The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (50 page)

The commandment to love the stranger is decidedly not reserved to some vague and distant messianic future—it is meant to be obeyed here and now. To be sure, the biblical authors sometimes indulged in flights of fancy and soaring mystical speculation, but most of what is told and taught in the Hebrew Bible is intended for the day-to-day lives of real people. Moses ascends to the peak of Sinai and experiences the “glory” of God in some unknowable way that defies mere words and images—but Moses comes back down the mountain bearing tablets of common stone, and the God-given laws are meant for ordinary men and women.

Rather, Moses insists, all of us are capable of performing the commandment right here and right now: “But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it” (Deut. 30:14). To do justice to the stranger, even to love the stranger, is not too hard for us, even if five thousand years of human history and today’s newspaper headlines suggest otherwise.

Salman Rushdie, a modern author who has suffered a medieval ordeal as punishment for writing a book, once invoked Sartre’s “god-shaped hole” in an effort to explain why he persists in his efforts. “I, too, possess the same God-shaped hole,” Rushdie explains. “Unable to accept the unarguable absolutes of religion, I have tried to fill up the hole with literature.”
⁵

The enterprise that Rushdie describes—the effort to understand God through literature—has been undertaken not only by secular writers in the late twentieth century but also by true believers throughout the ages. The Bible was fixed in its current form at some unknowable point in distant antiquity, but the tradition of explaining and elaborating upon the Bible, which went on even while the Bible was still being written, has never stopped for a moment.
Midrash
is the Hebrew word that describes the ancient and honorable tradition of telling stories in order to reveal the inner meaning of sacred texts.

Midrash
translates roughly as “exegesis” and is broadly defined as “a reflection or meditation on the Bible” in which “[t]he biblical message is adapted to suit contemporary needs.”
⁶
Its earliest practitioners were the ancient sages whose commentaries are collected in the vast anthologies of rabbinical literature known as the Talmud and the Midrash. These learned and pious commentators often drew upon the rich accumulation of Jewish legend and lore generally known as Haggadah to illustrate the meanings that they detected in the biblical text. Storytelling, they realized, is what makes the Bible
and
biblical commentary come fully alive.

The same tradition can be found in “rewritten” Bibles like the
Biblical Antiquities
of Pseudo-Philo (see chapter eleven) or the scenes and dialogue that were boldly inserted into early Aramaic translations of the Bible known as Targums. Indeed, the First and Second Book of Chronicles, two books of the Hebrew Bible that tell a cleaned-up version of the saga of David and Solomon, are regarded by some scholars as a midrash on the First and Second Books of Samuel and the First and Second Books of Kings. So it turns out that teachers and preachers of Jewish tradition—ancient, medieval, and modern—brought their own lively imaginations to bear on Holy Writ and felt perfectly free to retell the stories of the Bible in colorful and sometimes provocative ways.

Thus the legend and lore called Haggadah became the raw material for pious musings that were intended not only to instruct and inspire but also to amuse. “The high aim of the Haggadah is religious and moral instruction and edification, but its authors are aware that to catch and hold the attention [of the reader] it must make itself interesting,” explains one contemporary Bible scholar, “and it is not beneath its dignity to be entertaining.” Precisely because a retold story is “only loosely connected with the Bible, and bears the teacher’s or preacher’s own individual stamp,” the tradition is “characterized by a ‘free diversity.’ In other words, there is no such thing as ‘orthodox’ haggadah.”
⁷

Today, the term “midrash” has come to be applied to
any
earnest effort to understand and explain the Bible, and it is often used nowadays to describe the retelling of Bible stories in new and imaginative ways to shed light on the ancient texts. The need of human beings “to hear and tell stories,” as Reynolds Price puts it, explains why we are drawn to storytellers, and the “god-shaped hole” in the human heart and soul, as Sartre puts it, explains why stories that help us understand who God is and what God wants are especially compelling.

For some readers, the Bible is a work of human authorship that may have been divinely inspired but does not amount to Holy Writ. “I myself do not believe that the Torah is any more or less the revealed Word of God,” insists Harold Bloom in
The Book of J
, “than are Dante’s
Commedia
, Shakespeare’s
King Lear
, or Tolstoy’s novels, all works of comparable literary sublimity.”
⁸
Regardless of its authorship, however, the Bible itself has always inspired human beings to try their hands at explaining what they find in its hallowed pages. And so, if I may echo Bloom’s words, I do not believe that the Talmud and the Midrash are any more or less illuminating as commentary on the Bible than are Thomas Mann’s
Joseph and His Brothers
, Joseph Heller’s
God Knows
, Jack Miles’s
God: A Biography
, or Bloom’s own
Book of J
, “all works of comparable literary sublimity.”

One author whose life’s work can be understood as a contemporary midrash is Isaac Bashevis Singer, the master storyteller whose books and stories, all of them first written in Yiddish, were honored with a Nobel
Prize in 1978. When I was a young man who aspired to be what Singer liked to call a “scribbler,” I came across an essay in which he summarized his own credo as a writer, a bit of confessional writing that discerns in God himself the humor, irony, and ingenuity of a novelist. “Yes,” Singer wrote, “God is a writer, and we are both the heroes and the readers.”
⁹

So Singer, whose novels were often serialized in the Yiddish-language
Jewish Daily Forward
before publication in English, encourages us to regard all of life as the daily episodes in a serial that began with Genesis: “One keeps on reading it day and night,” Singer concluded. “The fear of death is nothing but the fear of having to close God’s book.”
¹¹

What both Singer and the biblical authors understood is that ordinary men and women are not plaster saints. Real life includes moments of passion and pain, sin and scandal, just like the ones that we find in the forbidden and forgotten texts of the Bible. Indeed, the landscape that is described in the Bible is so alluring—and the Bible itself is so enriching and so enduring—precisely because it is peopled with men and women who are capable of both joy and sorrow, good works as well as great evil, acts of compassion and acts of cruelty.

The path across the biblical landscape is not straight and narrow, nor does it always lead to a city on a hill where all is goodness and light. Rather, as we have now seen, the Bible road wanders through some dangerous and yet tantalizing places where both skeletons and treasures are buried. Hidden away among all those psalms and proverbs, the “begats” and the “thou shalt nots,” are groves of enchantment
and
killing fields—but these places are not easy to find, and few guides will point the way to them. And sometimes, as we travel toward some shimmering spiritual truth that beckons on the far horizon, we should be careful not to overlook the intriguing and instructive sights that can be seen at the side of the road.

F
or some true believers today, the Bible is the Revealed Word of God, and nothing else need be said about its authorship.

For other believers, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible were conveyed in their entirety “from the mouth of God to the hand of Moses,” according to the prayerful words still recited in synagogues today. The remaining sacred books of the Bible, according to tradition, were authored by various prophets and kings: Samuel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel, for example, are thought to be the authors of the books that bear their names; King Solomon wrote the Song of Songs; David wrote the Psalms; and so on.

A century of modern Bible scholarship suggests otherwise.

Today, the Bible is regarded by most scholars and critics as a patchwork of legend, lore, and law that was created over a thousand years or so in distant antiquity by countless unknown chroniclers and lawgivers and storytellers, collected and compiled and corrected by generation after generation of editors (or “redactors”), and canonized by the ancient rabbis only toward the end of the biblical era. Thus, even if we regard what we find in the Bible as divinely inspired, the words themselves were spoken aloud by human voices and set down in writing by
human hands. What’s more, the creation of the Bible as envisioned by contemporary scholarship is hardly less miraculous than the account embraced by orthodox believers of various faiths. We are invited to imagine the ancients at some distant and irretrievable moment in history: they have remembered and passed down their sacred stories from generation to generation, but only in the form of poems and songs committed to memory. Some of these stories are so old that no one remembers when or why they were first told; some are borrowed from the faith and folklore of travelers and sojourners, allies and enemies, invaders and conquerors; some are concocted by bards whose motives are not much different from those of Homer or Shakespeare, Mark Twain or Rudyard Kipling.