This phenomenon is, of course, well-attested and recognized. Think of the game “Telephone” (or “Chinese Whispers” or “Russian Scandal”, depending on your upbringing and/or loyalties): one person says something to another, then it is repeated to the next person, and so on down the line until it has morphed into something quite different and possibly unrecognizable from its original form. This sort of thing happens all the time in the world of textual transmission—Greek tragedies, for example, are excellent places to see medieval monks’ copying abilities really go to town on a text—and there is a highly specialized (black) art to piecing together all the different evidence from all the different versions in circulation to try to determine which reading is the closest to the original text.

The Bible, of course, has been subject to some really terrible textual transmission problems over the centuries. If you’re interested in this on a scale larger than the small examples I plan to deal with in this essay, check out Bart Ehrman’s excellent book Misquoting Jesus. But for the moment, allow me to illustrate with a trivial example, and please bear with me—I promise this does get interesting: Psalm 145, which is recited as part of the traditional Jewish liturgy three times daily. The psalm is an alphabetic acrostic, having one verse beginning which each letter of the alphabet. However, one letter—nun—appears to be missing: the psalm skips right from mem to samekh.

Why is there no verse for the letter nun? The traditional Jewish answers are completely full of nonsense. For example, one traditional explanation is that nun stands for all kinds of bad things, like n’filah—”downfall”—so the Psalmist avoided the letter the letter to avoid referring to the possibility of the people Israel’s future downfall. Never mind the fact that every other acrostic uses the letter nun, such as Psalm 34 or the first four chapters of the Book of Lamentations.

In fact, the explanation is much simpler. Our oldest manuscripts of the Masoretic Text, on which the Hebrew text of the Bible is based, are only as recent as the eleventh century CE. If you look further back in history, you find older texts—the Hebrew-language Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as ancient translations of the Bible into Greek and Syriac—and do you know what? All of these texts have a line corresponding to the letter nun. Only the comparatively recent Masoretic Text does not.

What conclusion can we draw? The simplest explanation is that somewhere between antiquity and the eleventh century, a scribe skipped the nun verse while copying out Psalm 145, and his version ended up being codified as the basis for all future texts. Later, many silly arguments were developed by overzealous exegetes to explain this “absence” of a verse. But in reality the verse has been there all the time, just not in the one text considered to be “authoritative”.

It’s this kind of bullshit that leads to the silencing of voices—and sometimes those voices are women’s voices, or at least feminine voices.

One of my favourite Hebrew poems is Yedid Nefesh, composed by the sixteenth-century Kabbalist Rabbi Eliezer Azikri. The poem is a love song between a lover and God—but the God character in the poem is often spoken of in the feminine. It is very difficult to translate the poem into English, which does not make gender distinctions in its second-person pronouns, and retain the ambiguity present in the extremely dense Hebrew. But the fact remains that the God of Yedid Nefesh is in some respects feminine and in some respects masculine.

Since it was written, Yedid Nefesh has been copied and recopied so many times that whole lines now bear no resemblance to the way they were originally written. This is ridiculous because the manuscript version—in the author’s own handwriting—still exists. Yet the versions of this poem that circulate in the Jewish liturgical world bear very little resemblance to the work of striking beauty—and gender ambiguity—that was what the author originally wrote. The conception of the character of God has become much less fluid; all the pronouns have been turned into masculine pronouns, and the poem now presents a much less “threatening” image of God for the traditional Jew.

Whether what has happened has been a deliberate masculinizing of a feminine voice or simply the vicissitudes of history taking their toll on this poem is irrelevant: this God has been masculinized either way. Since it doesn’t jive with traditional Jewish notions of God’s masculinity, it is heretical and wrong. Even though the original text the way Charlie actually wrote it still exists, only a scant few prayer books print the true text. Bad textual transmission has meant that a feminine voice, a feminine conception of God, has been silenced.

So what are we to do about this? Do we sing the Yedid Nefesh the way the author wrote it, or do we sing the “traditional” and corrupted version? Do we put the nun verse back into the Hebrew text of Psalm 145, or do we leave it out? My mind isn’t quite made up, and I’d like to throw this topic open for debate (that is, if anyone’s had the fortitude to stick with me this far into the essay): At what point—if any—should we restore the original version of a text to a liturgy? My own feeling is that, as for Psalm 145, the nun verse should stay out, since that’s how it’s been recited for a thousand years and this tradition has developed a life of its own. Yet as for the feminine God of Yedid Nefesh, I think that the textual corruption has become so bad and so destructive that more drastic measures should be taken—like restoring the poem to the way it was actually written. Not only would this restore the text to its original form, but it would restore an arresting and challenging conception of a God who is both masculine and feminine into a world where such conceptions of God are sorely lacking.

(X-posted to Feministe.)

On the other hand, there is the Hockey Hall of Fame. A pilgrimage was made. We also visited the Royal Ontario Museum, which rather disappointingly tries to be all things to all people. One whole floor is pleasingly devoted to Greece and Egypt and Cyprus and much of the rest of the ancient Mediterranean, while another is devoted to dinosaurs and yet another to Canada’s aboriginal peoples. The curating wasn’t all that good or consistent either; often we had no idea what it was we were looking at, some dates and times were missing, and (possibly worst of all) there was a teensy bit of orientalist fetishization of aboriginal cultures…but more about all that in a future post.

For now, enjoy this sampling from all the photos from Toronto:

The plan for the next few days is to drive northwest round the Great Lakes. Next stop: Sault Ste Marie, hopefully!

Remember, the full photo gallery is here; there are quite a few photos from today’s travels. Here are some of my favourites:

[Sculptor Adam] Reeder explains: “In mythology Pan played his flute and danced in the woods. In my sculpture, the flute is replaced with an iPod. The nature of Pan hasn’t changed, but the context in which he is seen has changed. The technology has changed what Pan is doing.”

Adam’s masters thesis through The San Francisco Academy of Art University is based on a series of sculptures where mythological or classical figures are used to represent Western culture and are combined with modern technological objects to illustrate how technology has changed the way people interact.

The best part: one of these meisterwerks will set you back a mere $9800.

My erstwhile beauty and my skill I sing,
   When I once soldier’d on Love’s battlefield,
But Arms made obsolete by War I bring,
   My sword, my lyre, my spear, fife, drum and shield.
Now I consign them to their rightful place:
   Rest, rest, ye arms, on pegs by Venus’ side!
And near the Goddess, born of foam, a space
   For torches, threat’ning War where they abide.
O Goddess who in Cyprus blest doth dwell,
   And Memphis, far from Thracian mountains snowy,
Queen, take thy Whip against her to rebel,
   And with one humb’ling blow, I pray, strike Chloe.

—Horace, Ode 3.26

I rendered this poem into alternate rhyming lines of iambic pentameter so as to keep the line numbers the same, thereby imitating the styles of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century translators. It’s even better if you imagine it written out with elongated s and fl and ct ligatures, and the proper names in small caps. This poem would make a great sonnet, I think—there’s a pretty good volta right where the third quatrain would begin. Unfortunately, there are only twelve lines in the original, so if you wanted to stick your own ‘zinger’ couplet at the end, it’d have to be of your own devising.

CAESAR. The Ides of March are come.
SOOTHSAYER. Ay, Caesar, but not gone.

His famous last words are, naturally, legend. As the inimitable folks of I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again once put it:

Bill Oddie: Well, I know his famous last words!
David Hatch: And what were they?
Bill: Err…quod erat demonstrandum.
David: That means ‘which was to be proved’.
Bill: What was to be proved?
David: Which was to be proved!
Bill: Well, no wonder they were his last words.

Caesar’s last words were reported by Plutarch to be καὶ σὺ τέκνον; (’You too, my son?’) and literally translated by Suetonius as tu quoque, fili mi? (’You too, my son?’). However, the translation given in Shakespeare of et tu, Brute? is undoubtedly more popular and famous. Also, it flows better, despite the fact that Caesar, like other educated, upper-class Romans, would have probably spoken Greek in day-to-day use, unlike the vulgar Latin of the vulgar masses. In fact, there’s a terrific bit of dialogue from the beginning of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that picks up on this quite nicely:

CASSIUS. Did Cicero say anything?
CASCA. Ay, he spoke Greek.
CASSIUS. To what effect?
CASCA. Nay, an I tell you that, I’ll ne’er look you i’ the face again: but those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me.

But let turn back to ISIRTA for the last word:

David Hatch: Eventually, Caesar was stabbed in the Appian Way.
Bill Oddie: And that’s a very nasty way to be stabbed!
David: I’m sorry, did I say he was stabbed in the Appian Way? I meant he was stabbed in the Senate.
Bill: That’s even nastier.

My students asked me what they could do to commemorate the Ides of March, and I told them to stab their best friends before their friends could stab them. A good bit of advice, that, especially if you’re an ancient Roman, but I wonder how much utility it has today. I do hope they didn’t take me seriously. Ave atque vale, Caesar.

I’m not sure I agree with T. Rex, however—and I’m not sure the classics world would either. As the chorus say in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus 1225, μὴ φῦναι τὸν ἅπαντα νικᾷ λόγον, ‘By all reckoning, it is best not to be born.’ Utahraptor would have something to say to that, I’m sure.

If Virgil is your thing, however, you will probably have something to say about Ahl’s new translation. It is written in something approximating English dactylic hexameter, which gives him a lot of room to play with per line (the line count is the same as in the Latin original). Also, Ahl’s hexameters are a damn sight better and more natural-sounding than Longfellow’s awful

This is the forest primeval: the murmuring pines and the hemlock

But Ahl’s hexameters—especially in terms of versification—are not perfect, and he has to deal with the problem of sustaining the hexameter through thousands of lines in English, which can start to sound quite tiresome even after only a few verses. Additionally, there is a lot of unnecessarily technical vocabulary retained, significantly in some of the crazier battle scenes. Much of this is explained via endnotes linked to asterisks in the text, which seems clunky and inelegant poetry to me. But then again, what is a translator to do?

For example, let me quote twelve lines from Book IX, during one of the interminable ‘fight scenes’ (9.503–514):

Far off, the resonant bronze of a bugle has crackled staccato
Terror. There follows a thunderous cheer bellowed back by the heavens.
Quickly the Volscians approach in an interlocked tortoise formation,
Ready to fill in the trenches, to ram through and rip apart ramparts.
Some look for ways to get in and to scale outer walls upon ladders:
Points undermanned, where the crown of defence admits flickers of daylight
Through less dense crenellations of troops. In response, though, the Teucrians
Blast them with all kinds of weapon, prise ladders away with strong levers.
Holding a wall under siege was a skill they’d acquired in prolonged war.
Further, they tried hurling boulders of murderous heaviness, hoping
Somehow to break through this covered attack. But whatever they threw down,
Troops underneath that dense-packed tortoise easily handled.

In the text, ‘Volscians’ has an asterisk and endnote, referring the reader to a different endnote, in which these people are identified, and a cross-reference to yet a third endnote to explain the ‘interlocked tortoise formation’. Yet I would be doing a disservice to Ahl to carp too much upon this: certainly there are many other features about this translation that are redeemable. The line ‘Ready to fill in the trenches, to ram through and rip apart ramparts’ has some terrific alliteration, nicely rendering the Latin alliterative vellere vallum in the same line, for example. Ahl is also a master of making the metre ‘paint’ his text, parallelling this feature in Virgil: the original ferre iuvet subter densa testudine casus, heavily spondaic as it is, is reflected as such in Ahl’s translation: ‘Troops underneath that dense-packed tortoise easily handled’—a very heavily accentual and spondaic line to reflect the tightness of the soldiers’ formation.

What is more, the reader is drawn in to the action of the text, not left standing as an observer outside the text (this, I feel, is the downside of many modern translations, including Mandelbaum’s celebrated version and possibly even Fagles’ recent effort; a step backwards, in a way, from his masterful Iliad and Odyssey). But I can’t help feeling that this is compromised in some ways by awkwardnesses in the text—’all kinds of weapon’, for instance, does not strike me as particularly elegant English, and the two lines beginning with ‘Points undermanned’ does not read like natural language, and is complicated by needlessly obscure vocabulary (’crenellations‘, for example, are those square bits cut out of the tops of towers at castles; I don’t see how the word is really being applied here to this situation). Finally, there are some nice and some not-so-nice features about the versification—the enjambment of ’staccato / Terror’ is well done, but ‘In response, though, the Teucrians’ smacks of metrical filler, and ‘they’d acquired in prolonged war’ scans badly with respect to the line’s accentuation.

So take the new Ahl translation for what it’s worth (mine cost £16.99 plus postage and packing, though it seems now to be available in North America via the usual outlets)—hopefully it will be able to take its rightful place among the excellent efforts of the modern translators.

They say that Philoxenus, the poet who wrote dithyrambs, was the biggest glutton of all time. This one time in Syracuse, they say that he bought and ate all of a two-foot-long octopus—almost, except the head. Seized by heartburn, he was in a bad way. A doctor came to him, and seeing that he wasn’t feeling so well, he said, ‘Philoxenus, if there’s anything you need to set straight in your domestic affairs, do it right away, because you’re going to die at the seventh hour.’ Philoxenus replied, ‘All of my belongings are in order, doctor, and were set straight long ago. I leave behind my grown-up dithyrambs, all crowned by the grace of the gods, which I have consecrated to the Muses and Aphrodite and Dionysus—but my will makes all that clear. Seeing as Charon (as in Timotheus’ Niobe) does not permit lingering, and is shouting that his boat is departing, and dark Fate calls, and we must heed her—and so that I can go below with all of my stuff, give me the leftovers of the octopus.’

—The comic poet Machon, in Athenaeus 8.341a–d

(Seneca, Thyestes 1096–1112, my own translation. The text is R. J. Tarrant’s 1985/1998 edition (APA).)

The Hebrew text that reads ‘to ascents’ for the beginning of Psalm 121 is the Masoretic Text and its manuscript tradition, and it is the reading that has filtered down to us today. But the Septuagint (LXX Ps 120) reads Ὠδὴ τῶν ἀναβαθμῶν (ōdē tōn anabathmōn, ‘A song of ascents’)—the very same formula used to begin the entire sequence of Psalms 120 through 134 in the Septuagint (translating the Hebrew construct state by the Greek genitive), without altering it as the Masoretic Text does. The apparatus to the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, the best Hebrew edition of the Masoretic Text ever compiled, notes rather cryptically, Q nonn Mss ‘הַמּ ut 122,1 etc, which essentially translates into ‘The Dead Sea Scrolls and some other manuscripts of the Masoretic Text read ‘of ascents’, like Psalm 122 verse 1 and the rest’. But it doesn’t tell you which Dead Sea Scroll—you have to look in more specific reference sources, which will tell you that 11QPs^a, one of the scrolls discovered in the eleventh cave at Qumrān, in its Psalter, uses the reading ‘of ascents’, in keeping with the pattern of the surrounding psalms.

Much has been made of this one letter’s difference in traditional and modern commentaries and in Jewish homiletics. I will provide but two small but representative examples. The ArtScroll Siddur, commenting on this psalm, says (emphases original), ‘This song differs from all others in this series because it is not called שִׁיר הַמַּעֲלוֹת, a song of ascents; but is dedicated לַמַּעֲלוֹת, to the ascents. It describes the means whereby Israel finds the strength to attain godly heights and ascend to His glorious Presence.’ However, we must keep in mind that the ArtScroll series is written by Orthodox Jews for other Orthodox Jews (and for more subliminal conversionary purposes, but that’s a separate rant), so we might look in the ecumenical Jewish Study Bible, which contains the (usually excellent) translation of the Jewish Publication Society along with a (usually excellent) modern commentary, for a more informed and balanced view. Yet they also make this one letter sing and dance: ‘Uniquely, the opening is A song for ascents rather than “to ascents.” It is unclear why the psalmist is looking to the mountains; some have suggested that this is a polemic against deities on the mountains (see esp. Ezek. 18.6), or this expresses the pilgrim as he moves toward Jerusalem in the Judean hills; more likely “it is the custom of anyone in straits to lift his eyes to see if help will come to repel the enemy” (Ibn Ezra).’ Not a word about the manuscript tradition—this is surprising given that the commentary on Psalm 145, which has a whole verse that has been deleted by the manuscript tradition, gives a rather thorough exposition of the fact that a verse has been dropped but exists in other manuscripts (though it hastens to add that its presence there is ‘most likely secondarily’).

One might raise an objection to the reading ‘of ascents’, even though it is apparently indicated in the older sources (the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint both precede the Masoretic Text by a good millenium), on the grounds of the old paleographic canard lectio difficilior preferenda est, ‘the more difficult reading is to be preferred’. Since the variant reading ‘to the ascents’ is definitely stranger and more difficult, one might be tempted to consider it the correct reading—especially since it is a quite noticeable deviation from a well-established pattern. However, I would argue that the overriding pattern of Psalms 120 through 134 is powerful evidence for the ‘of ascents’ reading; the Bible simply doesn’t like to deviate from its patterns, as much as we want to make hay out of a single mistranscribed letter. A better explanation, in my opinion, is that the reading we have is unsatisfactory and has been transmitted to us through a flawed manuscript tradition.

Do traditional Jews just not care about the manuscript tradition? Certainly they don’t. But why not? Is it so hard to conceive of the fact that scribes wrote things out and made mistakes doing it? Psalm 145, to which I alluded earlier, is a perfect example: its dropped verse begins with the letter nun, which is subsequently conspicuously missing from the psalm’s alphabetic acrostic scheme. Traditional Jews have made much out of it, e.g. claiming that the nun verse was intentionally left out because nun refers to n’filah, ‘downfall’, alluding to the possibility of Israel’s downfall. Never mind that in other alphabetic acrostics, such as Psalm 34, or chapters 1 through 4 of the book of Lamentations (despite the probable transposition of two verses in that book), or Psalm 119, all contain the letter nun: this one time it is left out, it could not possibly have been due to a scribal error. Never mind that every other source—the Greek Septuagint, the Syriac Peshitta, the Dead Sea Scrolls—include the verse. It has to not exist in the text because a homiletical point can be made. I suspect something similar has happened with Psalm 121’s ‘A psalm to ascents’—but don’t expect Jews to start changing the text around any time soon.

Good shabbos.