lilbrattyteen's Nonfiction Challenge
CharlasNon-Fiction Challenge / Journal
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1JDHomrighausen
Greetings,
Just rejoined LT after a lengthy interlude. I'm posting my journal on Club Read (librarything.com/topic/137522) but decided to put it here too. Sorry if anyone sees repeats!
I'm 22, in university, majoring in religious studies and English and minoring in Greek. I intend to be an academic and for some time my interests have run to interreligious dialogue, mythology, biblical studies, mysticism, psychology, and spirituality. Specifically I am a Roman Catholic who has also been touched by Zen Buddhism. Don't ask me to make sense of it.
My readings tend to religion, psychology, and philosophy. Right now I'm in the middle of:
Dreamworlds of Shamanism and Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Place by Angela Sumegi
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
True and False Reform in the Church by Yves Congar
I recently finished Social and Cultural Anthropology: a Very Short Introduction and posted about it in my Club Read journal.
I'm also in a Buddhist Studies program in Nepal for the summer and have a metric ton of reading for that.
Just rejoined LT after a lengthy interlude. I'm posting my journal on Club Read (librarything.com/topic/137522) but decided to put it here too. Sorry if anyone sees repeats!
I'm 22, in university, majoring in religious studies and English and minoring in Greek. I intend to be an academic and for some time my interests have run to interreligious dialogue, mythology, biblical studies, mysticism, psychology, and spirituality. Specifically I am a Roman Catholic who has also been touched by Zen Buddhism. Don't ask me to make sense of it.
My readings tend to religion, psychology, and philosophy. Right now I'm in the middle of:
Dreamworlds of Shamanism and Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Place by Angela Sumegi
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
True and False Reform in the Church by Yves Congar
I recently finished Social and Cultural Anthropology: a Very Short Introduction and posted about it in my Club Read journal.
I'm also in a Buddhist Studies program in Nepal for the summer and have a metric ton of reading for that.
2JDHomrighausen
What the hell, why not.
Social and Cultural Anthropology: a Very Short Introduction, by John Monaghan
Finished 7/2/12
Now that I made my aspiration to read two books a week for this coming year of my life, I have already discovered the temptation to just read two *short* books every week. The Very Short Introduction series fills this need, and has provided me with such little tomes as Globalization: a Very Short Introduction and Continental Philosophy: a Very Short Introduction (which actually was so concise it made my head hurt). Monaghan's book, co-written with friend and fellow anthropologist Peter Just, was definitely worth reading, inspired by discussions with a friend who studies anthropology.
Monaghan and Just (hereafter MJ) explain that anthropology is a qualitative, interpretive social science that began in the discourses of colonialism and natural science in the 19th century. Early thinkers were interested in cultural evolution, or broad schemes of how culture develops, and wanted to understand culture by looking at its simplest expression: primitive society. So early anthropologists attempted to find 'primitive' tribes 'untouched' by modernity. Most of these early aims were later found aimless.
The authors combine discussion of contemporary anthropological work with some of the intellectual history of the discipline. In the second chapter, on culture, the term was defined as learned behavior passed down in society. Humans rely on "cultural glasses" to frame all actions and experiences. Sapir even argued for a king of cognitive relativism, in which the way culture (especially language) is structured can lead totally different worlds of understanding of a supposedly simple event. Yet how does one isolate a 'culture'? Is 'America' a culture? California? San Francisco? The Haight?
A lot of the stuff in the religion chapter was review for me. MJ discussed Durkheim's theory that religion's object of worship symbolically stands for the society. For example, YHWH would function as a pointer to the totality of Israelite society, which provides the sort of nomos and life meaning that YHWH is portrayed as doing in the Tanakh. Religion is a model for society and vice versa, as is shown by the fact that the Mosaic covenant in Exodus is patterned after a suzerein treaty between two unequal parties. Cultural change touches religion, particularly leading to millenial movements, cargo cults, charismatic prophets, and syncretistic adoption of an imported missionary religion.
But the most interesting chapter was on different cultures' approchaes to personhood. Some cultures consider one's person to extend beyond the body, perhaps resting in a spirit animal one experiences the consciousness of in dreams. Some cultures consider biological humans outside the realm of personhood, such as babies born a particular time of the year, or include non-homo sapiens in that realm such as rice. I wish they would have addressed some of the psychiatric issues there, such as how MPD is conceptualized in different cultures and perhaps even functions in possession states.
I've always been attracted to the anthropological perspective, and find it useful to understand my own religion and the cultural logic of the forms it takes. I'm not as much a fan of the kind of numbers-driven research more popular in sociology. As MJ point out, numbers don't say much, but the deep context understood by the ethnographer in the field does. MJ's concise work is a definite plus, far better than plowing through an undergraduate textbook. Best of all are the number of recommended works, including examples of ethnographies to get me started.
Rating: 4/5
Social and Cultural Anthropology: a Very Short Introduction, by John Monaghan
Finished 7/2/12
Now that I made my aspiration to read two books a week for this coming year of my life, I have already discovered the temptation to just read two *short* books every week. The Very Short Introduction series fills this need, and has provided me with such little tomes as Globalization: a Very Short Introduction and Continental Philosophy: a Very Short Introduction (which actually was so concise it made my head hurt). Monaghan's book, co-written with friend and fellow anthropologist Peter Just, was definitely worth reading, inspired by discussions with a friend who studies anthropology.
Monaghan and Just (hereafter MJ) explain that anthropology is a qualitative, interpretive social science that began in the discourses of colonialism and natural science in the 19th century. Early thinkers were interested in cultural evolution, or broad schemes of how culture develops, and wanted to understand culture by looking at its simplest expression: primitive society. So early anthropologists attempted to find 'primitive' tribes 'untouched' by modernity. Most of these early aims were later found aimless.
The authors combine discussion of contemporary anthropological work with some of the intellectual history of the discipline. In the second chapter, on culture, the term was defined as learned behavior passed down in society. Humans rely on "cultural glasses" to frame all actions and experiences. Sapir even argued for a king of cognitive relativism, in which the way culture (especially language) is structured can lead totally different worlds of understanding of a supposedly simple event. Yet how does one isolate a 'culture'? Is 'America' a culture? California? San Francisco? The Haight?
A lot of the stuff in the religion chapter was review for me. MJ discussed Durkheim's theory that religion's object of worship symbolically stands for the society. For example, YHWH would function as a pointer to the totality of Israelite society, which provides the sort of nomos and life meaning that YHWH is portrayed as doing in the Tanakh. Religion is a model for society and vice versa, as is shown by the fact that the Mosaic covenant in Exodus is patterned after a suzerein treaty between two unequal parties. Cultural change touches religion, particularly leading to millenial movements, cargo cults, charismatic prophets, and syncretistic adoption of an imported missionary religion.
But the most interesting chapter was on different cultures' approchaes to personhood. Some cultures consider one's person to extend beyond the body, perhaps resting in a spirit animal one experiences the consciousness of in dreams. Some cultures consider biological humans outside the realm of personhood, such as babies born a particular time of the year, or include non-homo sapiens in that realm such as rice. I wish they would have addressed some of the psychiatric issues there, such as how MPD is conceptualized in different cultures and perhaps even functions in possession states.
I've always been attracted to the anthropological perspective, and find it useful to understand my own religion and the cultural logic of the forms it takes. I'm not as much a fan of the kind of numbers-driven research more popular in sociology. As MJ point out, numbers don't say much, but the deep context understood by the ethnographer in the field does. MJ's concise work is a definite plus, far better than plowing through an undergraduate textbook. Best of all are the number of recommended works, including examples of ethnographies to get me started.
Rating: 4/5
3kidzdoc
Excellent review of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Jonathan. I'll move it up a bit higher on my TBR list.
4The_Hibernator
Yes, that is a great review of Social and Cultural Anthropology, I'll keep an eye out for it. :)
5JDHomrighausen
Dreamworlds of Shamanism and Tibetan Buddhism: The Third Place, by Angela Sumegi
Finished 7/6/12
Though I am interested in dreaming and religion, I only ran into this book because she is a professor of a friend's. I'm glad I did. Sumegi's book explores theories and practices of dream interpretation in Buddhism and shamanism and how they come together in interesting ways in Tibetan Buddhism. Although its dense style reads like the doctoral dissertation it was based on, her book provided me with a wealth of information. One of the central questions in her book is how two traditions with very different cosmologies and soteriologies end up sharing similar practices.
Sumegi begins by describing the nature of shamanism as a construct in anthropology and religious studies. Shamanic traditions, she writes, rely on an animistic worldview in which all (or many) things have spirits: disease spirits, weather spirits, mountain spirits, etc. A shaman is a 'ritual specialist' who goes into altered states of consciousness in order to communite with these spirits to fix a problem in his or her community. For example, if someone is sick, the shaman can make a deal with, appease, or even fight the disease spirit to make them go away. This happens in different types of ASCs, from psychoactive plants to the dreams that she focuses on. Shamans have the power to deal with the liminal aspects of human existence such as the lines between life and death and waking and dreaming. These lines tend to be blurred, so that dream influences reality.
Sumegi next dives into theories of dream in the Buddhist context. Because Buddhism arose from Vedic Hinduism, she turns to the Vedas and early Indian Buddhism for background to Tibetan Buddhism. She finds an ambivalence toward dreaming in these traditions. For example, Vedic Hinduism sometimes saw dreams as illusory mental creations, sometimes as real explorations of other realms, and other times as a discovery of the Atman. Like shamanism, Vedic Hinduism stressed the interdependence and hidden relations at work in all things, and the need for ritual specialists (Brahmins) to interact with these relations and the liminal aspects of human life. Nightmares were even considered evil deities one had to protect against with amulets or spells.
Early Buddhism and the later Mahayana tradition took over this ambivalence toward dreams, which Sumegi explores in the third chapter. Because Buddhism tries to overcome concretizing the reality of appearances in waking life, dreams (another state in which one does that) were seen as more illusion. At the same time, dreams were used on the path to liberation. Dream was used as a simile for waking life, which is impermanent and transitory in its true nature. Adepts were encouraged to view all of reality as a dream. Dreams could also be a source of revelation in which one could encounter Buddha or a Buddhist saint who would provide teaching in the dream. Dreams could even be an omen whose validity was determined in large part by the moral merit of the dreamer. Dreams play a large role in the myths of the Buddha's life, from his mother Maya being impregnated in a dream to an ascetic foreseeing Siddhartha's paths of great king or spiritual liberator of humanity in a dream. Dreams also portent various stages on the path to Buddhahood, as shown by the "Five Great Dreams of a Buddha" list. In this context, dream interpretation could be both a matter of omens for practical life or tied into Buddhist liberation. But the category of dreams that were just memory or created experience was also at play. Dreams were viewed with both interest and suspicion by the tradition.
Sumegi's fourth chapter explores the history of Tibetan Buddhism, Tantric practices, and shamanism. In its early years in Tibet, Buddhism had harsh competition with the indigenous shamanic practices such as Bon. Clerics in both traditions would do exorcism, healing, divination, and other folk rituals. Sumegi argues that Tibetans had three main goals in their religious system: Buddhic, Karmic, and pragmatic. On the Buddhic level, dreams worked their way into Tantric practice. This development of the Vajrayana school of Buddhism in Tibetan sought to provide an intense, fast track to enlightenment. Despite all the sex Westerners assume "Tantra" refers to, that is actually a small part of these practices involving deities. One Tantric practice is dream yoga, which goes beyond dreams as omens or metaphors for the nature of reality, and uses dreams as an arena of practice. On the Karmic level, Tibetans saw a parallel between the transition from
life -> death -> bardo (realm between rebirths) -> life
and
waking -> dreamless sleep -> dreams -> waking
If one learned to be cognizant in dreams and recognize dream states, then one could also be cognizant of the process of rebirth. Perhaps this would lead to a better rebirth (?). On the pragmatic level, lamas would even compete with local shamans, showing that they were better at these rituals, better at influencing the deities. At the same time, the lamas would emphasize the different orientation they had to these rituals. They were counseled to be detached from these omens and rituals, and their moral path emphasized perfection and the overcoming of ignorance rather than the moral harmony of good and evil in the shamanic tradition. Lamas took refuge in the Three Jewels, while shamans took 'refuge' in local deities. In this way the lamas would perform shamanic rituals while differentiating themselves from shamans by their intentions and soteriological ends.
Sumegi's final chapter explores contemporary dream practice in Tibetan Buddhism, finding a lot of this similar ambivalence and appropriation of shamanic practice. Even now, lamas perform divinations for Tibetans alongside meditation instruction for Westeners! Sumegi looks at traditional Tibetan medicine, hagiography and biography for material. Medical texts list seven different types of dreams, using them as part of diagnosing an illness. The night is divided into three parts, and only dreams in the third part of the night are valid omens. Buddhist teachers also view dreams as a possible sign of good practice or a deity consenting to a deity practice. Dreams can also be a site of tendrels, or auspicious omens. Tendrels are a connection between different things arising from the interdependence of reality, connections often hidden. Perhaps this is similar to Jung's concept of synchronicity.
While Sumegi has boatloads of information on the connection between psychology, culture, and religion, her book isn't very clear about its own argument. Sumegi's main point seems to be that the ambivalence about dreams in the Buddhist tradition springs not from a distinction between elite, doctrinal Buddhism and folk Buddhism, but instead from the interplay between absolute truth (appearances, concrete things) and ultimate truth (emptiness). She quotes Milarepa, who wrote that he had transcended the illusion of dreams - which was what allowed him to interpret them! And while Sumegi does make some interesting points about the differing soteriologies of Buddhism and shamanism, I wish she had done more analysis and less literature review. For example, she provided several lists of different dream symbols and motifs in Tibetan Buddhism, but I was left curious how the tradition decided whether a motif was a good or bad omen. So not the best academic book in the world, the amount of information in it made it worth my time. If you really want to blaze through this book, the most valuable information was in chapters 1, 4, and 5.
This book raises another question for me: how does one tradition appropriate another's practice into its own worldview and spiritual path? Buddhists took in shamanic ritual - did that distort either? As I see Christians and Jews taking up Buddhist meditative practices, I wonder if there are parallels between the two.
Rating: 3/5
Finished 7/6/12
Though I am interested in dreaming and religion, I only ran into this book because she is a professor of a friend's. I'm glad I did. Sumegi's book explores theories and practices of dream interpretation in Buddhism and shamanism and how they come together in interesting ways in Tibetan Buddhism. Although its dense style reads like the doctoral dissertation it was based on, her book provided me with a wealth of information. One of the central questions in her book is how two traditions with very different cosmologies and soteriologies end up sharing similar practices.
Sumegi begins by describing the nature of shamanism as a construct in anthropology and religious studies. Shamanic traditions, she writes, rely on an animistic worldview in which all (or many) things have spirits: disease spirits, weather spirits, mountain spirits, etc. A shaman is a 'ritual specialist' who goes into altered states of consciousness in order to communite with these spirits to fix a problem in his or her community. For example, if someone is sick, the shaman can make a deal with, appease, or even fight the disease spirit to make them go away. This happens in different types of ASCs, from psychoactive plants to the dreams that she focuses on. Shamans have the power to deal with the liminal aspects of human existence such as the lines between life and death and waking and dreaming. These lines tend to be blurred, so that dream influences reality.
Sumegi next dives into theories of dream in the Buddhist context. Because Buddhism arose from Vedic Hinduism, she turns to the Vedas and early Indian Buddhism for background to Tibetan Buddhism. She finds an ambivalence toward dreaming in these traditions. For example, Vedic Hinduism sometimes saw dreams as illusory mental creations, sometimes as real explorations of other realms, and other times as a discovery of the Atman. Like shamanism, Vedic Hinduism stressed the interdependence and hidden relations at work in all things, and the need for ritual specialists (Brahmins) to interact with these relations and the liminal aspects of human life. Nightmares were even considered evil deities one had to protect against with amulets or spells.
Early Buddhism and the later Mahayana tradition took over this ambivalence toward dreams, which Sumegi explores in the third chapter. Because Buddhism tries to overcome concretizing the reality of appearances in waking life, dreams (another state in which one does that) were seen as more illusion. At the same time, dreams were used on the path to liberation. Dream was used as a simile for waking life, which is impermanent and transitory in its true nature. Adepts were encouraged to view all of reality as a dream. Dreams could also be a source of revelation in which one could encounter Buddha or a Buddhist saint who would provide teaching in the dream. Dreams could even be an omen whose validity was determined in large part by the moral merit of the dreamer. Dreams play a large role in the myths of the Buddha's life, from his mother Maya being impregnated in a dream to an ascetic foreseeing Siddhartha's paths of great king or spiritual liberator of humanity in a dream. Dreams also portent various stages on the path to Buddhahood, as shown by the "Five Great Dreams of a Buddha" list. In this context, dream interpretation could be both a matter of omens for practical life or tied into Buddhist liberation. But the category of dreams that were just memory or created experience was also at play. Dreams were viewed with both interest and suspicion by the tradition.
Sumegi's fourth chapter explores the history of Tibetan Buddhism, Tantric practices, and shamanism. In its early years in Tibet, Buddhism had harsh competition with the indigenous shamanic practices such as Bon. Clerics in both traditions would do exorcism, healing, divination, and other folk rituals. Sumegi argues that Tibetans had three main goals in their religious system: Buddhic, Karmic, and pragmatic. On the Buddhic level, dreams worked their way into Tantric practice. This development of the Vajrayana school of Buddhism in Tibetan sought to provide an intense, fast track to enlightenment. Despite all the sex Westerners assume "Tantra" refers to, that is actually a small part of these practices involving deities. One Tantric practice is dream yoga, which goes beyond dreams as omens or metaphors for the nature of reality, and uses dreams as an arena of practice. On the Karmic level, Tibetans saw a parallel between the transition from
life -> death -> bardo (realm between rebirths) -> life
and
waking -> dreamless sleep -> dreams -> waking
If one learned to be cognizant in dreams and recognize dream states, then one could also be cognizant of the process of rebirth. Perhaps this would lead to a better rebirth (?). On the pragmatic level, lamas would even compete with local shamans, showing that they were better at these rituals, better at influencing the deities. At the same time, the lamas would emphasize the different orientation they had to these rituals. They were counseled to be detached from these omens and rituals, and their moral path emphasized perfection and the overcoming of ignorance rather than the moral harmony of good and evil in the shamanic tradition. Lamas took refuge in the Three Jewels, while shamans took 'refuge' in local deities. In this way the lamas would perform shamanic rituals while differentiating themselves from shamans by their intentions and soteriological ends.
Sumegi's final chapter explores contemporary dream practice in Tibetan Buddhism, finding a lot of this similar ambivalence and appropriation of shamanic practice. Even now, lamas perform divinations for Tibetans alongside meditation instruction for Westeners! Sumegi looks at traditional Tibetan medicine, hagiography and biography for material. Medical texts list seven different types of dreams, using them as part of diagnosing an illness. The night is divided into three parts, and only dreams in the third part of the night are valid omens. Buddhist teachers also view dreams as a possible sign of good practice or a deity consenting to a deity practice. Dreams can also be a site of tendrels, or auspicious omens. Tendrels are a connection between different things arising from the interdependence of reality, connections often hidden. Perhaps this is similar to Jung's concept of synchronicity.
While Sumegi has boatloads of information on the connection between psychology, culture, and religion, her book isn't very clear about its own argument. Sumegi's main point seems to be that the ambivalence about dreams in the Buddhist tradition springs not from a distinction between elite, doctrinal Buddhism and folk Buddhism, but instead from the interplay between absolute truth (appearances, concrete things) and ultimate truth (emptiness). She quotes Milarepa, who wrote that he had transcended the illusion of dreams - which was what allowed him to interpret them! And while Sumegi does make some interesting points about the differing soteriologies of Buddhism and shamanism, I wish she had done more analysis and less literature review. For example, she provided several lists of different dream symbols and motifs in Tibetan Buddhism, but I was left curious how the tradition decided whether a motif was a good or bad omen. So not the best academic book in the world, the amount of information in it made it worth my time. If you really want to blaze through this book, the most valuable information was in chapters 1, 4, and 5.
This book raises another question for me: how does one tradition appropriate another's practice into its own worldview and spiritual path? Buddhists took in shamanic ritual - did that distort either? As I see Christians and Jews taking up Buddhist meditative practices, I wonder if there are parallels between the two.
Rating: 3/5
6qebo
1: Sorry if anyone sees repeats!
It's fairly typical for this group to be the non-fiction subset of books listed elsewhere. Welcome! Nepal would seem a cool place to spend the summer.
2: which actually was so concise it made my head hurt
I've had that experience with other Very Short Introductions. Short, but a lot is packed in.
It's fairly typical for this group to be the non-fiction subset of books listed elsewhere. Welcome! Nepal would seem a cool place to spend the summer.
2: which actually was so concise it made my head hurt
I've had that experience with other Very Short Introductions. Short, but a lot is packed in.
7JDHomrighausen
Hi qebo! I was just looking at your journal. You make me feel guilty for not reading any science books. :P
The Continental Philosophy VSI was too short to really explain stuff, but the Globalization one is good. On my soon-TBR list I have Literary Theory: a Very Short Introduction and Myth: a Very Short Introduction.
The Continental Philosophy VSI was too short to really explain stuff, but the Globalization one is good. On my soon-TBR list I have Literary Theory: a Very Short Introduction and Myth: a Very Short Introduction.
8aulsmith
The Myth VSI answered a lot of questions for me and helped me sort through a huge backlog of books, most of which I can now discard.
9qebo
7: You have plenty of time. I, on the other hand, regret all the books that I didn't read in the past 30 years.
10JDHomrighausen
> 9
Being a college student presents its own issues. I tend to read around my major because those are the books being mentioned in class and books I use for essays. To branch out into something totally different (politics, science) is harder.
I've tended to avoid science classes as well, because I tend to think in terms of abstractions and arguments and that is not how intro-level science classes I've been in are taught. For example, physical anthropology was very valuable because now I can explain the theory of evolution, but memorizing all the fossil names and lineage of homo sapiens ancestors was rather tedious. It's a vicious cycle. So I admire that you read a lot of science stuff.
Being a college student presents its own issues. I tend to read around my major because those are the books being mentioned in class and books I use for essays. To branch out into something totally different (politics, science) is harder.
I've tended to avoid science classes as well, because I tend to think in terms of abstractions and arguments and that is not how intro-level science classes I've been in are taught. For example, physical anthropology was very valuable because now I can explain the theory of evolution, but memorizing all the fossil names and lineage of homo sapiens ancestors was rather tedious. It's a vicious cycle. So I admire that you read a lot of science stuff.
11qebo
Ah, now if I could do college over again, I'd want to stuff information into my brain, along with theory. :-) Yeah, what's stopping me now, but I kinda do enough pragmatic tedium as paid employment, and it's about as much as I can manage to switch gears to the layman level of something different in the off hours. It's a limitation though. I'm trying to read a book on plant evolution for example, and it should be fascinating, but I'm tripped up multiple times per paragraph by unfamiliar botanical terms, and I haven't yet dredged up the necessary intensity to learn them as I would for a test. I can completely see why you'd stick to the general themes of your major for now.
12The_Hibernator
>10 JDHomrighausen: I'd forgotten how much memorization there is in introductory science classes. It's not like that when you get into the advanced classes, but there's no point in taking a whole bunch of intro classes that are outside your major. If you want to learn about science, you can always read some books and not feel forced to memorize anything. :)
13JDHomrighausen
> 12
I'm not a good memorizer, LOL. Part of the reason I like classes like literature, religious studies, and philosophy is you don't need a lot of background knowledge to have good discussions and debates about various issues. It seems like in science you need a lot of the basic terminology and concepts from lower-level classes to really even understand the debates that go on in science. Compare that to my experience TAing for Philo 101 classes where students were having great discussion groups about God's existence and free will by the 3rd-4th week of class.
I'm not a good memorizer, LOL. Part of the reason I like classes like literature, religious studies, and philosophy is you don't need a lot of background knowledge to have good discussions and debates about various issues. It seems like in science you need a lot of the basic terminology and concepts from lower-level classes to really even understand the debates that go on in science. Compare that to my experience TAing for Philo 101 classes where students were having great discussion groups about God's existence and free will by the 3rd-4th week of class.
14JDHomrighausen
The Christ and the Bodhisattva, ed. Donald S. Lopez and Steven C. Rockefeller
Finished 7/8/12
This anthology is a collection of talks given at a conference in 1985 at Middlebury College. Big-name scholars and religious figures were invited to give talks related to the title's theme. When I picked this volume up at the book store and saw names like Donald S. Lopez, Ann Ulanov, Brother David Steindl-Rast, Robert Thurman, and the Dalai Lama, I knew I could not go wrong.
And I didn't. My favorite essays were Thurman's, Ulanov's, and Steindl-Rast's. Thurman's essay details the path of the bodhisattva, a lot of which I've been learning in my classes here in Kathmandu. Like the Christ, the bodhisattva is a courageous "savior" of humanity in Mahayana Buddhism's soteriological system. The bodhisattva takes a vow to strive for liberation, not just for themselves but for all sentient beings. As such a bodhisattva vow may take eons of rebirths to fulfill. The bodhisattva is constantly striving for wisdom (realization of emptiness) and boundless compassion. Thurman traces the development of the bodhisattva concept in Buddhism to the need for a more "messianic" way to practice, away from just monasticism. Once this ideal became established, writers such as Shantideva wrote beautiful treatises on the virtues of a bodhisattva, and methods of practice such the sevenfold precept and exchange of self for other came about. A bodhisattva considers their joy and suffering as important as everyone else's, and they will act as selflessly as possible to perfect their wisdom and compassion and increase others'. Thurman also explains some of the "apocalyptic" practices of Tantric or Vajrayana Buddhism and some tales of the divine bodhisattvas such as Manjusri and Avalokiteshvara. Overall his account of the bodhisattva and her virtues was very profound.
Ulanov, a Christian Jungian analyst, wrote an essay on "The God You Touch." Ulanov begins with the idea that the Christian God, the incarnate God, is not some abstract principle. This is a God you can touch, a God who touches you. Ulanov analyzes some of the psychological dynamics of this touch. She looks at how our fear of God's touch, of being transformed by some total Other, can make us try to put God into categories that She won't fit. Our efforts to make God relevant for today, or for women for example, run the risk of creating an idol. This touch can also be dangerous, for in order to begin to transcend one's self one must have a stable and sane ego-self. Yet this transcendence takes us back into the world, to show love for others, to bear our crosses with consent. Ulanov remarks that while depth psychology teaches we must respect our urge to bring our I-self into relation with a non-ego - in Jungian terms the unconscious. This requires us to detach from all the concerns and values of the I-self. Ulanov sees this as the point where psychology leaves off and theology takes over to tell us about this relationship with God.
I won't detail the rest of the essays, but since they came from a speech they all had an informal quality to them lacking in most academic writing. Langdon Gilkey wrote about the dynamic between affirming and negating the world in Christianity. Donald S. Lopez explained how the Dalai Lama tradition started and what the current one has undergone in his politically upsetting life. Overall, a great book, and the transcript of the panel discussion at the end is just dessert. I will leave you with some quotes from it below.
Rating: 5/5
"'Our heritage is now the world'...By that one means not that the religions will be watered down and syncretized and reduced to one form, but rather the development of a world religious consciousness means that people in their religious lives and ethical lives will be able to draw on the full richness of all the many different religious traditions in the world." (229)
"The differences between Buddhism and Christianity have generated in me a certain sense of the importance of history, of the importance of social action ... and a certain rediscovery of the element of grace in Buddhism, which I think is there but I had missed it until I started talking to Christians and suddenly realized it is actually there." (237)
"On this planet I think there are more than four billion human beings. I usually see them in three cateories: one category, I think the majority, are those who are simply neglecting any spiritual value, simply concentrating on money. Then, another cateory includes those who accept the value of religion and follow it as much as they can. Another category deliberately abandons and denies any value of religion. ... There is a difference in the amount of mental peace, mental satisfaction, inner stability you see in these two groups. I feel that the people who have some spiritual belief have some basis for their hope and courage." - His Holiness the Dalai Lama (249)
Finished 7/8/12
This anthology is a collection of talks given at a conference in 1985 at Middlebury College. Big-name scholars and religious figures were invited to give talks related to the title's theme. When I picked this volume up at the book store and saw names like Donald S. Lopez, Ann Ulanov, Brother David Steindl-Rast, Robert Thurman, and the Dalai Lama, I knew I could not go wrong.
And I didn't. My favorite essays were Thurman's, Ulanov's, and Steindl-Rast's. Thurman's essay details the path of the bodhisattva, a lot of which I've been learning in my classes here in Kathmandu. Like the Christ, the bodhisattva is a courageous "savior" of humanity in Mahayana Buddhism's soteriological system. The bodhisattva takes a vow to strive for liberation, not just for themselves but for all sentient beings. As such a bodhisattva vow may take eons of rebirths to fulfill. The bodhisattva is constantly striving for wisdom (realization of emptiness) and boundless compassion. Thurman traces the development of the bodhisattva concept in Buddhism to the need for a more "messianic" way to practice, away from just monasticism. Once this ideal became established, writers such as Shantideva wrote beautiful treatises on the virtues of a bodhisattva, and methods of practice such the sevenfold precept and exchange of self for other came about. A bodhisattva considers their joy and suffering as important as everyone else's, and they will act as selflessly as possible to perfect their wisdom and compassion and increase others'. Thurman also explains some of the "apocalyptic" practices of Tantric or Vajrayana Buddhism and some tales of the divine bodhisattvas such as Manjusri and Avalokiteshvara. Overall his account of the bodhisattva and her virtues was very profound.
Ulanov, a Christian Jungian analyst, wrote an essay on "The God You Touch." Ulanov begins with the idea that the Christian God, the incarnate God, is not some abstract principle. This is a God you can touch, a God who touches you. Ulanov analyzes some of the psychological dynamics of this touch. She looks at how our fear of God's touch, of being transformed by some total Other, can make us try to put God into categories that She won't fit. Our efforts to make God relevant for today, or for women for example, run the risk of creating an idol. This touch can also be dangerous, for in order to begin to transcend one's self one must have a stable and sane ego-self. Yet this transcendence takes us back into the world, to show love for others, to bear our crosses with consent. Ulanov remarks that while depth psychology teaches we must respect our urge to bring our I-self into relation with a non-ego - in Jungian terms the unconscious. This requires us to detach from all the concerns and values of the I-self. Ulanov sees this as the point where psychology leaves off and theology takes over to tell us about this relationship with God.
I won't detail the rest of the essays, but since they came from a speech they all had an informal quality to them lacking in most academic writing. Langdon Gilkey wrote about the dynamic between affirming and negating the world in Christianity. Donald S. Lopez explained how the Dalai Lama tradition started and what the current one has undergone in his politically upsetting life. Overall, a great book, and the transcript of the panel discussion at the end is just dessert. I will leave you with some quotes from it below.
Rating: 5/5
"'Our heritage is now the world'...By that one means not that the religions will be watered down and syncretized and reduced to one form, but rather the development of a world religious consciousness means that people in their religious lives and ethical lives will be able to draw on the full richness of all the many different religious traditions in the world." (229)
"The differences between Buddhism and Christianity have generated in me a certain sense of the importance of history, of the importance of social action ... and a certain rediscovery of the element of grace in Buddhism, which I think is there but I had missed it until I started talking to Christians and suddenly realized it is actually there." (237)
"On this planet I think there are more than four billion human beings. I usually see them in three cateories: one category, I think the majority, are those who are simply neglecting any spiritual value, simply concentrating on money. Then, another cateory includes those who accept the value of religion and follow it as much as they can. Another category deliberately abandons and denies any value of religion. ... There is a difference in the amount of mental peace, mental satisfaction, inner stability you see in these two groups. I feel that the people who have some spiritual belief have some basis for their hope and courage." - His Holiness the Dalai Lama (249)
15JDHomrighausen
In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language, by Joel Hoffman
Finished 7/13/12
One of my systematic and efficient ways to approach my TBR pile in the next year (which includes physical books, Kindle books, and a 14-page Amazon wishlist) is by clumping them into reading themes of 5-10 books to be read in succession. I'm hoping that this will not only promote synergy from reading many books on the same topic, but also help me tackle entire sections of my library.
The current topic: Biblical Hebrew language and literature. I've spent a year in Biblical Hebrew and start Greek this fall. While studying Hebrew I wished I had some auxiliary texts that would have fun info about Hebrew without being dense textbooks. This is that theme.
Joel Hoffman: In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language
Joel Hoffman: And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning
Robert Chisholm: From Exegesis to Exposition
Moises Silva: God, Language, and Scripture: Reading the Bible in the Light of General Linguistics
Joseph Lowin: Hebrew Talk: 101 Hebrew Roots and the Stories They Tell
Robert Alter: The Art of Biblical Poetry
Robert Alter: The Art of Biblical Narrative
In that spirit, I've already finished Joel Hoffman's In The Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. I remember one day studying with the rabbi, I asked him if modern Hebrew is really the same as Biblical Hebrew. He chuckled and said that Israelis like to think it is. Hoffman's work disentangles the many different kinds of Hebrew in ancient documents. He brings together his background in Biblical scholarship and linguistics to provide a readable and insightful history of the Hebrew language useful for the student of Hebrew. He demystifies a lot of the religious ideology surrounding Hebrew. Readers should not that Hoffman is Jewish so for him "the Bible" does not include the New Testament. But that should not deter any Christians from reading this valuable work. Here I will roughly sum up each chapter and end with my thoughts.
After laying out his scientific modus operandi, Hoffman sets forth his theory in chapter three that Hebrew was the first alphabetic language. He sets forth four different types of writing systems:
1. Logographic, such as Chinese;
2. Syllabic;
3. Consonantal (early Hebrew); and
4. Alphabetic.
Hoffman argues (from admittedly scant evidence) that around 1000 BCE, three letters used for consonants were adapted to also be used as vowels. These letters were yud, hey, and vav, which respectly could stand for i/e, a/ah, and i/u. Though this was not the full development of vowel pointing as used by the Masoretes, even these few vowels were a sea change. The complicated and unphonetic system of Hebrew writing had worked because only a few highly trained scribes ever wrote, but it also restricted writing to these highly trained scribes. Alphabetic systems made writing possible. By taking the Phoenician alphabet and adapting it to express vowel sounds, Hebrew-speakers revolutionized human language.
In chapter four, "Magic Letters and the Name of God," Hoffman reviews how crucial Hebrew's alphabet is. Though some of these links are more tenuous than others, Hoffman traces many writing systems of the world back to Hebrew: Roman and Cyrillic through Greek, Arabic through Aramaic, and even Indian writing systems. Hoffman also argues that these new vocalic letters, yud, hey, and vav, became cultural trademarks for Hebrews, marks of pride. This explains why Sarai became Sarah, why the plural of El became Elohim rather than Elim, and even why these three letters comprise the Tetgrammaton, the sacred name of God in the Torah. Even in later manuscripts written in later "Block Hebrew" (like a more modern font), the Tetragrammaton was written in an archaic style, as if it was a symbol for something. Furthermore, there is no agreed-on etymology for this unpronounceable name, and Hoffman takes care of that by saying there need be none.
In chapter five, "The Masoretes," Hoffman explores these scribal schools and some of their differences. Though we often speak of this group who worked from 600-800 CE as unitary, in fact there were many different schools of Masoretes: Tiberian, Babylonian, Palestinian, and so on. Masoretes are not only important for introducing punctuation and vowel pointings (diacritics) into the text, making pronunciation must more explicit, but they also produced the oldest Hebrew Bible manuscript known. This is the Leningrad Codex (from 1009 CE), which modern Hebrew Bibles are based on. Since the Lengingrad Codex uses the Tiberian pointing system, this school effectively won out over the others. Part of the Masoretes' diacritic system is the dagesh, which affects some consonants (the BeGaD KeFaT consonants) to make them either voiced or unvoiced. Despite this fanfare, some skepticism about the Masoretes remains. Hoffman argues (from some very technical data) that in at least one respect their writing system could not have matched spoken Hebrew, and so there could be other respects in which they invented rather than preserved the Bible's pronunciation. Since we have no pre-Masorete complete manuscripts we cannot know.
Chapter six, "Pronunciation," was pretty technical. The main question here is whether or not Tiberian Masoretic pronunciation was the same as Biblical pronunciation. Overall: probably not. But finding evidence for this is hard. Modern Hebrew is useless, as are comparisons to other Semitic languages of the time (known even less). Hoffman turns to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Tanakh. By looking at transliterations and doubled letters in the Septuagint, Hoffman finds that the Masoretes were fairly close to the original Biblical Hebrew in consonants but not vowel pronunciation. For example, the Masorete's "Chava" (Eve) was "Eua" in the Septuagint. So the later "v" was a "u" sound and the "ch" (the "throat-clearing" sound) was more like "h". By looking at this and Origen's Hexapla, Hoffman sums up the differences between Masoretic and Biblical Hebrew: the vav sound, the differences between stops and fricatives in the BeGaD KeFaT letters, and the vowels in general.
Chapter Seven leads us into the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS). Hoffman sums up the great story of how the scrolls were discovered, studied, and disseminated. In 1947 a Bedouin found some scrolls in a cave, scrolls that contained 2 copies of Isaiah, a commentary on Habukkuk, a targum of Genesis, an apocalyptic war scroll, and a list of rules for a community. After 10 more caves, 50 years, 15000 scrolls fragments, and decades of backstabbing and intrigue, the text of the Scrolls can be purchased in any bookstore. Through dating we can surmise that they were written from the 3rd century BCE to 68 CE. The DSS contain community rules, Halakhic texts, Biblical texts (both canonical and non), and literary, poetic, liturgical, eschatological, exegetical, and astrological texts. There is even a copper scroll listing burial places of golden treasure, none of which has ever been found.
The reigning theory is that the DSS were produced by Qumran, a religious community described by Josephus as apocalyptic and separatist. The DSS are the largest corpus of pre-Masorete Hebrew we have. We find that DSS scribes used more vowels than the Bible, adding yuds, heys, and vavs to make the text more phonetically clear. The Tetragrammaton was written in an archaic script. Grammatically, the DSS use double-plural compounds, like "tools of wars," and Biblically there are major and minor differences, includuing an entire added passage in Samuel 11.
Hoffman then moves into Biblical dialects for chapter 8. Again, it's silly to assume there is one "Biblical Hebrew." The Bible was written over hundreds of years and it stands to reason the writing system changed. After the exile in 586 BCE, a new trend known as "Late Biblical Hebrew" (LBH) emerged. LBH is the intermediate point between "Biblical Hebrew" and DSS Hebrew. Like DSS Hebrew, it adds extra vowels to give words "fuller" spellings, but unlike DSS lacks double-verb compounds. It also lacks the double verbs of BH, which were used to mark emphasis, e.g. "David fight fought." (David is particularly important for studying LBH because many of the comparisons are between Samuel/Kings and the later retellings in Chronicles.) One delightful result into different Hebrew dialects is the ability to look at a text's dialect and guess when it was written, though since dialects are differentiated by texts' composition dates this leads to a nice circularity. More importantly, how do we know LBH changes were actual changes in the Hebrew and not changes by later Masorete scribes? This seems unlikely, since if the Masorete scribes were editing for consistency they would edit out all differences between BH and LBH. Even spelling differences were not "covered up" by the Masoretes.
Chapter nine goes into "Post-Biblical Hebrew." One stage of this is Rabbinical Hebrew. When the Jews were under Persian rule, they learned Aramaic, and once under Greek rule learning Greek they were often trilingual. Then somewhere around 200 CE, Hebrew ceased being a spoken language and was only used for liturgy and study. Rabbinical Hebrew sources are mostly liturgical prayers, the Mishnah, and midrash. Rabbinical Hebrew shows far more diversity than Biblical Hebrew does - but perhaps that is only because rabbinical sources were copied less carefully and some scribes would "correct" rabbinical words to match Biblical ones. Rabbinical Hebrew uses double vowels to express consonants, and uses yud-nun to express plural nouns rather than only yud-mem (this was borrowed from Aramaic). It also brought in hundreds of loan words from Greek, often expressing concepts not in the Hebrew Bible such as "lawyer." The grammar was much like LHB, including double plural compounds. Hoffman hypothesizes that at some point Rabbinical Hebrew must have been spoken, because some of the changes it made would not have happened to a purely written language. However, it ended around 476 BC when it became a dead language, used only for literature. (I wish he had discussed if synagogues for the next millenium conducted services in vernacular.) Later forms of "non-spoken Hebrew" included Masoretic, Muslim Spain, and 18th century European Hasidim.
The real fun begins again with Modern Hebrew. In 1882, Ittamar Ben-Ave was born. He was the son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a talented linguaphile and Lithuanian Jew who wanted to bring back Hebrew as a spoken lingua franca of the Jewish world. He raised his son to only speak Hebrew, making his son the first native speaker of the language in ~1700 years. Ben-Yehuda, through popular dictionaries and coining his own words, encouraged other Jews to do the same, making 50,000 native speakers by World War I and 350,000 by the founding of Israel in 1948. Since then the number has shot up to six million. Modern Hebrew's pronunciation tends to be a mix of Sepharidic and Ashkenic, and its grammar has taken elements from German, Russian, and English (e.g. in word order). There still rage furious debates about issues such as:
- How to create new words - do we transliterate from foreign languages or keep the language "pure" and use Hebrew roots?
- Spelling - which is now in major crisis, particularly around vowels. The official vowel pointing rules of the Israeli Academy that dictates language are so arcane that even educated people can't remember them, so even standard spellings of many words are variant.
As a descriptive linguist Hoffman doesn't really care for these debates. And I have to agree.
The great thing about Hoffman's book is that he is technical without being too technical. Even a basic knowledge of the alphabet and pronunciation of Hebrew is enough to understand his book. This book has reinvigorated my study of Hebrew, a language of many firsts. I only wish he had talked a bit about the Vulgate, because Jerome translated from the Hebrew and I wonder if that would give us any clues about the Hebrew of Jerome's day.
(I'm sorry this is so LONG; I do this less to be readable and more to help me retain the material.)
Finished 7/13/12
One of my systematic and efficient ways to approach my TBR pile in the next year (which includes physical books, Kindle books, and a 14-page Amazon wishlist) is by clumping them into reading themes of 5-10 books to be read in succession. I'm hoping that this will not only promote synergy from reading many books on the same topic, but also help me tackle entire sections of my library.
The current topic: Biblical Hebrew language and literature. I've spent a year in Biblical Hebrew and start Greek this fall. While studying Hebrew I wished I had some auxiliary texts that would have fun info about Hebrew without being dense textbooks. This is that theme.
Joel Hoffman: In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language
Joel Hoffman: And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning
Robert Chisholm: From Exegesis to Exposition
Moises Silva: God, Language, and Scripture: Reading the Bible in the Light of General Linguistics
Joseph Lowin: Hebrew Talk: 101 Hebrew Roots and the Stories They Tell
Robert Alter: The Art of Biblical Poetry
Robert Alter: The Art of Biblical Narrative
In that spirit, I've already finished Joel Hoffman's In The Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. I remember one day studying with the rabbi, I asked him if modern Hebrew is really the same as Biblical Hebrew. He chuckled and said that Israelis like to think it is. Hoffman's work disentangles the many different kinds of Hebrew in ancient documents. He brings together his background in Biblical scholarship and linguistics to provide a readable and insightful history of the Hebrew language useful for the student of Hebrew. He demystifies a lot of the religious ideology surrounding Hebrew. Readers should not that Hoffman is Jewish so for him "the Bible" does not include the New Testament. But that should not deter any Christians from reading this valuable work. Here I will roughly sum up each chapter and end with my thoughts.
After laying out his scientific modus operandi, Hoffman sets forth his theory in chapter three that Hebrew was the first alphabetic language. He sets forth four different types of writing systems:
1. Logographic, such as Chinese;
2. Syllabic;
3. Consonantal (early Hebrew); and
4. Alphabetic.
Hoffman argues (from admittedly scant evidence) that around 1000 BCE, three letters used for consonants were adapted to also be used as vowels. These letters were yud, hey, and vav, which respectly could stand for i/e, a/ah, and i/u. Though this was not the full development of vowel pointing as used by the Masoretes, even these few vowels were a sea change. The complicated and unphonetic system of Hebrew writing had worked because only a few highly trained scribes ever wrote, but it also restricted writing to these highly trained scribes. Alphabetic systems made writing possible. By taking the Phoenician alphabet and adapting it to express vowel sounds, Hebrew-speakers revolutionized human language.
In chapter four, "Magic Letters and the Name of God," Hoffman reviews how crucial Hebrew's alphabet is. Though some of these links are more tenuous than others, Hoffman traces many writing systems of the world back to Hebrew: Roman and Cyrillic through Greek, Arabic through Aramaic, and even Indian writing systems. Hoffman also argues that these new vocalic letters, yud, hey, and vav, became cultural trademarks for Hebrews, marks of pride. This explains why Sarai became Sarah, why the plural of El became Elohim rather than Elim, and even why these three letters comprise the Tetgrammaton, the sacred name of God in the Torah. Even in later manuscripts written in later "Block Hebrew" (like a more modern font), the Tetragrammaton was written in an archaic style, as if it was a symbol for something. Furthermore, there is no agreed-on etymology for this unpronounceable name, and Hoffman takes care of that by saying there need be none.
In chapter five, "The Masoretes," Hoffman explores these scribal schools and some of their differences. Though we often speak of this group who worked from 600-800 CE as unitary, in fact there were many different schools of Masoretes: Tiberian, Babylonian, Palestinian, and so on. Masoretes are not only important for introducing punctuation and vowel pointings (diacritics) into the text, making pronunciation must more explicit, but they also produced the oldest Hebrew Bible manuscript known. This is the Leningrad Codex (from 1009 CE), which modern Hebrew Bibles are based on. Since the Lengingrad Codex uses the Tiberian pointing system, this school effectively won out over the others. Part of the Masoretes' diacritic system is the dagesh, which affects some consonants (the BeGaD KeFaT consonants) to make them either voiced or unvoiced. Despite this fanfare, some skepticism about the Masoretes remains. Hoffman argues (from some very technical data) that in at least one respect their writing system could not have matched spoken Hebrew, and so there could be other respects in which they invented rather than preserved the Bible's pronunciation. Since we have no pre-Masorete complete manuscripts we cannot know.
Chapter six, "Pronunciation," was pretty technical. The main question here is whether or not Tiberian Masoretic pronunciation was the same as Biblical pronunciation. Overall: probably not. But finding evidence for this is hard. Modern Hebrew is useless, as are comparisons to other Semitic languages of the time (known even less). Hoffman turns to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Tanakh. By looking at transliterations and doubled letters in the Septuagint, Hoffman finds that the Masoretes were fairly close to the original Biblical Hebrew in consonants but not vowel pronunciation. For example, the Masorete's "Chava" (Eve) was "Eua" in the Septuagint. So the later "v" was a "u" sound and the "ch" (the "throat-clearing" sound) was more like "h". By looking at this and Origen's Hexapla, Hoffman sums up the differences between Masoretic and Biblical Hebrew: the vav sound, the differences between stops and fricatives in the BeGaD KeFaT letters, and the vowels in general.
Chapter Seven leads us into the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS). Hoffman sums up the great story of how the scrolls were discovered, studied, and disseminated. In 1947 a Bedouin found some scrolls in a cave, scrolls that contained 2 copies of Isaiah, a commentary on Habukkuk, a targum of Genesis, an apocalyptic war scroll, and a list of rules for a community. After 10 more caves, 50 years, 15000 scrolls fragments, and decades of backstabbing and intrigue, the text of the Scrolls can be purchased in any bookstore. Through dating we can surmise that they were written from the 3rd century BCE to 68 CE. The DSS contain community rules, Halakhic texts, Biblical texts (both canonical and non), and literary, poetic, liturgical, eschatological, exegetical, and astrological texts. There is even a copper scroll listing burial places of golden treasure, none of which has ever been found.
The reigning theory is that the DSS were produced by Qumran, a religious community described by Josephus as apocalyptic and separatist. The DSS are the largest corpus of pre-Masorete Hebrew we have. We find that DSS scribes used more vowels than the Bible, adding yuds, heys, and vavs to make the text more phonetically clear. The Tetragrammaton was written in an archaic script. Grammatically, the DSS use double-plural compounds, like "tools of wars," and Biblically there are major and minor differences, includuing an entire added passage in Samuel 11.
Hoffman then moves into Biblical dialects for chapter 8. Again, it's silly to assume there is one "Biblical Hebrew." The Bible was written over hundreds of years and it stands to reason the writing system changed. After the exile in 586 BCE, a new trend known as "Late Biblical Hebrew" (LBH) emerged. LBH is the intermediate point between "Biblical Hebrew" and DSS Hebrew. Like DSS Hebrew, it adds extra vowels to give words "fuller" spellings, but unlike DSS lacks double-verb compounds. It also lacks the double verbs of BH, which were used to mark emphasis, e.g. "David fight fought." (David is particularly important for studying LBH because many of the comparisons are between Samuel/Kings and the later retellings in Chronicles.) One delightful result into different Hebrew dialects is the ability to look at a text's dialect and guess when it was written, though since dialects are differentiated by texts' composition dates this leads to a nice circularity. More importantly, how do we know LBH changes were actual changes in the Hebrew and not changes by later Masorete scribes? This seems unlikely, since if the Masorete scribes were editing for consistency they would edit out all differences between BH and LBH. Even spelling differences were not "covered up" by the Masoretes.
Chapter nine goes into "Post-Biblical Hebrew." One stage of this is Rabbinical Hebrew. When the Jews were under Persian rule, they learned Aramaic, and once under Greek rule learning Greek they were often trilingual. Then somewhere around 200 CE, Hebrew ceased being a spoken language and was only used for liturgy and study. Rabbinical Hebrew sources are mostly liturgical prayers, the Mishnah, and midrash. Rabbinical Hebrew shows far more diversity than Biblical Hebrew does - but perhaps that is only because rabbinical sources were copied less carefully and some scribes would "correct" rabbinical words to match Biblical ones. Rabbinical Hebrew uses double vowels to express consonants, and uses yud-nun to express plural nouns rather than only yud-mem (this was borrowed from Aramaic). It also brought in hundreds of loan words from Greek, often expressing concepts not in the Hebrew Bible such as "lawyer." The grammar was much like LHB, including double plural compounds. Hoffman hypothesizes that at some point Rabbinical Hebrew must have been spoken, because some of the changes it made would not have happened to a purely written language. However, it ended around 476 BC when it became a dead language, used only for literature. (I wish he had discussed if synagogues for the next millenium conducted services in vernacular.) Later forms of "non-spoken Hebrew" included Masoretic, Muslim Spain, and 18th century European Hasidim.
The real fun begins again with Modern Hebrew. In 1882, Ittamar Ben-Ave was born. He was the son of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a talented linguaphile and Lithuanian Jew who wanted to bring back Hebrew as a spoken lingua franca of the Jewish world. He raised his son to only speak Hebrew, making his son the first native speaker of the language in ~1700 years. Ben-Yehuda, through popular dictionaries and coining his own words, encouraged other Jews to do the same, making 50,000 native speakers by World War I and 350,000 by the founding of Israel in 1948. Since then the number has shot up to six million. Modern Hebrew's pronunciation tends to be a mix of Sepharidic and Ashkenic, and its grammar has taken elements from German, Russian, and English (e.g. in word order). There still rage furious debates about issues such as:
- How to create new words - do we transliterate from foreign languages or keep the language "pure" and use Hebrew roots?
- Spelling - which is now in major crisis, particularly around vowels. The official vowel pointing rules of the Israeli Academy that dictates language are so arcane that even educated people can't remember them, so even standard spellings of many words are variant.
As a descriptive linguist Hoffman doesn't really care for these debates. And I have to agree.
The great thing about Hoffman's book is that he is technical without being too technical. Even a basic knowledge of the alphabet and pronunciation of Hebrew is enough to understand his book. This book has reinvigorated my study of Hebrew, a language of many firsts. I only wish he had talked a bit about the Vulgate, because Jerome translated from the Hebrew and I wonder if that would give us any clues about the Hebrew of Jerome's day.
(I'm sorry this is so LONG; I do this less to be readable and more to help me retain the material.)
16JDHomrighausen
The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen
Finished 7/14/12
Matthiessen's memoir, in journal format, recounts his adventures hiking through the Himalayas with his biologist friend George Schaller. Though the ostensive reason for the trip was Schaller's fieldwork on the blue sheep of the Himalayas, Matthiessen seeks for some kind of transformation on the trip. He details he and Schaller's arudous hikes, the villages they go through, their sometimes frustrating dealings with unreliable sherpas and porters, and the earth and its inhabitants they pass through. But Matthiessen makes the work personal by foraying into memories of his late wife, his children left with George's wife, and how the vastness and quiet of his trip strikes the root of his Buddhist practice.
I really liked this book, which was a needed light read. Matthiessen is very quotable. Though I'm not trekking through the Himalayas, being in Nepal is close enough to read the book. In fact today's hike, on dirt paths surrounded by rice patties and punctuated by small villages, brought me into many of the same kinds of villages Matthiessen saw. Despite the rapid change in Kathmandu, the country folks' lives look little different externally than the nearly 40 years ago Matthiessen went on his journey.
Rating: 4/5
Finished 7/14/12
Matthiessen's memoir, in journal format, recounts his adventures hiking through the Himalayas with his biologist friend George Schaller. Though the ostensive reason for the trip was Schaller's fieldwork on the blue sheep of the Himalayas, Matthiessen seeks for some kind of transformation on the trip. He details he and Schaller's arudous hikes, the villages they go through, their sometimes frustrating dealings with unreliable sherpas and porters, and the earth and its inhabitants they pass through. But Matthiessen makes the work personal by foraying into memories of his late wife, his children left with George's wife, and how the vastness and quiet of his trip strikes the root of his Buddhist practice.
I really liked this book, which was a needed light read. Matthiessen is very quotable. Though I'm not trekking through the Himalayas, being in Nepal is close enough to read the book. In fact today's hike, on dirt paths surrounded by rice patties and punctuated by small villages, brought me into many of the same kinds of villages Matthiessen saw. Despite the rapid change in Kathmandu, the country folks' lives look little different externally than the nearly 40 years ago Matthiessen went on his journey.
Rating: 4/5
17JDHomrighausen
And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning, Joel M. Hoffman
Finished 7/16/12
Joel Hoffman, Biblical linguist, has a bone to pick with English translations of the Bible. Simply put, they lack an adequate understanding of linguistic theory, and veer far too much to the side of word-for-word translations. Hoffman argues that literal, word-by-word translations often miss some of the most important aspects of a text.
Hoffman begins with the KJV. Few serious scholars argue that the KJV rivals the accuracy of modern translations such as the NAB, NIV, or NRSV. Yet despite the KJV's now-defunct (and confusing!) English, its poor knowledge of Hebrew, and its even poorer knowledge of translation theory, all these modern versions work from it.
From here Hoffman begins to explain how translation works. It seems obvious: first, you find out what the original Hebrew means. Then, you find a suitable English idiom in which to express it. Seems simple, but Hoffman accuses many translators of not even being able to do the first. He lists three bad ways to find the meaning of a word:
1. Internal word structure. Deriving the meaning of "translator" from "translate" works. But what about "patently"? Is "hostile" similar to "host"?
2. Etymology: "Philosophy" is an easy example where etymology gives you a reasonable idea of what the word means. But what about "understand"?
3. Cognate languages: Always tempting, but as every Spanish learner embarrassingly discovers, "embarazada" in Spanish is not the same as "embarrassed" in English.
The proper way to find a word's meaning, Hoffman argues, is by context. While we can run into such dangerous things as homynyms and metonymy, this is the most foolproof method.
Moving from the Hebrew to English is similarly complicated. Of the five levels of meaning of any Hebrew utterance, the translator can't accurately recreate them all. These levels - sounds, words, phrases, concepts, and affect - interplay and change importance based on context. For example, sounds are not important for most prose translation, but what if the phrase has a pun or an alliteration that adds to the meaning? An extreme example: Hebrew poetry works mostly on parallelism, while English poetry traditionally runs on meter and rhyme. Should Hebrew poetry be put into rhyming meter to make it sound poetic to English ears?
Phrases that make sense in Hebrew similarly don't always translate well. The phrase "X of Xs" in Hebrew means "the ultimate" or "the best," as in Handel's famous "King of Kings" and "Lord of Lords." But "Song of Songs" in English sounds a little strange - perhaps a song about other songs, or a song made up of strung-together smaller songs. As for concepts, if 5 PM in one language's culture is dinnertime, should that be translated as "8 PM" in a more night-owly culture? The French word for horse is "cheval," but while a French reader may think "French horse" when she reads "cheval," an American reader might think "English horse" when he reads "horse." Affect, the fifth level of meaning, is even harder to translate. 10 km in a metric culture is a nice round number, like a stranger on the street directing you, "The gas station is in 10 km." But a literal translation of this into an American system sounds technical: "The gas station is in 6.2137 miles." Language does more than convey information, as it is enmeshed in and conveys underlying affects and concepts of culture. In the Hebrew Bible, it conveys poetry through chiasmus and parallelism. It conveys different registers of formality and linguistic usage, despite the fact that translations tend to make the entire text one register (KJV formal, NRSV colloquial, NIV chatty). Hoffman leads the reader to the conclusion that even the most scholarly, respected, modern translations focus far too much on the second level (words), even when the other levels are more important.
The rest of Hoffman's book applies this analysis to oft-quoted passages in the Bible. "Love the Lord with all your heart (levav), soul (nephesh), and might" becomes "Love the Lord with your mind and body and power to change the world," as "levav" and "nephesh" refer respectively to the invisible and visible aspects of the human person. "The Lord is my shepherd (ro'eh)" doesn't have any English equivalent, as the meek shepherd of the modern imagination was a fierce, highly respected, physically powerful, and romantic protector of the week. What career has all those connotations in America? (The same goes for Biblical epithets of God as King.)
The funniest mistranslation he encounters is the incestuous "my sister (kalah), my spouse (achot)" in the Song of Solomon. Rather than being a literal sister, familial terms were used in the ancient world to convey status, as a king would refer to an equally powerful king as "brother" and a more powerful king as "father." Also, kalah refers to a lover of some sort, but not necessarily a spouse. "My sister, my spouse" becomes "my equal, my lover." "Thou shalt not kill (r'tasch)" actually refers to illegal killing, not the accepted blood redemption (revenge) or the prescribed killing of idol worshippers. "Thou shalt not covet (chamad)" doesn't refer to just wanting something, but more specifically to taking it temporarily and fostering thoughts of keeping it permanently, bringing in both intention and action. And most famously, "a virgin (alma) shall conceive" refers to a "young woman," which in ancient Hebrew society would have usually implied "virgin" (in the same way "teenager" implies "high schooler" in the modern USA). But that is only an implication, not watertight, and one that would not hold nowadays.
Overall, Hoffman's book was a great read, a big help in my ongoing study of Biblical languages. His appendix evaluating different translations and recommending more books was also useful (hint: he favors the NRSV and Robert Alter's translations). But his point is often too strongly stated. While it is true that many of the key words he expertly traces different uses of are often impossible to translate on all five levels of meaning, he seems to forget that any serious study Bible has footnotes explaining these things. My NRSV can explain that shepherds had to fight off wild animals attacking their herd, so were not men to pick a fight with. Footnotes can explain what the idiom "Song of Songs" means in Hebrew. So while he criticized other translations for sticking to literal word-for-word meaning too much, he could also have made the less daring assertion that translations should have better footnotes explaining difficult-to-translate words. And at the end of the day, I would still much rather have a literal translation with good footnotes. Departing from that risks sinking into the morass of paraphrase "translations" such as the Living Bible or The Message - works that he rightly criticizes. Even so, I recommend Hoffman, only with the caveat that he is not the only voice in translation theory applied to the Bible.
Rating: 4/5
Finished 7/16/12
Joel Hoffman, Biblical linguist, has a bone to pick with English translations of the Bible. Simply put, they lack an adequate understanding of linguistic theory, and veer far too much to the side of word-for-word translations. Hoffman argues that literal, word-by-word translations often miss some of the most important aspects of a text.
Hoffman begins with the KJV. Few serious scholars argue that the KJV rivals the accuracy of modern translations such as the NAB, NIV, or NRSV. Yet despite the KJV's now-defunct (and confusing!) English, its poor knowledge of Hebrew, and its even poorer knowledge of translation theory, all these modern versions work from it.
From here Hoffman begins to explain how translation works. It seems obvious: first, you find out what the original Hebrew means. Then, you find a suitable English idiom in which to express it. Seems simple, but Hoffman accuses many translators of not even being able to do the first. He lists three bad ways to find the meaning of a word:
1. Internal word structure. Deriving the meaning of "translator" from "translate" works. But what about "patently"? Is "hostile" similar to "host"?
2. Etymology: "Philosophy" is an easy example where etymology gives you a reasonable idea of what the word means. But what about "understand"?
3. Cognate languages: Always tempting, but as every Spanish learner embarrassingly discovers, "embarazada" in Spanish is not the same as "embarrassed" in English.
The proper way to find a word's meaning, Hoffman argues, is by context. While we can run into such dangerous things as homynyms and metonymy, this is the most foolproof method.
Moving from the Hebrew to English is similarly complicated. Of the five levels of meaning of any Hebrew utterance, the translator can't accurately recreate them all. These levels - sounds, words, phrases, concepts, and affect - interplay and change importance based on context. For example, sounds are not important for most prose translation, but what if the phrase has a pun or an alliteration that adds to the meaning? An extreme example: Hebrew poetry works mostly on parallelism, while English poetry traditionally runs on meter and rhyme. Should Hebrew poetry be put into rhyming meter to make it sound poetic to English ears?
Phrases that make sense in Hebrew similarly don't always translate well. The phrase "X of Xs" in Hebrew means "the ultimate" or "the best," as in Handel's famous "King of Kings" and "Lord of Lords." But "Song of Songs" in English sounds a little strange - perhaps a song about other songs, or a song made up of strung-together smaller songs. As for concepts, if 5 PM in one language's culture is dinnertime, should that be translated as "8 PM" in a more night-owly culture? The French word for horse is "cheval," but while a French reader may think "French horse" when she reads "cheval," an American reader might think "English horse" when he reads "horse." Affect, the fifth level of meaning, is even harder to translate. 10 km in a metric culture is a nice round number, like a stranger on the street directing you, "The gas station is in 10 km." But a literal translation of this into an American system sounds technical: "The gas station is in 6.2137 miles." Language does more than convey information, as it is enmeshed in and conveys underlying affects and concepts of culture. In the Hebrew Bible, it conveys poetry through chiasmus and parallelism. It conveys different registers of formality and linguistic usage, despite the fact that translations tend to make the entire text one register (KJV formal, NRSV colloquial, NIV chatty). Hoffman leads the reader to the conclusion that even the most scholarly, respected, modern translations focus far too much on the second level (words), even when the other levels are more important.
The rest of Hoffman's book applies this analysis to oft-quoted passages in the Bible. "Love the Lord with all your heart (levav), soul (nephesh), and might" becomes "Love the Lord with your mind and body and power to change the world," as "levav" and "nephesh" refer respectively to the invisible and visible aspects of the human person. "The Lord is my shepherd (ro'eh)" doesn't have any English equivalent, as the meek shepherd of the modern imagination was a fierce, highly respected, physically powerful, and romantic protector of the week. What career has all those connotations in America? (The same goes for Biblical epithets of God as King.)
The funniest mistranslation he encounters is the incestuous "my sister (kalah), my spouse (achot)" in the Song of Solomon. Rather than being a literal sister, familial terms were used in the ancient world to convey status, as a king would refer to an equally powerful king as "brother" and a more powerful king as "father." Also, kalah refers to a lover of some sort, but not necessarily a spouse. "My sister, my spouse" becomes "my equal, my lover." "Thou shalt not kill (r'tasch)" actually refers to illegal killing, not the accepted blood redemption (revenge) or the prescribed killing of idol worshippers. "Thou shalt not covet (chamad)" doesn't refer to just wanting something, but more specifically to taking it temporarily and fostering thoughts of keeping it permanently, bringing in both intention and action. And most famously, "a virgin (alma) shall conceive" refers to a "young woman," which in ancient Hebrew society would have usually implied "virgin" (in the same way "teenager" implies "high schooler" in the modern USA). But that is only an implication, not watertight, and one that would not hold nowadays.
Overall, Hoffman's book was a great read, a big help in my ongoing study of Biblical languages. His appendix evaluating different translations and recommending more books was also useful (hint: he favors the NRSV and Robert Alter's translations). But his point is often too strongly stated. While it is true that many of the key words he expertly traces different uses of are often impossible to translate on all five levels of meaning, he seems to forget that any serious study Bible has footnotes explaining these things. My NRSV can explain that shepherds had to fight off wild animals attacking their herd, so were not men to pick a fight with. Footnotes can explain what the idiom "Song of Songs" means in Hebrew. So while he criticized other translations for sticking to literal word-for-word meaning too much, he could also have made the less daring assertion that translations should have better footnotes explaining difficult-to-translate words. And at the end of the day, I would still much rather have a literal translation with good footnotes. Departing from that risks sinking into the morass of paraphrase "translations" such as the Living Bible or The Message - works that he rightly criticizes. Even so, I recommend Hoffman, only with the caveat that he is not the only voice in translation theory applied to the Bible.
Rating: 4/5
19JDHomrighausen
Wisdom Energy: Basic Buddhist Teachings by Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche
Finished 7/19/12
This book is a collection of talks given by these two lamas on a tour of the U.S. in the 1970s. Although the teachings in the book are much the same as what I am learning in my Buddhism classes here at Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Nepal, the way they are presented is very different. Lamas Yeshe and Zopa tend to keep a lot of the more technical terms and lists of practice aspects out of the book and focus more on the basics: learning how to train the mind, how to deal with attachment and grasping, how to approach studying the dharma.
What I find most important about the dharma to me now is looking at how many of the thoughts and concepts we create about ourselves and the world around us are really reified delusions - things we invent but think are real. So we dislike another person for 'their' traits when in fact we project those traits onto them. We feel like we're unable to do something because we create a self-definition based on our inability. Seeing how this process of delusion creates and recreates itself in the mind is fundamental to being free from ignorant thoughts. Most importantly, the dharma is something to be taken in, internalized, reflected and lived out, not just memorized once and mastered in a formulaic way.
Overall, a useful book. Too bad Lama Yeshe has passed.
Rating: 5/5
Finished 7/19/12
This book is a collection of talks given by these two lamas on a tour of the U.S. in the 1970s. Although the teachings in the book are much the same as what I am learning in my Buddhism classes here at Rangjung Yeshe Institute in Nepal, the way they are presented is very different. Lamas Yeshe and Zopa tend to keep a lot of the more technical terms and lists of practice aspects out of the book and focus more on the basics: learning how to train the mind, how to deal with attachment and grasping, how to approach studying the dharma.
What I find most important about the dharma to me now is looking at how many of the thoughts and concepts we create about ourselves and the world around us are really reified delusions - things we invent but think are real. So we dislike another person for 'their' traits when in fact we project those traits onto them. We feel like we're unable to do something because we create a self-definition based on our inability. Seeing how this process of delusion creates and recreates itself in the mind is fundamental to being free from ignorant thoughts. Most importantly, the dharma is something to be taken in, internalized, reflected and lived out, not just memorized once and mastered in a formulaic way.
Overall, a useful book. Too bad Lama Yeshe has passed.
Rating: 5/5
20JDHomrighausen
The Art of Biblical Narrative by Robert Alter
Finished 7/21/12
When I was a freshman in high school, my English teacher quipped that Edith Hamilton was the goddess of Greek mythology. If every pantheon has a scholar that is the god of it, then Robert Alter is the God of the Hebrew Bible. After creating and popularizing literary approaches to the Bible in this book and The Art of Biblical Poetry, he began his brilliant translations of the Torah, Psalms, Wisdom books, and the one my group read is doing now, The David Story.
Alter's main point in this careful polemic is that historical-critical scholarship, which dominated biblical scholarship in most of the twentieth century, is unimaginative. It places too much emphasis on the fragmented nature of the Biblical texts, and in doing so overlooks the nuances of language and story that unify the tomes. When it sees two different writing styles, it automatically assumes that there are multiple sources at work, rather than that one author or authorial school intentionally changed voices. The closest it ever got to literary criticism, form criticism, only created categories to place different texts in, without exploring the dynamics of how the author employed or refused to employ the genre. By assuming that the text is fragmentary and often not well-wrought, it denigrates the text.
Alter seeks to restore the genius of the writers of the Hebrew Bible not from an a priori religious framework of inspiration, but by close readings of pericopes demonstrating the subtleties of the Biblical tales that previous scholarship, done by historians and archaeologists rather than literary critics, did not pick up on. Alter situates his analysis of the literary techniques and forms of the Hebrew Bible in the overarching theological problematic of the monotheistic revolution: how do God and man interact? The Bible everywhere explores the tension between God's perfect plan and man's uncertain agency, between God's certain knowledge and man's chaotic uncertainty, between the seeming contradiction of a Godly determinism and the basic human impulse to free will. The Bible explores this not just in its content, but in its use of narrative style, dialogue, repetition, and type-scenes.
In chapter two, Alter begins his scrutiny of narrative by looking at the difference between ancient polytheistic myth and the Bible. The difference is that the pagan world of myth had a stable closure, and stories were tied to orality, to repetition, to ritual. Hebrew narrative has an indeterminacy to it, as the stories are ambiguous, leave things unsaid, and leave the reader with multiple meanings available. (This underdetermined nature of Biblical narrative was likely what led to later midrashic traditions.) He compares the creation narrative of J starting in Genesis 2:4 with the Enuma Elish, and finds that humanity in Genesis has a "morally problematic interiority," made in the image of God but also autonomous, that is not in the Babylonian creation myth. This indeterminacy and element of the chaotic humanness (which the reader always lives in) plays out in the Bible's depiction of history, which oscillates between God's hand being clearly at work (Esther) and human drama taking the spotlight (Deueteronomistic history), with no book being completely at one extreme or the other. The Hebrews were writing neither history nor fiction, but "fictionalized history" with conscious artistic intent. This fiction written in order to explore history plays out most fully in the David saga, which Alter compares to Shakespeare's fictionalized versions of English history. In its deep characterization and portrayal of the human, Alter sees in the Bible a possible birth of fiction.
The third chapter moves onto type-scenes, archetypal repetitions of events that formed part of the unspoken artistic conventions of Biblical narrative. Since we don't know of any ancient Hebrew literary theory, we can only guess what these conventions might be. These type-scenes, such as the hero's betrothal played out in Moses, Jacob, and Samson, are consciously varied to let the reader infer aspects of the particular hero of that story. For example, whereas Moses' betrothal begins with him defending helpless women and properly meeting the bride's father, Samson bluntly desires a foreign woman and simply demands his parents secure her. Moses' near-perfect morality contrasts with Samson's hot-headed and cocky swag, both here and everywhere else in their stories. These repeated type-scenes capture the cyclical rhythm of God's activity in history - the saga of human life, of following and forgetting God, of birth and death.
In chapter four, Alter makes a fascinating assertion about Biblical narration: it is scant. The reader learns far more about characters through dialogue and reported action than through an omniscient narrator's epithetic labeling. This is unique to the Bible; Homer has long monologue rather than dialogue. By focusing the reader on dialogue, the emphasis becomes characters' reactions to events rather than the events themselves. And not knowing about a character's interior motives leaves us wondering about them, leaves us in the human's-eye view of uncertainty rather than the God's-eye view of omniscience about the character. This emphasis on the spoken word even evokes the theology that as God creates and reveals with words, so God-imaged humanity reveals and creates with words. The reader of Biblical narrative is advised to look closely at the dialogue. Does a character speak in lofty near-verse or in brief, slangy utterances? When does the narrator transition between his voice and the dialogue, what is being emphasized in doing so? The narrator's hands-off treatment, prefiguring modern novels, lets human agency express itself in the midst of a God-driven world.
But not only are type-scenes repeated. Repetition moves up a scale, from words, motifs, themes, and sequences of actions, up to type-scenes. As Biblical narrative moves on, it adds new connotations and meanings to repeated units, as they evoke their past instantiations. Just as God's orderly pattern of words created an orderly universe, so God's word is repeated and made sense of in the context of Biblical narrative. For example, the motif of water repeats in Moses' life, from the water he was put in at birth to the water he draws from the stone in the desert. Elsewhere in the Bible, water will evoke Moses and how water both let them escape from Egypt and prevented them from entering Canaan. Not only is repetition key in the Bible, but so is lack of repetition - say a type-scene of a hero is omitted from one hero's story - or difference from the usual way of repeating a unit. Dialogues can be repeated by characters saying the same words but with different intentions. As Alter says, the Biblical narratives are not merely conveying information, they are using language - the vehicle of the story - as an intrinsic part of what is being narrated.
Despite the fact that little explicit characterization is done in the Bible (remember: dialogue-focused), characters still seem fully fleshed out. How? Alter explores this in the sixth chapter. Though the Biblical narrator is almost always omniscient, we only see glimpses of this, and are instead given information about a character indirectly through actions and words. Looking at when a narrator chooses to reveal their knowledge can tell us a lot about the content. For example, when David is coming to power, we only hear his public speeches and actions. Yet the narrator reveals Saul's internal motives and crazed thoughts. Only later in the David saga do we see the complex man behind the public image. This reticence to share leaves the reader both wondering about the characters (remember: human's-eye view) and allows the characters to develop. There are no Homeric epithets in the Bible.
Alter then returns to the historical-critical scholars for the seventh chapter, on "composite artistry." What is a "book" in the Bible? Can any one book be set apart from the others, or are the boundaries too porous? Is any book unified, or is it a patchwork of different authors? In what I consider the most brilliant chapter of the book, Alter finds a middle road: yes, there are differing voices and styles in the Bible, and there is a multiplicity. But the final redactors also used literary genius in bringing these different accounts together. For example, the surface contradiction between the Priestly creation's simultanous creation of man and woman and the Yahwist's creation of woman from man are in fact complementary. The Yahwist perspective coming from sexism paints women as inferior, as helpers for the men who do the important things in society. The Priestly account recognizes that women are mens' equal in morality, in strength, in intelligence. Together these provide two contrasting and complementary perspectives that can both be found elsewhere in the Bible. Same with the tension between P's rhymic, orderly, rational creation emphasizing God and J's chaotic creation emphasizing man and his free will. What seems like a contradiction - or elsewhere in the Bible, seems like sloppy editing - is only so due to the reader's inability to read literary nuances. Narrative structure allows for these "montage of views arranged in sequence" concerning God's agency vs. humanity's, the universe's chaos and its order, and the messy human drama of history and God's divine plan. Literature is paradoxical as is human life.
Last but not least, Alter examines how Biblical narrative is a form of knowledge. It reveals a fund of experience, of human life, that is both the same and wildly different from the 21st-century North American reader's. The narrator only lets us learn what he wants us to learn. The narrator's relation to the reader is like God's relation to humanity - only allowing the recipient to have some knowledge, but also forcing them to think things out for themselves. Alter looks at the scenes where Joseph re-encounters his brothers, showing his Joseph's motives are both clear and unclear. The reader, putting herself in this story and all the others of the Bible, begins to see how to relate to God in her human uncertainty and chaos. The Bible's artistry, first seen as a rejection of a purely didactic purpose, turns out to have theological import.
This multiplicity of meanings, this ongoing human saga, is what attracts me to the Bible. The Hebrew Bible far more than the New Testament contains a complete portrait of a human society, of people experiencing human dramas, of the mundane aspects of life apart from the specifically religious. Alter's book hit me like dynamite opening new caves to explore in my ongoing quest to dive into sacred texts. His ability to convey literary nuances while not expecting the reader to know Hebrew is even more amazing. My only complaint is that the book is a bit dated. The second edition only updated a few things here and there, and did not take into account all the scholarship in literary criticism and the Bible that has happened in the thirty years since Alter published his book. Still, this book is worth its weight in gold, and belongs on every literature lover's shelf.
Rating: 5/5
Finished 7/21/12
When I was a freshman in high school, my English teacher quipped that Edith Hamilton was the goddess of Greek mythology. If every pantheon has a scholar that is the god of it, then Robert Alter is the God of the Hebrew Bible. After creating and popularizing literary approaches to the Bible in this book and The Art of Biblical Poetry, he began his brilliant translations of the Torah, Psalms, Wisdom books, and the one my group read is doing now, The David Story.
Alter's main point in this careful polemic is that historical-critical scholarship, which dominated biblical scholarship in most of the twentieth century, is unimaginative. It places too much emphasis on the fragmented nature of the Biblical texts, and in doing so overlooks the nuances of language and story that unify the tomes. When it sees two different writing styles, it automatically assumes that there are multiple sources at work, rather than that one author or authorial school intentionally changed voices. The closest it ever got to literary criticism, form criticism, only created categories to place different texts in, without exploring the dynamics of how the author employed or refused to employ the genre. By assuming that the text is fragmentary and often not well-wrought, it denigrates the text.
Alter seeks to restore the genius of the writers of the Hebrew Bible not from an a priori religious framework of inspiration, but by close readings of pericopes demonstrating the subtleties of the Biblical tales that previous scholarship, done by historians and archaeologists rather than literary critics, did not pick up on. Alter situates his analysis of the literary techniques and forms of the Hebrew Bible in the overarching theological problematic of the monotheistic revolution: how do God and man interact? The Bible everywhere explores the tension between God's perfect plan and man's uncertain agency, between God's certain knowledge and man's chaotic uncertainty, between the seeming contradiction of a Godly determinism and the basic human impulse to free will. The Bible explores this not just in its content, but in its use of narrative style, dialogue, repetition, and type-scenes.
In chapter two, Alter begins his scrutiny of narrative by looking at the difference between ancient polytheistic myth and the Bible. The difference is that the pagan world of myth had a stable closure, and stories were tied to orality, to repetition, to ritual. Hebrew narrative has an indeterminacy to it, as the stories are ambiguous, leave things unsaid, and leave the reader with multiple meanings available. (This underdetermined nature of Biblical narrative was likely what led to later midrashic traditions.) He compares the creation narrative of J starting in Genesis 2:4 with the Enuma Elish, and finds that humanity in Genesis has a "morally problematic interiority," made in the image of God but also autonomous, that is not in the Babylonian creation myth. This indeterminacy and element of the chaotic humanness (which the reader always lives in) plays out in the Bible's depiction of history, which oscillates between God's hand being clearly at work (Esther) and human drama taking the spotlight (Deueteronomistic history), with no book being completely at one extreme or the other. The Hebrews were writing neither history nor fiction, but "fictionalized history" with conscious artistic intent. This fiction written in order to explore history plays out most fully in the David saga, which Alter compares to Shakespeare's fictionalized versions of English history. In its deep characterization and portrayal of the human, Alter sees in the Bible a possible birth of fiction.
The third chapter moves onto type-scenes, archetypal repetitions of events that formed part of the unspoken artistic conventions of Biblical narrative. Since we don't know of any ancient Hebrew literary theory, we can only guess what these conventions might be. These type-scenes, such as the hero's betrothal played out in Moses, Jacob, and Samson, are consciously varied to let the reader infer aspects of the particular hero of that story. For example, whereas Moses' betrothal begins with him defending helpless women and properly meeting the bride's father, Samson bluntly desires a foreign woman and simply demands his parents secure her. Moses' near-perfect morality contrasts with Samson's hot-headed and cocky swag, both here and everywhere else in their stories. These repeated type-scenes capture the cyclical rhythm of God's activity in history - the saga of human life, of following and forgetting God, of birth and death.
In chapter four, Alter makes a fascinating assertion about Biblical narration: it is scant. The reader learns far more about characters through dialogue and reported action than through an omniscient narrator's epithetic labeling. This is unique to the Bible; Homer has long monologue rather than dialogue. By focusing the reader on dialogue, the emphasis becomes characters' reactions to events rather than the events themselves. And not knowing about a character's interior motives leaves us wondering about them, leaves us in the human's-eye view of uncertainty rather than the God's-eye view of omniscience about the character. This emphasis on the spoken word even evokes the theology that as God creates and reveals with words, so God-imaged humanity reveals and creates with words. The reader of Biblical narrative is advised to look closely at the dialogue. Does a character speak in lofty near-verse or in brief, slangy utterances? When does the narrator transition between his voice and the dialogue, what is being emphasized in doing so? The narrator's hands-off treatment, prefiguring modern novels, lets human agency express itself in the midst of a God-driven world.
But not only are type-scenes repeated. Repetition moves up a scale, from words, motifs, themes, and sequences of actions, up to type-scenes. As Biblical narrative moves on, it adds new connotations and meanings to repeated units, as they evoke their past instantiations. Just as God's orderly pattern of words created an orderly universe, so God's word is repeated and made sense of in the context of Biblical narrative. For example, the motif of water repeats in Moses' life, from the water he was put in at birth to the water he draws from the stone in the desert. Elsewhere in the Bible, water will evoke Moses and how water both let them escape from Egypt and prevented them from entering Canaan. Not only is repetition key in the Bible, but so is lack of repetition - say a type-scene of a hero is omitted from one hero's story - or difference from the usual way of repeating a unit. Dialogues can be repeated by characters saying the same words but with different intentions. As Alter says, the Biblical narratives are not merely conveying information, they are using language - the vehicle of the story - as an intrinsic part of what is being narrated.
Despite the fact that little explicit characterization is done in the Bible (remember: dialogue-focused), characters still seem fully fleshed out. How? Alter explores this in the sixth chapter. Though the Biblical narrator is almost always omniscient, we only see glimpses of this, and are instead given information about a character indirectly through actions and words. Looking at when a narrator chooses to reveal their knowledge can tell us a lot about the content. For example, when David is coming to power, we only hear his public speeches and actions. Yet the narrator reveals Saul's internal motives and crazed thoughts. Only later in the David saga do we see the complex man behind the public image. This reticence to share leaves the reader both wondering about the characters (remember: human's-eye view) and allows the characters to develop. There are no Homeric epithets in the Bible.
Alter then returns to the historical-critical scholars for the seventh chapter, on "composite artistry." What is a "book" in the Bible? Can any one book be set apart from the others, or are the boundaries too porous? Is any book unified, or is it a patchwork of different authors? In what I consider the most brilliant chapter of the book, Alter finds a middle road: yes, there are differing voices and styles in the Bible, and there is a multiplicity. But the final redactors also used literary genius in bringing these different accounts together. For example, the surface contradiction between the Priestly creation's simultanous creation of man and woman and the Yahwist's creation of woman from man are in fact complementary. The Yahwist perspective coming from sexism paints women as inferior, as helpers for the men who do the important things in society. The Priestly account recognizes that women are mens' equal in morality, in strength, in intelligence. Together these provide two contrasting and complementary perspectives that can both be found elsewhere in the Bible. Same with the tension between P's rhymic, orderly, rational creation emphasizing God and J's chaotic creation emphasizing man and his free will. What seems like a contradiction - or elsewhere in the Bible, seems like sloppy editing - is only so due to the reader's inability to read literary nuances. Narrative structure allows for these "montage of views arranged in sequence" concerning God's agency vs. humanity's, the universe's chaos and its order, and the messy human drama of history and God's divine plan. Literature is paradoxical as is human life.
Last but not least, Alter examines how Biblical narrative is a form of knowledge. It reveals a fund of experience, of human life, that is both the same and wildly different from the 21st-century North American reader's. The narrator only lets us learn what he wants us to learn. The narrator's relation to the reader is like God's relation to humanity - only allowing the recipient to have some knowledge, but also forcing them to think things out for themselves. Alter looks at the scenes where Joseph re-encounters his brothers, showing his Joseph's motives are both clear and unclear. The reader, putting herself in this story and all the others of the Bible, begins to see how to relate to God in her human uncertainty and chaos. The Bible's artistry, first seen as a rejection of a purely didactic purpose, turns out to have theological import.
This multiplicity of meanings, this ongoing human saga, is what attracts me to the Bible. The Hebrew Bible far more than the New Testament contains a complete portrait of a human society, of people experiencing human dramas, of the mundane aspects of life apart from the specifically religious. Alter's book hit me like dynamite opening new caves to explore in my ongoing quest to dive into sacred texts. His ability to convey literary nuances while not expecting the reader to know Hebrew is even more amazing. My only complaint is that the book is a bit dated. The second edition only updated a few things here and there, and did not take into account all the scholarship in literary criticism and the Bible that has happened in the thirty years since Alter published his book. Still, this book is worth its weight in gold, and belongs on every literature lover's shelf.
Rating: 5/5
21JDHomrighausen
God, Language, and Scripture: Reading the Bible in the Light of General Linguistics by Moises Silva
Finished 7/22/12
I discovered Silva's work via a recommendations in the backs of Joel Hoffman's books. Like Hoffman, Silva is a linguist, but unlike Hoffman he is a Christian whose interest extends to both Testaments. Silva, an evangelical scholar, provides an overview of both linguistics in general and that of Biblical Hebrew and Greek in particular.
Silva begins with a look at how language is portrayed in the Bible. Language is a double-edged sword: it is both how God created the universe and how humans are divided in their multitude of Babels. In the New Testament, Jesus is the Incarnate Word, the Logos of God, but words of insult and scandal also divide early Christian communities, as shown in the epistles. Silva points out that language, as part of humanity's image of God, is a religious act. Using language well is a development of one of humanity's greatest potentials. Language is a Christian act. A bit cheesy, and a bit brief, but then again he's not a theologian.
Linguistics, for Silva, is a synchronic descriptive discipline. That is, it is not historical, and it is not prescriptive. Languages are often studied under the humanities, but linguistics is mainly a behavioral science. Despite historical change of languages not being the main focus of linguistics, it is useful to know that Greek comes from the Indo-European or Indo-Aryan language family. It is cousins with the Romantic and Germanic languages, and even related to Sanskrit. But Hebrew is from the Semitic family, closely related to Canaanite and Aramaic and more distantly to Arabic. While we often think that Jews spoke and used Hebrew at all times in the ancient world, in fact many Jews spoke Aramaic, which has similar sounds and many cognates with Hebrew. Hebrew likely developed as a dialect of Canaanite, and was restricted to Jews, whereas Aramaic was a lingua franca of the ancient Near East.
Unlike Hebrew, we know many ancient dialects of Greek. But the varieties of Aeolic, Doric, Ionic, and Attic Greek were subsumed by the latter when Alexander the Great established his empire in the fourth century BCE. Attic Greek's becoming a koine, or common, language required much simplification, which intellectuals decried in their effort to keep it pure and literary. Their campaign to make a "high culture" Koine never made it to the New Testament, which even in its most eloquent writings does not display the "high Attic" style. Knowing that the Greek language was undergoing drastic change during the time of the New Testament makes me wonder how visible that is in its writings. Is the Greek of the early Pauline letters (50s CE) that different from that of Revelation (early 100s CE)? How much is that due to the indivudual authors' differences? How could a translator capture those nuances, replicating how the NT's style of Greek would have sounded to a Greek in the first century? Ironically, what English KJV readers think of as high, archaic language - "the King's Speech" - was actually colloquial and common Greek.
Silva's information on the many varieties of Greee contrasts with the scant evidence of the history of Hebrew in Hoffman's In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. There could have been many different dialects of Hebrew spoken by ancient Jews, many different forms of both high and low Hebrew. But we have a plethora of ancient Greek writing samples compared to Hebrew. Since our manuscripts of the Masoretic text only date to c. 1000 CE, we can't know how many different regional writing styles or dialects were standardized by a milennium or more of scribal copying. All we have from the ancient world are the Dead Sea Scrolls and a handful of inscriptions. It's tantalizing to think what we have lost and may never find.
The meat of Silva's book is in his descriptions of the grammar of Greek and Hebrew. Some points:
-- The main difficulty in learning these languages is that unlike English, they are highly inflected. Even more in Greek than in Hebrew, grammar is expressed by changing words, adding prefixes and suffixes, in Hebrew's case also by changing vowels. English is more word order-based. While nouns inflect in Greek by grammatical function (five cases!), in Hebrew they only do so by gender and number.
-- Greek, like German, easily makes new words by combining nouns. This makes Greek etymology often very transparent, even though finding the meaning of a word through etymology is usually very risky.
-- Hebrew's perfect-imperfect system often leaves novice learners mystified. After all, if Hebrew can't express the present tense, doesn't this have some deep mystical impact on the way ancient Israel ontologized the world? But in fact, it is only a grammatical convention, and Hebrew can use participles or context to express the present tense quite easily.
I did encounter something new in Silva's section on discourse analysis. What is a sentence? How do we know something is a paragraph? This seems abstract, but remember that often the verse and paragraph distinctions in both Old and New Testament are arbitrary and not in the original manuscripts. How can the meaning of a text change if the paragraphs are restructured? Silva also describes the debates between dyanmic and formal translation proponents. (Another reason to learn the original.)
Like Hoffman, Silva stresses that context is really the only way one can find out what a word means. Textbook definitions such as "levav = heart" fail to capture the nuances of how context can change the meaning of a word. This is especially true of prepositions, which can have over a dozen meanings. Even verb forms have this problem, as a student may have only learned the 1-2 major meanings of a verb form, leaving them confused when a more obscure meaning is intended. Overall, the map is not the territory, and the simplistic definitions and grammatical explanations required to teach these languages must eventually be discarded.
Silva's book was a bit of a let-down after reading Alter. But I will also give Silva the benefit of the doubt, as this was not intended to be an original scholarly work like Alter's but more of a layperson's overview. Silva has a more technical work, Biblical Words and Their Meaning: An Introduction to Lexical Semantics, that I hope to get to someday. But alas, I first must learn Greek. Overall, Silva's is a useful, if not always clear and pointed, introduction to some highly technical issues for the average churchgoer who has no need to wade through linguistics textbooks. But for this reader, it was just too facile.
Rating: 3/5
Finished 7/22/12
I discovered Silva's work via a recommendations in the backs of Joel Hoffman's books. Like Hoffman, Silva is a linguist, but unlike Hoffman he is a Christian whose interest extends to both Testaments. Silva, an evangelical scholar, provides an overview of both linguistics in general and that of Biblical Hebrew and Greek in particular.
Silva begins with a look at how language is portrayed in the Bible. Language is a double-edged sword: it is both how God created the universe and how humans are divided in their multitude of Babels. In the New Testament, Jesus is the Incarnate Word, the Logos of God, but words of insult and scandal also divide early Christian communities, as shown in the epistles. Silva points out that language, as part of humanity's image of God, is a religious act. Using language well is a development of one of humanity's greatest potentials. Language is a Christian act. A bit cheesy, and a bit brief, but then again he's not a theologian.
Linguistics, for Silva, is a synchronic descriptive discipline. That is, it is not historical, and it is not prescriptive. Languages are often studied under the humanities, but linguistics is mainly a behavioral science. Despite historical change of languages not being the main focus of linguistics, it is useful to know that Greek comes from the Indo-European or Indo-Aryan language family. It is cousins with the Romantic and Germanic languages, and even related to Sanskrit. But Hebrew is from the Semitic family, closely related to Canaanite and Aramaic and more distantly to Arabic. While we often think that Jews spoke and used Hebrew at all times in the ancient world, in fact many Jews spoke Aramaic, which has similar sounds and many cognates with Hebrew. Hebrew likely developed as a dialect of Canaanite, and was restricted to Jews, whereas Aramaic was a lingua franca of the ancient Near East.
Unlike Hebrew, we know many ancient dialects of Greek. But the varieties of Aeolic, Doric, Ionic, and Attic Greek were subsumed by the latter when Alexander the Great established his empire in the fourth century BCE. Attic Greek's becoming a koine, or common, language required much simplification, which intellectuals decried in their effort to keep it pure and literary. Their campaign to make a "high culture" Koine never made it to the New Testament, which even in its most eloquent writings does not display the "high Attic" style. Knowing that the Greek language was undergoing drastic change during the time of the New Testament makes me wonder how visible that is in its writings. Is the Greek of the early Pauline letters (50s CE) that different from that of Revelation (early 100s CE)? How much is that due to the indivudual authors' differences? How could a translator capture those nuances, replicating how the NT's style of Greek would have sounded to a Greek in the first century? Ironically, what English KJV readers think of as high, archaic language - "the King's Speech" - was actually colloquial and common Greek.
Silva's information on the many varieties of Greee contrasts with the scant evidence of the history of Hebrew in Hoffman's In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language. There could have been many different dialects of Hebrew spoken by ancient Jews, many different forms of both high and low Hebrew. But we have a plethora of ancient Greek writing samples compared to Hebrew. Since our manuscripts of the Masoretic text only date to c. 1000 CE, we can't know how many different regional writing styles or dialects were standardized by a milennium or more of scribal copying. All we have from the ancient world are the Dead Sea Scrolls and a handful of inscriptions. It's tantalizing to think what we have lost and may never find.
The meat of Silva's book is in his descriptions of the grammar of Greek and Hebrew. Some points:
-- The main difficulty in learning these languages is that unlike English, they are highly inflected. Even more in Greek than in Hebrew, grammar is expressed by changing words, adding prefixes and suffixes, in Hebrew's case also by changing vowels. English is more word order-based. While nouns inflect in Greek by grammatical function (five cases!), in Hebrew they only do so by gender and number.
-- Greek, like German, easily makes new words by combining nouns. This makes Greek etymology often very transparent, even though finding the meaning of a word through etymology is usually very risky.
-- Hebrew's perfect-imperfect system often leaves novice learners mystified. After all, if Hebrew can't express the present tense, doesn't this have some deep mystical impact on the way ancient Israel ontologized the world? But in fact, it is only a grammatical convention, and Hebrew can use participles or context to express the present tense quite easily.
I did encounter something new in Silva's section on discourse analysis. What is a sentence? How do we know something is a paragraph? This seems abstract, but remember that often the verse and paragraph distinctions in both Old and New Testament are arbitrary and not in the original manuscripts. How can the meaning of a text change if the paragraphs are restructured? Silva also describes the debates between dyanmic and formal translation proponents. (Another reason to learn the original.)
Like Hoffman, Silva stresses that context is really the only way one can find out what a word means. Textbook definitions such as "levav = heart" fail to capture the nuances of how context can change the meaning of a word. This is especially true of prepositions, which can have over a dozen meanings. Even verb forms have this problem, as a student may have only learned the 1-2 major meanings of a verb form, leaving them confused when a more obscure meaning is intended. Overall, the map is not the territory, and the simplistic definitions and grammatical explanations required to teach these languages must eventually be discarded.
Silva's book was a bit of a let-down after reading Alter. But I will also give Silva the benefit of the doubt, as this was not intended to be an original scholarly work like Alter's but more of a layperson's overview. Silva has a more technical work, Biblical Words and Their Meaning: An Introduction to Lexical Semantics, that I hope to get to someday. But alas, I first must learn Greek. Overall, Silva's is a useful, if not always clear and pointed, introduction to some highly technical issues for the average churchgoer who has no need to wade through linguistics textbooks. But for this reader, it was just too facile.
Rating: 3/5
22The_Hibernator
Hey! Just wanted to let you know that I started the Paradise Lost discussion thread. :)
http://www.librarything.com/topic/140583
http://www.librarything.com/topic/140583
