History – Page 27 – Northcoast Antiquarian

The Creation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and A Recommended Translation

Antonio Tempesta’s etching “The Creation of the World” is based on Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. Ovid, a canonical Roman poet, is best known for this epic poem, which beautifully recounts classical mythology tales. Charles Martin’s translation of Metamorphoses is recommended for its elegance and brilliance. In the poem, Ovid describes the divine creation of the universe, which Stephen M. Wheeler argues is influenced by the Homeric shield from Homer’s Iliad. Wheeler notes Ovid’s self-consciousness as a poet, suggesting that the universe’s ordering is a metaphor for the creation of the poem itself. This insightful exploration adds depth to Ovid’s captivating tale of creation.

Antonio Tempesta (Italian, Florence 1555–1630 Rome) Plate 1: The Creation of the World (Orbis fabrica), from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’, 1606 Italian, Etching; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection.

Pūblius Ovidius Nāsō (43 BC – 17/18 AD), known in English as Ovid, is, along with Virgil and Horace, one of the three “canonical poets” of Latin literature. He is, no doubt, best known today for his epic poem Metamorphoses, which is an extraordinarily beautiful telling of the tales of classical mythology. I first became intimately acquainted with Metamorphoses in summer 1987 and have revisited it on multiple occasions ever since, never ceasing to be refreshed and delighted by the visit.

**Metamorphoses – Ovid: A New Translation by Charles Martin, Introduction by Bernard Knox. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2004.**

Several years ago, I purchased and read Charle Martin’s translation of Metamorphoses and do not hesitate to recommend this particular translation to you for its elegance, flow, and brilliance as demonstrated in the following excerpt.

The Creation
Before the seas and lands had been created,
before the sky that covers everything,
Nature displayed a single aspect only
throughout the cosmos; Chaos was its name,
a shapeless, unwrought mass of inert bulk
and nothing more, with the discordant seeds
of disconnected elements all heaped
together in anarchic disarray.
The sun as yet did not light up the earth,
nor did the crescent moon renew her horns,
nor was the earth suspended in midair,
balanced by her own weight, nor did the ocean
extend her arms to the margins of the land.
Although the land and sea and air were present,
land was unstable, the sea unfit for swimming,
and air lacked light; shapes shifted constantly,
and all things were at odds with one another,
for in a single mass cold strove with warm,
wet was opposed to dry and soft to hard,
and weightlessness to matter having weight.
Some god (or kinder nature) settled this
dispute by separating earth from heaven,
and then by separating sea from earth
and fluid aether from denser air;
and after these were separated out
and liberated from the primal heap,
he bound the disentangled elements
each in its place and all in harmony.
The fiery and weightless aether leapt
to heaven’s vault and claimed its citadel;
the next in lightness to be placed was air;
the denser earth drew down gross elements
and was compressed by its own gravity;
encircling water lastly found its place,
encompassing the solid earth entire.
Now when that god (whichever one it was)
had given Chaos form, dividing it
in parts which he arranged, he molded earth
into the shape of an enormous globe,
so that it should be uniform throughout.
And afterward he sent the waters streaming
in all directions, ordered waves to swell
under the sweeping winds, and sent the flood
to form new shores on the surrounded earth;
he added springs, great standing swamps and lakes,
as well as sloping rivers fixed between
their narrow banks, whose plunging waters (all
in varied places, each in its own channel)
are partly taken back into the earth
and in part flow until they reach the sea,
when they – received into larger field
of a freer flood – beat against shores, not banks.
He ordered open plains to spread themselves,
valleys to sink, the stony peaks to rise,
and forests to put on their coats of green.
And as the vault of heaven is divided
by two zones on the right and two on the left,
with a central zone, much hotter, in between,
so, by the care of this creator god,
the mass that was enclosed now by the sky
was zoned in the same way, with the same lines
inscribed upon the surface of the earth.
Heat makes the middle zone unlivable,
and the two outer zones are deep in snow;
between these two extremes, he placed two others
of temperate climate, blending cold and warmth.
Air was suspended over all of this,
proportionately heavier than aether,
as earth is heavier than water is.
He ordered mists and clouds into position,
and thunder, to make test of our resolve,
and winds creating thunderbolts and lighting.
Nor did that world-creating god permit
the winds to roam ungoverned through the air;
for even now, with each of them in charge
of his own kingdom, and their blasts controlled,
they scarcely can be kept from shattering
the world, such is the discord between brothers.
Eurus went eastward, to the lands of Dawn,
the kingdoms of Arabia and Persia,
and to the mountain peaks that lie below
the morning’s rays; and Zephyr took his place
on the western shores warmed by the setting sun.
The frozen north and Scythia were seized
by bristling Boreas; the lands opposite,
continually drenched by fog and rain,
are where the south wind, known as Auster, dwells.
Above these winds, he set the weightless aether,
a liquid free of every earthly toxin.
No sooner had he separated all
within defining limits, when the stars,
which formerly had been concealed in darkness,
began to blaze up all throughout the heavens;
and so that every region of the world
should have its own distinctive forms of life,
the constellations and the shapes of gods
occupied the lower part of heaven;
the seas gave shelter to the shining fishes,
earth received beasts, and flighty air, the birds.
An animal more like the gods than these,
more intellectually capable
and able to control the other beasts,
had not as yet appeared: now man was born,
either because the framer of all things,
the fabricator of this better world,
created man out of his own divine
substance – or else because Prometheus
took up a clod (so lately broken off
from lofty aether that it still contained
some elements in common with its kin),
and mixing it with water, molded it
into the shape of gods, who govern all.
And even though all other animals
lean forward and look down toward the ground,
he gave to man a face that is uplifted,
and ordered him to stand erect and look
directly up into the vaulted heavens
and turn his countenance to meet the stars;
the earth, that was lately rude and formless,
was changed by taking on the shapes of men.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book I, lines 6-125 (trans. Charles Martin)

Ovid’s tale of creation is both moving and striking, to say the least. And if one is at all like me in intellectual temperament, one cannot help but wonder where Ovid found the inspirational well for his striking poetic imagery and design. Fear not, my friends, Stephen M. Wheeler explored this issue in “Imago Mundi: Another View of the Creation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses” (The American Journal of Philology, vol. 116, no. 1, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp. 95–121, https://doi.org/10.2307/295504), an article recommended as worth your time to read.

Among other things, Wheeler argues that Ovid uses the Shield of Achilles (the Homeric Shield), from Homer’s Illiad, as “a model for his own version of the divinely created universe.” Wheeler does so by presenting evidence showing Ovid’s “allusive engagement with the Homeric shield” in his account of chaos, showing that Ovid’s description of the universe resembled the ecphrasis [i.e., the use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device] of a work of art in the tradition of the Homeric shield, and that it prefigured other divine works of art in Metamorphoses, and by explaining why Ovid began the Metamorphoses with a reference to the Homeric shield as well as how the work should be read in “light of obvious allusions to Hesiod’s Theogony and the Apollonian song of Orpheus.”

Greek, c. 470BC. Two-handled ceramic jar (amphora) depicting Hephaistos polishing the Shield of Achilles in the presence of Thetis. In the field, a pair of greaves, a helmet, tongs, hammer and saw. Bartlett Collection. (c) Museum of Fine Art Boston.

Towards the conclusion of his article, Wheeler states the following: “Ovid’s choice to begin Metamorphoses with an epic ecphrasis also highlights his own-self-consciousness as a poet. It is well-known that the device of ecphrasis offers the poet an opportunity to reflect upon his own art while describing the art of another. The deus et melior natura may therefore be read as a figure for the poet, and the ordering of the universe as a metaphor for creation of the poem; thus the “real” subject of Ovid’s cosmogony may be the literary creation of Metamorphoses, just as the shield of Achilles is emblematic of the creation of the Iliad” (p. 117).

Giambattista Vico, Metaphorical Language, and the Darmok episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation

Giambattista Vico, an influential figure in the 18th century, has gained recognition for his work on historical imagination. His opus “The New Science,” published in 1744, has contributed significantly to various disciplines, including philosophy, anthropology, literary criticism, and psychology. Vico’s views have influenced notable thinkers and writers, such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Karl Marx, R.G. Collingwood, and James Joyce. Understanding Vico’s perspective on metaphorical language sheds light on the significance of ancient literary and artistic works. This understanding resonates with the “Darmok” episode in Star Trek, where the encounter between two species with different languages reflects Vico’s ideas. The implications of language and culture on human advancement continue to be a subject of debate and analysis.

Of late, the insights and importance of Giambattista Vico, an eighteenth century Neapolitan, especially as they relate to historical imagination, have attracted my attention. To plumb the depths of the significance of his work, which are far deeper than I initially imagined, I obtained and read a translation of his opus Scienza Nuova seconda (or simply The New Science, the title under which the definitive version published in 1744 is known today). The translation I obtained was published by Yale University Press in 2020, translated by Jason Taylor and Robert C. Miner, with an introduction by Giuseppe Mazzotta. It is the third English translation of The New Science and is both well-notated and highly readable.

Book Cover: The New Science by Giambattista Vico

Giovanni Battista Vico was born in Naples on June 23, 1668. He received his education at local grammar schools, from Jesuit tutors, and at the University of Naples from which he graduated in 1694 as Doctor of Civil and Canon Law. Although he never succeeded in obtaining the chair of Jurisprudence at the University of Naples, which he long desired, he did obtain a professorship in Rhetoric at the University, which he held until 1741. Vico died in Naples in January 1744, at the age of 75.

In his lifetime Vico’s works were largely unremarked, however, by the nineteenth century his extraordinary insights began to make a significant impression on philosophers, historians, and other intellectuals. Vico’s ideas reached a wider audience with a German translation of The New Science by W.E. Weber which appeared in 1822, and, more significantly, through a French translation by Jules Michelet in 1824. Subsequently, Vico’s views influenced the work of Wilhelm Dilthey, Karl Marx, R.G. Collingwood, and James Joyce, who used The New Science to structure Finnegans Wake. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that “ … an appreciation of Vico’s thought has spread far beyond philosophy, and his ideas have been taken up by scholars within a range of contemporary disciplines, including anthropology, cultural theory, education, hermeneutics, history, literary criticism, psychology, and sociology. Thus despite obscure beginnings, Vico is now widely regarded as a highly original thinker who anticipated central currents in later philosophy and the human sciences.”

When I was searching for guidance on understanding Vico, I quickly found that some of the greatest intellects of the twentieth century had both lectured and written on him. For instance, the political philosopher Leo Strauss had lectured on him in Autumn Quarter 1963 at the University of Chicago. Audio files of the lectures are available at the University’s Leo Strauss Center website; however, the quality of the audio files is uneven and, in many instances, poor. But not to fear, a comprehensive and helpful written summary of the lectures is available here. More helpful, and the immediate impetus for this posting, is the second guide I utilized for Vico: the writings by the intellectual historian Isaiah Berlin collected in the work entitled, Three Critics of the Enlightenment – Vico, Hamann, Herder (with a foreword by Jonathan Israel), Second Edition, edited by Henry Hardy, which was published by Princeton University Press in 2013.

Bookcover: Isaiah Berlin's Three Critics of the Enlightenment Vico Haman Herder

From the latter work, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, Berlin wrote a masterful section summarizing Vico’s attitude towards an appropriate historical understanding of humanity’s use of metaphorical language that immediately gave me a greater understanding and appreciation of both Vico’s genius and insight as well as brought to my mind with particular force many different literary and artistic works which I had previously experienced, but in a new and more vivid light. First, the lengthy extract from Berlin’s essay:

“We normally distinguish between the literal and the metaphorical use of language. To be literal is to call things by their appropriate names, and describe them in plain, simple terms; to use metaphor is a sophisticated or poetical way of embellishing or heightening such plain usage for the sake of giving pleasure or of creating vivid imaginative effects, or of demonstrating verbal ingenuity; this is usually considered the product of conscious elaboration which could, with enough effort, always be translated back into the plain or literal sense of which it is merely an artificially heightened expression. Metaphor and simile, even allegory, are not for Vico, deliberate artifices. They are natural ways of expressing a vision of life different from ours. Men once thought, according to him, in images rather than concepts, and ‘attributed senses and passions […]to bodies as vast as sky sea and earth’. What for us a less or more conscious use of rhetorical devices was their sole means of ordering, connecting and conveying what they sensed, observed, remembered, imagined, hoped, feared, worshiped – in short their entire experience. This is what Vico calls ‘poetic logic’, the pattern of language and thought in the age of heroes. The metaphorical use precedes – and must precede – the ‘literal’ use of words, as poetry must come before prose, as song is earlier than spoken speech; ‘the source of all poetic locution are two: poverty of language and need to explain and be understood’. Early man, animist and anthropomorphist, thought in terms of what we now call metaphor as naturally and inevitably as we now think in ‘literal’ phrases. Hence a great deal of what now passes for literal speech incorporates dead metaphors, the origins of which are so little remembered that they are no longer felt – even faintly – as such. Since the changing structure of a language ‘tells us the histories of the institutions signified by the words’, we can glean from it something of how their world looked to our ancestors. Because primitive man cannot abstract, ‘metaphor makes up the great body of the language among all nations’ at that time. Vico supposed that such men used similes, images and metaphors much as people, to this day, use flags, or uniforms, or Fascist salutes – to convey something directly; this is a use of signs which it would today seem unnatural to call either metaphorical or literal. Vico maintains that when a primitive man said ‘the blood boils in my heart’, where we should say ‘I am angry’, his ‘metaphorical’ phrase is a uniquely valuable evidence of the way in which such a man though, perceived and felt. What he felt when he spoke of blood boiling seemed to him – and indeed was – more directly related to his perception of water in a heated cauldron than our sensation of anger would seem to us today. The marvellous images, the immortal phrases coined by early poets are, according to Vico, due not to conscious flights of fancy but to the fact that the imaginations of such men and their capacity for direct sensations were so much stronger than ours as to be different in kind, while their capacity for precise analogies and scientific observations was far less developed. Hence, if we are to understand their world, we must try to project ourselves into minds very remote from our own and endowed with these unfamiliar powers. A world in which men naturally talk of the lip of a cup, the teeth of a rake, the mouth of a river, a neck of land, handfuls of one thing, the heart of another, veins of minerals, bowels of the earth, murmuring waves, whistling winds, smiling skies, groaning tables and weeping willows – such a world must be deeply and systemically different from any in which such phrases are felt, even remotely, to be metaphorical, as contrasted with so-called literal speech. This is one of Vico’s most revolutionary discoveries.”

A Roman copy of a Hellenistic image of the poet Homer, author of the Iliad and Odyssey, sculpted in white marble between 150 and 125 BC. Copyright ©Museo Nacional del Prado

Revolutionary indeed! Who cannot but grasp even a scintilla of the foregoing and not know that reading the Iliad or Gilgamesh will be even more instinctually meaningful and powerful if read with this understanding of how those works struck the ears and core of our ancestors so many thousands of years ago? And this, finally, brings me to the Darmok episode, which came to mind quite readily as I read the above on metaphorical speech.

A Trekkie I am not. However, I do recall being struck by the brilliance of the Darmok episode when I first saw it decades ago. The episode summary: Starfleet, a species known as speaking a literal language, interacts with a species (Tamarians) that uses a metaphorical language. As a result of the language disconnect, the two species are initially unable to understand each other with tragic consequences as they engage in an ‘epic’ struggle with a hostile predator. Ultimately, Picard, using the metaphorical language of Gilgamesh, communicates his understanding, such as it is, with the other species, thereby extending a tenuous bridge between the species … with optimistic portents for future relations. Star Trek often had ‘primitive’ species zipping across the universe with advance technology. As such, it is not surprising that a species capable only of metaphorical language would be capable of interstellar flight in the Star Trek universe. In Vico’s universe, however, such a primitive state of humanity (for he could conceive only of humanity) would not be capable of such advanced technological achievements.

An Atlantic article published in 2014 noted that many Trekkies also argued that the Tamarians would be unable to be so advanced given the limitations imposed by their metaphorical language. However, the author of the article, Ian Bogost, countered that the Tamarian language was sufficient, if compared, not to metaphor, but perhaps to allegory or, better yet, was understood as an abstraction, that is, a form of logic, which could be best described as a strategy. His argument is, to my sensibilities, convoluted, complex, and unattractive, but worth reviewing.

All Abuzz about the Nexus Between My Readings: The Promised Land

Honey Bee alighting on a bloom. Photo by Michelle Reeves on Pexels.com

And the Lord said, “I indeed have seen the abuse of My people that is in Egypt and its outcry because of its taskmasters. I have heard, for I know its pain. And I have come down to rescue it from the hand of Egypt and to bring it up from that land to a goodly and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Amorite and the Perizzite and the Hivvite and the Jebusite.”
Exodus 3:7-8. From Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible : A Translation with Commentary.

What particularly caught my attention after reading this passage was Robert Alter’s commentary on the milk and honey to be found in The Promised Land. He stated the following: “The honey in question is probably not bee’s honey, for apiculture was not practiced in this early period, but rather a sweet syrup extracted from dates. The milk would most likely have been goat’s milk and not cow’s milk. In any case, these two synecdoches for agriculture and animal husbandry respectively become a fixed epithet for the bounty of the promised land” (Alter, Robert (2019). The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, v. 1, p. 221, n. 8.).

Immediately upon reading this I was seized with a curiosity to know more about the sweet syrup extracted from dates and apiculture in the Holy Land. Let us begin with a research paper that helps me understand the comment above and discusses the earliest known archaeological apicultural remains in The Promised Land.

In 2010, Guy Bloch and others published an exciting paper detailing the oldest archaeological evidence related to bee-keeping ever discovered (Bloch, Guy; Francoy, Tiago; Wachtel, Ido; Panitz-Cohen, Nava; Fuchs, Stefan; and Mazar, Amihai. (2010). Industrial Apiculture in the Jordan Valley during Biblical Times with Anatolian Honeybees. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 107. 11240-4. 10.1073).

The work began by noting that: “[a]lthough texts and wall paintings suggest that bees were kept in the Ancient Near East for the production of precious wax and honey, archaeological evidence for beekeeping has never been found. The Biblical term “honey” commonly was interpreted as the sweet product of fruits, such as dates and figs.” This confirmed Alter’s comment, above. But then the paper proceeded to share its extraordinary findings:

“However, actual evidence for beekeeping in antiquity had not been found before the recent discovery of what appears to be a well-organized apiary at Tel Rehov in the middle Jordan valley in northern Israel. Tel Rehov is one of the largest Iron Age sites in Israel. A city 10 ha in area flourished there between the 12th and 9th centuries Before Common Era (B.C.E.). The apiary includes ≈30 hives (of 100–200 estimated) that were made as unfired clay cylinders. The hives have a small hole on one side for the bees to enter and exit and a lid on the opposite side for the beekeepers to access the honeycomb. Three rows of such hives were located in a courtyard that was part of a large architectural complex that was severely destroyed, most probably at the end of the 10th or beginning of the 9th centuries B.C.E. In terms of Biblical historiography, this period corresponds with the United Monarchy of David and Solomon and the beginning of the kingdom of northern Israel” p. 11240.

What is also extraordinarily interesting is that the authors report the discovery of remains of honey bees and their larvae inside the hives, which allowed them to identify the species of bee. The authors determined that the bees in the hives were A. m. anatoliaca, which currently resides in Turkey. This suggested to them that either Western honeybee subspecies distribution has undergone rapid change during the past 3,000 years or that the ancient beekeepers at Tel Rehov imported bees with a less aggressive temperament and superior honey yield (3 to 8 times more yield than the native species, A. m. syriaca). The possibility of importation cannot be easily dismissed given tantalizing hints of a developed apiculture transport practices, such as the following, cited by the authors:

“There is evidence that beekeeping was practiced in Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age (1); Hittite laws dated to the 14th–13th centuries B.C.E. contain severe punishments for thieves of bee swarms and hives (25). The Zenon papyri from Egypt suggest that transferring bees in portable hives or pottery jars was practiced in the third century B.C.E. (1). An Assyrian memorial stele dated to the mid-eighth century B.C.E. (about 100–150 y later than the beehives at Tel Rehov) describes the importation of honeybees from a country called “Habha,” probably in the Zagros or Taurus mountains (modern day southeastern Turkey
or northwestern Iran), about 300–400 km to the north or northeast of the land of Suhu on the Middle Euphrates (the modern border zone between Syria and Iraq)” pp. 11243-11244.

Today, apiculture is flourishing in The Promised Land. The Israeli Honey Production and Marketing Board says that apiculture and the trade in honey produced by honey bees can be traced back to 1882. The Israeli honeybee is actually of Italian origin, and is known as the Apis mellifera ligustica – a subspecies of the western honey bee. There are 529 beekeepers in Israel tending to approximately 120,000 hives. Their bees produce approximately 35 kilograms of honey per hive annually. Fortunately, honeybee populations are reported to be stable in The Promised Land, which serves as a transition to my next “connected” reading.

Newsweek reported earlier this week that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reviewed a petition calling for the the American bumble bee to be listed as an endangered or threatened species and found it “may be warranted.” The petition, which can be found here, was written and submitted by the Center for Biological Diversity and the Bombus Pollinators Association of Law Students. The petition states, in part, in its executive summary, the following:

*Bombus pensylvanicus De Geer* (American Bumble Bee)

“The American bumble bee (Bombus pensylvanicus De Geer) is one of the most iconic native pollinators in North America. This highly adaptable pollinator once ranged coast to coast, foraging in the grasslands, fields, and open spaces in 47 of the lower 48 states. Like the endangered rusty-patched bumble bee, it is a generalist that provides essential pollination service to a wide variety of plants—including native plants and cultivated crops, across a vast range. Its loss will have considerable consequences to whole ecosystems and to crop production. Once the most commonly observed bumble bee in the United States, the American bumble bee has declined by 89 percent in relative abundance and continues to decline toward extinction due to the disastrous, synergistic impacts of threats including habitat loss, pesticides, disease, climate change, competition with honey bees, and loss of genetic diversity. In the last 20 years, the American bumble bee has vanished from at least eight states, mostly in the Northeast, and it is in precipitous decline in many more. For example, in New York it has suffered a catastrophic decline of 99 percent in relative abundance, and in Illinois it has disappeared from the northern part of the state and is down 74 percent since 2004. In sum, the American bumble bee has become very rare or possibly extripated from 16 states in the Northeast and Northwest; it has experienced declines of over 90 percent in the upper Midwest; and 19 other states in the Southeast and Midwest have seen declines of over 50 percent” p. 8.

That the American Bumble Bee would be so close to extinction, in the land that so many identify as the new promised land, is depressing. Which leads to one final, not bee related but promised land related reading: Charles Taylor’s book review, An America That Could Explain: On Barack Obama’s “A Promised Land.” The reader should read the review but for my purposes, I will share only the concluding thought of the review, as it seemed most appropriate for these troubled times:

In Caste, Isabel Wilkerson quotes Taylor Branch, the author of the magisterial Martin Luther King Jr. biography America in the King Years. “The real question,” Branch asks, “would be if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?” At last count, the answer is 74,222,958.

“Put your hand, pray, under my thigh, that I may make you swear by the Lord, God of the heavens and God of the earth …”

Cast Bronze Statue of Rebekah, whom the servant of Abraham found at the well, as a wife for Isaac. From my collection, Aspire.03.2011.

In the 24th Chapter of Genesis of The Hebrew Bible, Abraham, the Patriarch of the Abrahamic Faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, calls his servant to him, and bids the servant to swear a most solemn oath, by either holding his, Abraham’s genitals, or placing his hands next to his genitals, a means of oath-taking attested in various ancient cultures, to the following effect:

Put your hand, pray, under my thigh, that I may make you swear by the Lord, God of the heavens and God of the earth, that you shall not take a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanite in whose midst I dwell. But to my land and to my birthplace you shall go, and you shall take a wife for my son, for Isaac.”
Genesis, Chapter 24: 1-4

Genesis records in Chapter 24, 9-10, “And the servant put his hand under Abraham’s thigh and he swore to him concerning this thing. And the servant took ten camels from his master’s camels, with all the bounty of his master in his hand, and he rose and went to Aram-Naharaim, to the city of Nahor.”

Rebecca at the Well (Oil on canvas, c. 1660)
Murillo, Bartolome Esteban (1617-1682)
Copyright ©Museo Nacional del Prado

When the servant arrived outside the city of Nahor by the well, he said:

“Lord, God of my master Abraham, pray, grant me good speed this day and do kindness with my master Abraham. Here, I am poised by the spring of water, and the daughters of the men of the town are coming out to draw water. Let it be that the young woman to whom I say, ‘Pray, tip down your jug that I may drink,’ if she says, ‘Drink, and your camels, too, I shall water,’ she it is whom You have marked for Your servant, for Isaac, and by this I shall know that You have done kindness with my master.” He had barely finished speaking when, look, Rebekah was coming out, who was born to Bethuel son of Milcah, the wife of Nahor, Abraham’s brother, with her jug on her shoulder. And the young woman was very comely to look at, a virgin, no man had known her. And she came down to the spring and filled her jug and came back up. And the servant ran toward her and said, “Pray, let me sip a bit of water from your jug.” And she said, “Drink, my lord,” and she hurried and lowered her jug onto her hand and let him drink. And she let him drink his fill and said, “For your camels, too, I shall draw water until they drink their fill.” And she hurried and emptied her jug into the trough and she ran again to the well to draw water for all his camels. And the man was staring at her, keeping silent , to know whether the Lord had granted success to his journey. And it happened, when the camels had drunk their fill, that the man took a gold nose ring, a beqa in weight, and two bracelets for her arms, ten gold shekels in weight. And he said, “Whose daughter are you? Tell me, pray, Is there room in your father’s house for us to spend the night?” And she said to him, “I am the daughter of Bethuel the son of Milcah who she bore to Nahor.” And she said to him, “We have abundance of bran and feed as well and room to spend the night.” And the man did obeisance and bowed to the Lord, and he said, “Blessed be the Lord, God of my master Abraham, Who has not left off His steadfast kindness toward my master – me on this journey the Lord led to the house of my master’s kinsmen.”
Genesis Chapter 24: 12-27

Chapter 24 of Genesis concludes with the servant negotiating the betrothal of Rebekah to Isaac, transporting Rebekah to Isaac, and Isaac taking Rebekah as his wife.

This post was inspired by the gorgeous cast bronze statue of Rebekah in my collection and the recent acquisition of The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter for my library. The Hebrew Bible is highly recommend as a sensitive and inspired translation with deeply insightful scholarly commentary.

The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter

It is not to be doubted that soon I will be looking for a scholarly paper or two on the solemn oaths which the ancients took that involved the holding of the genitalia of others … as I am most curious as to when such intimate habits were abandoned for less hands on formalities. I can hardly imagine any Muslim, Christian, or Jew not doing other than seeking criminal charges if someone went near their genitalia in the name of an oath these days – even in the name of the Lord with appropriate appeals to Abrahamic precedents.

I am also intrigued by the citation of weights in the Biblical verses of this chapter. I study weights, and the importance of weights to early trade and civilization cannot be overstated.

And to hold back the donkeys, Who has breath for that?

As they say: to stand up, and to sit down,
To protect the king’s son,
And to hold back the donkeys,
Who has breath for that?
Gilgamesh and Akka, Lines 24-27 (trans. Dina Katz)

Gilgamesh and Akka, by Dina Katz (Library of Oriental Texts, Vol. 1, STYX Publications, 1993), explores the short narrative poem in standard literary Sumerian which tells the tale of Gilgamesh of Uruk’s war against Akka of Kish.

In the tale, Akka of Kish demanded physical labor from the people of Uruk “to finish the wells, to finish all the wells of the land.” Gilgamesh, in response, asked the elders of Uruk for permission to wage war against Kish. The elders denied Gilgamesh permission to wage war against Kish, at which point Gilgamesh took his case for war to the able-bodied men of Uruk directly:

Since Gilgamesh, the Lord of Kulaba
had placed his trust in Inanna,
He did not take to heart the words of his city’s elders.
Gilgamesh before the able-bodied men of his city again
Laid the matter, seeking for words:
‘To finish the wells, to finish all the wells of the land,
To finish all the shallow wells of the land,
To finish all the deep wells with hoisting ropes,
Let us not submit to the house of Kish,
Let us smite it with weapons.’
The convoked assembly of his city’s able-bodied men answered Gilgamesh:
‘As they say: To stand up, and to sit down,
To protect the king’s son,
And to hold back the donkeys,
Who has breath for that?
Let us not submit to the house of Kish, Let us smite it with weapons.’
Gilgamesh and Akka, Lines 15-29 (Trans. Dina Katz)

The tale records that Gilgamesh and his able-bodied men went on to wage successful war against Akka and Kish.

Katz identified the passage that I am so enamored of, and which I quoted at the beginning of this post, as “puzzling.” She noted that a previous scholar felt that the expression was likely a “common saw” [i.e., a common Sumerian saying] whose meaning was lost to us. She noted, however, that the verbs “to stand” and “to sit” were often associated with the participants of the public assembly. It would appear, from the context, that the expression suggests having no more need or patience for further discussion due to appropriate consideration having been given (as in an assembly), pressing exigent conditions (as in a security situation), or exasperating circumstances (as in corralling or guiding donkeys).

Herman L. J. Vanstiphout, in reviewing Katz’s work in “A New Edition of Gilgamesh and Akka” (Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 119, no. 2, American Oriental Society, 1999, pp. 293–96) generally approved of Katz’s scholarly contributions and, with respect to the translation of the particular passage, took exception only with the wording regarding holding back the donkeys. He conceded that translating the line as “to hold back” “might surely be all right in a general sense” but seemed to suggest that something along the lines of “to hold the reins” may have been (more?) appropriate. For my part, I find the translation endearing, and intend to invoke the phrase regarding the donkeys, as translated, however perplexing it may seem, whenever I seek to end a discussion and perhaps give exasperated approval to a request in which I am in agreement.