Reading the Bible with your Eyes Open

I remember a story about a professor, Hendrik Hart, who would begin his introductory course in philosophy with the question, “How are you?” “No,” he would add. “I said: How are you? That is, how is it that you are in this world? Describe your location.”

If we don’t think about these questions, we probably won’t get very far in understanding what the Bible has to say. Or any other example of literature. Thus, if you want to understand the book of Genesis, you will have to learn, in the immortal words of Socrates, to “know thyself.” How you fit into the scheme of things.

Cultural anthropologists and sociologists have their own unique ways of asking the question, “How are you?” The kind of things Margaret Mead paid attention to, how mothers bathe their children, how the generations relate to each other. It’s amazing how much one can learn by paying attention to detail of this kind.

It’s true that we walk around with our eyes wide shut most of the time, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

When I was a student in Rome – a fabulous place to study – I hooked up for a few days with a photographer from San Francisco. He was taking pictures of doorways. That’s right: doorways, entrances to courtyards, lintels, and knockers.

What I liked about him is that his eyes were wide open in a way mine were not. He taught me to see things, the relationship of things, that previously had escaped my attention.

Human settlement, an anthropologist will tell you, is a cultural ecosystem. How is it structured? Many a passage of the Bible becomes clear if and only if a clear answer is given to this question.

As I learned while a pastor there, the ideal life, for a Sicilian family, is not an apartment in town, where everyone lives cheek to jowl. A villa in the countryside, with olive groves and lemon trees, sheep and goats perhaps, and a vineyard. That is ideal, with muri a secco to subdivide and mark territory. If you don’t know what muri a secco are, click on the photos here. They are walls made of rock sculpted with a hand tool and fitted together, with no mortar to keep the components of the wall together.

One goes to town, of course, to the central square or piazza, to catch up with friends, run errands, say hello to the mayor and the doctor, and keep office hours if you have that kind of job.

With that in mind, it’s possible, I believe, to make sense out of Job 29:7 and following:

בְּצֵאתִי שַׁעַר עֲלֵי־קָרֶת

בָּרְחוֹב אָכִין מוֹשָׁבִי

 

רָאוּנִי נְעָרִים וְנֶחְבָּאוּ

וִישִׁישִׁים קָמוּ עָמָדוּ

 

שָׂרִים עָצְרוּ בְמִלִּים

וְכַף יָשִׂימוּ לְפִיהֶם

 

קוֹל נְגִידִים נֶחְבָּאוּ

וּלְשׁוֹנָם לְחִכָּם דָּבֵקָה

When I exited the gate for the city

to set up my seat in the square,

 

the young men saw me and hid,

and the elders rose and stood.

 

The authorities held back their words,

put their hands to their mouths;

 

the voice of nobles died out,

their tongue cleaved to their palate.

                                        (Job 29:7-10)

 

In a traditional Levantine town, as you exit the gate, or ‘mouth of the town’ (Proverbs 8:3), for the city, there is a broad place where people gather. ‘Exiting the gate for the city’ is an expression that makes sense from the point of view of someone who lives outside of town, but visits there on business. From his perch on a rubbish heap, Job remembers how he would do that, and be greeted with respect as he entered the central square or piazza, and took his habitual spot. To this day, people of note in a Sicilian town have a particular place on the town square they go to, where other people know to find them.

The Hebrew of Job 29:7 supports this interpretation. It is helpful to remember that in the dialect used in the book of Job, instead of the preposition ל ‘to, for’ or אל ‘to, towards,’ one often has על ‘upon, beside,’ as here. Hebrew prepositions are used in a bewildering variety of ways, of course, as prepositions in any language are.

This post was the third in a series of three. Go here and here for the other two. It was my way of handling a case of nostalgia for Sicily.

Comments

[Lingamish]

More, more, we want more. Three posts does not a series make.

[Rodney Harrier]

I am a Sunday School teacher teaching the book of Job to senior citizens. I am looking for tips in teaching the Hebrew poetry of Job to this age group. How can I make it meaningful? I do not want this to be a dry lesson on structure of Hebrew poetry. How does the structure of the poetry contribute to the message of the book?

[JohnFH]

I would talk to them about the dynamics of parallelism. Have them color code items in parallelism on a photocopy of, say, Job 3.

To get an idea of what I mean, see my post on Jonah 1 indexed in the left sidebar.