Indeed we do. I feel as if I'm corresponding with one at this moment. For
there is no one so illiterate as the literal-minded. That's also the big
problem with the current spate of atheist best sellers; they approach the
Book as if it were a literal explanation of how we got here, not as a
revelatory insight into our nature and our relationship with each other and
the divine.
Do you think a belief or disbelief in the theory of evolution, or even an
agnostic suspension of judgment about it, has ever affected how anyone
actually lives, treats others or seeks to restore his soul? That's the
difference between a scientific theory and a towering, ages-old work of
faith and literature like the Bible.
At the risk of shocking those who would never entertain a critical thought
about Holy Writ, let me confess that those last chapters of Ecclesiates
always had the sound of moralistic tidying-up to me, a snap answer to
unanswerable questions. They're much like the unconvincing Happy Ending
appended to the story of Job, which only blurs the profound questions that
book raises about justice in this world rather than answering them.
Your literal-minded reading of Ecclesiastes brings to mind those who are at
pains to explain that the Song of Songs, also attributed to Solomon, really
isn't the sensual love song it is but some kind of platonic allegory about
divine love, as if God's love could have nothing in common with the human
kind. Are we not made in His image?
Is this a profanation - to read the Bible as literature, even to criticize
it as such? I would submit that reading the Word with a critical eye is not
to denigrate it but to appreciate, and apprehend it, in a different,
literary light. Granted, the Bible is more than literature, but that doesn't
mean it isn't literature, too.
It's sad, the extent of biblical illiteracy in a nation rooted in the values
of Pilgrims and Puritans - and in which the religious impulse continues to
play so great a part, whether we're talking about Martin Luther King Jr. or
the sudden emergence of a Baptist preacher like Mike Huckabee in the
presidential sweepstakes.
Surely a literal-minded pedantry can only discourage people from
appreciating the Bible as the literary masterpiece it is. Presenting the
Bible as just another moralistic tract, rather than in all its literary and
poetic glory, only disguises its greatness. It would be like reading
Shakespeare for the plots and not the inexhaustible language. How
perverse.
What rich and enduring literature this Book is - always human even as it is
divine, ever relevant even as it is timeless, as majestic and moving in the
English of the King James Version as it is by turns tender and thunderous in
Hebrew.
It's long been my fancy that the Five Books of Moses were handed down at
Sinai in Elizabethan-Jacobean English, and only then translated into ancient
Hebrew. I agree with Robert Alter, whose literary approach to Biblical
narrative has made him the leading biblical translator of our time: While
the authors of the KJV may have been deficient in Hebrew, translations ever
since have been deficient in English. The treasure of the English tongue has
seldom if ever been so wondrously displayed. How not wonder at such, yes,
literature?
There. I feel better now. This has been great therapy.
Bless your heart,
Inky Wretch