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Literary Review
Classics Revisited
A climate of thought
RAVI VYAS
The Bible lies at the heart of Western culture, shaping emotional history, law, language and literature.
The Bible, edited with an introduction and notes by David Norton, published by Cambridge University Press (2005) and reprinted by Penguin Books, (2006) Priced £10.50.
The 1611 King James Authorised Version of the Book of Psalms and Proverbs — and of course the entire Bible, especially the Book of Job — is so deep in the English language and literature that we longe
r know that we are constantly using its phrases and ideas in everyday speech. The translation from Aramaic into English has become the bedrock for English language and literature that has transformed the holy book into the Book itself. Writers and poets have used it all the time because, as St. Augustine said in his Confessions, the Psalms were mirrors of ourselves. It is inevitable that writers would look into the mirror of this fountainhead to find their inspiration, much as we look into our classics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. In many ways, the Psalms, Proverbs and Job is the classic of all classics because all the Big Questions in literature can be traced back to them.
Universal themes
There are 10 themes or clusters of ideas in the Bible. They are the central themes and therefore a convenient entry into the Bible’s world of thought; they have been shown to have a background of the general culture of the ancient Near East and they all reflect the continual reinterpretation from one book of the Bible — from the Old Testament to the New Testament, for instance — to another. But there is an essential continuity in the Biblical tradition. Very briefly, some of the leading themes that provide the background to the Psalms, Proverbs and Job are:
God is in many ways the leading character of the Bible which presents human history as being under his ultimate control. The question of His presence or non-presence and God’s “ultimate control” has formed a central theme in all classical literature, as has the music of chance. So too is the imagery used of God in the Bible that has been predominantly drawn from human beings and human society, to some extent also from the natural world that has been repeatedly questioned in literature. If God had drawn man in his own image, why then was there so much evil and injustice in the world?
Covenant: The covenants which the Bible describes God as making with men are of two different types: the unconditional and conditional. Can there be an unconditional agreement or should all agreements be contingent to a given set of circumstances? If they change over time, as they would, shouldn’t the covenant provide for them?
Promise, threat, and fulfilment: A great many texts of the Bible are eschatological, that is, the theology concerned with the end of the world. This has been the central theme of much modern literature that has been “waiting for the end”.
Law and Righteousness, Sacrifice and Expiation, Purity and Holiness, Suffering, Exile and Restoration and finally, Wisdom that comes at the end of day are recurrent themes which find their place in great deal of classical literature from the Greeks, Shakespeare, down to contemporary literature, especially European and American. (It is also true of Latin American and African literature that have been concerned with the Great Dictator and the machinations of petty politicians.)
Mirroring our lives
Now open any page of the Psalms and Proverbs and you will find the parallelism with the themes quite clear. The Proverbs have been called “wisdom literature” by modern scholars like another, Ecclesiastes or The Preacher. The first part of the book, 1-9, is a series of poetic discourses in which a father urges his son to gain wisdom. The remainder of the book consists of several collections of mainly two-line proverbs for the successful conduct of life.
Some proverbs, at random. “The rich man’s wealth is his strong city; the destruction of the poor is their poverty.” “Where no counsel is, the people fall; but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.” “He that is surety for a stranger shall smart for it.”
Readers who encounter the Bible for the first time must bear in mind that, in spite of its physical appearance as a single book, it is a library. Pick up a book and one usually begins at the beginning, intending to read it all at one go; but that is not how one uses a library; there one chooses what to pick out from the shelves what appears to be more congenial. So it is with the Bible. You don’t read it consecutively from beginning to end. But once you start, you will go back to it, because the Bible, along with Shakespeare’s plays published only a few years later, lies at the heart of Western culture, shaping emotional history, law, language and literature — and much else besides. It is a climate of thought.
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