Poets, Prophets, and Texts in Play: Studies in Biblical Poetry and Prophecy in Honour of Francis Landy 9780567662095, 9780567224095, 9780567295316

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LIBRARY OF HEBREW BIBLE/ OLD TESTAMENT STUDIES

597 Formerly Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series

Editors Claudia V. Camp, Texas Christian University Andrew Mein, Westcott House, Cambridge

Founding Editors David J. A. Clines, Philip R. Davies and David M. Gunn

Editorial Board Alan Cooper, John Goldingay, Robert P. Gordon, Norman K. Gottwald, James E. Harding, John Jarick, Carol Meyers, Carolyn J. Sharp, Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Francesca Stavrakopoulou, James W. Watts

POETS, PROPHETS, AND TEXTS IN PLAY

Studies in Biblical Poetry and Prophecy in Honour of Francis Landy

Edited by Ehud Ben Zvi Claudia V. Camp David M. Gunn Aaron W. Hughes

T&T CLARK Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, T&T CLARK and the T&T Clark logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2015 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Ehud Ben Zvi, Claudia V. Camp, David M. Gunn, Aaron W. Hughes and contributors, 2015 Ehud Ben Zvi, Claudia V. Camp, David M. Gunn, and Aaron W. Hughes have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-0-56722-409-5 PB: 978-0-56768-168-3 ePDF: 978-0-56729-531-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Poets, prophets, and texts in play : studies in biblical poetry and prophecy in honour of Francis Landy / edited by Ehud Ben Zvi, Claudia V. Camp, David M. Gunn, Aaron W. Hughes. pages cm. – (The library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament studies ; volume 597) Includes indexes. ISBN 978-0-567-22409-5 – ISBN 978-0-567-29531-6 (epdf) 1. Bible. Old Testament– Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Landy, Francis, honouree. II. Ben Zvi, Ehud, 1951- editor. BS1171.3.P64 2015 221.6’6–dc23 2014046276 Typeset by Forthcoming Publications Ltd (www.forthpub.com) To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Francis Landy

CONTENTS Abbreviations Contributors The Publications of Francis Landy

ix xi xiii

INTRODUCTION Claudia V. Camp and David M. Gunn

xix

Part I CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON ANCIENT TEXTS OF AN IMAGINATION ALL COMPACT: THE GARDEN, THE FOREST AND THE WASTELAND AS THE APPLE OF THE PROPHETIC POET’S EYE James R. Linville

3

DIVINE AND HUMAN WISDOM IN THE BOOK OF HOSEA: A PEDAGOGICAL PERSPECTIVE Kåre Berge

19

REMEMBERING HOSEA: THE PROPHET HOSEA AS A SITE OF MEMORY IN PERSIAN PERIOD YEHUD Ehud Ben Zvi

37

MISAPPREHENSIONS, ANCIENT AND MODERN, ABOUT LIONS (NAHUM 2:13) David J. A. Clines INTERTEXTUAL ALLUSION USING THE ROOT 01 IN ZECHARIAH 9:13–15 Diana V. Edelman

1

58

77

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Contents

A BIRD ON THE ROOF: TRAUMA AND AFFECT IN PSALM 102 Fiona C. Black THE MAN IN THE SONG OF SONGS J. Cheryl Exum

89 107

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN,” “WOMAN WISDOM,” AND “THE STRANGE WOMAN”: ON FEMININITY IN THE SONG OF SONGS Daphna V. Arbel POETRY AMID RUINS Peter J. Sabo

125 141

Part II ANCIENT TEXTS AND THEIR CULTURAL AFTERLIVES REFLECTIONS ON THE RECEPTION EXEGESIS OF ISAIAH John F. A. Sawyer

161

POETRY, MERCY, AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF JUSTICE Benjamin L. Berger

175

THE POET’S SILENCE: LANGUAGE AND NON-LANGUAGE IN ROSENZWEIG Aaron W. Hughes

191

LOVING THE HIGHWAYMAN: PROVERBS 1–9 AND THE ROMANCE OF THE ROAD Claudia V. Camp and David M. Gunn

206

HANDEL AND THE “QUEEN OF THE GARDEN” Philip R. Davies

225

THE BIBLE IN MOOMINVALLEY: THE CHILD AS READER AND THE DECEPTIVE BIBLICAL AUTHOR Hugh S. Pyper

235

Index of Biblical References Index of Authors

253 260

1

ABBREVIATIONS AB ASV

ATD BASOR BDB BHS Bib BibInt BibOr BRev BSac BZAW CBQ CBSC CEB

DCH EV(V) FAT FOTL GCT HALAT

HALOT

HAR HS HUCA ICC Int JAAR JBL JBQ

Anchor Bible American Standard Version Das Alte Testament Deutsch Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Brown, F., S. R. Driver, and C. A. Briggs. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Oxford, 1907 Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. Edited by K. Elliger and W. Rudolph. Stuttgart, 1983 Biblica Biblical Interpretation Biblica et orientalia Bible Review Bibliotheca sacra Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Catholic Biblical Quarterly Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges Common English Bible Dictionary of Classical Hebrew. Edited by D. J. A. Clines. 8 vols. Shef¿eld, 1993–2011 English version(s) Forschungen zum Alten Testament Forms of the Old Testament Literature Gender Culture Theory Koehler, L., and W. Baumgartner, Hebräisches und aramäisches Lexikon zum Alten Testament. Leiden, 1967–96 Koehler, L., W. Baumgartner, and J. J. Stamm, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. Translated and edited under the supervision of M. E. J. Richardson. 4 vols. Leiden, 1994–99 Hebrew Annual Review Hebrew Studies Hebrew Union College Annual International Critical Commentary Interpretation Journal of the American Academy of Religion Journal of Biblical Literature Jewish Bible Quarterly

x JETS JHS JNES JPS JQ JSOT JSOTSup KAT KJV

LHBOTS LXX MT NAB NEB NIV NJB NJPS NLT NRSV

OBO Or OTL PEQ RB REB RSV RV

SBLAIL Semeia SJOT SOTS TEV

VT VTSup WBC WMANT WO ZAW ZDPV

1

Abbreviations Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society Journal of Hebrew Scriptures Journal of Near Eastern Studies Jewish Publication Society Jewish Quarterly Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Journal for the Study of the Old Testament: Supplement Series Kommentar zum Alten Testament King James Version Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies Septuagint Masoretic text New American Bible New English Bible New International Version New Jerusalem Bible Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures: The New JPS Translation according to the Traditional Hebrew Text New Living Translation New Revised Standard Version Orbis biblicus et orientalis Orientalia (NS) Old Testament Library Palestine Exploration Quarterly Revue biblique Revised English Bible Revised Standard Version Revised Version Society of Biblical Literature Ancient Israel and Its Literature Semeia Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament Society for Old Testament Study Today’s English Version (= Good News Bible) Vetus Testamentum Supplements to Vetus Testamentum Word Biblical Commentary Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament Die Welt des Orients Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Zeitschrift des deutschen Palästina-Vereins

CONTRIBUTORS Daphna Arbel, Professor of Biblical and Early Jewish Literature and Mysticism, University of British Columbia, Canada Ehud Ben Zvi, Professor of (Ancient) History, Dept. of History and Classics, University of Alberta, Canada Kåre Berge, Professor of Old Testament Studies, NLA University College, Bergen, Norway Benjamin L. Berger, Associate Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Canada Fiona C. Black, Associate Professor, Religious Studies, Mount Allison University, Canada Claudia V. Camp, John F. Weatherly Professor of Religion, Texas Christian University, USA David J. A. Clines, Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies, University of Shef¿eld, UK Philip R. Davies, Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies, University of Shef¿eld, UK Diana V. Edelman, Professor of Hebrew Bible, Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo; Center for Advanced Study, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters J. Cheryl Exum, Professor Emerita of Biblical Studies, University of Shef¿eld, UK David M. Gunn, A. A. Bradford Professor Emeritus of Religion, Texas Christian University, USA

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Aaron W. Hughes, Philip S. Bernstein Chair of Jewish Studies, University of Rochester, USA James R. Linville, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Lethbridge, Canada Hugh S. Pyper, Professor of Biblical Interpretation, University of Shef¿eld, UK Peter Sabo, Religious Studies, University of Alberta, Canada John F. A. Sawyer, Honorary Fellow, School of Divinity, New College, University of Edinburgh, UK

1

THE PUBLICATIONS OF FRANCIS LANDY Books Hosea. Readings: A New Biblical Commentary. 2d rev. ed. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Phoenix, 2011. 1st ed. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1995. Paradoxes of Paradise: Identity and Difference in the Song of Songs. 2d rev. ed. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Phoenix, 2011. 1st ed. Shef¿eld: Almond, 1983. Beauty and the Enigma and Other Essays in the Hebrew Bible. JSOTSup 312. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 2001. Edited Volumes (ed. and trans.) The Tale of Aqhat. London: Menard, 1981. (with Leigh Trevaskis, and Bryan Bibb) Text, Time and Temple: Literary, Historical and Ritual Approaches to Leviticus. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Phoenix, 2014. Articles Forthcoming “Sotah and Nazir: Structure and Liminality.” In Reading Leviticus in its Contexts. Edited by Francis Landy, Bryan Bibb, and Leigh Trevaskis. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Phoenix, forthcoming. 2014 “Fluvial Fantasies.” Pages 437–55 in Thinking of Water in the Early Second Temple Period. Edited by Ehud Ben Zvi and Christoph Levin. BZAW 461. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter. “Threshing Floors and Cities.” Pages 79–97 in The City as a Site of Memory in the Hebrew Bible. Edited by Diana V. Edelman and Ehud Ben Zvi. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. 2013 “Isaiah 2: Torah and Terror.” Pages 259–71 in Far From Minimal: Celebrating the Work and InÀuence of Philip R. Davies. Edited by Duncan Burns and J. W. Rogerson. LHBOTS 484. New York and London: T&T Clark International. “Maurice Blanchot on Prophetic Speech.” Pages 356–67 in Welcome to the Cavalcade: A Festschrift in Honour of Rabbi Professor Jonathan Magonet. Edited by Howard Cooper, Colin Eimer, and Elli Tikvah Sarah. London: Kulmus.

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2012 “I and Eye in Isaiah or Gazing at the Invisible.” JBL 131: 85–97. “Levinas on Prophecy.” Pages 179–203 in Making a Difference: Essays on the Bible and Judaism in Honor of Tamara Cohn Eskenazi. Edited by David J. A. Clines, Kent Harold Richards, and Jacob L. Wright. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Phoenix. “Notes Towards a Poetics of Memory in Ancient Israel.” Pages 331–45 in Remembering and Forgetting in Ancient Israel. Edited by Ehud Ben Zvi and Christoph Levin. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. “Paradoxes of Prophetic Language in Isaiah.” Pages 28–40 in He Who Reads May Run: Essays in Honour of Edgar W. Conrad. Edited by Roland Boer, Michael Carden, and Julie Kelso. LHBOTS 553. New York and London: T&T Clark International. 2011 “The Book that Cannot Be Read.” Pages 230–55 in A Critical Engagement: Essays on the Hebrew Bible in Honour of J. Cheryl Exum. Edited by David J. A. Clines and Ellen van Wolde. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Phoenix. (with Willi Braun) “Wither or Whither? The Study of Religion at the University of Alberta.” Religion 41: 145–48. 2010 “David and Ittai.” Pages 19–37 in The Fate of King David: The Past and Present of a Biblical Icon. Edited by Tod Linafelt, Timothy Beal, and Claudia V. Camp. LHBOTS 500. New York and London: T&T Clark International. “Exile in the Book of Isaiah.” Pages 241–56 in The Concept of Exile in Ancient Israel and Its Historical Contexts. Ehud Ben Zvi and Christoph Levin. BZAW 404. Berlin: de Gruyter. “Reading, Writing, and Exile.” Pages 257–74 in The Concept of Exile in Ancient Israel and Its Historical Contexts. Edited by Ehud Ben Zvi and Christoph Levin. BZAW 404. Berlin: de Gruyter. “Three Sides of a Coin: In Conversation with Ben Zvi and Nogalski, Two Sides of a Coin.” JHS 10/11: 1–21. “Where is Isaiah in Isaiah?” Pages 283–300 in Literary Constructions of Identity in the Ancient World. Edited by Hanna Liss and Manfred Oeming. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. 2009 “Shibboleth.” Pages 231–32 in New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. Edited by Katherine Doob Sakenfeld. 5 vols. Nashville: Abingdon. “Spectrality in the Prologue to Deutero-Isaiah.” Pages 131–59 in The Desert Shall Bloom: Poetic Visions in Isaiah. Edited by A. Joseph Everson and Hyun Chul Paul Kim. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.

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2008 “The Burden of Tyre.” Pages 239–52 in Berührungspunkte: Studien zur Sozial- und Religionsgeschichte Israels und seiner Umwelt. Festschrift für Rainer Albertz zu seinem 65. Geburtstag. Edited by Ingo Kottsieper, Rüdiger Schmitt, and Jakob Wöhrle. Alter Orient und Altes Testament 350. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag. “Smith, Derrida, and Amos.” Pages 208–30 in Introducing Religion: Festschrift for Jonathan Z. Smith. Edited by Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon. London: Equinox. 2007 “Noah’s Ark and Mrs. Monkey.” BibInt 15: 351–76. “Song of Songs.” Pages 585–87 in Encyclopaedia of Love in World Religions. Edited by Yudit K. Greenberg. Oxford: ABC Clio. 2006 “The Ghostly Prelude to Deutero-Isaiah.” BibInt 14: 332–63. “Judges 1: The City of Writing, the Sacred, and the Fragmentation of the Body.” Pages 37–50 in Voyages in Uncharted Waters: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Biblical Interpretation in Honour of David Jobling. Edited by Wesley J. Bergen and Armin Siedlecki. Hebrew Bible Monographs 13. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Phoenix. “The Temple in the Akedah.” Pages 237–50 in Biblical Interpretation in Judaism and Christianity. Edited by Isaac Kalimi and Peter J. Haas. LHBOTS 439. London: T&T Clark International. 2005 “The Parable of the Vineyard (Isaiah 5.1-7) or What is a Love Song doing among the Prophets?” Studies in Religion 34: 147–64. “A Rejoinder to A. Brenner, “Regulating ‘sons’ and ‘daughters’ in the Torah and in Proverbs: Some Preliminary Insights.” JHS 5. 2004 “Between David and David: Psalm 24 and David Clines.” Pages 275–89 in Reading from Right to Left: Essays on the Hebrew Bible in Honour of David J. A. Clines. Edited by J. Cheryl Exum and H. G. M. Williamson. London: Continuum. “The End of the World: Qohelet 12.1-7 and Lamentations Rabbah.” Pages 231–46 in Derrida’s Bible. Edited by Yvonne Sherwood. New York: Palgrave. 2003 “Torah and Anti-Torah: Isaiah 2:2-4 and 1:10-26.” BibInt 11: 317–34. 2002 “Ghostwriting Isaiah.” Pages 93–114 in First Person: Essays in Biblical Autobiography. Edited by Philip R. Davies. New York: Continuum. “Perversity, Truth and the Readerly Experience.” Pages 60–78 in Autobiographical Biblical Criticism. Edited by Ingrid Rosa Kitzberger. Leiden: Deo. “Prophetic Intercourse.” Pages 261–79 in Sense and Sensitivity: Essays on Reading the Bible in Memory of Robert Carroll. Edited by Alastair Hunter and Philip R. Davies. JSOTSup 348. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic. 1

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2000 “The Covenant With Death.” Pages 220–32 in Strange Fire: The Hebrew Scriptures After the Holocaust. Edited by Tod Linafelt. The Biblical Seminar 71. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic. “Récits d’amour dans la Bible hébraique.” Le Monde du Bible 128: 53–55. “The Song of Songs.” Pages 1242–44 in Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible. Edited by David N. Freedman. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. “Vision and Voice in Isaiah.” JSOT 88: 19–36. 1999 “Leviticus, Deconstruction and the Body.” JHS 2. “Seraphim and Poetic Process.” Pages 15–34 in The Labour of Reading: Desire, Alienation, and Biblical Interpretation. Edited by Fiona C. Black, Roland Boer, and Erin Runions. Semeia Studies. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. “Strategies of Concentration and Diffusion in Isaiah 6.” BibInt 6: 58–86. 1998 “Flood and Fludd.” Pages 117–59 in Biblical Studies/Cultural Studies: The Third Shef¿eld Colloquium. Edited by J. Cheryl Exum and Stephen D. Moore. JSOTSup 226. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic. 1997 “Do We Want our Children to Read this Book?” Semeia 77: 155–75. 1995 “Fantasy and the Displacement of Desire in Hosea 2.4-17.” Pages 145–60 in A Feminist Companion to the Latter Prophets. Edited by Athalya Brenner. A Feminist Companion to the Bible 8. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic. “In the Wilderness of Speech: Problems of Metaphor in Hosea.” BibInt 3: 35–59. “Sex and Sadism in Hosea.” Pages 17–26 in Jewish Explorations of Sexuality. Edited by Jonathan Magonet. Providence: Berghahn. 1994 “Ruth and the Romance of Realism, or Deconstructing History.” JAAR 62: 285–317. 1993 “The Construction of the Subject and the Symbolic Order: A Reading of the Last Three Suffering Servant Songs.” Pages 60–71 in Among the Prophets: Language, Image and Structure in the Prophetic Writings. Edited by Philip R. Davies. JSOTSup 144. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic. “Mishneh Torah: A Response to Myself and Phyllis Trible.” Pages 260–65 in A Feminist Companion to the Song of Songs. Edited by Athalya Brenner. A Feminist Companion to the Bible 1. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic. “On Metaphor, Play and Nonsense.” Semeia 61: 219–37. “Sacred Space and Public Pleasure.” Muse 11: 22–27. “Tracing the Voice of the Other: Isaiah 28 and the Covenant with Death.” Pages 140–62 in The New Literary Criticism and the Hebrew Bible. Edited by David J. A. Clines and J. Cheryl Exum. JSOTSup 143. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic. 1

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1992 “In Defense of Jakobson.” JBL 111: 105–13. 1991 “Jouissance and Poetics.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 45: 51–64. “Foreword.” Pages xi–xvi in J. P. Fokkelman, Narrative Art in Genesis: Specimens of Stylistic and Structural Analysis. The Biblical Seminar 12. Shef¿eld: JSOT. 1990 “Humour as a Tool in Biblical Exegesis.” Pages 101–17 in On Humour and the Comic in the Hebrew Bible. Edited by Yehuda T. Radday and Athalya Brenner. JSOTSup 92. Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic. Reprint of “Humour in the Bible.” JQ 29 (1980): 13– 19. “On the Gender of God and the Feminist Enterprise: A Response to Shannon Clarkson.” Studies in Religion 19: 485–87. “Shibboleth: The Password.” Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress of Jewish Studies: 91–99. 1989 “Between the Bible and Torah.” Pages 83–86 in Approaches to the Hebrew Bible in Translation. Edited by Barry N. Olshen and Yael S. Feldman. New York: Modern Language Association of America. “Literariness and the Bible.” JQ 135: 53–57. “Narrative Techniques and Symbolic Transactions in the Akedah.” Pages 1–40 in Signs and Wonders: Biblical Texts in Literary Focus. Edited by J. Cheryl Exum. Atlanta: Scholars Press. 1987 “Lamentations.” Pages 329–334 in The Literary Guide to the Bible. Edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. “Recent Developments in Biblical Poetics.” Prooftexts 7: 163–78. “The Song of Songs.” Pages 305–19 in The Literary Guide to the Bible. Edited by Robert Alter and Frank Kermode. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. “Vision and Poetic Speech in Amos.” Hebrew Annual Review 11: 223–46. 1986 “Gilead and the Fatal Word.” Proceedings of the Ninth World Congress of Jewish Studies: 39–44. “A Possible Trace of the Theme of the Centaur in the Midrash.” Synkrisis. Testi e studi di storia e ¿loso¿a del linguaggio religioso. Il Centauro, D 156-161, E 121-130. 1985 “Are We in the Place of Averroes?” Semeia 32: 131–48.

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1984 “Poetics and Parallelism: Some Comments on James Kugel’s ‘The Idea of Biblical Poetry.’” JSOT 28: 61–87. 1983 “The Case of Kugel: Do We Find Ourselves When We Lose Ourselves in the Text?” Comparative Criticism 5: 305–16. “Eros and Hieros in the Song of Songs.” The Heythrop Journal 24: 301–7. 1982 “Two Versions of Paradise: The Metaphor of the Garden in the Song of Songs and the Garden of Eden.” Harvest 28: 112–29. 1981 “Irony and Catharsis in Biblical Poetry: David’s Lament over Saul and Jonathan.” European Judaism 15: 3–13. “The Name of God and the Image of God and Man.” Theology 84: 164–70. “The Serpent in the Garden of Eden.” Harvest 27: 38–44. “Structure and Mythology in the Song of Songs.” Prospice 11: 97–117. 1980 “Beauty and the Enigma: An Inquiry into Some Interrelated Episodes in the Song of Songs.” JSOT 17: 53–106. 1979 “The Song of Songs and the Garden of Eden.” JBL 98: 513–28.

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INTRODUCTION Claudia V. Camp and David M. Gunn

Francis Landy Francis Landy is considered by many to be the ¿nest critic of biblical poetry writing today. The same could have been said of him for decades now. His work is recognized as having a quality all of its own. He has an extraordinary ability to trace the resonances and multivalences of poetry and write of them in his own subtly textured prose. Since his ¿rst book, Paradoxes of Paradise,1 which ushered in literary-critical reading of the Song of Songs and is now considered a classic, he has steadily written paper after paper, always imaginative, ¿nely tuned, demanding our closest attention—just as the poetry he reads elicits his closest attention. Profound and perceptive, he can be af¿rming and disruptive, not to say impish and quirky, delightfully so. His erudition is matched by his humor, and his integrity by his tolerance. He has an innate ability to tease out the intricate meanings of particular segments of poetry and show how the segments link to build larger themes and express deeper anxieties or desires that span the whole work. It is not simply that he has a keen eye for detail and nuance. What makes his work so rewarding to read is that he brings to his engagement with the text a rich experience of literature and life, along with his patent pleasure in the play of language. He generally wears lightly his keen interest in critical theory, though his appreciation for some theorists (Kristeva, for example) and critical movements (feminist criticism has long inÀuenced his writing) will show through. And always his writing turns and returns, with great sensitivity, to central aspects of the human condition. Of Paradoxes of Paradise Cheryl Exum wrote, “His book takes us on a fascinating journey through the poem, exploring its imagery, its suggestiveness, its layers of meaning, its ability (and inability) to 1. Paradoxes of Paradise: Identity and Difference in the Song of Songs (Bible and Literature 7; Shef¿eld: Almond, 1983).

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communicate the incommunicable.”2 Succinctly put, and applicable to so much of Landy’s work. In this particular journey through the imagery of the Song we come to see the lovers forming a composite personality in which each self sees itself reÀected in the other. We ¿nd ourselves exploring the relationship of beauty, ambiguity, and terror in the Song; and our journey takes us further, into the Garden of Eden. In Landy’s commentary on Hosea,3 one of the ¿rst literary-critical commentaries on a prophetic book, we are treated to a fascinating exposition of the role of gender-switching in the poetry, where female imagery complements male and male complements female. Isaiah is another book that has long been a locus for Landy’s explorations. His analysis of Isa 6,4 for example, lays out the rhetorical strategies whereby the narrator diverts attention from the ineffable vision of God and focuses it rather on the person of the prophet and his paradoxical commission. A close reading of Isa 40:1–115 takes up the passage’s relationship to Isa 6 and how it produces an effect of the Freudian uncanny, through intensity of its desire to return home, a home which, however, is haunted by the voices of the past. That path taken has led Landy to think further about Deutero-Isaiah’s “secondariness,” its use of quotations from and allusions to Proto-Isaiah among other texts, and about its ambiguity. The range and inventiveness of his writing is remarkable: for a sample, dip into the collection of essays in Beauty and the Enigma and Other Essays on the Hebrew Bible.6 Landy is interested in the way texts may be read as a whole yet without suppressing their disjunctions, their contradictions, and the powerful impulses that lie beneath their surfaces, those aspects of texts which, together with the continuities, constitute a complex coherence. He is a literary critic but has always been keenly aware of the historical dimensions of his texts and has consistently brought to bear on his interpretations evidence from the artifactual and cultural worlds of antiquity (as, for example, his use of Egyptian, Syrian, and Assyrian evidence in Paradoxes of Paradise). He also wants to mark where historical critics have found problems in the text, not only problems about historical context but also problems about style and language. For he knows that 2. Book review in JAAR 54 (1986): 592–93 (592). 3. Hosea (Readings; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1995; 2d ed.; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Phoenix, 2011). 4. “Strategies of Concentration and Diffusion in Isaiah 6,” BibInt 6 (1999): 58–86. 5. “The Ghostly Prelude to Deutero-Isaiah,” BibInt 14 (2006): 332–63. 6. JSOTSup 312; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 2001. 1

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there is a signi¿cant overlap between the literary and historical critic and therefore signi¿cant literary-critical potential in taking account of the results of two centuries of historical-critical research. Moreover, he does not see his literary criticism as simply a synchronic endeavor, an interpretation of the ¿nal form of a text without signi¿cant reference to historical context, but rather as incorporating a crucial diachronic dimension. Indeed, he sees the trauma of historical change as being at the core of a book like Isaiah where the end result of this change is a prophetic work calling for the text itself—not state institutions or temple cult—to be recognized as the center of religious life. A vital quality of the book’s poetry is to provoke its readers to sustained interpretation as they seek to ¿nd meaning in horror, mass destruction, and God. This poetic critic of poetry grew up in London. He ventured to Cambridge for his undergraduate studies (B.A., 1969) and then to the University of Sussex, where he wrote his doctoral thesis (D.Phil., 1983) under the mentorship of David Daiches, and where he found himself in valued dialogue with Gabriel Josopovici. It was at this point in his career, in England, that he and David Gunn (editor) met, worked together, and began a life-long conversation and friendship. The University of Alberta had the inestimable good sense to appoint him Assistant Professor in 1984, drawing him to Canada where, in due course, he met his inestimable spouse, Bennett, and where their son, Joseph, was born. He became Associate Professor in 1989 and Professor in 1994. Not long after Landy arrived in Edmonton, Ehud Ben Zvi (editor) became Landy’s colleague. For more than twenty-¿ve years they contributed to and facilitated each other’s academic journeys. They constituted also a complementary duo that turned their institution into one of the most interesting places to study and research the Hebrew Bible in Canada. Claudia Camp (editor) came to know Landy as not only a friend but a valued reader of her own work, and a ¿ne dinner companion. Aaron Hughes (editor) worked with Francis as an undergraduate between 1990 and 1993, becoming a subsequent friend and conversation partner. Hughes is grateful for Landy’s textual and poetic sensitivity and credits it as a major impetus for his own work in Jewish thought and philosophy. He is one of the many students who have been inspired by Landy, both in the area of biblical studies and in the ¿eld of religious studies in general. Landy has been a constant contributor to the programs of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) and the International SBL among other societies, always in demand as a presenter. He has also been much interested in the general study of religion in Canada, taking an active role in its growth at both the institutional and the national levels. He served on

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the executive board of both the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion (CSSR) and the Canadian Corporation for the Study of Religion (CCSR). From 2007–2012, moreover, he edited the CCSR’s Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, the major journal devoted to religious studies in Canada. He served also as the president of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies from 2009–2010 and his presidential address is still remembered for its unique quality. The Essays The organization of essays in a Festschrift, no matter how intentionally planned, is always a challenge to its editors. In our experience, though, some broad trends in theme or approach typically emerge that allows for meaningful groupings of the various contributions. Such trends did indeed in this case emerge, but a set of categories for grouping the essays remained elusive: rather than setting them into groups, the themes and approaches ran like threads through the essays, combining one with another in different ways, a recognizable cluster in one essay, a different cluster in another. One thing the editors could agree on: how like Francis Landy to have produced such a deconstructive effect! Let us, though, try to tease out the various strands of thought. Texts and Reception On a very basic level, the essays could be thought of in two groupings— and this is how we have chosen to order them—one where the main focus is on interpretation of particular biblical texts in conversation with contemporary scholarship and the other for those that aim toward some engagement either with a wider history of reception or with some other aspect of Western culture. In the ¿rst category, we have placed James Linville’s “Of an Imagination All Compact: The Garden, The Forest and the Wasteland as the Apple of the Prophetic Poet’s Eye” (on Hos 1–3 and Isa 32); Kåre Berge’s “Divine and Human Wisdom in Hosea: A Pedagogical Perspective”; Ehud Ben Zvi’s “Remembering Hosea: The Prophet Hosea as a Site of Memory in Persian Period Yehud”; David Clines’s “Misapprehensions, Ancient and Modern, About Lions (Nahum 2:13)”; Diana Edelman’s “Intertextual Allusion Using the Root 01 in Zechariah 9:13–15”; Fiona Black’s “A Bird on the Roof: Trauma and Affect in Psalm 102”; Cheryl Exum’s “The Man in the Song of Songs”; Daphna Arbel’s “‘The Most Beautiful Woman,’ ‘Woman Wisdom,’ and ‘the Strange Woman’: On Femininity in the Song of Songs”; and Peter Sabo’s “Poetry Amid Ruins” (on Lamentations). 1

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In the second category, essays dealing in one form or another with reception history or cultural studies, fall John Sawyer’s “ReÀections on the Reception Exegesis of Isaiah”; Benjamin Berger’s “Poetry, Mercy, and the Phenomenology of Justice”; Aaron Hughes’s “The Poet’s Silence: Language and Non-Language in Rosenzweig”; Claudia Camp and David Gunn’s “Loving the Highwayman: Proverbs 1–9 and the Romance of the Road”; Philip Davies’s “Handel and the ‘Queen of the Garden’”; and Hugh Pyper’s “The Bible in Moominvalley: The Child as Reader and the Deceptive Biblical Author.” Categorizations may easily break down, however, and borders are often porous. For one thing, a canonical order to the essays in the ¿rst, text-focused, group seemed an obvious choice, but what about the second? There, too, we have chosen (for the most part—Pyper’s will be an exception) canonical order, a nod to the fact that our work in reception history and cultural studies begins and ends with a concern for the biblical text. Indeed, one of Sawyer’s central concerns is precisely that fact, as indicated by the phrase “reception exegesis” in his title rather than the frequently used “reception history.” Sawyer wishes to shift the emphasis away from the history of reception of texts as an end in itself (as in reception history) or from focus on the expressive contexts (art, literature, music, e.g.) in which they have been used (as in reception criticism), and onto the meaning of the texts themselves. By means of examples from his own forthcoming commentary on Isaiah, he illustrates how the larger history of exegesis of this prophetic book might illuminate the meaning of the text, helping “to explain dif¿cult words and phrases, ¿ll in gaps in the narrative, and highlight interesting features of the text,” with intellectual room allowed for the critic to make judgments about “better” and “worse” interpretations. Quite different is Berger’s agenda, being an exploration on the question of the place of mercy in our contemporary understandings of justice. But he turns to the book of Jonah as a source for reÀection on “the place of mercy in the architecture of justice,” offering a meditative commentary on the book to build his case. Camp and Gunn also depend ¿rst on biblical exegesis as the basis for their larger look at the Highwayman as a cultural icon, providing a detailed account of the verbal and thematic interconnections in Prov 1–9 between the ¿gures of the Strange Woman and the Highwayman. Some of the essays in the ¿rst group, moreover, while focused on interpretations of the texts themselves, nonetheless show the impress of the authors’ wider interests. Linville’s interpretation of Hos 1–3 and Isa 32 takes us to that borderland, both Shakespearean and biblical,

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where “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet” meet. In another vein, Clines’s at ¿rst apparently straightforward lexicographic study of vocabulary for lions in Nahum shows the relevance of current scienti¿c knowledge, not to prove the biblical text correct or incorrect in that regard, but to help translation show more clearly what the text’s own concerns are and are not. At the same time, the bias of modern translators who sometimes choose to ignore this information in service of their own ideological interests is revealed: Clines’s highly technical enterprise is surely no end in itself! Ehud Ben Zvi’s “Remembering Hosea: The Prophet Hosea as a Site of Memory in Persian Period Yehud” has its own special relationship to the question of text and reception. Ben Zvi takes up a text of enduring interest to Landy as a site to continue his own longstanding work with memory theory. Ben Zvi considers the mnemonic grammar of “preferences and dispreferences” that underlay the construction of Hosea-theprophet by the Second Temple scribal community that produced Hoseathe-book. To function as a viable site of memory, he argues, Hosea had on the one hand to be remembered as sharing key traits with others “memorialized” in the prophetic book collection (and other parts of what became the canon), for example, the typical pattern of disregarded announcements of deserved doom, alongside predictions of a utopian future yet to come. On the other hand, the memory of Hosea as a Northern prophet offered a distinctive element that was particularly important to the “Israel” being both remembered and constructed by this group, namely, an Israel that included the former Northern Kingdom, along with Judah, as the true people of Yahweh. This essay, then, while focused on a particular biblical text and drawing upon memory scholarship, is most concerned with exploring the political and theological “mindscape” of Hosea’s ancient readers and how that conceptual world shaped what those readers understood to be the text. In this sense, the text was the book-as-read. A study of Hosea and its ancient readers along these lines has clear af¿nities to reception studies. Less obviously, perhaps, the use of allusion—a frequent topic of Landy’s explorations—might also be thought about in terms of reception. Diana Edelman’s “Intertextual Allusion Using the Root 01 in Zechariah 9:13–15” examines Zechariah’s use of the rare verb 01—to protect or defend—in order to show intertextual resonances between this text and three passages in Isaiah also using the verb. Yet Edelman’s work is quite different from Ben Zvi’s. She focuses on evocative language, especially the dense and sometimes enigmatic imagery of Zech 9:13–15 which mixes motifs of instruments of war, animals of prey, and an altar 1

Introduction

xxv

running with blood with depiction of Yahweh as holy warrior in a future day of battle. The verb 01, though, she argues, by means of its deliberate allusion to Isaiah, brings reassurance to Zechariah’s readers that Yahweh will indeed protect and defend Israel in that future battle, as he had against Sennacherib in the days of Isaiah. With provisos such as the foregoing in mind, we now leave, as Landy would no doubt be glad for us to do, the question of categories and borders, turning from the effort to justify ourselves as editors and, more appropriately, to some ways in which the various essays embody the interests of Francis Landy. The Generation of the Subject: Psychoanalysis and Metaphor, Play and Lament Several of the essays take up Landy’s typical engagement with postmodern literary theory, especially that with a psychoanalytic orientation and/or a focus on metaphor. All highlight in different ways the new generation of the subject by means of the indeterminacy of poetic language, while evoking other important components of Landy’s thought: the relationship of beauty to play, on the one hand, and, on the other, to loss and despair. James Linville and Kåre Berge fall more on the playful end. Linville’s close readings of Hos 1–3 and Isa 32 through the lens of Shakespeare’s “imagination all compact” show how these two prophets—lunatics, lovers, and poets both!—engage in a poetic play of creation and destruction. They “draw their players in metaphoric wildernesses and…set their play of culture and society into an ever-shifting landscape of order and oblivion,” from “garden to wasteland, city to ruins, beloved people to victims or exiles and back again.” Reading or writing religious texts, which stand at the intersection of religion and art, is understood by Linville as analogous to performing rituals that invoke and respond to the mythic need to identify, resolve, and sanctify the “disjunction and dissonance between external and internal realities” as “a holy paradox or enigma.” Working with two of Landy’s favorite theorists, Kristeva and Winnicott, Berge seeks to understand the metaphors of parents and children in Hosea in terms of modern notions of poetics and pedagogy. Such a framework can account for what appears to be subverted pedagogical relationships here: a mother who leads her children astray and is to be criticized by them, and a God without a coherent Ego who closes down the maternal “play space” where creative learning takes place. Berge elaborates on the instability of these metaphors to show that Hosea’s is

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an “aesthetic pegagogy,” designed not to instruct in conventional codes of behavior but, through its poetics, to emancipate a community toward a new awareness of its “subject-ness.” This poetics works, paradoxically, precisely by breaking authoritarian notions of moral cause and effect based on unitary meaning and establishing a pedagogical relationship between the text and the reader based on its inherently unstable metaphors, which neutralize death in the play-space of language. Fiona Black and Peter Sabo turn to the darker, but still creative, end of beauty’s emotional spectrum. The enchanting yet disturbing presence of birds, of more or less determinate species, in the lament of Psalm 102 draws Black to consideration of their poetic effect—on the lamenting individual, on the community that witnesses the lament, and on herself as reader. They represent, she argues, das Unheimliche, the uncanny in Kristeva’s sense, in this case the non-human, that resides suppressed within the individual. The imagery thus evokes what the lamenter experiences as the greatest threat, the loss of his humanity, and in so doing, addresses the psychic damage to both the individual and the community of the trauma of the exile. Sabo is likewise concerned with lament and exile, bringing together the destruction poetically depicted in the book of Lamentations with poetry’s conjuring up of beauty by means of the semiotic dimension of language. He reads Lamentations as a melancholic text, endlessly repeating its mourning, but also (with Kristeva) argues that melancholia’s inability to come to terms with its loss disconnects the sufferer from the symbolic (paternal) dimension of language only to bring its semiotic (maternal) aspect to the fore: the rhythms, repetitions, alliterations, etc.—and the unsettling polyvalence—that constitute poetry provide a “counterdepressant that curbs mourning” and prevents complete loss of meaning. At the level of signi¿cation Lamentations offers no meaning, yet comfort in the form of “an ephemeral catharsis” might be found in the details of the poetic language itself. Taking the instability of metaphor to its ¿nal frontier, Aaron Hughes shows how the elusive metaphorical language of the Song of Songs encapsulates the enigmatic tension between language and silence at the heart of the cosmological thinking of the early twentieth-century Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig. Hughes reads the Song as a “poetic microcosm” of the relationships between God, human, and world unfolded in Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption, relationships that exist in and through the interplay of the language of revelation and the silences of creation and redemption. Revelation is thus founded in a “paradox of indeterminacy and spontaneity that simultaneously limits and permits access to truth.” 1

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Nature: Garden and Wilderness Much of Landy’s work has been undertaken as and on a journey from the Garden to the Wilderness and back, with the literal and metaphorical, the material and mystical, the human and divine qualities of both never separable, always mutually informing. Linville’s play with garden, forest, and wasteland in prophetic texts channels Landy in this regard, as does Black’s attraction to the psalmic bird on the rooftop. And in a very different way, Clines pays tribute both to Landy and to the importance in biblical poetry of the larger, non-human world of creation, with his careful attention to the lions of Nahum. Philip Davies also enters into Landy’s garden idyll, but by a different road—that of reception history—and with a different end, namely, the use of the imagery as political rhetoric. In “Handel and the ‘Queen of the Garden,’” he argues that Handel’s oratorio Solomon should be understood against the background both of “the Solomonic intertextuality of the Bible” and the politics of Handel’s day. Unnoticed by music historians unschooled in the Bible, he observes, is the libretto’s use of the Song of Solomon, as well as 1 Kings. “Solomon” is George II, Handel’s patron, depicted as deeply in love with his Queen. This female ¿gure, though, admits of more than one interpretation; she is at once the former Queen Caroline (now twenty years dead) and also an idealized Lady Wisdom drawn from Proverbs. But the oratorio’s Song/Eden-like valorization of the pastoral setting also evokes the use of the Bible’s creation stories in the debate regarding the divine right of kings in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and England. The oratorio thus “entailed a delicate negotiation with the Bible, with Realpolitik, with a biblically knowledgeable audience, and with the king himself.” Feminist and Gender-Critical Studies Though Davies’s essay is not feminist in thesis or method, it already highlights the persistent linkage in Landy’s work between gardens and the gendered beings who ¿nd themselves therein. Indeed, a hallmark of Landy’s work from early on is the use of feminist theorists like Kristeva in his readings of biblical texts, especially Hosea and the Song of Songs, where poetic construals of male–female relationships play such a central role. Several contributors to this volume take up questions of gender directly. In contrast to the tendency of recent commentators to highlight the importance of the female ¿gure in the Song of Songs, Cheryl Exum turns attention to the male. Separating the man’s speeches from the woman’s as a notional independent poem, she considers the differences in the way the two characters “speak about love and about each other.” On the one

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Introduction

hand, we ¿nd a male character not unlike others in the Bible, with concern shown in his own speeches for self-control, here in the area of desire, and a preference for military metaphors. In the woman’s speeches, on the other hand, we see his “better side,” an attentive (if not always available!) man, who takes possession of the woman only at her invitation. The Song’s unique representation of a man in love, as seen both from his own perspective and his lovers, thus contributes to the small but emerging area of masculinity studies of the Hebrew Bible. Daphna Arbel returns to consideration of the woman in the Song, setting her in comparison to the antithetical ¿gures in Proverbs of “woman wisdom” and “the strange woman,” and arguing that she embodies traits of both. This dual-faceted ¿gure, Arbel suggests, is an intentional construction of womanhood that “gives access to what ‘femininity’ means in the Song,” a model that embraces a complex set of meanings and values, both “wise” and “strange,” thus rejecting Proverbs’s binary view that promotes a single, domesticated ideal while regulating women’s sexuality outside male control. Claudia Camp and David Gunn direct the gendered conversation from Proverbs’ Strange Woman and Highwayman to later recon¿gurings of these cultural icons. The links between the male and female images in Proverbs itself, they argue, have the effect of blurring gender boundaries,” and at the same time cover up an “ambiguous moral discourse” on the part of the father-teacher regarding the desire for treasure. They then examine different, but analogous, ways in which the iconic ¿gure of the Highwayman has continued his variously coded subversions of gender and morality in later literature, in particular, in the early twentiethcentury poem, “The Highwayman,” by Alfred Noyes and in a novel by the proli¿c author of historical romances, Barbara Cartland. Here, they argue, the complex representations of the Highwayman suggest “a cultural mythos more complex than is allowed in Prov 1–9” and thus intensify the biblical hermeneutical question: what does Proverbs’ father ¿gure have to hide? David Clines’s sly study of the lions deserves mention here. Though Clines wears the mantle of lexicographer, his inner ideological critic shines through. A substantial component of the argument regarding what is (and was) known about lions has to do with distinguishing habits of male and female lions, along with their mating behavior. He expresses alarm at the way notable and popular modern translations impose the translators’ preference for monogamy on the animal world, transforming the lion’s “mates” to “mate,” despite clear textual witness for the plural. No feminist could condemn more strongly this “reprehensible” procedure and “frightening example of the power of the translator’s prejudices.” 1

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Poetic Justice: The Mystic and the Child Deconstruction in both philosophy and literary criticism has often gotten a bad rap. To some, the endless deferral of meaning appears as but a mindgame, just as mysticism—deconstruction’s more spiritual cousin— seems escapist rather than engaged with the sorrows and struggles of life in the real world. To see a poet and mystic and intellectual, to see Francis Landy, at life and at work gives the lie to such specious dismissals. The essays of Black and Sabo demonstrate the intense reality of the search for ever-receding meaning in the face of suffering, and the equally real, if ephemeral, catharsis that poetry can offer. And that ever-receding meaning is also, at the same time, always playfully present, as Linville suggests. Berge, moreover, shows the moral dimension of the unstable and deconstructive play of language in the text’s pedagogy toward personhood. The essays of Benjamin Berger and Hugh Pyper also reÀect in different ways on the essential role of imagination in the building of a world in which children can live. Unfolding the contemporary problem of integrating mercy and justice, Berger argues that the practice and theories of law and political philosophy are designed to suppress the messiness of real human experience, while narrative, story, and poetry, with their ability to “unsettle ideas, to aggravate convention, and trouble settled wisdom,” offer themselves as means to “access ‘life.’” His interpretation of the book of Jonah construes it as a parable about the nature of justice that points to the peril of human reliance on the comfort found in a Jonah-like “life-Àattening simplicity of judgment”—evident as well in our current legal system— where mercy, appearing as uncanny, is repressed. Finally, Pyper explores a question that Landy has also addressed—do we want our children to read the Bible?—by “setting [it] alongside another canon of literature that plays with the boundaries between writing for children and writing for adults,” namely, the Moomin books by Swedish author Tove Jansson. Children’s authors, says Jansson, write to deceive, to intimate while also covering over dark mysteries that naturally excite children’s imaginations. Thus, stories of a Àood, for example, register in both canons a sensitivity to catastrophe but also, paradoxically, a search for comfort in “the security of the fantastic.” Pyper’s essay is, as noted above, the one that, Flood-like, overÀows our editorial efforts at a canonically based ordering of the contributions. We believe that the reader who follows to the end Pyper’s meditation on the child as reader will appreciate it as the last and best word one might offer in Landy’s honor.

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The editors hope that this volume will be a ¿tting tribute to our friend and colleague, Francis Landy. We hope also that it will be reminiscent of some aspects of his work and thought—work and thought we continue to celebrate. Above all, we hope that this volume will encourage readers to keep reading and rereading Landy’s writings, for in them they will ¿nd, time and again, something new and fascinating.

1

Part I

CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES ON ANCIENT TEXTS

1

OF AN IMAGINATION ALL COMPACT: THE GARDEN, THE FOREST AND THE WASTELAND AS THE APPLE OF THE PROPHETIC POET’S EYE James R. Linville

The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet’s eye, in ¿ne frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Theseus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5:1, 7–17

It is an honor to contribute to this Festschrift, as it was a delight to study under Francis Landy during my B.A. years and to learn so much from him since. In dedicating this essay to him, I am sorting through the memories I have of my time as his student and his research assistant on the project that resulted in his book on Hosea. One fond memory during my years at the University of Alberta in Edmonton was seeing my ¿rst Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I watched with the same kind of wonderment as Francis brought to the book of 1 Samuel during a semester-long seminar. Here were imagined worlds of enchantment, fate, transformation, tragic Àaws, and words that always said more than they seemed at ¿rst hearing. And so, I would like to dedicate this brief Àight of fancy to my teacher and friend. Much of the magic of Shakespeare’s play takes place in an enchanted transformative space and time: a mid-summer’s night in a forest outside of the ordered life and culture of Athens. Lovers Àee to escape a cruel law, faeries play, plot, and scheme, and people who are not really actors rehearse being different people entirely, while identities, emotions, and

4

Poets, Prophets, and Texts in Play

the occasional person’s head, are magically trans¿gured. Biblical texts too draw their players into metamorphic wildernesses and, as I will develop in this essay, set their play of culture and society in an evershifting landscape of order and oblivion. Between landmarks of towns and villages, one can become lost and perish. The cycles of nature are obvious but not predictable. Harvests can fail for any number of reasons, storms terrify and destroy. In the Bible’s opening chapters, humanity is cast from a perfect garden to scratch out a precarious living, caught between paradise and death. Between the Sea and the River, in an uninhabitable land, Israel was transformed into a covenant people. According to Daniel Hawk, the rise of the Israelite monarchy told in Samuel and Kings follows a pattern comparable to that of the Oresteia trilogy of Aeschylus. Both narratives detail the birth of a society from an old social order based on kinship and feature a youthful character’s transition in episodes in which the wilderness plays an important role. As Orestes was pursued into parts uninhabited by the Furies, David was forced to Àee to the wilds from Saul. It is the newly created deity, Athena, who ¿nally made peace with the Furies, while the enigmatic Solomon established the new social order of Israel around the Temple, a feat accomplished with divine wisdom, albeit, as we all know, a gift soon squandered.1 The natural environment itself is liminal, caught between heaven and Sheol, the sacred center of oblivion. As the symbiosis between the divine, nature, and humanity is disturbed, the poetic constructs invert and transform: light becomes dark, the vineyard a desert, and life becomes death. The world of culture, of cities and citadels, houses and homes is transformed into nature and chaos. Like Daphne or Attis, characters in biblical poetry merge with the landscape. As is well known, divine judgment on humans in the Bible sees not only the destruction of culture but also the ravishing of nature while the restoration of divine human relationships see rebuilt cities and a new edenic bounty in farms and vineyards (e.g., Amos 9:13–15). A symbiotic relationship between the divine, humanity, and nature is constructed in many biblical texts. Anything that upsets that three-way relationship has an impact on the whole that sees the inversion of the ideal. The divine becomes demonic, habitable nature becomes a wasteland, while living spaces are turned into places of exile or the underworld. In Joel, sacri¿ce mediates tensions in that relationship.2 The 1. L. Daniel Hawk, “Violent Grace: Tragedy and Transformation in the Oresteia and the Deuteronomistic History,” JSOT 28 (2003): 73–88. 2. James R. Linville, “The Day of Yahweh and the Mourning of the Priests in Joel,” in The Priests in the Prophets: The Portrayal of Priests, Prophets, and Other

LINVILLE Of an Imagination All Compact

5

transformations of order, be it garden to wasteland, city to ruins, beloved people to victims or exiles and back again, are a common feature of the Bible’s prophetic texts. My chief examples in this paper are found in the opening chapters of Hosea and Isa 32 but before turning to these passages my initial conceptual framework needs to be detailed. This is not the place for demonstrating universal features of religion or culture, but one would probably not be far from error in stating that such a symbiosis with its dark shadow is recognized in many different societies and that it is often the role of religion to offer a ritual or other means of maintaining or restoring its positive aspects when disturbed. Superimposed on the symbiotic triad are at least two intersecting models of sacred space. According to Ronald Simkins, the vertical model is based on the notion of a central axis that unites the earth with heaven above and the underworld below. This axis mundi is usually in the form of a cosmic mountain. In ancient Israel, this mountain was understood to be Zion and Sinai. This model is linked to myths of divine combat and ¿gures prominently in such passages as Isa 14:12–15 when the king of Babylon is cast from heaven into Sheol.3 The human realm lies between the upper and lower domains and so is a kind of liminal space itself. In the so-called horizontal model sites of theophanies mark sacred centers while chaotic peripheral regions lie beyond the ordered realm in which humans might dwell. Both center and periphery are equally “sacred” albeit appearing diametrically opposed. This perceived tension between the positive and negative aspects of the sacred blurs its essential unity.4 They are two sides of the same coin. Jonathan Z. Smith likewise ¿nds chaos to be an integral part of the sacred, saying that chaos can never be profane or neutral. He maintains, however, that temple sites may mark the separation of earth from heaven as much as they mark their intersection.5

Religious Specialists in the Latter Prophets (ed. L. L. Grabbe and A. Ogden Bellis; London: T&T Clark International, 2004), 98–114. Ronald Simkins, Yahweh’s Activity in History and Nature in the Book of Joel (Ancient Near Eastern Texts and Studies 10; Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1991), 58–75; Ronald Simkins, “God, History, and the Natural World in the Book of Joel,” CBQ 55 (1993): 435–52. 3. Ronald Simkins, Creator and Creation: Nature in the Worldview of Ancient Israel (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994), 138–42. 4. Ibid., 133–35. 5. Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Wobbling Pivot,” in Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religions (ed. Jonathan Z. Smith; Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity 23; Leiden: Brill, 1978), 88–103 (97–99).

6

Poets, Prophets, and Texts in Play

These two models are useful to the scholar up to a point, especially when taken as complementary. Taken together, the “middle realm” is dotted with multiple centers of powers, both positive and negative. Simkins ¿nds the two at play in passages such as Joel 3:18, Zeph 14:8, and Ezek 47, in which a river from the sacred mountain will go out to water the whole land. Still, the utility of the two models is limited in that they are rather static and lack the dynamic Àuidity of human perception of the environment, both natural and supernatural. Given the precariousness of human life, dependent upon a multitude of factors from the weather and diseases to political circumstances and family relations, construction or discovery of the sacred in all of its aspects is necessarily a creative enterprise that operates on multiple levels at once. What concerns me is the overlapping of these and other maps or blueprints for world construction. Multiplicity of such imagery is central to poetry and, I argue, to religious mythology in general. Both the horizontal or vertical models of sacred space are “locative” maps in that they seek to restore order through a ritualization of chaos.6 The call for collective supplication in the book of Joel reÀects such a ritualization. As I have argued elsewhere, however, in Joel the ritual is not only intended to recreate life-giving nature from its desiccated and threatening current condition, but also to transform Yahweh, who, as destroyer of nature, has become the embodiment of chaos and must, in a sense, be recreated as a deity of order and life.7 The dual nature of the biblical deity has been acknowledged by a number of scholars. Dennis Silva argues that the =#:!1 in Ps 93 are not a watery chaos opposed to God but are a manifestation of the deity. Yahweh is the sea monster.8 He writes, The =#:!1 rise and crash thunderously. But the power that threatens to disrupt order is actually a manifestation of the power that establishes order. A seamless world has been created. In the robe of Yahweh threat and lordship are interwoven. Stability is neither achieved by controlling the unabolished chaos, as in Genesis, nor wrestled from a primal chaos, as in the Chaoskämpfe. Stability is a larger reality that includes the chaos. The depths are the fountainheads of chaos, which may erupt through natural or historical forces. The power of chaos itself, however, belongs to God.9 6. Jonathan Z. Smith, “Map Is Not Territory,” in Smith, ed., Map Is Not Territory, 289–309 (309). 7. Linville, “The Day of Yahweh,” 98–114. 8. Dennis Silva, “The Rising =#:!1 of Psalm 93: Chaotic Order,” JSOT 36 (2012): 471–82. 9. Ibid., 482.

LINVILLE Of an Imagination All Compact

7

Landy links -'!+ %#:, “wind/spirit” of God, in Gen 1:2 to the creative “spirit of Yahweh” of Isa 40:13 but also to the “breath of God” in 40:7 that withers the grass. “So the God of creation is the God of death, and the despair the prophet enunciates is inherent in the structure of creation.”10 Similarly, the destructive !#!' %#: blows in Hos 13:15 and, I will argue, in Isa 32. There are close af¿nities between the work of religion and that of art. Raymond Firth writes that religion and art are human responses to incongruity between the ideal and real and between the desire for life and happiness and the certainty of death and pain.11 Scholars such as Jonathan Z. Smith and Burton Mack construe mythology as a creative play and overlap of conceptual frameworks of meaning and experienced reality that generates thought.12 Here, disjunction and dissonance between external and internal realities can be identi¿ed, resolved, or even sancti¿ed as a holy paradox or enigma. Art requires expressive styles similar to that of religion and these styles distance people from their usual means of testing reality. Through identi¿cation, audiences can participate in a staged, or cosmic, drama. Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi calls all myths fantasies and regards religion as art when viewed from the perspective of the individual and as identity in its social contexts.13 To my mind, literary texts, even when not performed in a theatre or sacred space, can open a sacred world in which identi¿cation can occur. Here I am not falling back on the “Myth and Ritual” presuppositions, but arguing rather that reading or writing a religious text has some analogues to performing rituals.14 Such texts are “verbal icons,” to borrow Steven S. Tuell’s phrase.15 Most importantly, text and ritual

10. Francis Landy, “The Ghostly Prelude to Deutero-Isaiah,” BibInt 14 (2006): 332–63 (347). 11. Raymond Firth, “Spiritual Aroma: Religion and Politics,” American Anthropologist NS 83 (1981): 582–601 (584). Firth refers to his longer discussion in Raymond Firth, Elements of Social Organization (London: Tavistock, 1971), 241– 50. 12. Smith, ed., Map Is Not Territory; Burton Mack, Myth and the Christian Nation: A Social Theory of Religion (Religion in Culture; Shef¿eld: Equinox, 2008). 13. Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, “Religion as Art and Identity,” Religion 16 (1986): 1–17 (5–6, 15). 14. This school of thought was inÀuential in the twentieth century and understood myth to be inherently linked to ritual. See Robert A. Segal, ed., The Myth and Ritual Theory: An Anthology (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998). 15. Steven S. Tuell, “Ezekiel 40–42 as Verbal Icon,” CBQ 58 (1996): 649–64 (663).

8

Poets, Prophets, and Texts in Play

create an arti¿cial reality as a playful (but still serious) construction of the world as “other” in which one might afford the distancing effect noted by Beit-Hallahmi. For Smith, this counter-reality produces thought of both personal and social relevance.16 For André Droogers, play provides a “counterpoint to lived experience” in which one might deal with multiple classi¿cations of reality.17 The subjunctive, “as if,” mode of thought inherent in play is based on cultural repertoires and “schemas,” which Droogers compares to generic bureaucratic forms that can be ¿lled out with speci¿c data as the need arises. This play is also spontaneous with different schema being accessed simultaneously and gives life to the linear form of verbal expression.18 The overlapping of different schema may, of course, produce apparent logical contradictions but as Beit-Hallahmi indicates, what is most important in myth—and I would say many other religious texts—is psychological truth, not any other kind.19 The religious imagination gains its power from human ability to play by creating ¿ctive worlds and then penetrating the intuitive boundary between that world and reality. Building on the work of Tanya Luhrmann, Kenneth G. MacKendrick comments how “[t]he social relation within witchcraft circles enshrines a kind of incommensurability with the ‘real world’ by weaving an ‘imaginative fabric’ of shared symbols and poetic ambiguity.”20 While communication with deities or ancestors is a feature of the constructed worlds, such communication is also construed as a mode of interpretation of those worlds, as in the case of divination.21 Poetry, in its broad, crosscultural sense, is closely linked with prophecy, manticism, and mysticism. In a volume entitled Poetry and Prophecy: The Anthropology of Inspiration, John Leavitt writes: “The difference between poet, prophet, and lunatic…is one of degree.”22 16. Smith, “Map Is Not Territory.” 17. André Droogers, “Enjoying an Emerging Alternative World: Ritual in Its Own Ludic Right,” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 48 (2004): 138–54. 18. Ibid., 149–51. 19. Beit-Hallami, “Religion as Art,” 6. 20. Kenneth G. MacKendrick, “We Have an Imaginary Friend in Jesus: What Can Imaginary Companions Teach Us About Religion?,” Implicit Religion 15 (2012): 61–79 (72–73). 21. MacKendrick, “We Have an Imaginary Friend,” 62–65. 22. John Leavitt, “The Language of the Gods: Craft and Inspiration in Central Himalayan Ritual Discourse,” in Poetry and Prophecy: The Anthropology of Inspiration (ed. J. Leavitt; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 129–68 (130).

LINVILLE Of an Imagination All Compact

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Imagined worlds, dramatic, ritual, literary or mythic, are built on symbol and metaphor. As Landy reminds us, metaphor is disjunctive, destructive of established language, since it eliminates dissimilarity between distinct objects. Through metaphors new realities are produced.23 As multiple schemas are employed, tensions and contradiction appear, albeit perhaps not as logical faults in the world, but as new meaning carrying juxtapositions and inversions. Central to Landy’s work on Hosea is how the severity of the contrasting and reversing metaphors in the book renders meaning a precarious thing. If all art seeks to make sense of discordant reality, Hosea is an extreme case of a work whose task is to extract meaning from the collapse of meaning. The immense destructiveness with which it is charged, and is manifesting in the shattering of language, is framed by the hope of reconstruction. Hence every metaphor is ambivalent, riven by opposing agendas.24

The prophet stands betwixt and between Israel and God, even as his mission is to ¿nd metaphors for God that will ultimately prove inadequate, contradictory, and unstable. He is Israel’s exemplar yet also expresses the death inherent in the divine word.25 As is well known, the prophetic and divine voices merge at many points in the biblical literature, leaving the reader unsure who is speaking. The prophet may also stand between Israel and foreign nations and even merge with the message. In Isa 20 the deity recalls how the prophet wandered around naked for three years as a symbol of the captivity of Egypt and Kush.26 The prophet and man of spirit are mad according to Hos 9:7. Landy writes that one characteristic of schizoid states is the taking of metaphors literally. In Hosea, the metaphors for God and his relationship with Israel lead the prophet to embody them in his own life, thus demonstrating the failure of poetic representation.27 Israel, too, is in a double bind, expected to be like God and yet unlike the deity, while Yahweh himself wonders about his own identity, seeking to explore life’s possibilities through Israel. This leads to persecution, with Israel punished for both refusing God and transgressing the deity’s boundaries, only reinforcing the distance between God and Israel.28 23. Francis Landy, “In the Wilderness of Speech: Problems of Metaphor in Hosea,” BibInt 3 (1995): 35–59 (35–36). 24. Ibid., 37. 25. Francis Landy, Hosea (2d ed.; Readings; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Phoenix, 2011), 6–9 (6). 26. Francis Landy, “I and Eye in Isaiah, or Gazing at the Invisible,” JBL 131 (2012): 85–97 (95). 27. Landy, Hosea, 8–9. 28. Landy, “Wilderness of Speech,” 40.

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Poets, Prophets, and Texts in Play

As in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the book of Hosea begins with talk of a wedding and quickly moves into an enchanted countryside. Hosea’s marriage is a ¿gure of God’s relationship with Israel, both land and people. In Hos 1:2 God declares that the land has committed adultery.29 The prophet is instructed to name his ¿rst child Jezreel (+3:$', “God Sows”). The deity vows to return the “Blood of Jezreel” on the corrupt dynasty of Jehu. This probably refers to the divinely sanctioned massacres carried out by Jehu at Jezreel and to the murder of Naboth so Ahab and Jezebel could acquire his vineyard.30 In v. 4, however, the intersection of land, fertility, and divine sexual violence is made. Weapons, including bows, are ancient symbols of masculinity. The vow to break the bow of Israel in the Valley of Jezreel (Hos 1:5), then, symbolically emasculates the boy and the nation. The metaphor, however, embraces an irony given the sexual innuendo of the name Jezreel. The divine threat is that Yahweh will no longer sow the land.31 This is reinforced by the pun in the word “blood of,” '/, that can also be read as the “cessation” of Jezreel, the end of God sowing the land. Reinforcing the double entendre is the following prediction of the end of the House of Israel. The verb here is the Hiphil form of =