by Harold Bloom
But where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?
Man knoweth not the price thereof; neither is it found in the land of the living.
The depth saith, It is not in me: and the sea saith, It is not with me.
It cannot be gotten for gold, neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof.
It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx, or the sapphire.
The gold and the crystal cannot equal it: and the exchange of it shall not be for jewels of fine gold.
No mention shall be made of coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdom is above rubies.
The topaz of Ethiopia shall not equal it, neither shall it be valued with pure gold.
Whence then cometh wisdom? and where is the place of understanding?
Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all living, and kept close from the fowls of the air.
Destruction and death say, We have heard the fame thereof with our ears.
God understandeth the way thereof, and he knoweth the place thereof.
For he looketh to the ends of the earth, and seeth under the whole heaven;
To make the weight for the winds; and he weigheth the waters by measure.
When he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the lightning of the thunder:
Then did he see it, and declare it; he prepared it, yea, and searched it out.
And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding.
Poetry is defeated here by wisdom. Yahweh does not bother to defend his justice. His goal is devastation by language just as Moby-Dick destroys Ahab, the Pequod, and all the crew except Ishmael, who in the accents of Job escapes alone to tell us. No one could possibly undervalue the literary power of the book of Job, but can there be a wisdom literature if it gives up being wise?
From childhood on, I have insisted upon reading the book of Job as a fury against the injustice of Yahweh.
Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.
Job 42:6
Herbert Marks wonderfully points out that the verb “abhor” lacks any object in the Hebrew. Scholars mistranslate this as “I recant.” If you want to you can see Job as penitent, but I go with Herbert Marks. Job holds his ground. He casts aside his own humility, and he pities all mortals (“dust and ashes”) for being subject to so dreadful a Yahweh.
The Song of Songs:
“Set Me as a Seal upon Thine Heart”
AFTER SIXTY-ODD YEARS of teaching, I go on telling my students to go apart, whether outdoors or alone in their room, and read very slowly out loud to themselves. When I reread I murmur softly to myself, frequently closing my eyes, since I possess the work by memory. Few weeks go by these days without the loss of friends and good acquaintances in my own generation, and at moments I wonder whether I read and teach to hold off death. There is no melancholy in such reflection, since I waveringly have the vision that I share my quest with all readers who struggle for the Blessing of a more abundant life.
Yesterday an old friend visited and reminded me we had met at a temple in Washington, D.C., half a century ago, when I lectured to the congregation on the elements in normative Judaism that were imported by Rabbi Akiba and his school from Platonism. I did not intend to be contentious, but many of them were troubled by my insistence that nothing in Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible) stated that a people or an individual could become holy through study. Although that seems now the most Judaic of commonplaces, it did not exist before the Platonic influx into second-century B.C.E. Palestine. In discussion afterward, several of them expressed dismay when I summed up by saying that normative Judaism was an extremely persuasive misreading of Tanakh, carried out by Akiba and his followers to meet the needs of a Jewish people under Roman occupation.
I cite this only as an instance of how subtle and complex the reading of a great literary text can be, since without Akiba’s misprision Judaism could not have survived. Akiba, martyred by the Romans for inspiring the Bar Kochba insurrection, had struggled with the angel in the mode of Jacob who became Israel. The difference was that Akiba made the text of the Hebrew Bible into the angel who had to be withstood. It has always charmed me that the Song of Songs was included in Tanakh only at the insistence of Akiba, evidently since he read it as part of the Oral Torah given by Yahweh at Sinai. For the great founder of normative Judaism, the Song of Songs celebrated Yahweh in love.
Most of us enjoy the Song of Songs as an astonishing dramatic lyric that contrasts the erotic ecstasy of a woman with that of a man. In the King James Bible, I find the poem to be unique in that it surpasses its Hebrew original in eloquence and a kind of sublime rapture. Herbert Marks, much the best literary critic of the English Bible, moves me by insisting that the young woman’s voice is far more inward and complex than that of the man, since she is less centered on him than on the love that consumes her. There is something dangerously intense in her splendid apotheosis:
Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.
His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me.
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.
The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills.
My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice.
My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land….
Geneva Bible, Song of Songs 2:5–12
In the very different Greek and Latin tradition, the turtledove is sacred to Aphrodite/Venus. Here the song of spring emanates in a manner that only allegorizing could transform into a spiritual sense. Whoever the Hebrew poet was who composed this grand hymn, perhaps a courtier attendant upon King Solomon, he understood that the essence of attraction is ambivalence and also a kind of ambiguity that nurtures itself upon secrecy. Again the woman magnificently takes precedence over her lover, who lacks her ardor:
By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.
I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.
The watchmen that go about the city found me: to whom I said, Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?
It was but a little that I passed from them, but I found him whom my soul loveth: I held him, and would not let him go, until I had brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me.
I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.
Geneva Bible, Song of Songs 3:1–5
In a way, Rabbi Akiba was right, though he would not have approved of the poetry in the Western tradition directly inspired by the Song of Songs. The tragic conversos or Jewish Catholics of Spain were obsessed by the Song: Teresa of Ávila, Saint John of the Cross, Fray Luis de León. In English poetry, Edmund Spenser composed a superb “Epithalamion” for his own wedding, which carries on the spirit of the Song of Songs. Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis is another instance. In the Victorian Age, Christina Rossetti and Coventry Patmore write their own versions of Solomon’s Song, and Walt Whitman’s “Lilacs” elegy for Lincoln is deeply involved in the Song’s vision of the bliss of union.
Akiba thought that the Blessing of the Song of Songs was a divine gift to us. I sometimes thin
k he was correct, because everyone I know who reads the Song of Songs is enriched with a sense of more life:
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.
Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.
My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.
Geneva Bible, Song of Songs 2:13–16
I recall discussing this incandescent passage with Lillian Hellman sometime in the mid-1970s and being told that her play of 1939, The Little Foxes, began with her brooding upon the Song of Songs. Miss Hellman, during the years I knew her, still mourned her second husband, Dashiell Hammett, and had a fine bitterness toward life and literature. I told her that she misread this superb erotic invitation, to which she justly replied that, right or wrong, she had been stimulated to creation. Forty years later, I yield to her procedure and wonder why I always feel blessed by chanting the Song aloud to myself, whether in Hebrew or in English:
Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.
Geneva Bible, Song of Songs 8:6
I am overwhelmed by this, though the Hebrew is even darker, since it calls love as fierce as dying and sings that love is as strong as Sheol or Hades. I hear something of this terror in Shakespeare’s sonnets when he cries out, “Desire is death,” or in the “stony sestina” of Dante, where the poet proclaims he would sleep away his life in stone or feed like beasts upon the grass, only to see his lady Pietra’s garments cast a shade. The blessing given to me by the Song of Songs has an element of the negative, since a passion so dangerously intense exacts a cost not less than total.
Ruth:
“Whither Thou Goest, I Will Go”
I ALWAYS FIND something frightening about Yahweh in his acute ambivalence toward us. We can understand Zeus or Odin being anxious, but how can Yahweh experience anxiety? His actions are unpredictable. I surmise that he wounded himself in the act of creation. He seems to have both good and bad days. He has astonishing limitations.
Kabbalah tells us that Yahweh is gigantic. Whenever he has a sense that he might have been diminished by creating the world and humankind, a kind of fury possesses him. He began as primordial Man. There are traditions that say that Yahweh’s name was lost after he underwent contraction. He then became Elohim. Without that contraction, he and the cosmos would remain one. He becomes more human as he drives to keep the world and humanity separate from himself.
Gershom Scholem and I shared a conviction that Walt Whitman was a kind of natural Kabbalist. The Walt Whitman of Leaves of Grass has many Yahwistic elements. He too creates by concentration and contraction. But, unlike Yahweh, Walt loves humankind. No one would ascribe fury to Whitman. Yahweh is a man of war; Walt Whitman is a man of peace.
My lifelong experience is that the book of Ruth is the most beautiful work in all the Hebrew Bible. It is economical, benign, and loving. Its poetic progeny include John Keats in his “Ode to a Nightingale” and Victor Hugo in an equally superb poem, “Boaz Asleep.” In some ways, the book of Ruth is really a prose poem rather than a short story.
We do not know who wrote this wonderful vision of human passion. Whoever it was, she or he must have lived about 700 B.C.E. or even earlier: perhaps contemporary with the Yahwist in 950 B.C.E. or so. Herbert Marks usefully demonstrates the wonderful perspectivism of Ruth. Its four chapters center on four scenes, private and public: the road back to Bethlehem, where Ruth makes her decision to follow Naomi; Boaz’s field, where she meets her future redeemer; the threshing floor at night, where she gains his love; and, finally, the city gate, where Boaz gathers public endorsement for the marriage.
Marks is superb in restating the crucial theme of Jewish redemption through migration. The greater junction “get thee out of”—Abram from Ur of the Chaldees, Moses from Egypt into the Promised Land—is re-enacted by Ruth and Naomi as they return from Moab to Israel. Renunciation is set aside, and the grand patriarch Boaz becomes the second change that Yahweh allows to those who trust in him.
The name “Ruth” means a “friend”—that is, a refreshment of life. “Naomi” means “sweetness,” a meaning that is momentarily set to one side when in her grief she calls herself Mara, or “bitterness.” “Boaz” can be read as “strength” in a particular sense of shrewdness.
The covenant love between Ruth and Boaz is matched by the love between Naomi and Ruth, who become truly a mother and a daughter:
And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God:
Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.
Ruth 1:16–17
The love that binds together is hesed, or loyalty to the covenant. The fable of Ruth is a high song to the great women of Covenant: Leah, Rachel, Tamar, and, here, Ruth and Naomi. It is through her marriage to Boaz that Ruth will bear Obed, the grandfather of King David. The concept of hesed becomes a large one, since Ruth is a Moabite convert, even as King Solomon will be the son of the Hittite woman Bathsheba. Tamar was a Canaanite, like Judah’s wife before her, and so David is of Moabite, Hebrew, and Canaanite lineage.
No one can now read the book of Ruth without remembering Keats’s tribute to her in his “Ode to a Nightingale”:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
Side by side with this is the marvelous poem “Boaz Asleep,” from Hugo’s epic, The Legend of the Ages. Boaz is clearly the great Victor Hugo himself, tireless seducer of battalions of women:
While he was sleeping, Ruth, a Moabite,
Came to his feet and, with her breast bared, lay
Hoping for some unknown uncertain ray
When, suddenly, they would waken into light.
Though she was near, Boaz was unaware;
And what God planned for her, Ruth couldn’t tell.
Cool fragrance rose from the tufts of asphodel,
And over Galgala, night stirred the air.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Wondered—with parting eyelids half revealed
Beneath her veils—what stray god, as he cropped
The timeless summer, had so idly dropped
That golden sickle in the starry field.
Translated by E. H. and A. M. Blackmore
Ecclesiastes:
“And Desire Shall Fail”
IF THE GIFT to us of the Song of Songs is marked by an appropriate ambivalence, I find an even darker exuberance in Ecclesiastes, a mistranslation of the Hebrew Koheleth, who is the “assembler” of these sayings. The speaker is not preaching to a congregation but ruminating upon heretical wisdom. Though Koheleth is ascribed to Solomon, eighty years old and glorious, the writer cannot be dated. He may be third-century B.C.E. and is a kind of Hebraic Epicu
rus. His book opens memorably, and its subsequent eloquence never flags:
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.
The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.
All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.
Geneva Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:2–9
“Vanity” is a departure from the Hebrew hevel, which is only a breath, a vapor, or nothing at all. Koheleth tells us that every increase in wisdom is a kind of mourning and every growth in knowledge an augmentation of sadness. This great ironist praises life but only because “a living dog is better than a dead lion” (Ecclesiastes 9:4). As for the dead, even our memory of them fades away, and yet we are urged to continue with our work:
Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Geneva Bible, Ecclesiastes 9:10–11
