In Bible and Poetry, Michaël Edwards focuses on those books of the Old Testament with a pronounced lyrical character, such as the Song of Songs and the Psalms, and he remarks the points where the prose of Genesis or Isaiah switch to verse: “We find ourselves constantly in the presence of writings that invite us into the joy of words, into a well-shaped language, in a form that demands from us the attention that we give to poetry and awakens us to expectation.” And, “In its own way, and without being supernatural, poetry too is revelation.”
Edwards shows the deadening effect of poor translation, offering the example of Ecclesiastes 11:1; “Cast your bread upon the waters, after a long time you will find it again”, which appears in the New English Bible as “Send your grain across the seas, and in time you will get a return.” (The American Bible Society’s 1966 version is “Invest in foreign trade, and one of these days you will make a profit.”)
But it is not the author’s intention to present the Bible, “in a civilisation referred to as post-Christian” as a literary treasure: “A poetic reading of the Bible is simply an invitation to rediscover Christianity, right there where it is to be found, and as it presents itself.”
And this is where the problems begin. Edwards shows little interest in the context in which the biblical texts were composed, or in the history of Christian mistranslation and misrepresentation of Judaic texts.
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The Old Testament is the work of many hands over many centuries. It is varied in its styles and preoccupations and was written in Hebrew. The New Testament was written in Greek, is relatively compact and is thematically focused. In historical – and literary – terms the New Testament is an addendum to the Hebrew Bible. (Nietzsche, ever contrarian, described the New Testament as a “rococo of tastes” and raged against the literary and moral crime of tacking it onto the Hebrew Bible.)
Theologically, the Christian texts appropriate the Hebrew Bible and reinvent it, most notably through altering the meaning of key Hebrew terms, such as “messiah”.
Edwards is faithful to this tradition of mistranslation, reading the messianic books of Judaism, particularly Isaiah – as the Gospels do – as prophesying the coming of Jesus. For Edwards, these revelations are “veiled”, by which he means that they were not fully understood by the people who wrote them down and can only be interpreted, retrospectively, by Christians. Edwards repeats some of the grossest Greek mistranslations of the Hebrew, such as Matthew 1.2′s rendering of Isaiah 7.14, that the messiah would be born to a virgin; in fact, the Hebrew term in Isaiah refers to a young woman of marriageable age.
The term “messiah”, to the Jews of the first millenium BCE, meant the anointed one, a king who would rule over the Jewish people when it renewed its covenant with God and obeyed His law. The prophetic literature of Judaism is both an attempt to account for the defeat and enslavement of the Jews under the Assyrians and a call to individual and collective responsibility in creating the moral and political conditions for a renaissance. It had nothing to do with the Christian idea of God appearing on Earth in human form. It could not have had, because Judaism is iconoclastic in its rejection of representations of God in simplified objective or personalised form, as we find in Greek religion.
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Christianity is a fusion of Judaic and Hellenic concepts. Christianity drew on the religion of the Greeks, where gods interfere in human affairs, assume corporeal form, mingle with people, produce offspring with them and undergo resurrection. This will be familiar to anyone who has read the Iliad or knows a little about the mystery cult of Eleusis. The – for Edwards – “humanly inexplicable triumph of primitive Christianity” is less mysterious if we consider the way it articulated religious ideas familiar to ordinary people under the early Roman Empire. That said, early Christian factions struggled over what constituted an acceptable synthesis. In time, canonical texts and orthodox interpretations were settled upon, and the Hebrew messiah became synonymous with the Greek “christos”.
Jews in Christian societies would end up paying the price for this act of mistranslation, because it convicted them of spiritual obstinacy in rejecting their own messiah, and even of killing Him. The Catholic Church did not exonerate the Jews of deicide until 1964.
But all this is getting away from the Bible itself and its poetry. Fine translations have appeared in recent years, most notably by Robert Alter, who is not ashamed to approach these books as great works of literature or to discuss the context in which they were written and the challenges of translating them.
