I was sorting through materials I’ve collected over the years when I came across a mimeographed copy of author and critic Edmund Wilson’s On First Reading Genesis. It had first appeared in the May 15, 1954, issue of The New Yorker. I knew exactly how it had come into my possession, and I immediately sat down to read it, as if for my first time.
During my first semester in seminary, Dr. James Muilenburg distributed On First Reading Genesis to his “Introduction to the Old Testament” class. Dr. Muilenburg, a master teacher, often gave us “extra” readings to supplement our textbooks. Perhaps because of his own experience as an English teacher, he wanted us to appreciate the full power of the original language of scripture.
Wilson’s essay is a wonder of insight, wonder of the kind that only first-time readers of anything worth reading can know. Himself a writer, Wilson delves into how the Hebrew language works, and specifically into how the Hebrew verb tenses reveal a very different understanding of time that we have. I am no longer sure if Wilson has everything “right” about Hebrew, and probably our understandings of it are different now than they were 60 years ago, but many lights of recognition came on in my head as I re-read On First Reading Genesis.
After describing the Hebrew language’s bold written consonants attended by dots and dashes (“pointings”) to represent vowel sounds, Wilson writes:
“Our first look at the text of the Bible, when we have mastered the alphabet, is likely to give us the feeling that this system is extremely impractical. It required what must seem to the beginner an annoying and easily avoidable effort to coordinate with the heavy consonants the elusive little dashes and dots that hover about them like midgets ...
“Even the printing of these signs is difficult, impossible for a linotype machine (!), since they appear in innumerable combinations. The result is that, even in learned books, the consonants are, if possible, written without the ‘pointings,’ and what you get is a kind of shorthand. You must already know the words extremely well in order to be able to recognize them.
“Yet some further acquaintance induces respect, and a perception that this method is appropriate, an inalienable element of the Jewish tradition. The characters themselves are impressive -- not fluent like the Roman or Greek, but retaining still, as these have not, the look of having once been cut in stone. To write out Hebrew vocabulary, with black ink and stub pen, affords a satisfaction that may give one a faint idea of the pleasures of Chinese calligraphy, as well as a feeling of vicarious authority as one traces the portentous syllables. ...
“These twenty-two signs ... from which, in their Phoenician form, all our European alphabets have been taken, have, austere in their vowelless terseness, been steadily proceeding from right to left, over a period of two thousand years, among peoples that read from left to right; and in the Bible they take on an aspect exalted and somewhat mysterious: the square letters holding their course, with no capitals for proper names and no punctuation save the firm double diamond that marks the end of a verse, compact in form as in meaning, stamped on the page, like a woodcut, solid verse linked to solid verse with the ever recurrent ‘and’ the sound of which is modulated by changes of vowel, while above and below them a dance of accents shows the pattern of metrical structure and the rise and fall of the chanting, and, above and below, inside and out, the vowel pointings hang like motes, as if they were molecules the consonant breathed.
“Difficult for the foreigner to penetrate and completely indifferent to this, they have withstood the drive toward assimilation, to their Spanish and Germanic neighbors, of the Jews of the Middle Ages; and in the dialect of German that is Yiddish, in newspapers spread in the subway, they still march in the direction opposite to that of all the other subway newspapers, English or Spanish or Italian, Hungarian or Russian or Greek, with only a light sprinkling of pointings to indicate Germanic vowels. And we have seen them reassemble in Israel, reconstituting their proper language -- not embarrassed in the least by the fear that the newspaper reader of our century, even knowing Hebrew perfectly, may have difficulty in distinguishing, in the British reports, a vowelless Bevan from a vowelless Bevin. (to what is that a reference?) They march on through modern events as if they were invulnerable, eternal.
“But in the meantime, the Bible confronts us, in the dignity and beauty of its close-packed page.”
I think James Muilenburg intended his students to take those paragraphs to heart. They stand in the center of the essay, making clear why this ancient language still matters, still makes a difference, still comforts and confronts men and women in all cultures and times.
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