A Case of Conscience by James Blish

Science fiction has a tendency to ignore religion; this may have stemmed from its early Enlightenment-style emphasis on rationality, or it may have been sheer laziness, since predicting how some of our oldest cultural institutions would fare years into the (often dystopian) future is difficult at best.

There are notable exceptions to this, and the situation has gotten better as the years wind on and the genre refines itself. Writers aren’t always nice to religion, but they’ve generally stopped ignoring it as a force for (or resistance to) change. But even in scifi’s early days, there were some writers who not only included organized religion in their stories, but actually centered the plots on it. Most frequently cited is Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. But just a scant year before Miller published his first and last novel, another titan of the early science fiction scene, James Blish, published A Case of Conscience, whose protagonist(?) is a Jesuit priest.

Like most of the best (or longest-lived) science fiction, A Case of Conscience‘s focus is largely sociological; there are no laser battles, though there are plenty of large, reptilian aliens. On the planet of Lithia, Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez is priest/biologist, one of four human scientists sent to the world to determine if it should be opened to general human availability. This is partially an academic exercise of determining if the environment is malicious or benign to homo sapiens, but also to understand the culture of the native Lithians and predict whether being a spaceport will wind up more like Sweden or more like Afghanistan for loud Westerners.

Blish’s decision to make Sanchez a Jesuit is no coincidence; the Jesuits are [in]famous for being the most scientific and rationalistic of Catholics, so Sanchez seems in many ways more like a scientist than a Padre, but it soon becomes apparent that what could be a nuanced, meaningful interplay of religious conservatism and futuristic scientism is destined to be turned into two flailing caricatures, and I think the Catholics get the worse end of the deal.

The Lithians, though they resemble pulp-era science fiction villains in appearance, are a squeaky-clean species: intelligent to a fault, they are utterly rational, inherently moral without any sort of religion or notion of faith at all; a peaceful, self-sacrificing race whose unique skill at interdisciplinary fields would make them valuable partners to Earthlings, whose economy and minds have been warped by years of a “shelter economy”, driven underground for entire generations by the threat of nuclear holocaust. Schizophrenia is on the rise, and a strange system of have/have-not closely resembling that of the Soviet Union seems to pervade. But this is all thin political blustering; at issue is the apparent “perfection” of the Lithians, which ultimately brings Ruiz-Sanchez to a horrifying conclusion: the planet of Lithia was created by The Devil in order to convince Man to stop believing in God.

Regardless of one’s spiritual convictions, this is a rather hard to accept, even in science fiction. It may stem from Blish’s agnostic misunderstanding of Catholic dogma; perhaps it represents the sort of thing that really would concern a Catholic back in 1958—this was, after all, before Vatican II, when Catholicism was, if it’s even possible, draped even more mysticism and incense-and-dagger horseshit than it is now. In any case, Blish made sure to mitigate the ridiculousness of Ruiz’s sudden revelation with an even more exaggerated Henry-Kissinger-as-comic-book-villain exposition from Paul Carver, another member of the four-man expedition, who hates Lithia and Lithians and wants to turn the entire planet into a thermonuclear weapons factory. This point is about halfway through the book, even before Ruiz-Sanchez shares his blithering revelation, and Blish could not make Carver sound like more of a megalomaniacal Bond villain if he tried. Once again, I’m not sure if Blish simply happened to traffick in caricatures, or if he purposely wrote Carver as a slavering Cold War missile-monger in order to offset what must have seemed, even in context, like a “Dinosaur bones were put here by God to test our faith” kind of fairy tale from the Jesuit.

The second half of the book deals largely with a young Lithian, Egtverchi, who is given to Sanchez in egg form as a gift/ambassador. Lithians have no real sense of familial structure, evolving into intelligence mostly on their own, but Egtverchi manages to grow up, let’s say “wrong”, and becomes a rabble-rouser on Earth, instigating violence and social upheaval. The image, I suppose, is supposed to be one of leftist rationalism bunker-busting Cold War-style mindsets, though Egtverchi himself is something of a cipher and the events that follow are somewhat tangential, including a party scene at a sex-crazed political socialite’s mansion that accomplishes nothing in its significant length except serving as Egtverchi’s debutante ball, where he “comes out” to the human world as an obnoxious teenager.

I won’t spoil the ending, although it won’t come as a surprise in a story about Cold War politicking. Though one can sense Blish was attempting an ambiguity, he only succeeding in making Ruiz-Sanchez look like a hysterical moonbat, eclipsed only by his (Norwegian!) pope and by extension the entirety of the Catholic church. Though one may guess that I’m no great friend of the institution, I give it, generally, a little more respect than flailing caricatures. Even more disappointing is that Blish’s initial setup seemed so promising; the conflict between Ruiz-Sanchez’s rationalist flavor of faith and crass utilitarian Realpolitik might have been meaningful, but the final execution was poor then, and ages even more poorly.

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris

Sam Harris is best known as part of the “Four Horsemen”, or the “New Atheists”; his book, The End of Faith, was one of many which came out a few years ago and effectively sparked media coverage of the “movement”. There was also Christopher Hitchens’ God is not Great, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. Some of these were better than others; some I haven’t bothered to read.

Harris is the youngest of these authors, but in some ways the most prominent. Since his initial publication, he received a Ph.D. in neuroscience at UCLA, and it is the scientific approach to cognition which informs the content of his new book, The Moral Landscape.

Harris is like Dennett insofar as he casts religion as a sociological or anthropological phenomenon, which to some degree it is. Even dedicated Christians understand that participation in a shared religious belief is heavily influenced by culture and society; for an impressionistic—if actively hostile—example, see Matt Taibbi’s The Great Derangement.

In the world of Christian apologetics (I suppose religious apologetics generally), perhaps the most resonant argument is that which hangs our moral sense upon religion and dares the scientist and the antitheist to come up with a plausible alternative for not only how we appear to have a shared moral sense, but why we should feel obligated to follow it without a larger metaphysical scaffolding such as provided by many religious beliefs. Most replies to this either shrug and say that Morality-with-a-capital-M as we generally consider it doesn’t exist (unpalatable), or is completely relative (positively vomitous), or arises from a shared biological imperative. This last has been the most convincing of these arguments and the de facto response for many years; see Robert Wright’s Nonzero.

The Moral Landscape is a somewhat unsuccessful attempt to update the argument that morality is a product of biology and culture; importantly, it’s also an argument against the sort of ultra-liberal relativism that infects academia, against which Harris has also written and debated. Why do I call it unsuccessful? First we have to understand Harris’ first principles.

He’s a consequentialist. Perhaps it would be fair to say that he’s some variant flavor of consequentialist, but a consequentialist nonetheless, and anyone familiar with the different schools of moral philosophy will not be at all surprised by his stances. As opposed to a more absolutist moral doctrine like that of many religious traditions, consequentialism argues that a given outcome is the sole determinant of an action’s morality—often colloquialized as “the ends justifies the means”. Thus, Harris’ spectrum of morality (or what he calls the “Moral Landscape”) largely a measure of our maximization of general human well-being. The term “landscape”, evincing a many-peaked vista of a snowy mountain range and green-bedecked valleys below, is important, because Harris does not employ a spectrum of morality in the traditional sense, wherein maximal morality marks the right extreme, a lack thereof marks the left, and gradations fill the middle; rather, well-being may be maximized (peaks) in several different ways for any given problem. Sometimes, as the relativists always argue, there’s no right answer.

The phrase “human well-being” seems simple enough until one remembers just how many cultural relativists there are. Anticipating these criticisms, Harris makes the—admittedly persuasive—argument that figuring out whether controversial cultural hotspots are morally good or bad is relatively easy, at least once you strip away religious or traditional justifications for doing so. To use one of Harris’ examples, consider enforced burkas for Muslim women (or general conservative Middle-Eastern disenfranchisement of women)? Posit a single benefit that isn’t simply a deflection of responsibility (i.e. removing sexual temptation from men). This conclusion is fair enough, and the machinery is one shared with religious folks as well, even if the product of that machinery is different. In fact, the only real villains in this respect are cultural relativists, apparently the sickly product of collective white guilt of several centuries of persecution and ethnocentrism. But of course Harris’ argument is that we don’t need revealed religion to tell us what these universal maximizers of well-being are—that, contrary to some popular opinion, we’re perfectly capable of intuiting it on our own.

Remember, however, that the subtitle of the book is “How Science Can Determine Human Values”. So far, there’s been a lot of talk about commonsensical approaches to morality, assuming we can agree that morality is a measurement of the “well-being” of conscious creatures like humans (and, I suppose, higher-functioning animal). We’re taking for granted that health and conscious happiness are inarguable gauges of well-being, a deceptive a priori assumption. To that effect, Harris’ book is not about scientifically determining moral values: Harris’ opinion about moral values must be accepted a priori before he can tell us about his fMRI studies about the brain and what constitutes neurochemical happiness and harmony. At least insofar as Harris has written, there’s nothing in his argument that confirms his initial premise; assuming you agree with it, this is no hindrance to the rest of the book, but if he’s attempting to persuade the religious to accept his moral basis and abandon their own, it’s a fumbled start from which he never recovers.

The Moral Landscape is not a badly written book, and in fact one gets the impression that Harris has a point (or points) somewhere, but it seems to lack focus, and ultimately fails to execute its promises.

The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion by Matt Taibbi

Last year and I read and enjoyed Taibbi’s Spanking the Donkey—a cross between DWF’s Up, Simba and Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Taibbi is well-known for being acerbic, but admittedly he’s also an excellent writer, and there’s a particular joy in watching a silver-tongued left-libertarian wail on the political and cultural scaffolding with a heavy pipe.

In the preface to The Great Derangement, he expresses his concern that he’s become a victim to this very niche, having become a sort of editorial hatchetman—the guy Rolling Stone calls whenever they need a few pages of righteous fury. His discomfort implies that The Great Derangement will, in theory, be a different beast, but knowing Taibbi as we do, that isn’t necessarily the case.

The modern political dialectic, as presented to us by commercial journalism, is between extremists on the right and extremists on the left. Ask a right-winger to define the two, and you’ll get godless socialist atheist pro-choice libruhls on the left, and a firm insistence that there is no such thing as an American right-wing extremist; perhaps they’ll point to men like Scott Roeder, who murdered a provider of late-term abortions, but perhaps they won’t. Ask a left-winger to define the two, and they’ll likely define their opponents as Bible-thumping, gun-toting, ignorant pro-business thugs; as to the extremes of their own party, they’ll usually be charitable and offer up the conspiracy-loving anti-Bush fringe (e.g. 9/11 “Truth” movement, which believes that 9/11 was an inside job). These are terribly problematic descriptions, and not certain equivalent points of political extremism, either in degree or in prevalence (for one, Birthers are much more common than Truthers).

But this is the dichotomy that Taibbi sets up, offering up these two “extremes” of politics in an attempt to appear evenhanded. And yet, Taibbi invariably spends a couple of chapters, perhaps, on the 9/11 Truth movement and most of his time on Christian fundamentalism, in his typical gonzo style. Taibbi goes undercover at a Texas megachurch called CornerStone, run by (in)famous televangelist John Hagee. In between chapters, he gives brief interludes with some time spent in Washington—a typical muckraking of the great white sausage-grinder called Congress.

But really, The Great Derangement is a book about CornerStone church and charismatic fundamentalist Christians; like the somewhat false characterizations of political and cultural extremes which we and Taibbi appear to take for granted, the choice of a charismatic Texas church as his proving ground is a calculated decision to cast the right in as a deranged a light as possible. By “charismatic”, of course, I mean that the church encourages behavior akin to that of modern Pentecostals; fainting and speaking in tongues and all sorts of ridiculous, showy behavior. Unless you’re a Pentecostal, you are unable to read the book without being acutely aware, however much you may disagree with Taibbi’s atheism and general distaste for religion of all sorts, that the CornerStone church is filled to its brim with absolute horseshit. That Hagee is a rich, fat televangelist is known; that he’s of the sort which actively encourages Zionism in anticipation of the End Times is revealed; that Hagee’s sermons about Iran seem to bore his congregation (or so Taibbi says) is surprising.

This is the point at which church as a sociological phenomenon comes into play. His point of infiltration into CornerStone comes by way of a retreat weekend, which is sort of a great big group hug of a weekend camp. It begins with the premise that everyone has some traumatic incident in their childhood which made them turn from God, and they must think of it and cop to it before, apparently, becoming a good Christian. Taibbi’s disgust with the ridiculous bait-and-switch is justified, since it sounds suspiciously like Scientology’s M.O. In his time as a ersatz Christian, the focus seems to shift from his general disgust for fundamentalists to his conflicted opinions for his newfound friends. People joining CornerStone or its satellite programs often do so because of some secular trouble in their lives—that is, they have immediate need that cares nothing for Hagee’s pro-Israel lobby, and what’s more, these are need that are assuredly not met by the in-church zeitgeist of speaking in “tongues”. Taibbi manages by citing rock songs in Russian, but one gets the distinct impression, when other, less studious disciples are told to “practice” speaking nonsense “at home”, that what we’re witnessing is less evangelism and more a slick, corporate, and nonsensical approach.

Is the conservative Christian right represented by a televangelist and his megachurch? In Washington, perhaps. I think it’s generally unfair to cast disparate groups into the same bucket, even some may be more or less deserving. Taibbi’s problem is that Hagee’s (admittedly large) flock doesn’t really do much to make a point of argument. The best that Taibbi can do is to note that when Hagee spouts some obvious untruth in the course of his sermonizing, his congregation accepts it as a matter of course—that membership necessitates a suspension of disbelief and faculties of reasoning which looks remarkably like the sort practiced by 9/11 Truthers. This latter group, as Taibbi notes, also tends to be nice, working-class people led by crazy blowhards—another resonant but ultimately meaningless parallel.

I can’t help but enjoy Taibbi’s writing, but I think he does himself a disservice by attempting a Pepsi v. Coke approach to his polemics. For better or worse, we generally know where he stands, and pretending to get to know and write about megachurch members as people (and then waxing philosophical about the scaffolding above them) rings hollow. He’s better in short form, where he’s seemingly less afraid to call a spade a spade, to call bullshit on bullshit, and be the incisive, typecast polemicist he’s apparently afraid to be.

Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is hard to get a handle on. The same people who gleefully forward me his scathing review of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 would of course be aghast at his most controversial book, God is Not Great; similarly, those who would cheer No One Left to Lie To: the triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton wouldn’t likely appreciate The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. A man who for many years called himself a socialist and or a Trotskyist, Hitchens now finds himself largely decamped from the Left, operating in some vague political DMZ, his politics both hawkish and liberal.

Whether correct or not (most people find at least something about which to disagree with “Hitch”), it would be unfair at least to say that the man is uninteresting, not simply for his intriguing mix of ideas, but for the rather storied life he’s led—even moreso than I was aware. In latter days, he’s become something of a darling of the pro-liberation crowd with respect to Iraq; he’s a frequent contributor to Fox News, though I imagine he finds most of their bobble-head commentators to be irritating and boorish; simultaneously, he’s come to be a leading voice in anti-theist rhetoric (certainly, his lecture schedule has borne that out). But, in fact, I think Hitchens as political polemicist unfairly impinges upon Hitchens as a literary critic and even, oddly enough, Hitchens as a travel writer.

Given how generally well-spoken and well-read Hitchens is, it should come as no surprise that he was something of a nerdy boy, excelling at the private English boarding school to which his parents sent him. It will be a surprise to those who only know the pro-war latter-day Hitchens to know that he spent most of his life being a card-carrying socialist, getting arrested at rallies, demonstrating against dictators, and generally doing the things that insufferable and indispensable young activists do. It was also a trifle surprising to learn that Hitchens is or was bisexual—or at least took part in homosexual sex up through his college years. Ever the understated Brit when it comes to himself, he never comes out and says this, but it’s clear enough that it’s so. Of the many other stridently homosexual writers that Hitchens knows, he is perhaps the most vocal of Gore Vidal (“massive old darling” that he is).

Rather than stick to a strictly chronological progression, Hitchens divides his chapters by subject, ordered more or less by their order of occurrence. His childhood passes quickly, and I am not terribly surprised that he glosses over this. One of the earliest critical junctions comes at that point where his mother leaves with another man and the two commit suicide in Athens. Hitchens, then in college, describes having to see the crime scene with a sort of distant horror that comes off as heartbreaking. I’ve never known the man to be overly sentimental, and indeed he describes the experience with a philosophical disgust rather than a particularly personal one. This is a memoir, after all, and not a biography: Hitchens controls the content and tone, and thus one shouldn’t expect any shocking revelations from the Hitchens you know and love (hate?) from his appearances on television and previous books. In fact, if you follow his lecture/debate circuit to the extent that Youtube et al. will allow, you’ll find that he uses some of his same phrases, expressions, and stories from the lecture in his book (or vice versa). Though I’ve no doubt that he’s very good at extemporizing (in fact, I’ve seen him do on Uncommon Knowledge), this book as with his speeches is a sort of rehearsed intelligence; or, more likely, he extemporizes from a pool of practiced points, since he lectures so frequently upon the same subject.

One chapter is devoted to his closest friend, Martin Amis; another to Salman Rushdie, which is of course a springboard to Hitchens to express his views on religion, tyrants, and religious tyrants. In fairness to Hitch, he abstains from becoming overly polemical with respect to religion, since his last book was devoted entirely to the subject. He does spend a fair amount of time explaining his views on the various conflicts in the Middle East, which have distanced him from many of his former associates (and employers), but this is largely in service of an overarching point that Hitchens attempts to make with Hitch-22, namely the sort of “double life” that he’s led, both in the sense of believing in two (apparently) contradictory ideas and of having so often compromise his ideals in order to get a story. But don’t mistake me: this is no wistful or maudlin look back, nor an expurgation of youthful indiscretions; though the Hitchens writing his memoirs may be different than the Hitchens planting coffee plants in Cuba after Castro’s revolution, there’s an internal consistency that is at least somewhat gratifying. The same moral impetus made Hitchens (initially) celebrate Castro as made him encourage the invasion (er, “liberation”) of Iraq; defend Paul Wolfowitz and excoriate Henry Kissinger; defame Mother Theresa and laud Thomas Jefferson. The book reminded me more of Love, Poverty, and War than it did his most recent work; stiff-lipped and intellectual, it is occasionally turgid or pedantic, but mostly it’s a fascinating (albeit circumscribed) window into the mind of arguably one of the brightest public commentators of our generation.

And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning by Joel M. Hoffman

I’ve always been interested in the vagaries of translation—both the accomplishment of it and all the problems which plague it. Most recently, I read Robert Alter’s new translation of Psalms; it’s not a surprise that, not even counting the significant introduction on methodology, almost half of the book’s text is explanatory footnotes. The truth is, translating ancient Hebrew is a tricky business, and translating anew such beloved books is a delicate issue.

Thus it was that my interest in translation only slightly overwhelmed my suspicion of the book’s subtitle (“How Translations Conceal the Bible’s Original Meaning”), which seemed designed to provoke. “Conceal” has connotations of intent, in the same way that frauds and hucksters want to tell you about “real herbal remedies they don’t want you to know”. I hoped that Hoffman wouldn’t take a Freakonomics tack and oversell itself.

I’m not sure if the subtitle was Hoffman’s idea or some editor at Thomas Dunne, but I’m happy to report that And God Said is rather understated, academic, and interesting, and not at all an overinflated piece of wide-eyed conjecture. In fact, it was largely what I hoped it would be—namely, a creative and engaging book about the vagaries of translation. Though the latter portion of the Bible is written mostly in Greek, which I know for a fact has its own idiosyncrasies, Hoffman—himself a Jew, it would appear, and of that linguistic tradition—focuses on the Old Testament, written in Ancient Hebrew.

The first half of the book doesn’t even dive right into specific instances of mistranslation. Like Alter’s The Book of Psalms, there is a lengthy (100+ pages, in this case) introductory section in which he explains the vagaries of attempting to translate Ancient Hebrew into Modern English. He begins, as so much Biblical scholarship does, with the King James Version of the Bible—that venerable piece of literature which has not only set some of the direction of modern theology, but also modern language and culture as well. While writers like Alter were a little more sensitive to the great cultural debt which we owe to the KJV, regardless of its merits as a translation, Hoffman is more immediately dismissive, and not afraid to label parts of the KJV as well as the New International Version and others. He does not even broach, and I am glad, the spate of silly “good news” translations, which I will get into later.

The difference between the King James Version (from the early 17th century) and our modern efforts, Hoffman argues, is a good 400 years worth of advances in linguistics, translation, and the availability of source documents. The problem, even with later efforts such as the New International Version, is that they are all inevitably based upon the King James Version, and therefore tend to inherit some of its less-than-exemplary translations.

But as I said, the book eschews its specific discrepancies for about a hundred pages while Hoffman explains why translation of the Old Testament is such a difficult and occasionally imprecise task. He explains the usual methods for translating tough words, such as the context of its word and its other uses in the book; he even gets into the structure of Hebrew (roots and patterns and all that), which I found fascinating but which might bore those who aren’t interested in grammar. The tricky part about ancient Hebrew, he concludes is that a lot of tools which work 8 out of 10 times for indicating what a word means (its modern Hebrew counterpart, its etymology, its place in a root/pattern parallelism that Hebrew seems to have) will fail the last two times. We can’t trust these tools, in other words, since they have to potential to give us a subpar or—worse—misleading translation.

After significant preface, Hoffman launches into his examples, of which there are five, divided into chapters. As I started this section, I tensed up, once again worrying that he would revert to an “Everything you know is wrong!” approach and waste the enormous capital he built with his introduction to translation theory—which, I might add, was one of the better treatments I’ve ever read. But the instances that he cites tend to be less “conceal[ing] the Bible’s original meaning” and more qualifying corrections to translations that, while not 100% accurate, were also not terrible to begin with.

His first example, for instance, is the exhortation of Christ for us to “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul” (Matthew 22:37, KJV). “Heart” and “soul”, Hoffman says, are bad translations, and spends 20 pages explaining his criticism and proposing substitutes. His recommendation? “Mind” and “body”. Perhaps you are currently having the same reaction I did, which is to think that the colloquial phrase “heart and soul” still fairly well gets across the same point that “mind and body” does. I don’t take issue with his reasoning: the Hebrew levav and nefesh probably do more closely translate as “mind” and “body”, respectively, and in fact it’s extraordinarily interesting to see Hoffman reason out why this is so—specifically deducing as much from the commonalities of that same word’s usage in other parts of the Old Testament. His ultimate conclusion is that Jesus’ commandment was to use both the physical body and the non-material/emotive essence to love God; but was there ever any doubt about that meaning based on the KJV’s translation and those translation which proceeded from it? I’m not convinced there is.

Some aren’t so trivial. Hoffman’s tackling of Psalm 23 is especially neat: the “shepherd” which we’re so used to hearing about was a different creature entirely in the culture of the Old Testament. Though our iconography of God-as-Shepherd today tends to invoke the fluffy language of gentle Jesus, meek and mild, the Ancient Hebrew conception of a “shepherd” was more or less an action movie star: the sort of guy who would beat up lions, cavort with kings, and woo all the ladies. A more revealing translation, therefore, would be “The Lord is my Hero, I shall not be in want”, according to Hoffman. I personally prefer “The Lord is my Badass, I shall not be in want”, but then nobody ever asked me.

The closest that Hoffman comes to courting controversy is the issue of Isaiah 7:14, which is hardly a new thing at all. What it boils down to is that the chapter in Isaiah which ostensibly predicts the virgin birth of Jesus is likely to simply mean “a young woman will give birth” rather than a virgin specifically. Some fundamentalists proceeded as though this sought to invalidate the entirety of their doctrine, that’s a loaded issue and a bit beyond the purview of a simple book review.

If I had one criticism of And God Said, it’s that Hoffman seems almost too eager to dismiss the patchy-but-beautiful KJV and embrace whatever translation hews closest to the original intent in the idiom of Modern English. The 400-year-old language of King James, he insists, is not the language of modern America. And while he doesn’t come out and advocate the sort of terrible teen-friendly translations that make my butthole pucker, his emphasis on modern idiom makes me a little suspicious and disappointed. There is something to be said for translations which are not too archaic to obscure meaning (as is Hoffman’s point); but there is also something to be said for preserving the ability of modern speakers to read and absorb historically important language as well: you only rarely hear about “modern” translations of Shakespeare, for instance, because we consider the language—however difficult—a treasure. For as much as Hoffman protests about the beauty and poetry of Ancient Hebrew, he doesn’t seem to pay much attention to what comprises beauty and poetry and linguistic importance of English.

I may be ascribing an intention to Hoffman that he never had, and this is a minor point as far as I’m concerned, since the book as a whole was so interesting and generally well done. It is not necessarily the sort of subject matter that will interest everyone, but if translation and language is your niche, this is your book.

The Book of Psalms: A Translation With Commentary trans. Robert Alter

Any time one deals with a book which has been translated, you’re opening up a whole new can of worms above and beyond the quality of the book itself. I noted this with some hesitancy when I reviewed Orhan Pamuk’s Snow—or, more accurately, a translation of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow.

Biblical translation is even tougher: the politics it involves go beyond mere word choice and touch things which people hold as sacrosanct. Maybe you think I’m exaggerating, but consider as an example the movement of Christians who believe that the only correct version of the Bible is the King James Version. Mess with canon at your own peril.

I’ve reviewed one other piece of Biblical translation—The Book of Job—and it, like Psalms, is a translation of the Hebrew: New Testament books, whose original incarnations tended to be in Greek, generate less ambiguity and controversy. Hebrew is a complicated language, with a lot of meaning and structure which is particular to it. Much of this is often lost when translated, either because the sensitivity of King James translators was not sufficiently high, or because modern translations tend to focus overly much on readability rather than historicity.

In fact, the farther one delves in Hebrew translation, the easier it is to see why devout Jews will learn Hebrew to read the Torah, or Muslims will learn Arabic to read the Koran—and why keeping these original versions as canonical is so important to them. I imagine that Robert Alter would agree: a professor of Hebrew as UC-Berkley, the man has translated a number of Biblical books: the Pentateuch, the story of David from [1,2] Samuel, several books on biblical narrative and poetry, and so forth.

The biblical poetic tradition is important when talking about the Psalms because they are first and foremost a sort of poetry, and they tend—Psalms were gathered from a number of places, and possibly altered over the years—to follow a particular pattern. What’s more, there is a particular quality to them in the original Hebrew that is so often lost in English translations. I won’t repeat Alter’s introduction, which explains his approach to the translation and layout; needless to say, Alter’s translation is one of extreme care and craft. The resulting text is different (though hardly unrecognizable) from what you know: there’s less emphasis on salvation history, for instance, which was never present in the original and was only added through the (unintentional?) effort of Christocentric translators. Psalms are, after all, Jewish, and the Jewish relationship with Yahweh is a bit different than that of mainstream Christianity.

Here, for example, are three different versions of part of Psalm 1.

You can see the subtle differences; “sinner” here is replaced with “offender,” since the persecutions of the Psalms were less theological and more worldly, and therefore “offender” tracks the meaning of the Hebrew better. The NIV version is actually shorter and more concise in this case, though much of Alter’s translation focuses on restoring the characteristic brevity and crispness of the lines in Hebrew; these are, after all, poems, and to some degree they are supposed to scan or correspond. The theological motivations of most translators are vested almost entirely in meaning as opposed to form, which sells the Psalms short.

All of this begs the question: what does Alter’s translation give us that is good or desirable? Consider the King James translation which is not only venerable, but has the added benefit of classical-sounding style and syntax. Putting aside for a moment our considerations of which translations are or are not canonical or authoritative, what is the motivation of English-speaking readers to pick up Alter’s book as opposed to our well-worn KJV, or even some insipid “Good News” translation? If our sense of modern poetry is inspired by Milton and Keats and fine English traditions of that sort, to which such translations as KJV obviously appeal, does a translation which hews more closely to the Hebrew have a place on our shelves? The answer is a definitive yes, but explaining why is more involved.

For one thing, a little less than half of the text in the book is made up of the psalms themselves; the operative word here—”commentary”—comes from the subtitle, and it is partially what makes the book such a gem. Like any heavily-annotated book, the extra information can be overwhelming, but understanding why Alter glosses the way he does gives us not only an appreciation for the work of transliteration, but also gives us a deeper insight into the Psalms themselves, what passions informed their writing, and what literary tropes the writers used. In this way, The Book of Psalms is not merely a translation of the work, but a book about them: language is as much about history and culture as it is about phonemes, and what modern translations of the Bible don’t do as narratives is explain the history.

Alter, then, is giving us a look at the uniquely Hebraic character of the Psalms, not necessarily as a replacement for the more theological lens of our leatherbound volumes, but as a separate and distinct celebration of the psalms’ other virtues and special character as poetry, as Hebrew literature, and as historical documents.

Idiot America by Charles Pierce

Charles Pierce is a frequent guest on NPR‘s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” though I didn’t know this until after I read this book (go figure).

Despite the inflammatory title, Idiot America isn’t a criticism of the country, but rather a condemnation of the way in which idiocy or nescience has become something to be proud of; it’s a sort of extension of Thomas Frank’s question of authenticity. And it troubles Charles Pierce to no end.

I was a little surprised, immediately, at how meandering the whole affair was. I had expected path and acerbity—more like a series of caustic essays than anything else. But Pierce invariably prefaced every point he wanted to make with a long (comparable in length to the point itself) story about a historical figure or situation which paralleled something contemporary. Unfortunately, few of these stories were particularly elucidating, but served as distractions: by the time Pierce got around to making his point, I had forgotten what he was talking about.

Here’s how Pierce himself describes “Idiot America” as a concept:

The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of the intellectual elites that Richard Hofstader teased out of the national DNA, although both of these things are part of it. The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit, mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know the best what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a scientist, or a preacher, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

This is how Idiot America engages itself. It decides, en masse, with a million keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the words of an obscure biologist carry no more weight on the subject of biology than do the thunderations of some turkeyneck preacher out of Christ’s Own Parking Structure in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an “expert” and therefore, an “elitist.” Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He’s brilliant, surely, but no different from the rest of us, poor fool.

Most of Pierce’s examples are stock criticisms of the conservative right, such as the Terry Schiavo (wherein Bill Frist, if you’ll remember, diagnosed Terry’s condition based on a video montage provided by her mother and father….), and in themselves unconventional: I’ve read whole books about darn near each case, in fact, from the Dover Trials to lobbyist-funded scientists to to right-wing radio demagogues. Pierce then compares them infavorably against historical “cranks” such as Ignatius Donnelly: the point, as I take it, is that people with crazy ideas are an integral part of the American cultural fabric, so long as these crazy people are marginal. When you put a tie on them, stick them in front of CNN’s cameras, and pretend as though their opinion matters because they have a crazy idea and are willing to appear on TV, you’re beginning to talk about the disintegration of culture as we know it.

To phrase it contemporaneously (and surely Pierce himself would have mentioned it had it been a televised matter when he was writing the book), consider the issue of Orly Taitz, a dentist/realtor/lawyer who is leading the mad rabble known as the “Birthers,” who insist Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen. The perfect example of a “crank” whose ideas would normal be entertainment for those of us with functional brains, Ms. Taitz is instead put on TV as though she has equal footing with normal reporters or people without tinfoil hats.

But I disgress: Idiot America has its own set of examples. Some, I feel, are somewhat laborious. I’m unsurprised, given that the book is really an extended version of a essay Pierce wrote several years ago. Its padding, I think, I somewhat deleterious to its aims. You could easily read Idiot America and enjoy it; by that same measure, though, you could also read the original article and come away on about the same footing. The choice is yours.

And the Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave

Nick Cave is much better known as a musician than as a writer; few even realize that he wrote the screenplay for the fabulous movie The Proposition, especially since so much attention is payed to his equally-wonderful work on its soundtrack.

But long, long ago (OK, only 1989), Cave penned his debut novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, whose content will not surprise you if you are familiar with Cave’s lyrics.

Those familiar with the “Southern Gothic” style of writing popularized by the likes of Flannery O’Connor or William Faulkner will be right at home with Cave’s novel, though admittedly I think that latter is far darker and more violent. Cave’s stylistic borrowings from Faulker are even more self-evident, wherein a character’s internal narration is beautiful prosody, but inevitably contrasted against that same character’s simplistic dialogue. Euchrid Eucrow, the main character—I hesitate to call him a protagonist—is a mute, born the son of a drunk, belligerent mother and a perverse, violent father in some generically-southern valley populated with fanatically religious Ukulites. The novel belies a sense realism immediately when Eucrid as Narrator speaks from inside the womb of the death of his twin bother. This sense of surrealism is pervasive; though traditionally Southern Gothic in the sense that Cave uses more realistic archetypes, there’s an ecstatic sort of fantasy that is layered over everything.

An outcast in a valley already full of outcasts, Euchrid’s hatred for the land’s inhabitants grows as he does, hitting a critical juncture when he witnesses the murder-by-mob of the lavender-scented prostitute, Cosey Mo. His spiral into violent delirium, matched almost blow-for-blow by the self-destructive nature of the valley’s rough inhabitants, forms the crux of the plot, finally realized (sort of) in a(nother) terrible act of violence. In this way, it reminds me very much of Egolf’s Lord of the Barnyard, but with considerably more feverish Gospel-quoting and maniacal prosody. Consider this passage, chosen at random:

Ah remember a time of eudaemonia. A time when skies were azure blue and streaked with veils of cirrus — or else they carried the hull of a cotton-coloured cumulus across their infinite waters. A time when the shrill song of the cicada filled the vale and the cedar’s low sough mingled with the hush and mutter of the cane crop’s relentless unnersong. A time filled with the scent of pine and orange flowers. When jack-o’-lanterns and will-o’-the-wisps shone in the brakes and bracken. When the humming breath of summer grazed the cheek of shallow waters, sending bulrushes all a-reeling. Ah remember a time when years were quartered in seasons, when day became night. A time of dusks and dawns and suns and moons. When all the valley green worked toward the ingathering, the munificent harvest and the rewards of honest toil, of good health, of well-being, of Christian charity, of brotherly love and the love of God, all beneath the boon of a golden sun. AH remember a time when there was peace in the valley.

But not for me. Never was there peace in the valley for me.

That’s one of the brighter passages; rest assured the rest is mired in a fanatical despair and violence, perhaps one of the more damning indictments of its subjects that I’ve seen. Its entire elaborate rhetorical life seems intended to provoke foreboding—a thousand needle pricks in preparation for vivisection.

If you are adventurous enough to dare Cave’s rather clotted, manic prose, then I think you will find And the Ass Saw the Angel a rewarding read. It’s not rife with subtext—I don’t think anything in it serves as a metaphor or synecdoche, nor does it ultimately explain something difficult or complicated. Much contrary to the book’s self-description—which mentions something about Euchrid’s “mad, angelic vision… ultimately redeem[ing] the town and its people”—I think And the Ass Saw the Angel is a terrifying study in the frailty of humanity, in the vein of Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and the very antithesis of the kind of uplifting or meaningful tragedy that Edith Hamilton liked to posit. If there’s a meaningful tragedy to be found in Cave’s novel, I have yet to discover it, but it was a wild ride nonetheless.

The Book of Job trans. Stephen Mitchell

The Book of Job continues a recent trend of books I’ve read that I received as gifts—specifically from my brother, who has similar taste.

Stephen Mitchell’s The Book of Job probably isn’t something I would have normally picked up. I’ve read the Biblical book, after all, and likely would have dismissed it as an undersized Cliff’s Notes to understanding the story. But with Brady’s explanation (possibly after seeing my puzzled face when I unwrapped it) piqued my interest.

What you must understand about the Biblical book of Job is that the story itself is very ancient, a fixture of Hebrew oral history since long before the Bible was ever compiled. In that way, it is one of the oldest stories in the Bible, and very, erm, Jewish. Like any old story, however, it’s been subject to a lot of revision, interpolation, and translation. What scholar Mitchell proposed to do in this 1992 work was revisit the purest possible texts—in the original Hebrew—and try to recapture that sense of poetry that imbued the original. As a result, this text differs somewhat from the Biblical version, with obvious later additions and glosses removed when they couldn’t be restored.

And there is definitely a sense of poetry inherent to the verse. It’s a very…particular…kind of poetry, of course; Job is, if nothing else, marked by a taste for the interrogative, and a particular structure of phrase that marks most of the text. But what you have to remember about any translated text is that the moment you remove a creative work from its original language, you are introducing ambiguities and uncertainty into the text. I remarked upon this same phenomenon in my review of Snow, and it holds true for a lot of works. The Book of Job has an extensive notes section which remark upon decisions that Mitchell made regarding particular phrases in the text, usually glossing the original Hebrew for the benefit of us slovenly English-speakers. Unfortunately, the notes seemed designed to follow the Biblical chapter:verse structure, which was not included in this translation. Certainly, it seemed a bit odd to me, and forced me to get out my Bible and doublefist the books for a bit while I compared notes. Certainly a tiresome approach to reading, if nothing else.

Ultimately, though, I found both my brother’s and Mitchell’s insistence true: there is both a particular quality of poetry about the pure(st possible) verse of Job, as well as marvelous theological/theodical questions that are—in the usual traditions—never quite answered to the satisfaction of us mortals.

For those of you who don’t know the story of Job, here’s a basic summary. Job is a prosperous, pious Jew. One day, Satan sidles up to Yahweh and says that Job is only so pious because he’s successful and happy; surely if he were to suffer, he would curse god instead. So Yahweh tells this mysterious Satan to do to Job what he will without harming him. Thereafter, Job’s entire family is killed, his possessions are ruined, and he is left destitute. Ever the resolute Jew, Job attributes this mysterious misfortune to a dry spell and remains upbeat. After another conservation in which Yahweh allows Satan to harm Job without killing him, Job developers terrible boils upon his body. It is at this point that Job enters into a long conversation with his three pious friends (the text of which comprises the bulk of the book). Job maintains his innocence, and his friends assert that (in line with a mode of thinking typical of ancient Hebrew theodicy) Job must have sinned if Yahweh were to punish him so. Finally, Yahweh (as a whirlwind) answers Job, berating him for assuming he knows all the moral intricacies involved in godhood. Job does an appropriate mea culpa and eventually, Yahweh reinstates Job’s riches and family when he proves to be a stalwart believer.

Mind you, there is a lot of subtext here—fabulous amounts of subtext and meaning and metaphor which I have glossed over for brevity’s sake. Mitchell’s translated addresses some of them; his lengthy introduction addresses others. However, I would have liked to see more copious annotations which explain some of the strange bits of the story; as well, I would prefer of Mitchell’s notes didn’t require constant reference to a second book in order to understand where the edit/gloss/revision has taken place.

For all this pedantic criticism, however, The Book of Job is a marvelous read. It’s complex despite its deceptively short length. It also shows you the great culturally and linguistic beauty inherent to the story that sometimes gets lost in the straightforward nature of a recent Biblical translation. For both historical and linguistic (and theological, if that interests you) reasons, put The Book of Job on your reading list.

Cherub as an English word first came about during the 14th century, borrowed directly from the Latin cherub, itself from the Greek cheroub, with its roots ultimately with the Hebrew כרוב (kerubh). According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, this Hebrew word might be related to the Akkadian karubu (“gracious, one who blesses”), which was used to describe the “bull-colossus.”

Cherubim (not cherubs, and certainly not cherubims) are one of the higher orders of angels; it was a cherub that guarded the entrance to the Garden of Eden with a flaming sword in the creation story of the Bible. Though Biblical descriptions of angels vary wildly, cherubim are often described as a combination of eagles, lions, and men, and always with a multitude of eyes.

Some modern scholars have attempted to trace the Hebrew conception of cherubim back to the Phoenician Lammasu, mythological man/lion beings which the Israelites could have absorbed and reinterpreted while they were a small part of the larger Canaanite region. Some also suggest that the prominence of the wings in this creature influenced the importance of wings to the angelic archetype in later Christian canon.

Regardless, cherubim were always pretty badass—that is, until the Renaissance, when Italian artists (Donatello is often regarded is the trendsetter in this regard) revived the classical putti, small, naked, winged babies. Since putti (pl. of putto, an Italian word from the Latin putus, or “little man”) are 2nd-century Greco-Roman, and therefore pagan, they were products of secular art. They are, after all, beings of Eros, made to facilitate erotic love. Cherubim, by contrast, would necessarily be some kind of facilitators of religious love between Man and God. For whatever reason, it was not long before these two beings were depicted substantially the same way and simply called different things depending on the nature of the work.

But this is hardly fair. Let me give you a helpful example.

Cherub Accuracy Comparison Table

Cherub	Not a cherub