Last Ramadan, as I picked up Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s translation of the Koran, the translation that I have used my whole life, I decided to add something new. I figured that if I wanted to present myself as an intellectually serious person, I had better get a closer understanding of the Bible than what I could get from reading The Cartoon History of the Universe over and over as a child. I had read good things about the literary qualities of Robert Alter’s translation, and so on the same day that I began rereading the Koran I began reading the Bible.
Immediately I felt that my effort was being rewarded. Not only is the Bible the underpinning of so much of our society and our manner of speaking, but it’s also the oldest work readily accessible to us today and a literary accomplishment of great merit in itself. For the reader there’s a special sort of connection that comes with reading a text and knowing that every line therein has been the subject of millennia of inquiry and disputation. Unfortunately all that thinking proved to be hard work, particularly since I was seriously reading the Koran at the same time, and after I got through Genesis I decided to put it away for a while.
Last week I found myself thinking about the impending start of Ramadan and about the recent Israeli election as I went up north along the coast. Those thoughts stuck with me as I walked through the ancient forest, where all the trees led me to start thinking less in days and weeks and more in centuries and millennia, and all those thoughts came together in my head and led me to the conclusion that I should start on Exodus.
In the opening chapters of Exodus, one passage in particular caught my attention, as I have to imagine it does the attention of every reader. This was Exodus 4:24–26, which Wikipedia refers to as “Zipporah at the inn“. Robert Alter renders it as follows:
24 And it happened on the way at the night camp that the LORD encountered him and sought to put him to death.
25 And Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin and touched it to his feet, and she said, “Yes, a bridegroom of blood you are to me.”
26 And He let him go. Then did she say, “A bridegroom of blood by the circumcising.”
The supply of questions from this passage alone is inexhaustible (for instance, it’s fascinating to consider what it might say about how why circumcision works and what makes it a requirement), but what immediately jars the reader is the way these three verses interrupt the narrative. God has spoken to Moses and tasked him with a mission to Pharaoh, and then all of a sudden he is marked by God for death. We assume that “he” here is Moses because of context clues, but really context clues are all we have to go on; “he” can refer to Moses or to his son or to God, and it can refer to more than one of them in the same sentence. The pronouns are strangely indeterminate.
I have no training in higher criticism or any historical analysis of the Bible, but that pronomial indeterminacy by itself immediately made me guess that this was an older passage than the rest of the chapter surrounding it. Specifically, I was reminded of Mary Beard’s description in SPQR of the language of the Twelve Tables:
It is a much simpler society, and its horizons much more restricted, than Livy’s account ever implies. That is clear from the language and forms of expression as much as from the content. Although modern translations do their best to make it all sound fairly lucid, the original Latin wording is often far from that. In particular, the absence of nouns and differentiated pronouns can make it almost impossible to know who is doing what to whom. ‘If he summons to law, he is to go. If he does not go, he is to call to witness, then is to seize him’ presumably means, as it is usually translated, ‘If a plaintiff summons a defendant to law, the defendant is to go. If he does not go, the plaintiff is to call someone else to witness, then is to seize the defendant.’ But it does not exactly say that. All the signs are that whoever drafted this and many other clauses was still struggling to use written language to frame precise regulations, and that the conventions of logical argument and rational expression were very much in their infancy.
The situation here is not exactly analogous—the biblical language is not nearly so amorphous, and the biblical writer is interested in crafting a narrative rather than logical reasoning—but the parallels are obvious. As Mary Beard puts it, there is a sense that the writer is reaching out beyond the boundaries of the language to find a way to say what needs to be said. But the Twelve Tables are mostly lost now, and even two thousand years ago they were only of historical interest. By contrast, even with the decline in biblical literacy in the West, the Bible is still read by hundreds of millions: not out of any historical interest, but for its content, which is still alive and still holds meaning as it did when it was first heard. It’s nice when some unusual wording can serve as a reminder of that connection.
Naveed Chowdhury 