Biblical Invective

 

I have spent a good deal of my life reading books, a certain amount more talking about books, and even a certain amount time writing books.  Books have even been, directly or indirectly, an important subject in many of my blog posts.  Today I turn my attention to the most widely printed, translated, and distributed book in the world: the Bible.  Although publication statistics are not always the same as reading statistics, the Bible also is probably still the most widely read book in the world—or at least read in.  Because, of course, the Bible is not a single book, but an anthology of books.  The word biblia is a plural noun meaning “the books.”  In fact, there is considerable generic differentiation among the biblical books, which date from different areas and reveal the influence of the varying historical and cultural eras in which they were written.  There are various “through lines” in the Bible, but it makes little sense to sit down and read through its thousand plus pages as one might try to read through War and Peace.  Large parts of the Hebrew Scriptures, or Old Testament in the terminology of most Christians, are legal, ceremonial, and genealogical compendiums that are pretty tough slogging.  So the question arises: what is the most widely read book in the Bible?

 

            I think the answer to that question,  approached from the historical point of view, must be the Book of Psalms.  Anyway, that is the one I’m going with.  The Psalms are, in the first place, a vital bridge between Judaism and Christianity, as they continue to occupy a vital role in both Jewish and Christian worship.  Some of the few words uttered by Jesus on the cross were psalm verses.  Paul likewise cites psalm verses.  Furthermore, the psalms have had an enormous influence on world literature, most especially of course its poetry.  My own last book was devoted to a magnificent poem by the Portuguese Renaissance poet Luis de Camões, often entitled simply “Babylon and Zion,” that is a meditation upon, and exegesis of, the psalm Super flumina Babylonis (“By the Waters of Babylon”), number 136 (137) in the psalter.* 

 

In 1903 Rowland Prothero (the Lord Ernle), a Conservative M.P. and first-class cricket player, published The Psalms in Human Life.  (Literate holders of public office, though on the wane even in Britain, were once thick on the ground.)  This particularly invaluable work of amateur Anglican scholarship I keep on a shelf beside a bilingual edition of the Psalms in the Socino Bible series (1950), a copy that once belonged to a congregant of the Etz Chaim synagogue in Flatbush, Brooklyn.  (One of the pleasures of having a library gradually constructed over many years, mainly from second hand and “bargain” books, is that provided by tracking down the connections of former owners.)  As for the psalms, I have never mastered the original Hebrew, but this translation is authoritative, and the commentary of the editor, the nearly anonymous Dr. A. Cohen, is invaluable.

 

            In the long tradition of Christian biblical scholarship, the psalms have been assigned to various categories.  One important group is called the penitential psalms, typified by the Miserere, “Have mercy on me, o God” (50, 51), traditionally thought to be the anguished cry of David as he reflected on what was in effect a homicide he had arranged to facilitate adultery.  But the group that has attracted my attention this week is that of the imprecatory psalms.  If you are familiar with any of the psalms at all, chances are that it is the very reassuring “The Lord in my shepherd…”  One doesn’t usually link the biblical spirit with violent imprecations—that is, curses—but there are some doozies in the psalter. 

 

            The fifteenth-century French poet François Villon, whom I have mentioned a couple of times in recent months, begins his most famous poem with an attack on Thibault d’Aussigny, the bishop of Orleans, from whose dungeons he has just been liberated--by nearly miraculous good luck.  (By ancient custom prisoners could be released on the occasion of a royal visit to the city.)  We do not know how Villon came to be incarcerated by the Bishop of Orleans, but my default suspicion is that it was for some very good reason.  He was, after all, a murderer and a cat burglar when not writing ballads.  Villon’s poem, of course, waxes indignant in its insistence that he was a victim of episcopal injustice.  He summarizes his poetic attack somewhat obliquely by referring readers to “the seventh verse of the psalm Deus laudem”.  The psalm to which he refers, a “psalm of David,” is Deus, laudem, meam ne tacueris…(O God, whom I praise, be not silent…), number 108 in the medieval Latin Bible.  In it, the psalmist, ostensibly King David, really unloads on his enemies, who “have opened wicked and treacherous mouths against me.”  If your idea of David is a nice little boy with a slingshot, this psalm may shock you as much as the behavior of its author.  The eighth verse is “May his days be few.  May another take his office [episcopatum].”  But that is only the beginning of the biblical invective.  Here are just a few clauses in the storehouse of Villon’s scriptural  invective: May his children be fatherless…May his children be roaming vagrants and become beggars…May the usurer ensnare all his belongings…May there be no one to do him a kindness…Let not his mother’s sin be blotted out…And that is just a sampling! Villon probably had the whole of the psalter by heart.  The feats of memory that were commonplace among the learned men of pre-Gutenberg times may seem to us astonishing.  Most “clerks” (i.e., educated people, including many women) had the psalter by heart , and you would too if you had recited it in its entirety week after week for years on end.  And there was within the book a poem precisely suitable for every mood and vagary of our human life.  Villon simply assumed that alluding to the title of the psalm would do the trick for him.

 

            I doubt that even among professional medievalists one in a hundred has run across the name of the once high and mighty Thibault d’Aussigny.  But most educated people have at least heard of the obscure university hanger-on, François Villon.  The poets usually win.  That is why Shelley calls poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

 

 

*There are 150 psalms, but there is a slight difference in the internal numeration in Catholic and Protestant bibles.  In earlier historical periods psalms were often cited by their incipits (initial verses) in Latin, as Villon does here. Thus the first psalm is called Beatus vir (“Blessed is the man…”), and that practice continues among many medievalists.