Strong As Death Is Love: The Song of Songs, Ruth, Esther, Jonah, and Daniel, A Translation with Commentary

280 Pages·2015·1.35 MB·English

by  Robert Alter

STRONG
AS DEATH
IS LOVE
THE SONG OF SONGS, RUTH,
ESTHER, JONAH, AND DANIEL
A Translation with Commentary
ROBERT ALTER
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for
Carol,
my one and only love
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
THE SONG OF SONGS
To the Reader
The Song of Songs
THE BOOK OF RUTH
To the Reader
The Book of Ruth
THE BOOK OF ESTHER
To the Reader
The Book of Esther
THE BOOK OF JONAH
To the Reader
The Book of Jonah
THE BOOK OF DANIEL
To the Reader
The Book of Daniel
INTRODUCTION
T
are generally classified by scholars as Late Biblical
HESE FIVE TEXTS
books. “Late Biblical Books” is by no means a rubric under which
texts have been placed in any of the formulations of the biblical
canon. The foundational books of the Hebrew Bible were composed
(though not yet edited) from the tenth or ninth to the seventh century
, with only a few archaic poems coming from an earlier period.
BCE
The watershed of biblical history was the Babylonian exile, which
began after the conquest of Judah and Jerusalem in 586 . Some
BCE
great prophetic poetry was written in the exile during the sixth
century, but its strong stylistic and thematic continuities with pre-
exilic writing preclude the classification of “late” for these texts.
There were also some psalms written around this time that were
included in the canonical collection and probably at least a few
proverbs. Late Biblical literature, showing marked differences from
the Hebrew writing of the First Commonwealth, was produced from
the fifth to the second century , some of it the work of writers in
BCE
the diaspora, by then under Persian domination, and some of it in the
Land of Israel. The two most original and theologically challenging
books of Late Biblical literature are Job and Qohelet, both of which I
have translated with commentary in a volume entitled The Wisdom
Books. The short books presented here are, even in their brevity, artful
and innovative literary works (perhaps with the exception of Daniel)
—beguiling, entertaining, and in some instances perhaps a bit
startling.
How do we know that they are late? Esther is manifestly set in the
Persian court, as is, retrospectively, Daniel; and Ruth, though it
purports to be a story that takes place in the period of the Judges, is
concerned with the question of exogamy that much exercised the
community in Judah in the mid-fifth century but that was not a
BCE
pressing issue in earlier times. Beyond any such thematic
considerations, the great hallmark of lateness, showing variously in all
five of these books, is linguistic.
Biblical Hebrew, like any language, changed through time. The
temporal distance between the sundry strands of Genesis or the Book
of Samuel and these Late Biblical texts is comparable to the distance
between Shakespeare and John Updike. Just as in the four centuries
separating Shakespeare from Updike the English language underwent
pronounced changes—terms once in common usage replaced by
others, palpable modifications of grammar and syntax—the Hebrew
through these centuries exhibits a similar set of changes. One of the
books in this volume, Ruth, because it purports to take place in the
period before the founding of the monarchy around 1000 , deploys
BCE
an archaizing style that is meant to sound like the literary Hebrew of
that era. Flawless archaizing, however, is a very difficult feat to pull
off, and so there is a series of small slips, perhaps as many as a dozen,
where a word or idiom is used that appears only in Late Biblical
Hebrew, never earlier. The Late Biblical character of the Hebrew of
Jonah and Esther is more straightforward: one encounters grammatical
usages, idioms, and primary items of vocabulary that are distinctively
Late Biblical, some of them reflecting the Aramaic that was becoming
dominant, and Esther also abounds in Persian loanwords. The Hebrew
of the Song of Songs is less overtly late, probably because of the
tendency of poetry to be stylistically conservative, but even here there
are a few grammatical features and some terms that would not have
occurred in the Hebrew in literary usage before 586 .
BCE
The Hebrew of the Book of Daniel is surely the oddest instance of
linguistic lateness. Roughly the first half of the book, beginning early
in Chapter 2, is written in Aramaic. (The only other extended Aramaic
section in the Bible is four chapters in the Book of Ezra.) The
Aramaic seems perfectly serviceable though not stylistically
distinguished, showing, as it does, a strong tendency to formulaic
language and mechanical repetitions. Chapter 7 to the end of the book
is written in Hebrew—probably because Hebrew is the language of
prophecy with which the author (or authors) sought to align his (or
their) own work. In keeping with the aim of sounding prophetic, the
writer tries to avoid overtly Late Biblical turns of language. It looks
suspiciously, however, as if Hebrew were not a vehicle with which he
is entirely comfortable: idioms get mangled, terms are sometimes used
in problematic senses, and the syntax in a good many instances is
awkward or actually garbled. What we have, then, in the Hebrew of
Daniel is a Late Biblical writer—indeed, the latest of biblical writers,
active, as one can tell from his historical references, in the fourth
decade of the second century —who labors to place his own
BCE
literary production in a Hebrew tradition that goes back to the era
before the Babylonian exile but does not succeed very well.
It has often been observed that this late period gave rise to writing
that diverged in its views or openly dissented from the biblical texts of
the First Commonwealth era. The impulse of dissent is most strikingly
evident in the challenges to mainstream biblical ideas laid out in Job
and in Qohelet. In the books in this volume, the celebration of erotic
love in the Song of Songs and the carnivalesque spirit of Esther, both
devoid of theological concerns, are altogether unlike anything found
in the antecedent Hebrew literature that has come down to us. What
should be added to this common observation about Late Biblical
writing is that it reflects a vigorous exploration of new literary forms,
and that will be a recurrent focus of the commentary which
accompanies these translations. Hebrew narrative before the
Babylonian exile is by and large formally conservative. There are
some stylistic as well as ideological differences among the four
principal strands that make up the Pentateuch, but all these writers
share common assumptions (and common literary conventions) about
how to tell a story and the purposes to be served by the stories. Nor
are there significant differences in these regards between the
Pentateuch and the sundry narratives that constitute the
Deuteronomistic History, the stretch of books from Joshua to the end
of Kings.
By contrast, the works composed from the fifth to the second
century reflect an extraordinary efflorescence of new literary
BCE
genres and techniques. Ruth, which by the author’s design seems
closest to earlier Hebrew writing, is nevertheless a new kind of
narrative—a bucolic idyll in which the profound elements of conflict
and ambiguity that define classical Hebrew narrative are rigorously
excluded, and the prose itself, with its repeated use of balanced
cadences approximating poetry, expresses the harmony of the idyllic
world. Jonah, though it purports to be the story of a prophet, deploys
fantastic elements to shape a fable about the prophetic calling, making
these elements seem different in kind from the stories of miracles that
occasionally punctuate earlier Hebrew narrative. Esther is a different
kind of fantasy, one of national triumph over powerful forces, which
does not employ supernatural intervention. It is cast in a satiric mold
that incorporates farce and is at moments even raucous. This writer’s
fondness for the descriptive details of imperial pomp is nothing like
antecedent Hebrew literature; and above all, it is a story framed for
sheer entertainment—which goes along with its often-noted lack of
reference to God, Torah, or the Land of Israel. In this crucial regard, it
is a kind of story that would have been inconceivable for the writers
of the First Commonwealth. Daniel is generically distinct from all its
literary antecedents in being an apocalyptic book: in its pages,
prophecy has been transformed into the deciphering of enigmatic
coded visions that indicate precisely what will happen and when it