In Tents #46 He is Risen and Other Texts That Don’t Behave as Textual Critics Think They Do Part VII

The 32nd chapter of Alma has an intriguing story where Alma is preaching on the hill Onidah and a group of poor people comes up behind him and asks where they can go to worship, since they aren’t permitted in the synagogues. Alma turns around and starts teaching them. The story is one of my favorite examples of someone acting out a figure of speech: Alma turns his back on his uninterested listeners and starts teaching the ones who want to listen. (Alma 32:6-7)

Alma teaches the poor people that they can exercise faith anywhere, even if they don’t have a building to meet in and quotes Zenos to that effect, a moving discourse meant to comfort outcasts. So why does he scold them immediately after quoting Zenos? “Now behold, my brethren, I would ask if ye have read the scriptures?” (Alma 33:14). Granted, it’s a mild scolding, but why scold at all? Shouldn’t he be encouraging them to read the words of Zenos rather than scolding them for not reading their scriptures at all? The subtle rhetorical shift in the passage puzzled me for a long time.

At my last big-0 birthday I was working my way through Deseret Book’s 1980 facsimile of the First Edition, and Statebird Book was offering Royal Skousen’s typographical facsimile of The Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon, and parts 1 & 2 of his Analysis of Textual Variants in the Book of Mormon for half price, or about $80 for all three. With some birthday money I bought them. So, when I got to the bottom of page 317, lines 42-43 in my first edition facsimile I checked it against the original manuscript–yes, extant for this passage–and it reads “these scriptures.” So Alma is not scolding them, he’s asking them if they are aware of the scriptures that can comfort them.

So what happened? Well, here’s 317:42,

Now, behold, my brethren, I would ask, if ye have read the

The end of the line happened, and John H. Gilbert needed two spaces. He hadn’t had to add any spaces to justify the line, so he couldn’t take any out, so he dropped two letters rather than having to go back and add 4 spaces to fully justify the line. Our current text reads,

Now behold, my brethren, I would ask if ye have read the

two characters shorter. If he had taken out those two commas later editors removed, and maybe the other two, Gilbert could have written these, but he probably didn’t want to take the time.

I’m not the first person to find this variant. It appears in the FARMS preliminary Critical Text. I don’t know how they found it, presumably through collation. But what if it hadn’t been in that part of the original manuscript that survives? When scholars don’t have original manuscripts to look at they often emend the text. My desire to find a different reading was based on my sensitivity to the tone of the passage, and when I saw that the was at the end of the line I figured the compositor might have come to the end of the line and substituted the for a longer word. And I might have suggested an emendation like these.

Because we’ve come to the five lessons on Isaiah in Sunday School I’ve been working my way through Avraham Gileadi’s translation, The Apocalyptic Book of Isaiah. Here’s how Chapter 48 opens in the KJV:

Hear ye this, O house of Jacob, which are called by the name of Israel, and are come forth out of the waters of Judah, which swear by the name of the Lord, and make mention of the God of Israel, but not in truth nor in righteousness.

Whenever I read that or hear it I mentally supply the phrase from I Nephi 20, “or out of the waters of baptism,” which,I learned in seminary, or in a religion class at BYU, was Oliver Cowdery’s (Martin Harris’s, someone’s?) addition to explain the phrase “waters of Judah.”

Gileadi emends the passage differently, adding a syllable to the Hebrew so it reads

you who are named Israel–
though you stem from the lineage of Judah–

to echo “the term in verse 19”

your offspring would have been
as the sands in number
your descendants as many as their grains

Joseph’s emendation has the feel of a marginal gloss in his copy of the first edition that got included among his revisions for the second edition. (Actually, it first appears in parentheses in the third edition–1840, Kirtland. For more detail see Royal Skousen’s comments in Part 1 of Analysis of Textual Variants in the Book of Mormon, 427-428, which mentions Hugh Nibley’s claim that the phrase originated with Parley P. Pratt.)

Gileadi’s emendaton feels like it came from his study of parallelism, typology and repetition in Isaiah.

That is, textual criticism and exposition often reflect what the interpreter believes about how texts act. But texts don’t always behave like readers think they do, or should. You can see that as a subtext in Reza Aslan’s Zealot. He wants to show us a different way of thinking about familiar texts.

The question of how we expect texts to behave is worth extended consideration because it affects how we interpret texts and what kinds of interpretations we pass along–so permit me a brief digression into Shakespearean textual criticism. I may have first read Othello in high school, and I can think of three college classes where we read it. The question Othello always raises is why Othello is so quick to believe, nay embrace, Iago’s flimsy evidence.

The discussions I heard of the play focused on why Othello believes Iago, but I don’t recall anyone pointing out the obvious: Men who love women do not murder them, and they don’t make the murder a ritual. How is Othello as a murderer different from any abusive husband who kills his wife?

I could sense that the answer most literary people would make is that literature doesn’t deal with the mundane, with social problems, but with the deeper recesses of the human heart. I explored the question of why we didn’t see Othello as a play about an abusive husband in my term paper for John Tanner’s class, my last at BYU. And in my reading I came across a variant reading from the Folio that supports the view that Othello murders his wife (notice the possessive pronoun rather than a name) out of concern for his own reputation. In III.iii. 386 Othello responds to Iago’s accusation of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness with this demand:

I’ll have some proof: my name, that was as fresh
As Dian’s visage, is now begrim’d and black
As mine own face.

I prefer this reading, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it in an edition of the play. Editors favor the Quarto reading, her name, presumably because her name better matches the feminine image in Dian’s visage. But I suspect even if her name is the correct reading Othello is really thinking about his good name.

Like Hamlet refusing to kill Claudius at his prayers lest Claudius go to heaven, Othello refuses to let his wife confess her sins before killing her. Both not only want to kill their enemies, but to damn them.  Very dark portrait. And yet, Shakespeare didn’t leave us in the dark. The Winter’s Tale feels like a replay of Othello–given a chance to repent.

About twelve years after Tanner’s class I picked up Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction, and found a provocative answer to my question in Chapter 1, “The Rise of English.” Eagleton says English was developed as an academic course of study by late nineteenth-century dons who wanted a back door into the academy for women, and they considered English sufficiently non-taxing for feminine minds.

But they had to do something to neuter the power of literature. They certainly wouldn’t want women reading Ibsen and seeing themselves in Nora Helmer and their husbands in Torvald, so they taught that literature deals with the higher, deeper, finer things–that you have to look beyond the surface to see what’s really happening in a work of art.

Eagleton might say that examining literature as a reporter on everyday life doesn’t trivialize literature, it elevates everyday life, testifying that it is an apt subject for great writing. Which makes sense. If you look at themes in Shakespeare they seem remarkably contemporary, political assassinations (Julius Sneezer), coups (Macbeth, Richard III, Hamlet) gangs and teen suicide (Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) runaways and homelessness (As You Like It, The Winter’s Tale), sexual harassment and assault (Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well), doing stupid things to preserve honor (Troilus and Cressida), honor killings (Hamlet, Othello, Much Ado About Nothing), the clash between strong men and strong women (Who Got a Shrewd Taming?) slavery (The Tempest), and more.

Eagleton might say all that (or might say I said it for him, so he doesn’t need to), but his point isn’t about particular works, it’s about control of meaning, about constructing a discipline so you maintain control of the interpreting. For some very good reasons early Christians fixed a canon of scripture, and were so successful at it that more than a thousand years later when people who wanted to re-form Christianity gained enough political power not to be destroyed by The Church, none of their reforms included the idea of petitioning God for new scripture. Christian exegetes, invoking the pagan Hermes, had set up a hermeneutic of closed canon so successfully that introducing an open canon can seem (as I suggested last month) nihilistic, annihilating more than a millennium and a half of Christian dogma.

That is, there’s nothing in the nature of scripture itself that requires a closed canon, and there’s nothing in the collection of prophetic writings we call The Books that says there will be no more scripture. The teaching that there won’t is a product of people developing particular ideas about how scriptural texts behave, and should behave.

A year or so ago Patricia Karamesines mentioned in an email to me that Arthur Henry King had talked in class about King Lear as an accurate and probing exploration of the problems of dealing with an aging parent. I thought about this last week when I read Richard Elliott Friedman’s comment about Genesis 48:7 in his “Notes on Identification of Authors” at the end of Who Wrote the Bible?

5 ¶And now thy two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, which were born unto thee in the land of Egypt before I came unto thee into Egypt, are mine; as Reuben and Simeon, they shall be mine.

6 And thy issue, which thou begettest after them, shall be thine, and shall be called after the name of their brethren in their inheritance.

7 And as for me, when I came from Padan, Rachel died by me in the land of Canaan in the way, when yet there was but a little way to come unto Ephrath: and I buried her there in the way of Ephrath; the same is Beth-lehem.

8 And Israel beheld Joseph’s sons, and said, Who are these?

9 And Joseph said unto his father, They are my sons, whom God hath given me in this place. And he said, Bring them, I pray thee, unto me, and I will bless them.

10 Now the eyes of Israel were dim for age, so that he could not see. And he brought them near unto him; and he kissed them, and embraced them.

11 And Israel said unto Joseph, I had not thought to see thy face: and, lo, God hath shewed me also thy seed.

12 And Joseph brought them out from between his knees, and he bowed himself with his face to the earth.

13 And Joseph took them both, Ephraim in his right hand toward Israel’s left hand, and Manasseh in his left hand toward Israel’s right hand, and brought them near unto him.

14 And Israel stretched out his right hand, and laid it upon Ephraim’s head, who was the younger, and his left hand upon Manasseh’s head, guiding his hands wittingly; for Manasseh was the firstborn.

Saying, “This verse does not connect easily with the text that precedes it (P) or with the text that follows it (E)” Friedman assigns v. 7 to the Redactor, and notes that, “in verse 5 (P), Jacob promotes Joseph’s sons, Ephraim and Manasseh to equal status with Jacob’s own sons; but in verse 8 (E), Jacob looks at Ephraim and Manasseh and says, ‘Who are these?'” (257-8).

I read Genesis 48 in Robert Alter’s The Five Books of Moses last spring, so I reread what he has to say about the verse. Like Gileadi, Alter is more interested in looking at the text as a whole than in fracturing it into different sources, so he starts his note by saying that critics who see verse 7 as a clumsy or incoherent attempt to join J and E “seriously underestimate the degree of integrative narrative logic that the writer–or perhaps one must say, the redactor–exhibits” (278).

Alter says verse 7 fits very well narratively to explain why Jacob is blessing the two sons of Rachel’s firstborn, or to suggest that he’s promoting them to equal status with his sons because they are the sons of his beloved dead wife’s firstborn.  Alter also suggests the Jacob’s inability to recognize the children in v. 8 that he blessed in v. 5 may be the effect of his blindness. He’s not sure who the children are because he can’s see them clearly.

Alter says “Who are these children?” may also be the beginning of an adoption formula. But the passage reminds me of dementia as well. For about the last 600 Sundays my calling has been among the residents of a small care center about a mile from my home. Over those same Sundays I’ve watched my mother age from a new widow of 84 years taking new great grandchildren in her arms, like Anna in the temple, to a widow of 95 years whose two-year-old great granddaughter loves to push her around the halls of the nursing home.

I like to visit her at dinner, encouraging her to eat. “I’ve got a large family to support.” “That’s why you have to eat, Mom. Your family wants you to be healthy.” A lot of times I can get her to eat another bite by saying what she told us so long ago about eating burnt toast, “It’ll put hair on your chest.”

Sometimes she says, “Are you my brother?” and says the same to my brother Dennis. “Whose children are these?” Blindness, adoption formula, dementia? Yes, I’ll take all three. There’s nothing in the nature of scripture that would tell me not to, especially not in a book abounding in puns and multiple meanings.

Your turn.