Homer Reading (the Bible)

Some time back, blogger Ken Brown started a blogger game (aka "a meme") which resulted in "more than fifty people having offered their top five most influential books or scholars." Ken's question was who has "had the most immediate and lasting influence on how you read the Bible"?

My listing starts this way: "Homer's most influenced how I read the Septuagint. The Septuagint's most influenced how I read the rest of the Bible."  (This is before any explicit acknowledgement of feminisms.)

In this post, I want to talk some about how Homer influences (me). In another post perhaps, I'll say a bit on the Septuagint.

The funny thing is, the story goes, is that Homer was blind. That's funny because until the braille books of the nineteenth century and the audio books of the twentieth century, people could only read his works by, well, by reading them with their eyes open.

But that's not how my story begins. I myself first heard the voice of Homer (the voices in his epics that is) in the voice of my mother. When my siblings and I were growing up as missionary kids in South Vietnam the last decade of the war, Mom would read to us. And she had a huge library of books. And she taught us each one to read. But Homer. He was a stand out even back then. The heroes and heroines and goddesses and gods and plot turns and places and violence and beauty and tensions sustained and subsiding and happy points and deep sadnesses. The Illiad was Truyện Kiều and The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe and Little Women and The Red Badge of Courage.

Fast forwarding a good bit, and moving across the Pacific Ocean, the story of my Homer Reading picks up again. As an undergraduate college kid learning Greek in Texas, I heard something new in the voice of the Hellene.

Wordplay.

The Odyssey and Odysseus are obvious enough in English translation even. I'm talking about the playfulness of these two words, the Journey and the Journeyman. But in Hellene, the Cyclops is no longer just Polyphemus who some critics glossed as "famous," but he's ironically Πολύ - φημος without Many eyes or Much vision at all. And the "Much - Legendary" monster, we now hear in Hellene, is "blinded" literally and figuratively by our Hero. Our Hero, Ὀδυσσεύς, tells his name to the creature: it's οὔτις. O-Dysseus, says our blind Homer, is called hO-Tis. SomeBody is NoBody. And if we listen like the Cyclops, then we're blinded, and dead.

Wordplay. Playfulness of words. And also Wiggleroom in how one sees and hears those words, in hermeneutics, in how one can or might not interpret words. With consequences.

(We could talk all day about Homer's wordplay, and Hesiod's, and Sappho's. We could take a graduate course in an American university. We could write a dissertation. We could devote a literary career to their study.

The only other thing I want to say about that is this:  that there have been some mighty important things noticed about Homer. First, Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle noticed how what he did with words threatened the Republic and the pan-Hellenic Politics. A great preface to some of the things Plato noticed is Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato. Second, Eva Brann has much more recently noticed many Homeric Moments that open up wordplay. And third, Sylvie Honigman has noticed Homer's influence in the legend on the development of the Septuagint--she has the best history on the subject ever: The Septuagint and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria: A Study in the Narrative of the Letter of Aristeas. Perhaps I'll post on the Septuagint next).

Even if one never reads F. A. Murray's Feminism In Greek Literature From Homer To Aristotle, I think few of us have a problem understanding that Homer's no feminist.  I don't have time to go into Homer's sex biases.  Nonetheless, Homer reading - with all the wordplay - opens up, for me, ways of knowing and of seeing (aka "epistemologies") that are akin to Nancy Mairs's and Mary Daly's and Alice Walker's and Maya Angelou's and Toni Morrison's. Morrison's Homer, of course, was blind but a woman.  When you listen, you can see what Homer means.

What is an adjective? (as if the question might be How are they glancing?)

What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives come from somewhere else. The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning "placed on top," "added," "appended," "imported," "foreign." Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are latches of being.

Of course there are several different ways to be. In the world of the Homeric epic, for example, being is stable and particularly is set fast in tradition. When Homer mentions blood, blood is black. When women appear, women are neat-ankled or glancing. Poseidon always has the blue eyebrows of Poseidon. Gods' laughter is unquenchable. Human knees are quick. The sea is unwearying. Death is bad. Cowards' livers are white. Homer's epithets are a fixed diction with which Homer fastens every substance in the world to its aptest attribute and holds them in place for epic consumption. There is a passion in it but what kind of passion? "Consumption is not a passion for substances but a passion for the code," says Baudrillard.

--Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse, from page 4

Listening to the Feminine, the Rhetorical, the Translational - in light of the heavy first line of Homer's Odyssey

Here's a bit from the wonderful Eva Brann's Homeric Moments (page 7):

"Here is the first line of the Odyssey:

Ān- dră mŏı | ēn- nĕ- pĕ | Mōu- să, pŏ | lȳ- trŏ- pŏn | hōs mă- lă | pōl- lă

It is a regular heroic line, in which the fifth foot is normally a dactyl. To have a spondee there indicates some sort of solemn havoc; it is a metric subtlety Homer uses with impressive effect. For example, the Odyssey has a villainous, draft-dodging antihero, Aegisthus, who conspires with his mistress, Agamemnon's wife, Clytemnestra, to murder the returning commander in chief of the Trojan expedition. This deed dominates the consciousness of all the 'Returns.' (The word is capitalized because it is almost a technical term in the Odyssey (15).) Hear how heavyhearted proceeds and ends the line that, early on, concludes the introduction of his baneful name:

hōs ē- phăth' | Hēr- mēı- | ās āll' | ōu phrĕ- năs | Āı- gī- | sthōı- ŏ.

The lines preceding are also heavily spondaic, but none as discombobulatingly so as the ones whose fifth foot is, against ordinary usage, a spondee.

A long oral tradition of hexametric recital would surely prepare a professional poet for wielding a standard line with so much flexibility, and so would the memory training required to hold in mind the twenty-seven thousand eight hundred and two lines of the two epics [Odyssey and Iliad], later on divided into twenty-four books each. And hold them in mind he did, both he and his audience, for his control of significant detail over thousands of lines is demonstrable."

Brann goes on to say what Homer makes possible for William Shakespeare and J. S. Bach and Virgil and John Milton. And she notes what "Horace says in humorously awed censoriousness" of Homer and how Whitehead compares Plato to Homer and how Aristotle, through his objective aristotelian eyes, must make his logical conclusion about the Odyssey. But we have other questions also, don't we?

Our questions:

1. Even if we're not literary critics, specialists using jargon such as "dactyl" and "spondee," can't we get the surprise? the profound "havoc" of the "deed [that] dominates the consciousness"?
   
2. Don't we get that Homer and (us - yes, you and me too - among) his audiences feel something here that Aristotle, among others, is wanting (us) to be anesthesized to?
3. Do you want me to blog on the "censoriousness" of the sexism of certain readers?
4. Do you want to discuss with me the richness of our languages that men long ago would rob us of?
5. Dare you rhetoricians and you linguists, like me, in light of Homer's heavy first line, ask questions that Eric Haveloc (in his Preface to Plato) and that Cheryl Glenn and Andrea Lunsford and so many others in their various historiographies and that Kenneth Pike ask about what it must take to recover and to uncover and to re-present rhetorics and languages?
   
6. Would you like to consider together the ways that the Jews are so like Homer? Like him in first forming / and continuing traditions? Doesn't he generate the genesis of orality married profoundly with literacy? And don't they (in what Tel Aviv University Professor Sylvie Honigman calls "the Homeric paradigm') generate the genesis of Hebrew scripture rendered profoundly into Hellene?
7. And, if we still had time, wouldn't you bibliobloggers think it's a fantastic idea to muse about how the writer of the "New Testament" "book" called "Hebrews" starts its "first line" with "a metric subtlety" like "Homer uses with impressive effect"? Jared Calaway started playing the pipes, but few of us so far have danced.

Reading Anointed in Greeky Hebrew

Yesterday our pastor preached a brilliant sermon (on the ways Moses changed and matured) the text of which was Hebrews 11:24-26:

²⁴By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh's daughter. ²⁵He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. ²⁶He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward. (NIV)

Today I want to look at other things in and around the text:

--> especially the ways the early writers and / or editors and / or translators liberally (or "progressively") change this text to increase the play in it (and by "play" I mean both "playfulness" and also interpretive "wiggle room");

--> but how the Christian Bible translators seem to want to do the opposite.

Here's Greek for comparison:

24Πίστει Μωϋσῆς μέγας γενόμενος ἠρνήσατο λέγεσθαι υἱὸς θυγατρὸς Φαραώ, 25μᾶλλον ἑλόμενος συγκακουχεῖσθαι τῷ λαῷ τοῦ θεοῦ ἢ πρόσκαιρον ἔχειν ἁμαρτίας ἀπόλαυσιν, 26μείζονα πλοῦτον ἡγησάμενος τῶν Αἰγύπτου θησαυρῶν τὸν ὀνειδισμὸν τοῦ Χριστοῦ, ἀπέβλεπεν γὰρ εἰς τὴν μισθαποδοσίαν.

Immediately, the reader is transported back to Egypt to ask questions.

There's the daughter of Pharaoh (θυγάτηρ Φαραω) in Hebrews 11:24; and she's lifted right out of Exodus 2:5 & 2:6 & 2:7 & 2:8 & 2:10 in the Greek translation of the Hebrew. That is, this "Hebrews" text points in reverse to an earlier Jewish-Greek translation of the traditional masoret Hebrew text, playfully named "Exodus" (i.e., the Odyssey-like "Way Out of Egypt"), commissioned and completed in Egypt. In Egypt, professor Sylvie Honigman of Tel Aviv University points out, the commissioned Hebrew translators render their old text in the "Homeric paradigm." And, as we're looking back to how the writers and/ or editors and/ or translators of the "Epistle of Hebrews" writes in Greek, Jared Calaway, at his blog Antiquitopia, lets us see and hear the Homeric play - through the first or second century right up to our own.

What we're beginning to question is whether Christian Bible translators work in this paradigm (i.e., the paradigm of Homeric play of the Hebrews). Or is the paradigm of Christian Bible translators more typically aristotelian? Aristotle, by logic of course, wanted to avoid ambiguities in Greek. The text was to lock down the meaning and was to say the one thing that the original author intended and nothing else.

As the reader reads the text above in English translation, an initial question is whether the text points forward to the future. To a precise point. And how far forward into the future? And whom and what might the text be pointing forward to? The quick and precise and unambiguous and objectively obvious answer must be: "to the Christian Christ." But we may be resorting to aristotelianism again - as if that's "translation." And we're getting a little ahead of ourselves, aren't we? So back up from now. Let's back up from "Jerusalem, and all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth" when such a remote spot focuses on a place such as bible-belt USA, where non-Hebrews here and now (the majority the population I dare guess) claim "The Book of Hebrews" as a text for Christians alone despite the fact that most Jews can rightly reply, "You can have it!"




Back in Egypt, there's this new King of Egypt (not necessarily Φαραω but certainly the monarch put there in Alexandria after the city is named after Alexander the Great who, we have to add, learned under Aristotle in the aristotelian paradigm). And there, but in the Homeric paradigm, in the Hebrew play with the Greek text in Egypt, this newer King is like the Pharaoh of old who interacted with Moses. Except he must interact with Hebrews who are translators of Moses. As the writer(s), or editor(s), or translator(s) of the epistle of Hebrews quote from these earliest translators, we wonder whether they sensed any fear in those first translators - but we have little doubt that they sensed anything but the proof of belief and the lack of fear in Moses. They write:

27Πίστει κατέλιπεν Αἴγυπτον, μὴ φοβηθεὶς τὸν θυμὸν τοῦ βασιλέως, τὸν γὰρ ἀόρατον ὡς ὁρῶν ἐκαρτέρησεν.
27By faith he left Egypt, not fearing the king's anger; he persevered because he saw him who is invisible. (NIV).

The reader immediately notices something and someone hidden. Perhaps more than one somebody missing. Yes, the invisible God. Yes also the hidden daughters. For all the repetition given to this daughter of Pharoah (Exodus 2:5 & 2:6 & 2:7 & 2:8 & 2:10) and for all of the recognition given to her, the text never gives her name. We know her because her name is invisible and unspoken and she acts like God: she saves the dying, the male, the Hebrew, the son. And she alone gives him his name. The name she gives translates into Hebrew wordplay: משה - the Egyptian Mosheh punning playfully on the agency of his Egyptian MaMa אם who Mercifully delivers him משה from the Muddy Ruddy Bloody Murderous waters מים - as if out of the womb and out of the lips of the Egyptian mother and midwife and princess christener and nurse provider.

In the old Greek text (that Hebrew translation done back in Egypt as "Exit Odyssey" or Exodus 2:11), Moses grows up: μέγας γενόμενος Μωϋσῆς. In the new Greek text (as Hebrews 11:24), the transition seems as abrupt: Μωϋσῆς μέγας γενόμενος. By the new text, the reader is carried back but is simultaneously thrust forward to a midrash-like analysis of an entire episode of the old story. An entire complex narrative turns on one little clause: ἠρνήσατο λέγεσθαι refused to be known. In the old story, the grown boy becomes a witness to injustice and murder and flees the scene. In the new text, he becomes the son of a mother no longer and is faithful to another.

At least this is how most English Christian translations of this text lock down the story.

It never moves forward from that.

There's the rejection of the female, a rejection of the faithful salvation by a woman of a male as if she were his very own mother and as she collaborates with other women braver than fathers and brothers (either Hebrew or Egyptian) - the baby's very own mother and sister collaborating with the princess - the incredible mix of Egyptians and Hebrews, faithful language and rhetorical naming and playful translation and ancient feminisms.

The Christian text in English rejects the feminism. So let's read more closely. Let's ask questions so that the apparent male dominance and Christian dominance of the text doesn't make it always only one thing and never ever anything else. (Yes, I know - such dominance sounds like Aristotle not necessarily anything like the Septuagint translators or the writers of Hebrews of a far different, absolutely more different in play.)

How different might the text (i.e., the Greek translation of the Greek translation of the Hebrew in the Homeric paradigm) be?

The identity "υἱὸς θυγατρὸς Φαραώ" in Greek might be translated in English as "a son of a daughter of Pharaoh." The collocation of son and daughter does not suggest an easy dominance of one over the other or even of the one purely different from the other. The collocation, in fact, syntactically mirrors an appositive - which is just a fancy way of saying that both nouns translate one another in what Mikhail Epstein might, rightly, see as an inter-lation as much as a trans-lation. And both, then, are related together to the proper noun "Pharoah" in a sense. This reading (which English translators tend to lose with "the son of the daughter of the Pharaoh") makes the contrast in the next verse very compelling.

There's more feminism (more gender inclusivity) than unmarked male-dominant sexism in Hebrews 11:25. (Long before the English bible gender debates in Chrsitianity especially, we get this inclusiveness in the Greek text of Hebrews). The identity "τῷ λαῷ τοῦ θεοῦ" in Greek is definite even in translated English: "the people of the god." The contrast of identities for the Hebrew around Πίστει is from indefinite son-daughter of Pharaoh to definite people of the Divine One. There's no necessary rejection of females or of the participation of a foreign Egyptian female. Moses, of faith (and prior to Jesus Christ and faith in him), does not lose his sonship with respect to the daughtership of the princess of Egypt. Moses is not even renouncing his lineage in the least - as Paul seems to when calling himself a Hebrew of Hebrews (of a particular tribe of the nation of Israel with a baby's circumcision to boot) while renouncing this identity "for the sake of Christ" as we read that in English. No - Moses "a son" who is in many ways like "a daughter" of Pharaoh is also one of "the people of God." And "a daughter" like that, we read in the old text and say again, is like "the God" who saves the son. If it we're not for her, he would not have the name Moses, the wordplay name, the feminist name of a princess collaborating in translation with a few slave women.

Which brings us to another verse:

26μείζονα πλοῦτον ἡγησάμενος τῶν Αἰγύπτου θησαυρῶν τὸν ὀνειδισμὸν τοῦ Χριστοῦ, ἀπέβλεπεν γὰρ εἰς τὴν μισθαποδοσίαν.

Christians who translate tend to make the "τοῦ Χριστοῦ" here refer to "Christ Jesus" only and obviously, quite objectively and logically, to no one else. (In another post, we've wondered why the English translation has to commit what Robert Alter calls "the heresy of explanation" when referring in Greek to Ἰησοῦς - who must always and only be explained by the translator to the reader as either "Jesus" or the other guy "Joshua.") So now again the English translator finds useful Aristotle's convenient logic boxes. "Christ" is the real (if abstract) category for the "Christian" - and nothing else fits.

But the text of Hebrews pushes readers back again to the Septuagint. First, we go back to Egypt and to daughters and a son being rescued. But then the translation brings us to lyric and poetic Hebrew beyond the epic narrative "Exodus."

First, from the phrase "τὸν ὀνειδισμὸν τοῦ Χριστοῦ" to Exodus 2:3 in Greek translation and a similar clause:

ἐπεὶ δὲ οὐκ ἠδύναντο αὐτὸ ἔτι κρύπτειν, ἔλαβεν αὐτῷ ἡ μήτηρ αὐτοῦ θῖβιν καὶ κατέχρισεν αὐτὴν ἀσφαλτοπίσσῃ καὶ ἐνέβαλεν τὸ παιδίον εἰς αὐτὴν καὶ ἔθηκεν αὐτὴν εἰς τὸ ἕλος παρὰ τὸν ποταμόν.

Notice the verb, κατέχρισεν - it's what the Hebrew daughter is doing. She's anointing the basket, she's "besmearing" says translator Lancelot Brenton, and she's "plastering" it says translator Larry Perkins. And those who read Homer's epic Odyssey remember hearing this at least four times as women are doing things on behalf of others in need:

τὰρ ἐπεὶ λοῦσέν τε καὶ ἔχρισεν λίπ’ ἐλαίῳ,
ἀμφὶ δέ μιν φᾶρος καλὸν βάλεν ἠδὲ χιτῶνα,

In another post at another blog, we've read the wordplay of Hebrews into Greek. But the point we want to make here is that such play is Homeric not aristotelian. The very idea of the Greek translation that "Christ" the English word comes from is from early ancient Greek feminism. It's messy stuff of lyric of epic of women of poetics of rhetorics that Aristotle tried to avoid. It's the messy stuff that Christ-ian translators today still try to avoid.

But it's the very stuff that Hebrews writing and translating their own scriptures embraced and produced.

So, in Hebrews 11:26, the writers-translators have Greek readers turning. Turning first back to the Homeric translating of Exodus 2:3 - a daughter translating a basket into a womb. We are taken back again to the Christ-verbs (to things women do and do again) in the Odyssey. Next, Hebrews 11:26 takes us back but forward a bit.

We are now turned to and turning in the "Strummings of Strings" in the "Psalms." The salient sounds of "τὸν ὀνειδισμὸν τοῦ Χριστοῦ" have their reverberations in Psalm 89.

(The Psalm in Hebrew is more "A Maskil [מַשְׂכִּיל "wise, nationalistic song"] of Ethan [איתן 'the Enduring'] the Ezrahite [אזרחי "Native Son"]-- notice the wordplay of the Hebrew names lost but found anew in the Greek a wise, nationalistic song which in Greek is by Αιθαν τῷ Ισραηλίτῃ or literally, "Shining / Blazing, the Israelite." Bacchylides loves the word αἰθᾶν in speaking of Apollo - so why not use it for איתן, the play on אזרחי?).

Listen to the reverberations from Hebrews 11:26 in the lyric Greek, in the Greek Psalm that is of Αιθαν τῷ Ισραηλίτῃ the "Shining Israelite." Here's the song in responsive dialogue with the Lord in Greek (Psalm 89:52, echoing 89:38, echoing 89:20). Listen:

οὗ ὠνείδισαν οἱ ἐχθροί σου, Κύριε,
οὗ ὠνείδισαν τὸ ἀντάλλαγμα τοῦ χριστοῦ σου

σὺ δὲ ἀπώσω καὶ ἐξουδένωσας,
ἀνεβάλου τὸν χριστόν σου·

εὗρον Δαυιδ τὸν δοῦλόν μου,
ἐν ἐλαίῳ ἁγίῳ μου ἔχρισα αὐτόν.

Who Anoints as a Greek woman might (verse 20)? And whom is Anointed (mashach משח)? Isn't God anointing his son David?

Why is the psalmist complaining? What good is the anointing if it seems the Lord is casting it off (verse 38)?

When the enemies reproach the anointed one, won't there be remembering (verse 52)?

משיח mashiyach חרף charaph

ὠνείδισαν oneidisan τοῦ χριστοῦ tou christou

Or will all be lost in translation? In the aristotelian paradigm of "translation" that separates:

"male" from "female"
"the son" from "the daughter"
"peasant women" from "a princess"
"Moses" from "Egyptian lips"
"Hebrews" from "the kingdom of Egypt"
"Jesus" from "Joshua"
"Christ" from "feminine anointing"
"Christ" from "David"
and finally
"Christian Hebrews" from "Jewish Hebrews"

In this post, I know I'm using hyperbole, exaggeration for effect. I'm not trying to overwhelm anyone with the exhaustive possibilities of wordplay. I am wanting to show some of the unaddressed power of Aristotle's method. And to show how separating and silencing Christian translation, by its limited logic, has tended to be. And to show that aristotelianism is not what Hebrew translators (including women as agents in Hebrew narrative) tend to use. And to reassure all of us that logic is okay as long as logic is not our only human tool or our only personal language.