, her eyes sunken and glittery. “Damn!” she whispered softly, and leaned her forehead against the cool metal above the car door. “Damn, damn.” “Mama,” Reese whimpered. I pressed my cheek against Mama’s side and kept still. There was a long cold moment while we waited, and then Mama pushed herself back up straight and opened the door. “All right,” she said, as if she were wrapping up some long conversation with herself. “All right.” I looked back to Aunt Alma’s house. Uncle Wade was standing in the kitchen looking out at us, his face stern and his mouth hard. Why was he angry? I wondered. What could have made him look so terribly angry? [image file=image_rsrc2PS.jpg] “Cook you some eggs,” Mama said as she steered us into the kitchen and sat us at the table. There was flour in a can, a jar of jelly, butter in a dish, a bag of tomatoes, fatback in a sealed package, and a carton of fresh eggs all speckled brown. She put most of it away and then whipped the eggs up with sweet milk, laying slices of green tomato to fry around the sides of the pan before she poured the eggs in. “My mama used to cook this late at night,” she announced, blinking in the too-bright light. Daddy Glen was sitting in the living room in front of the television set with the sound turned down low, not looking at us and not speaking. I watched Reese’s eyes flicker toward him and then back to Mama and over to me. Daddy Glen’s hands kept moving on his thighs, the fingers working into knots, tightening on his trousers and then shaking against the dark fabric like the legs of dying june bugs turned belly up in the night. Mama pulled a tray of biscuits out of the oven and grinned at us.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  “Anney!” He was following us. “Please, Anney!” Keep moving, Mama. Across the sparse grass and dirt, up to the car. Mama gasped into my ear, holding me against her trembling rib cage. She opened the door, eased me down onto the front seat, lifted my legs. He was still crying her name. I was thinking fast and slow at the same time. How could I do it? No shotgun here, not even a butter knife. “Anney, please. Talk to me. Love, please. Please, Anney.” She dodged him, ran around to the other side of the car, and got the door open. He was right beside her, sobbing and wringing his hands. He pushed the door almost shut while she struggled to open it again. “Anney, you know how I love you. I wouldn’t have hurt her, darling, but I went crazy. I just went crazy!” I pulled myself across the seat, trying to reach her and help, but it was back to being hard to move. The air had become thick as jelly. I had to push through it. I gritted my teeth and inched forward until I was leaning against the steering wheel, watching them struggle with the door. “Mama.” She looked toward me, her face empty and strange. I said it again. “Mama.” Mama slapped Glen again, with her open hand and then with her cupped fist. The sound of her blows was dull and horrible, but not so horrible as the mewling grunts he made as she struck him. “Let go,” she said. He staggered, sweat streaming into his eyes. His mouth worked uselessly, all his features seemed realigned. “Let go,” she said again. He wailed and dropped to his knees, his hands still clinging to Mama and the door. He bowed his head and whispered, “Kill me, Anney. Go on. I can’t live without you. I won’t. Kill me! Kill me!” Mama jerked away from him, and the door slammed shut. “Oh, no,” she whimpered. Her face became the mirror of his, her mouth as wide, her neck as rigid. “Kill me,” he said again, louder. “Kill me.” He butted his head into the metal door, pulled back, and rammed again. He shouted every time his head hit, the thuds punctuating the cries. “Kill me. Kill me.” Mama was so close I could have touched her, but her head was turned away, turned to Glen. I could not reach her. “Oh, God,” she cried, and I let go of the steering wheel. “No,” I whispered, but Mama didn’t hear me. “Glen!” she said. “Glen!” She moaned and covered her face with her hands. Her body shook as she sobbed. Mine shook as I watched her. “Glen, stop,” she said. “Stop.” She grabbed his head, wrapping her fingers over his forehead to block the impact of his blows. “Stop.” There was blood on her fingers. She was crying. He was still. I closed my eyes. “No,” I said again.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  18 [image file=image_rsrc2PR.jpg] Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies. It was that way with Mama and Daddy Glen. Aunt Raylene offered to let us all come stay with her, but Mama wouldn’t consider it. The one day Daddy Glen spent in the hospital, she moved us into an apartment over the Fish Market just a few blocks from the boarded-up windows of Woolworth’s. Every morning, I had to walk past those windows to get to the intersection where the bus picked us up for school. I saw the workmen replacing the shattered display windows with new plate glass panels, and one day I saw a very harassed-looking Tyler Highgarden supervising while box after box of dimestore notions was carried through the repaired doors. He never even looked in my direction, but I still felt the hair on the back of my neck rise up stiff and electrical. If everything hadn’t been so confused, I might have told Mama what I’d done. But Mama and I did not talk at all. It was a two-room apartment, one bedroom and a larger room that served for everything else. The kitchen was a stove, icebox, and sink in a little alcove to the side of the bedroom door. The bathroom smelled of damp, mildew, and fish, the latter seeping up from the shop below. It was dark, with dirty windows we had to scrub repeatedly to get clean. The only cheerful thing in the whole place was the blue-flowered wallpaper that set the kitchen area off from the rest of the front room. When I sat at the table to do my homework I always faced that wallpaper. I didn’t want to look at Reese, camped out in the bedroom with her coloring books and angry scowls, or at Mama, sitting wordless over on the couch, smoking, wiping her eyes, and listening to the radio. Mama had left the television set behind, left her washer, most of her furniture and dishes, and all of her knickknacks and good silverware. She had brought the sewing machine, the ironing board, our clothes, and most of hers. Since we hadn’t been there to help her pack, it was hard to figure out how she had decided what to take and what to leave, and since she clearly didn’t want to talk, it was impossible to ask. Reese complained about the television and her bicycle, but Mama just said she’d get us new ones in time. I didn’t question her, didn’t complain, barely spoke.