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I am trying out my new shakey skills with Ge’ez script here. Since I don’t know enough Amharic yet, it will be in transliterated English!

Transliteration: Learning Ge’ez script has been fun. I have always wanted to learn another language and another system of writing. Still, the amount of information available on it in English is rather thin. For example, why are there three characters for the ‘h’ sound? I think that one type is only used at the beginning of a word and others are used in the middle, but I have not been able to confirm this. Also, despite having a similar Semetic root to Hebrew and Arabic, it is not written from right to left but rather left to right just like Latin. It seems that Ge’ez is to Amharic what Latin is to modern Italian. In reading through my Ethiopian liturgy book, I found many of the words to be the same. That is all for now. Signing out!

In studying Ethiopia lately, both histories and recent sociological studies, I came across something that really caught my attention after reading so many of Leithart’s recent research posts on giving and gratitude.

In the 2012 study I mentioned earlier where anthropologist Daniel Mains lived in Ethiopia for about 2 years and documented to daily lives and finances of about 30 young men, he found that virtually every cent they made was immediately given out to friends and family in the form of purchased meals, coffee, or small cash gifts. Investing in relationships with ones friends and family was considered by many to be the chief end of having money in the first place. Saving the money (accumulating capital) was almost unthinkable for most of the people he spoke with. Even young aspiring businessmen, when they needed a substantial amount of money for a new venture or to buy inventory for a shop, were able to get all the cash they needed from their carefully cultivated network of friends and relatives who were all willing to lend at short notice.
Stashing earned money away and NOT gifting it was seen as greedy and anti-social.

Now perhaps this dynamic is all old news to someone who studies various African cultures, but it was new to me and it seems rather foreign to our mentality here in the west. Especially in Protestant circles, I think saving money (accumulating wealth) is seen as an incredibly WISE (even Godly) thing to do. But, for all their other problems, these tight communities in Africa are often sustained by the opposite notion.

In contrast, the author cites a fascinating study among palm farmers in Kenya that converted to Islam. Here is the relevant excerpt.

The history of anthropology in Africa is rich with studies documenting the difficulty of accumulating wealth without undermining the social support on which that accumulation is based. David Parkin’s (1972) study of Giriama of Kenya has become a classic analysis of the balance between social relationships and material accumulation. Parking argued that Giriama palm growers who wished to accumulate material wealth were faced with a challenging problem. To accumulate capital, palm growers had to distance themselves from community expectations that they would redistribute their wealth in the form of feasts involving large amounts of meant and palm wine. At the same time, access to land depended on social support. For palm growers to accumulate material wealth, they had to avoid redistributing their wealth while maintaining the social ties necessary to ensure their access to land. In Parkin’s study, conversion to Islam enabled farmers to solve this problem. Islam prevented men from drinking palm wine and eating meat slaughtered by non-Muslims and allowed them to be more selective about their engagement in relations of reciprocity. Therefore religion provided a justification for refraining from expending one’s wealth on shared consumption without being exposed to accusations of selfishness.

-Daniel Mains, Hope is Cut: Youth, Unemployment, and the Future in Urban Ethiopia, p.115

Wow. My visceral reaction to reading this is to think “Good grief! What better reason to throw a party RIGHT NOW!” Islam gave these capitalists the tools they needed to effectively shut down the party and accumulate material goods. It seems that some variations of Christian culture have also been utilized to do the same thing. I am increasingly skeptical that this is always such a great and wonderful thing. We have accumulated piles of property, but we are more lonely than ever. It makes me wonder if the reason our communities have such weak bonds is our lack of generosity.

I’ve been reading a book published just last year by Daniel Mains titled Hope is Cut: Youth, Unemployment, and the Future in Urban Ethiopia. Mains spent the better part of 2 years living in Jimma and documenting the lives about about 30 young men as they lived from day to day, tried to find work, hung out with friends, etc. He tracked their finances and eavesdropped on many conversations to figured out what made them tick and what cultural forces were driving their situations and what their motivations and challenges were. The book is an academic piece of anthropology and so it wasn’t a thrilling page-turner. Mains also spends most of the time laying out the facts and explaining the situation, not drawing conclusions. That is what a proper study if this kind should do. Still, I found many of his anecdotes fascinating, both as I try to understand Ethiopian culture specifically, the state of Africa more generally, and make connections with how life is shaping up in the United States as well.

The unemployment rate in urban Ethiopia is a rather staggering 50%. We in the west freak out about rates of 10%. Still, I think many of the forces at work in Africa are the same ones we are experiencing here. We are still propped up by piles of cash and property so we don’t see how similar our situations are. One common theme is the false hope of education. Today we have a growing crisis of young people who have accumulated huge amounts of debt going to college only to find that no job can be found afterwards except something in retail or food service. How many coffee baristas have graduate degrees these days? A lot! In Ethiopia too, education has been heavily invested in this past century. It’s been portrayed as a savior of sorts – the thing that will rescue our children from the backwards rural countryside. Nearly all the men in Mains’s study had completed high school and even some college. They were dramatically more educated than their parents. Yay! But there were no jobs for them. There is a glut of graduates but only a handful of modern well-paying work. BUT, they have been conditioned their whole life to expect something better. They don’t want to work as a barista making $0.50 a day. They can’t go back to the coffee plantation either since they moved to the city. What is to be done? It’s similar to how we told all our children in the West that they could grow up and be astronauts. Now they feel trapped and unsatisfied working in a cubical as a junior accountant. The same thing happened in rapidly modernized Africa: The kids were told they could get a meaningful job working for some government service ministry. A few did, but a huge chunk were left with nothing but a diploma and no prospects. For many of the young men interviewd (typically in their late twenties and early thirties), moving out of the country was seen as one of the only viable options to get un-stuck.

Still, at least in Ethiopia, everywhere he went he still found that people were optimistic about education. He points out that this can’t be sustained in other places.

The powerful faith in the value of education that I encountered in Jimma may be contrasted with other studies that describe increasing cynicism toward schooling as education fails to produce tangible economic benefits. For example, in a study among the Manu people of Papua New Guinea, Demerath (2003) found that most students were highly critical of education, rebelled against teachers and authority, and valued school primarily for its role in creating social relationships with peers. Despite the struggles that secondary school graduates faced in finding work, in urban Ethiopia the belief in the value of education was still quite strong at the time of my research.

-Daniel Mains, Hope is Cut: Youth, Unemployment, and the Future in Urban Ethiopia, p.73

Just as with our public schools here, “teaching to the test” is a big problem.

The long-standing obsession of students with the Ethiopian School Leaving Certificate Examination (ESLCE) demonstrates that education leads to work not because it provides skills but because it provides a certificate and official credentials. Essentially, the ESLCE was the test that determined whether one’s twelve years of schooling were wasted time or the first step toward government employment. During my experience teaching English in an Ethiopian secondary school as a Peace Corps volunteer, students with little speaking ability could easily conjugate English verbs in the present perfect tense. This was a reflection of students’ prioritization of preparing for the grammar portion of the ESLCE over learning English communication skills. For most students the process of education was about preparing for a test that would eventually provide them with access to government employment.

-p.74

In Ethiopia failing one’s matriculation exam closed off all possibilities for a successful future, but migration enabled opportunity and success that could eventually be brought home.

-p.141

There was a song on the radio a lot from a few years back called “Boston” where a young woman dreams of moving away from dead-end California and starting over fresh in New England. “I gotta get out of this town!”  to get ahead is a thought that often passes through young people’s minds. In Ethiopia, relocation is seen as providing similar ways of getting unstuck, thought the focus was often on maturing to becoming a provider and sending money back home rather that some sort of isolated sense of self-fullfilment. The connection to family and friends is still very strong there. You don’t strike out on your own to be on your own, but so you can come back around in a better situation than you left earlier. Most of the young men in Main’s study desperately WANTED to become providers instead of dependents but were discouraged that taking a low-wage job wouldn’t do enough to change that. They still couldn’t get married unless things changed more dramatically.

It seems that in the west, young men in their thirties have an easier time staying home and playing XBox in the evenings and making a few booty calls to their lady acquaintances on the weekend. We’ve made it pretty comfortable for folks to stay in their non-adult limbo state. Their frustration is numbed by a plethora of digital entertainment options available as well as (seemingly) consequence-free sex. It also helps that food can be had for cheap. In the capital-poor nations in Africa and Asia though, this frustration is thick in some places, driving young men (in Pakistan for example) to join the Taliban to try and get unstuck.

What is the solution to all of this? The author mentions that westerners who endeavour to study Africa often end up in a very cynical state. I can see how it would be easy to arrive there! People analyzing the west don’t have it much better if they try to see long-term. Secularists often have nowhere to turn to in the end except nihilism. Bill Gates and his foundation spend billions of dollars aiding Africa, but their stated underlying goal is population control. They have no eschatology so there is no ultimate end except the establishment of some sort of sustainable infertility.

I don’t believe that can save us. I believe that only Christ can save us. The answer to this and every other terribly complex problem is the Gospel. What does that look like on the ground? That’s our task to realize. One life lived would only see the tip of the iceberg.

Ouch. Two whole weeks since I last posted. Why? I’ve had a rather terrible flu which was followed up by a nasty head cold. I’ve missed several days of work and been all-around miserable. I don’t get sick often, but when I do I’m always surprised to discover how not only physical activity is difficult, but thinking as well. You would think that confined to bed I could at least read a book or two. Nope. Nadda. It’s so depressing.

I think I understand just a little better how Michael Spencer stopped writing so abruptly a few years ago when he got cancer. I mean, he wrote every single day for 10 years. It meant so much to him. How could he just sit in his bed for three months and watch TV? He only ever wrote one more short post after his cancer flared up and then he was pushing daisies. Now I don’t wonder. I didn’t have it near as bad and I got zero written. Granted, I was trying to keep up with the kid’s violin and homework and some house chores with what strength I could muster, but still. I’m so glad that is over. Thanks to my wife for putting up with me!

I’ve written three short posts for my coffee blog over here. More to come soon on this site.

Everyone you meet looks like someone else you know if you’ve been sufficiently around the block. Travel expands your categories – lets you dice and divide more finely – closer to the truth. Good education does the same when it demands that you do the slicing finer each day instead of just placing everything in categories for you lest you be misled by the “enemy”. Shortcuts. These sorts of intellectual shortcuts work too, but only for one generation. Your acolytes are on board but they really don’t know why. They’ve done their homework, but only the assignments you gave them. Their children, when exposed to legitimate challenges, will enter a dark night of the soul and they are unlikely to come out the other side of it with your orthodoxy intact. The much more difficult alternative is to teach yours students to think, but this is an even scarier proposition than the propaganda option. Now they are GUARANTEED to evolve your precious orthodoxy in ways you don’t except – some of which you will certainly drive you crazy. Hope is trusting it will one day be even better than yours, not worse. Who can believe such a thing? Someone who trusts in the Lord.

Well, I decided to bite the bullet and learn the Ge’ez script. The amount of Amharic material available transliterated into Latin is almost zero so if I’m going to learn anything beyond the ~400 words my wife and I studied last year, I must get a handle on the alphabet. It’s over 250 unique syllabic characters. They follow a nice pattern… except when they don’t which is a good 30% of the time. Fortunately, my wife made a full stack of nice flash cards for me by hand to practice with! They are working great so far.

A bit of psalm 30 with some commentary:

To you, O LORD, I cry,
and to the Lord I plead for mercy:
“What profit is there in my death,
if I go down to the pit?
Will the dust praise you?
Will it tell of your faithfulness?
(Psalm 30:8-9 ESV)

The language of his appeal to God takes us right back to the thematic foreground of language: there is no point in God’s allowing him to die, because lifeless dust cannot praise Him, cannot report to others His “truth” or “faithful performance”, one instance of which would be now to save the supplicant.[!]

It is through language that God must be approached, must be reminded that since His greatness needs language in order to be made known to men, He cannot dispense with the living user of language for the consummation of that end.

The essential condition of active articulation [of words] that distinguishes all of us above the Pit from those who have gone down into it.

-Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, p.135

This may explain why ghosts (if they are indeed real in any sort of non-demonic sense) seem to virtually never be able to speak, outside of literary fiction. At best they can just bump around. They may even be seen to some degree, but they cannot articulate language.

In other news though, “Will dust praise you?” The psalmist thinks not and implores God not to let him be turned to dust. But Jesus offers some interesting push back to this:

As he was drawing near—already on the way down the Mount of Olives—the whole multitude of his disciples began to rejoice and praise God with a loud voice for all the mighty works that they had seen, saying, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” And some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples.” He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”
(Luke 19:37-40 ESV)

Will dust praise you? Dust is just finely crushed up rocks. Same thing. Will the rocks praise God? Dang right they will! It’s better for man to do so, but if he doesn’t, even the dust knows that Jesus is walking by. Even the realm of death is swallowed up by Him.

The imagery in Amos 9 about the restoration of Israel takes on an eschatological tint due to it’s hyperbole.

“Behold, the days are coming,” declares the LORD,
“when the plowman shall overtake the reaper
and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed;
the mountains shall drip sweet wine,
and all the hills shall flow with it.
(Amos 9:13 ESV)

The plowman will overtake the reaper because the latter will have so much grain to harvest, while the treader of grapes will scarcely have time to complete the vintage before he finds by his side the eager sowers of a new crop. This does not quite cancel out the curse in Genesis of earning bread by the seat of one’s brow, but it does intimate a smooth and rapid current of fertile production that recuperates through joyful labor something of the Edenic experience.

-Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, p.156

Are things really THIS good when Israel comes back from captivity in 5th century B.C? Sounds to me more like a time reserved for the rule of Christ on the earth. Notice they are still tilling the earth, not sitting on clouds playing harps.

In psalm 72, Solomon writes of the coming just king. But the nature of his empire unusual.

    Give the king your justice, O God,
and your righteousness to the royal son!
May he judge your people with righteousness,
and your poor with justice!
Let the mountains bear prosperity for the people,
and the hills, in righteousness!
May he defend the cause of the poor of the people,
give deliverance to the children of the needy,
and crush the oppressor!
May they fear you while the sun endures,
and as long as the moon, throughout all generations!
May he be like rain that falls on the mown grass,
like showers that water the earth!
In his days may the righteous flourish,
and peace abound, till the moon be no more!
May he have dominion from sea to sea,
and from the River to the ends of the earth!
May desert tribes bow down before him,
and his enemies lick the dust!
May the kings of Tarshish and of the coastlands
render him tribute;
may the kings of Sheba and Seba
bring gifts!
May all kings fall down before him,
all nations serve him!
For he delivers the needy when he calls,
the poor and him who has no helper.
He has pity on the weak and the needy,
and saves the lives of the needy.
From oppression and violence he redeems their life,
and precious is their blood in his sight.
Long may he live;
may gold of Sheba be given to him!
May prayer be made for him continually,
and blessings invoked for him all the day!
May there be abundance of grain in the land;
on the tops of the mountains may it wave;
may its fruit be like Lebanon;
and may people blossom in the cities
like the grass of the field!
May his name endure forever,
his fame continue as long as the sun!
May people be blessed in him,
all nations call him blessed!
Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel,
who alone does wondrous things.
Blessed be his glorious name forever;
may the whole earth be filled with his glory!
Amen and Amen!
The prayers of David, the son of Jesse, are ended.
(Psalm 72 ESV)

Robert Alter comments thus:

The ideal king will rule from sea to sea, but even the verb of dominion, ‘yerd’, is qualified by its punning ocho of ‘yered’, the verb describing the ruler’s “descent” like rain on grass. The kings of all the earth, from Sheba and Saba in the south to westward Tarshish and the islands of the Mediterranean, do in fact prostrate themselves before the just monarch, but there is no indication in the poem of how he has managed to seize power over them. Indeed, the only verb of aggression he governs is “to crush” in line 4, an activity directed against the oppressors of the poor, and continued in the kings’s compassionate acts of rescue int he progressively heightened four versets of lines 13-14. The poem tactfully implies, without explicitly stating, a causal link between the beneficent effect of the just king indicated in lines 6-7 and the subsequent vision of imperial dominion. It is as though all the rulers of the earth will spontaneously subject themselves to this king, lay tribute at his feet, because of his perfect justice.

-The Art of Biblical Poetry, p.132

I love this. I think I love the psalm even more now. The future rule of Christ will not be like the others empires we have experienced on earth. I think sometimes we imagine that it WILL be like the other ones. This passage in Philippians gets mentioned a lot:

    Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
(Philippians 2:9-11 ESV)

I have often been told that every knee shall bow. Some of us will choose to bow and others will get their heads pressed down to the ground by a heavy divine boot. But in this psalm, the king is SO good, the nations spontaneously subject themselves to him. There is no talk of him conquering them with a sword and breaking their will. Granted, this still leaves room for stubborn rebels, but the normal state of things is rejoicing at the establishing of his empire and the removal of the old government. THIS ruler is finally just and the only crushing he does is of oppressors of the poor. An incomplete picture to be sure (he rides in on a white horse at some point), but I think this should be the dominant picture of the earthly rule of King Jesus. Can’t wait!

Excerpts I found the most interesting, with a bit of description. Overall I found the book a challenging read. I had to have at least two cups of coffee beforehand to tackle it. It was worth it though – learned a lot. His earlier work The Art of Biblical Narrative is going to naturally be more useful though since most of the OT is in prose. I would definitely recommend it before this one.

—

We have different expectations of poetry from the get-go.

“As soon as we perceive that a verbal sequence has a sustained rhythm, that it is formally structured according to a continuously operating principle of organization, we know that we are in the presence of poetry and we respond to it accordingly…expecting certain effects from it and not others, granting certain conventions to it and not others.” – Barbara Herrnstein Smith
Quoted on p.6

—

A great quote about artists here. I agree.

Let me spell out the general principle involved. Every literary tradition converts the formal limitations of its own medium into an occasion for artistic expression: the artist, in fact, might be defined as a person who thrives on realizing new possibilities within formal limitations.

p.24

—

The Hebrew imagination was unabashedly anthropomorphic but by no means foolishly literalist.

p.36

Some folks criticize the bible for being so anthropomorphic so often (“Come on, God doesn’t really have hands!”) but I don’t see any problem with it at all. It’s an effective way to communicate to us humans. Just don’t take it too serious.

—

Here, Alter takes aim at post-modern philosophers who think they can detect brilliant post-modern philosophy in the mind of the psalmist. On the contrary, they believe very much in the power of language and in God hearing it an understanding.

I do not want to propose, in the manner of one fashionable school of contemporary criticism, that we should uncover in the text a covert or unwitting reversal of its own hierarchical oppositions; or more specifically, that silence is affirmed and then abandoned in consequence of the poet’s intuition that all speech is a lie masquerading as truth because of the inevitably arbitrary junction between signifier and signified, language and reality. On the contrary, the ancient Hebrew literary imagination reverts again and again to a bedrock assumption about the efficacy of speech, cosmogonically demonstrated by the Lord (in Genesis 1) Who is emulated by man. In our poem [Psalm 39], the speaker’s final plea that God hear his cry presupposes the efficacy of speech, the truth-telling power with which language has been used to expose the supplicant’s plight. The rapid swings between oppositions in the poem are dictated not by an epistemological quandary but by a psychological dialectic in the speaker.

p.70

—

An interesting comment on the practice of head-shaving for mourning. It shows up in the psalms, but is actually forbidden.

Dressing in sackcloth and saving the head are both ancient Near Eastern mourning practices, but the latter may be more shocking to the sensibilities, both because it is an act performed on the body, not just a change of garment, and because it is a pagan custom actually forbidden by Mosaic law. The last point illustrates how the conservatism of poetic formulation, sometimes reflecting no-longer-current practices or beliefs, might be exploited for expressive effect.

p.74

—

A common theme in Alter’s commentary is that the poetry IS largely the content. It’s not just a technique the author is using to embellish what he really wants to say but actually what he really wants to say.

What I am suggesting is that the exploration of the problem of theodicy in the Book of Job and the “answer” it proposes cannot be separated from the poetic vehicle of the book and that one misses the real intent by reading the text, as has too often been done, as a paraphrasable philosophic argument merely embellished or made more arresting by poetic devices.

p.76

The choice of the poetic medium for the Job poet, or for Isaiah, or for the psalmist, was not merely a matter of giving weight and verbal dignity to a preconceived message but of uncovering or discovering meanings through the resources of poetry.

p.205

Tolkien disliked allegory but loved poetry. I think he must have seen the latter as a legitimate medium and the former as an artificial container or embellishment of sorts. Just a theory.

—

In the ancient Near East a “book” remained for a long time a relatively open structure, so that later writers might seek to amplify or highlight the meaning of certain of the original emphases.

p.91

This makes post-editing and additions not an evil thing like it is today. We are so used to treating books as high self-contained units. Publishing and copyright laws make it extremely so. But in ancient times, these things would float around and run on and be passed down through generations of scribes, copied occasionally. That what we have in the Old Testament is a curated collection of writings that a later editor put together should come as no surprise. We need not be bothered by that thought, as if it makes the bible less magical. That’s the only way ANYTHING got written down back then. It’s not like writing and disseminating things are now.

—

Here, Alter deals with the issue of Behemoth and Leviathan in Job. Growing up in young-earth-creationist circles, these passages were always pulled out as some sort of proof that dinosaurs and humans romped around together in recent history. I’m afraid I find the sort of explanation given below much more convincing.

To put this question in historical perspective, the very distinction we as moderns make between mythology and zoology would not have been so clear-cut for the ancient imagination. The Job poet and his audience, after all, lived in an era before zoos, and exotic beasts like the ones described in Chapters 40-41 were not part of an easily accessible and observable reality. The borderlines, then, between fabled report, immemorial myth, and natural history would tend to blur, and the poet creatively exploits this blur in his climactic evocation of the two amphibious beasts that are at once part of the natural world and beyond it.

p.107

—

Some great thoughts on the necessity of language with regards to religious experience.

But God manifests Himself to man in part through language, and necessarily His deeds are made known by any one man to others, and perhaps also by any one man to himself, chiefly through the mediation of language. Psalms, more than any other group of biblical poems, brings to the fore this consciousness of the linguistic medium of religious experience. These ancient makers of devotional and celebratory poems were keenly aware that poetry is the most complex ordering of language, and perhaps also the most demanding. Within the formal limits of a poem the poet can take advantage of the emphatic repetitions dictated by the particular prosadic system, the symmetries and antitheses and internal echoes intensified by a closed verbal structure, the fine intertwinings of sound and image and reported act, the modulated shifts in grammatical voice and object of address, to give coherence and authority to his perceptions of the world. The psalmsist’s delight in the suppleness and serendipities of poetic form is not a distraction from the spiritual seriousness of the poems but his chief means of realizing his spiritual vision, and it is one source of the power these poems continue to have not only to excite our imaginations but also to engage our lives.

p.136

—

On how the natural vagueness of poetry has made large parts of the bible still very meaningful to readers today and not just to their initial audience:

If we could actually hear God talking, making His will manifest in words of the Hebrew language, what would He sound like? Since poetry is our best human model of intricately rich communication, not only solemn, weighty, and forceful but also densely woven with complex internal connections, meanings, and implications, it makes sese that divine speech should be represented as poetry.

Such speech is directed to the concrete situation of a historical audience, but the form of the speech exhibits the historical indeterminancy of the language of poetry, which helps explain why these discoures have touched the lives of millions of readers far removed in time, space and political predicament from the small groups of ancient Hebrews against whom Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiach, ad their confreres originally inveighed.

p.141

—

On of the best teachers I had in college was always saying, “Be specific, use examples.” Here, Alter rewrites Isaiah 49:14-23 as prose and then describes what was lost in the transition. Go good example indeed.

But Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me;
my Lord has forgotten me.”
“Can a woman forget her nursing child,
that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb?
Even these may forget,
yet I will not forget you.
Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;
your walls are continually before me.
Your builders make haste;
your destroyers and those who laid you waste go out from you.
Lift up your eyes around and see;
they all gather, they come to you.
As I live, declares the LORD,
you shall put them all on as an ornament;
you shall bind them on as a bride does.
“Surely your waste and your desolate places
and your devastated land—
surely now you will be too narrow for your inhabitants,
and those who swallowed you up will be far away.
The children of your bereavement
will yet say in your ears:
‘The place is too narrow for me;
make room for me to dwell in.’
Then you will say in your heart:
‘Who has borne me these?
I was bereaved and barren,
exiled and put away,
but who has brought up these?
Behold, I was left alone;
from where have these come?’”
Thus says the Lord GOD:
“Behold, I will lift up my hand to the nations,
and raise my signal to the peoples;
and they shall bring your sons in their arms,
and your daughters shall be carried on their shoulders.
Kings shall be your foster fathers,
and their queens your nursing mothers.
With their faces to the ground they shall bow down to you,
and lick the dust of your feet.
Then you will know that I am the LORD;
those who wait for me shall not be put to shame.”
(Isaiah 49:14-23 ESV)

Paraphrased into prose:

Days are coming, the Lord declares, when your exiled children, whose strength was afflicted on the way, and whose ankles were put in chains, will return in exultation to Zion. And your oppressors will flee from your midst, and your people will inherit their land and build its ruined cities, and plant fields and vineyards in place of the desolation. And I will cause them to dwell on their soil, for My loving care will not depart from them On the day when I return their captivity, nations will bring them tribute, and none will make them afraid.

…and the analysis:

What has been left out of the prose version is the symbolic presence of Zion as a despereate, suffering woman, and the manifestation through God’s dialogue with Zion of the Lord’s tender, unfaltering love for Israel. The biological immediacy of womb and breast and bosom that contributes to the emotional force of the poem is also absent from the prose. Left out as will is the sense of miraculous surprise in the return to Zion when the breeaved woman suddenly discovers that her children are alive and well, that the ver regents of the earth now cradle and care for them.

p.161

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According to Alter, Proverbs 1:5-6 warns us that having a wise text isn’t good enough. You have to know how to read it.

The transmission of wisdom depends on an adeptness at literary formulation, and the reception of wisdom by an audience of the “wise” and the “discerning” – requires and answering finesse in reading the poems with discrimination, “to understand proverb and epigram.” The proem [preamble] of the Book of Proverbs, in other words, at once puts us on guard as interpreters and suggests that if we are not good readers we will not get the point of the sayings of the wise.

p.168

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On how the Bible writers weren’t trying to make a name for themselves or go for originality and novelty – the opposite in fact.

The Bible knows nothing of the personal lyric; the anonymity of all but prophetic poetry in the Bible is an authentic reflection of its fundamentally collective nature. I of course don’t mean to suggest that poetic composition in ancient Israel was a group activity only that the finished composition was meant to address the needs and concerns of the group, and was most commonly fashioned out of traditional materials and according to familiar conventional patterns that made it readily usable by the group for liturgical or celebratory or educational purposes. The orientation toward collective expression also explains the formal conservatism of biblical poetry.

p.207

—

A disclaimer of sorts, found on the very last page:

We cannot all be poets, but what some are privileged to grasp through an act of imaginative penetration others may accomplish more prosaically step by step through patient analysis.

p.214

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