Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Edmund Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351511353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

The Dead Sea Scrolls, a collection of 972 documents discovered between 1946 and 1956, are of immeasurable religious and historical significance. They include the oldest known surviving copies of Biblical-era documents. The manuscripts shed considerable light on forms of Judaism never known before. These forms contain hints of Christianity, or as put elsewhere, it was the Judaism amid which Christ and his first followers lived, thought, and wrote. Edmund Wilson's book is a record of this great scholarly find. Wilson was a prolific literary critic and social commentator, not an academic, and therefore Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls reads like a journalist's reportage. This unique personal account weaves together threads of folklore, history, and intrigue. As Leon Edel writes in his foreword, -Reading him, it is not difficult to imagine the ardor with which Edmund Wilson pursued his complex subject; it was the kind of subject he had always liked best, involving as it did history, politics, ancient lore, and all his faculties for imaginative reconstruction and historical analysis.... No book quite like this has been written in our century.- The scrolls of the Essenes, and the history of this Jewish sect's possible antecedence to Christianity, led the author to Israel and to the revelations contained in the scrolls. This book contains his resulting account of the scrolls' history. Originally published in 1978, this edition of Wilson's classic is made contemporary with a new introduction by Raphael Israeli, which illustrates the ongoing academic controversy surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls.

PART I
ISRAEL 1954

1
On First Reading Genesis

I DISCOVERED a few years ago, in going through the attic of my mother's house, an old Hebrew Bible that had belonged to my grandfather, a Presbyterian minister, as well as a Hebrew dictionary and a Hebrew grammar. I had always had a certain curiosity about Hebrew, and I was perhaps piqued a little at the thought that my grandfather could read something that I couldn't, so, finding myself one autumn in Princeton, with the prospect of spending the winter, I enrolled in a Hebrew course at the Theological Seminary, from which my grandfather had graduated in 1846.1 have thus acquired a smattering that has enabled me to work through Genesis, with constant reference to the English translation and the notes of the Westminster Commentaries, and this first acquaintance with the Hebrew text has, in several ways, been to me a revelation. In the first place, the study of a Semitic language gives one insights into a whole point of view, a system of mental habits, that differs radically from those of the West. But, besides this, I had never read Genesis before. In college I had taken the second half year of a course in Old Testament literature, so I did have some familiarity with the prophets and the later phases of Biblical history, but the Pentateuch and the earlier historical books were known to me only in patches or through simplified versions of Bible stories that had been read to me when I was a child. I came to them in the original for the first time rather late in life, when I had already read many other books, and since such an experience is probably rare—Hebrew being studied mainly by Christian seminarists and orthodox Jews, both of whom come to it early and with definite religious predispositions—I am going to give a report on it. I am myself neither a Jew nor a Christian, and I propose to disregard, in doing so, the little I know of the tons of theological commentary that have been written by the various churches. I do not propose to take for granted—as, from recent conversations on this subject with even well-educated people, I conclude I am warranted in not doing —that the reader is any better acquainted with even the most famous Bible stories than I was when I recently began to explore them.

First of all, the surprises of the language. The Bible in Hebrew is far more a different thing from the Bible in any translation than the original Homer, say, is from the best of the translations of Homer, because the language in which it is written is more different from English than Greek is. To speak merely from the point of view of style, the writing of the earliest books is a good deal tighter and tougher—Renan calls it a twisted cable—than is easy to imitate with the relatively loose weave of English. It is also much more poetic, or, rather, perhaps—since the King James Version does partly take care of this with its seventeenth-century rhythms—poetic in a more primitive way. Certain passages are composed in a kind of verse, and even the prose has a metrical basis. The first verse of Genesis, for instance, almost corresponds to a classical hexameter, and we soon feel we are reading an epic or a saga or something of the sort. The progress of the chronicle is interspersed with old prophecies and fragments of ballads that have evidently been handed down by word of mouth and that stand out from the background of the narrative by reason of their oracular obscurity and their "parallelistic" form. There are many plays on words and jingles that disappear in our solemn translations, and the language itself is extremely expressive, full of onomatopoeic effects. The word for "to laugh" is tsakhdq ("kh" as in "Chekhov"), and thus Isaac is called Isaac (Yits-khdq) because Sarah, in her delightful scene with God, cannot refrain from laughing when He tells her she shall yet bear a child; a light rain is called malar _y a heavier downpour gdshem (it was a geshem that caused the Deluge). The words for the emotions are likely to come from the physical states that accompany them. The verbs for "to love" and "to hate" are both based on heavy breathing: ahdv and aydv. Patience and impatience are rendered as the taking of long or short breaths.

The Hebrew language is also emphatic to a degree with which our language can hardly compete. The device for affirming something strongly is to repeat the important word, and God's warning to Adam that he will "dying, die," if he disobeys His orders, seems weakened in our version—"thou shalt surely die"—as does Joseph's assertion that "stolen, I was stolen out of the land of the Hebrews" by "indeed I was stolen." Nor can we match the vehement expression of the violent Hebrew emotions. When Jehovah, about to invoke the Flood, has become disgusted with man, it is not adequate to say that the thoughts of man's heart were "only evil continually"; in the "raq ra kol hayydm" of the text, we seem to hear the Creator actually spitting on his unworthy creation. "And Isaac trembled very exceedingly" is the rendering of the King James Version of the passage in which Isaac discovers that Jacob has deceived him, which falls short of "Isaac trembled mightily a great trembling," and in the next verse we read that Esau "cried mightily a great and bitter cry." This violence and vehemence of the Hebrews is implicit in the structure of the language itself. They did not conjugate their verbs for tenses, as the modern Western languages do, since our modern conception of time was something at which they had not yet arrived—a significant feature of the language that I want, in a later section of this essay, to discuss by itself at length. What the Hebrews had instead of tenses were two fundamental conjugations for perfect and imperfect— that is, for action completed and action uncompleted. And both of these two "aspects" theoretically exist in seven variations for every verb (though actually the complete set is rare) that have nothing to do with time. The primary form of the verb is known as the "light" or simple form, and the second is the passive of this, So much seems plain enough sailing, but what follow are three intensive forms—active, passive and reflexive—and two causatives—active and passive.

These verbs, which take little account of time, are the instruments, then, of a people who, at the period when this language was formed, must have been both passionate and energetic. It is not a question of when something happens, but whether the thing is completed or certain to be completed. There are special forms, the causatives, for getting things done: "I will multiply your descendants," "They made Joseph take off his coat." The intensives are unexpected to the non-Semitic reader, who has difficulty in getting the hang of them, but feels a dynamic element in the very bone of the language, and soon begins to find them fascinating. The translator of these strange verb forms, which double the middle consonant and vary the pattern of vowels, is obliged to resort to an adverb or a stronger verb. The intensive form of one of the words for "to kill," the paradigm verb that the student learns, is given in the grammars as "kill bratally " So you have "break" and "break to pieces," "grow" and "grow luxuriantly," A curious example, which occurs in Genesis 24:21, illustrates the problems of translators. When the emissary of Abraham meets Rebecca at the well and watches her attentively in silence, to see whether she will behave in the way by which he has proposed to God that the wife appointed for Isaac may be made to reveal herself, a verb that means "to look at" is put in the intensive form. The old Revised Version made it "And the man looked steadfastly on her"; the new Revised Version has it "gazed at her"—the first of these, that is, adds an adverb, the second tries to find an appropriate verb, and the nuances conveyed are different.

These intensives are sometimes baffling. It is not always easy to see what is implied in a given context. The forms may, in certain cases, turn intransitive into transitive verbs; the intensive of "to learn" may mean "to teach," or indicate multiplicity or frequency. The student soon finds himself groping amid modes of being and acting that cannot be accommodated to our Western categories, and of which the simplified descriptions supplied by his beginner's grammar do not really give him much grasp. The intensive reflexive, for example, has uses that are puzzling to render or even to understand, ft seems to imply behavior that ranges from what Henry James, borrowing from the French, meant by "abounding in one's own sense" to what we mean by "throwing one's weight around." When Enoch or Noah "walks with God," he does so in this form of the verb "to walk," and nobody has ever known how to render it. Yet one gets from the Hebrew original the impression that the walking of these patriarchs was of a very special kind, that it had the effect of making them both more important and more highly charged. This expression, in the Old Testament, says Dr. John Skinner, the author of the volume on Genesis in the International Critical Commentary series, in general "signifies intimate companionship, and here denotes a fellowship with God morally and religiously perfect. . • . We shall see, however, that originally it included the idea of initiation into divine mysteries." I have looked Enoch up in a number of translations, and the only attempts I have found to give the verb form its special force are in the independent modern translations by James Moffatt and Monsignor Knox, the former of whom says that Enoch 'lived close to God," the latter that he was "the close friend of God." The flaming sword set by God at the gate of the Garden of Eden is made to "turn" in the intensive reflexive, and the English translations, from the King James Version to the Revised Standard Version, render this as "turned every way." I imagine something a little more spectacular. Gesenius's standard lexicon seems to bear me out in suggesting "brandished, glittering." Yet as soon as you are beginning to pride yourself on seizing the force of the intensive reflexive, you are pulled up by finding that this variation of the verb that means "to shave" implies, in the hygienic prescriptions of Leviticus, nothing more interesting than "to shave oneself" or "to get oneself shaved."

When Abraham, foreseeing that the beauty of Sarah will cause Pharaoh to want her for his harem, has passed her off as his sister, in order that Pharaoh may not be impelled to put him out of the way, and when Pharaoh, afflicted by God for a sin he has committed unknowingly, learns at last what is causing the trouble and sends Abraham about his business, he says, "Here is your wife. Take her and go!" We are amused, when we first read this incident, to find "send" in the intensive form and to hear the brusque snap of "qakh vdelM" Yet we later on find that these words are more or less a conventional formula that does not necessarily imply irritation and that "send" in the intensive occurs when the sending is not necessarily ejective. There is something, we become aware, peremptory in the language itself. You have drawn-out "cohortative" forms that express, for the first person, exhortation, strong intention or earnest entreaty, along with clipped jussive forms for other people or things, as when God says, "Let this or that happen." The whole language is intensely purposeful, full of the determination to survive by force or by wit, to accomplish certain objectives, to lay down laws that will stabilize life and ensure its perpetuation, to fix the future by positive prophecies.

As this will of the ancient Hebrew finds expression in the dynamic verb forms, so the perdurability of the people is manifested in what may be called the physical aspects of the language. The prime unit of Hebrew is a group of three consonants. Nearly every verb consists of such a trinity. The values may be modified—the consonant may be doubled or be altered to a kindred sound, as T to "p," V to 'V—by a dot written inside the letter, and the intervening vowels may be indicated by a system of dots and dashes written above and below, but they were not so originally written and are not—except in poetry and in a single daily paper—so written today in Israel. The Hebrew alphabet thus differs from our alphabet in not including characters for the vowels, or even, in every case, different characters for kindred consonantal sounds. It is a system of twenty-two integers, a set of un-supplantable blocks, and each Hebrew word makes a shell into which a varying content of vowel sounds may be poured. The verbs are modified by prefixes and endings, and some of the conjugations take prefixes, but, to a Westerner, the most striking feature of the Hebrew conjugations is the way in which a shift of meaning (from active to passive, for example) is effected by a vowel change inside this consonantal shell—the kind of thing that we do on a lesser scale in inflecting our so-called strong verbs: e.g., "sing, sang, sung." We may put in an "o" for the noun and get "song," and the Jews, too, can use the same shell, with a different vowel content, for a noun. What impresses is the hardness of this shell.

Our first look at the text of the Bible, when we have mastered the alphabet, is likely to give us the feeling that this sytem is extremely impractical. It requires what must seem to the beginner an annoying and easily avoidable effort to coordinate with the heavy consonants the elusive little dashes and dots that hover about them like midges, especially since two of the former are not consonants in our sense at all but gutturals, no longer pronounced, which have to be regarded as blanks and read with the sounds of the vowels that are indicated above or below them. Even the printing of these signs is difficult, impossible for a linotype machine, since they appear in innumerable combinations. The result is that, even in learned books, the consonants are, if possible, written without "pointings," and what you get is a kind of shorthand. You must already know the words extremely well in order to be able to recognize them. Yet some further acquaintance induces respect, and a perception that this method is appropriate, an inalienable element of the Jewish tradition. The characters themselves are impressive—not'so fluent as the Roman and Greek, and retaining even more than these the look of having been once cut in stone.* To write out Hebrew vocabulary, with black ink and a stub pen, affords a satisfaction that may give one a faint idea of the pleasures of Chinese

* The movement from right to left is supposed to have been determined by the engraver's having held the chisel in his left hand and the hammer in his right, and thus naturally having worked from the right.

calligraphy, as well as a feeling of vicarious authority as one traces the portentous syllables. One remembers the hand of Jehovah writing on Belshazzar s wall (though He had to write Aramaic in order to be understood by that alien and uninstructed king). These twenty-two signs that Moses was believed to have brought back from Egypt graven on the Tables of the Law, and from which, in their early Phoenician form, all our European alphabets have been derived, have, austere in their vowel-less terseness, been steadily proceeding from right to left, over a period of two thousand years, among people that read from left to right; and in the Bible they take on an aspect exalted and somewhat mysterious: the square letters holding their course, with no capitals for proper names and no punctuation save the firm double diamond that marks the end of a verse, compact in form as in meaning, stamped on the page like a woodcut, solid verse linked to solid verse with the ever recurrent "and," the sound of which is modulated by changes of vowel, while above and below them a dance of accents shows the pattern of the metrical structure and the rise and fall of the chanting, and, above and below, inside and out, the vowel pointings hang like motes, as if they were the molecules the consonants breathed. Difficult for the foreigner to penetrate and completely indifferent to this, they have withstood even the drive toward assimilation—to their Spanish and Germanic neighbors—of the Jews of the Middle Ages; and in the dialect of German that is Yiddish, in newspapers spread in the subway, they still march in the direction opposite to that of all the other subway newspapers, English or Spanish or Italian, Hungarian or Russian or Greek, with only a light sprinkling of points to indicate Germanic vowels. And we have seen them reassemble in Israel, reconstituting their proper language—not embarrassed in the least by the fear that the newspaper reader of our century, even knowing Hebrew perfectly, may have difficulty in distinguishing, in the British reports, a vowelless Bevan from a vowelless Bevin. They march on through our modern events as if they were invulnerable, eternal.

But in the meantime, the Bible confronts us, in the dignity and beauty of its close-packed page.

The opening of Genesis is wonderful: the spirit of God in the darkness that hovers or broods on the waters, the sudden decree of light, the teeming of earth, sea and sky. The story of the Garden of Eden and the episode of Cain and Abel are imperfectly disengaged from some very ancient matrix of folklore, and parts of them are blotted in obscurity. What is the explanation of the phrase that so strangely recurs? "Your desire shall be for your husband," says God to Eve, "and he shall dominate you." "If you do not do well," He tells Cain, "sin is lurking at the door. His desire is for you, but you will dominate him." Is the second the mistake of a copyist, whose eye has slipped back to the earlier passage, or an obsessive idea of the author's? The serpent here is not the Devil, as the Jews later thought him to have been, but simply "the wiliest of all the beasts of the field." The Fall here has not the importance that it was later to take on for the Christians. Except for one reference to Adam in Job, the Old Testament does not mention it again. It was Paul who set up Original Sin, with the dreadful results we know for Catholic and Calvinist doctrine. The Creator here is all too human—we should nowadays say He was manic-depressive or something of the sort. He immediately becomes jealous of the man He has molded, angry at Adam for eating the fruit that has made him "like one of us" by imparting to him the knowledge of good and evil, and fearful lest he eat of the tree of life and so become immortal, too—as He is later, out of jealousy of human success, to frustrate the building of the city in which everyone speaks the same language and to impose the confusion of the Tower of Babel. What we do find in the story of Adam and his family are those living and salient traits—the relations of Adam and Eve, the sullen personality of Cain—that give these fragmentary legends a human truth and have caused them to haunt our imaginations; and you have, also, the earliest examples of that specialty of the Jewish genius—the development of the moral consciousness, of man's relations with God. This dawning of the moral sense brings with it, for Adam and Eve, an immediate awareness of their animal nature and the impulse to clothe themselves.

After Adam, the chronicle is almost lost in a cloudy domain of myth. Methuselah lives nine hundred and sixty-nine years; Enoch walks with God, then vanishes, "for God took him." The formidable race that the Septu-agint calls "giants" and the Masoretic Bible "Nephilim" (fallen ones?) are dwelling on the earth. The sons of God interbreed with the daughters of men. Something in all this has gone wrong, though it is not clear precisely what. The Creator, at an earlier stage so nervously suspicious of man, so anxious lest man try to compete with Him, now decides he has gone to the bad and regrets He has ever made him. He decides to wipe mankind out, but relents in favor of the family of Noah. There follows the account of a flood which, according to Sir Leonard Woolley, must actually have occurred locally some three thousand years before Christ, in the region between the Tigris and the Euphrates—an account that seems less poetic as well as less realistic than the similar record preserved in the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh. It is curious to compare the two stories. The Babylonian one mentions reed huts, the remnants of which Woolley found below a thick layer of river silt, and the adventures of the Ark are "lived," described here in much more detail than in the Biblical tale of the Flood. One is struck- by the behavior of these earlier gods. "The gods were frightened by the deluge, and, shrinking back, they ascended to the heaven of Anu. The gods cowered like dogs crouched against the outer wall." Later, when the waters are going down and a sacrifice is offered, "The gods smelled the savor, the gods smelled the sweet savor, the gods crowded like flies about the sacrificer." * This was not the way of Jehovah, who has absolute authority and absolute power, and could not behave so abjectly.

It should be said at this point that the text of Genesis is regarded as a patching together of texts by two different hands, combined, perhaps, with passages from still older sources. One sees clearly in the Hebrew the reasons that certain points seem confused in translation—though actually they have partially been ironed out—for the original is still more confused. In the two recensions that have been here brought together, it is evident that one of the scribes had referred to God as "Elohim," the other by the name that we call "Jehovah," The first of these words is a plural—most commonly used with a singular, but occasionally with <a plural verb—which seems to designate spirits or powers that preside over the phenomena of the universe. It will be noticed that the Creator in the Eden story expresses his displeasure that Adam has "become like one of ws," and this plurality of Elohim, the indeterminateness of his or their identity, lends mystery to certain incidents—the wrestling of Jacob with the "angel," the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—in which a "man" or several "messengers" turn out to be what

* I quote from the translation by E. A. Speiser, so excellent in its literary quality, included in Ancient Near Eastern Texts, Princeton University Press, 1950.

we translate as "God," though the names of Elohim and Jehovah, sometimes alternating, sometimes appearing together, make the ancient conception of deity rather difficult, at this early stage, to grasp. Jehovah is a definitely singular God, the pillar of monotheism. He figures in the Bible at first as the national divinity of the Hebrews, competing with neighboring divinities, but He is later, without ever losing His special relation to the Hebrews, to become a universal God; and one of the things that make Genesis interesting is to see how this universal Deity develops out of primitive conceptions, incompletely fused, o...