Gotta love this line:
...what to you
Is hapaxlegamenon once was passion's stutter.
Ahhh...
If this post is not honorificabilitudinitatibus, then nothing is. :)
Francis Bacon would be proud ;)
Wow, how did you spell that right? ;)
Great Poem !!! Where did you get that from ?
I think the answer to his question is that heros do look more human when "spade and learning" uncover them, but that makes them more worth emulating, not less.
Still..a great read.
It is from an issue of Reconstructionist from the late 1930s.
By the way, this is talui in a makhloket R. Yitzhaq Hutner and R. Shimon Schwab. ;)
Cool!
Wonderful dramatic monologue. Too bad Albrecht Alt (or Hermann Gunkel, or whoever) doesn't get to speak! Judah Goldin translated Shalom Spiegel's Me-Aggadot Ha-Aqedah, among other scholarly contributions. This is early in his "career". Eventually he, too, saw the wisdom of Biblical Criticism. But points well taken, in any case. "This business calls for soul beside linguistics."
Certainly Judah Goldin did not reject critical scholarship (although he dealt with rabbinic literature, mainly, and not Bible, if the JPS Scholars of Distinction volume of his essays is any indication). I think he was just making a neat counterpoint.
In the Intro to his translation of and Commentary on the Mekhilta on Shirat Ha-Yam, Goldin does engage in Biblical criticism, dating Exodus 15 to post-Solomonic times.
I loved the poem. Still I (not to mention the Rashbam) am not convinced that "Solomon" or whoever was the author of the body of Koheleth wrote the epilogue.
In a strange twist considering the genre of this poem, R. Yoel Bin Nun considers Qohelet to be a series of dramatic monologues by different personalities: skeptic, sybarite, wise man, etc., written by one author.
"Still I (not to mention the Rashbam) am not convinced that "Solomon" or whoever was the author of the body of Koheleth wrote the epilogue."
do you have a reference for the rashbam?
i know this doesn't help but this is a "famous" Rashbam.
It's funny, Goldin's essays also have a spare, poetic style.
> i know this doesn't help but this is a "famous" Rashbam.
This is a favorite one in the secular Israeli school system (those parts where they still teach tanach at any level worthy of appreciation).
It actually illustrates to me a classic example of the projection of the academic mind onto the religious one. Kohelet was one of the texts that spoke to me most on my road towards observance. Kohelet describes the conflicted religious sprit in a manner so profound that it never fails to strike the same chord every time I read it again.
Where academics will see as a sign of another author, I see as the final and natural surrender of religious man to the ultimate inexplicability of existence in its entirety. The surrender and acquiescence to the (mere) ability to access refractions of the infinite within the finite.
But that is not what Rashbam points to as evidence so much as the fact that the section discusses the person Qohelet in third person: veyoter, shehayah qohelet hakham..., etc., whereas if qohelet himself were talking about himself, we should expect him to be speaking in first person (ani qohelet, hayyiti melekh al yisrael...)...no?
grey Area,
True enough, but the point still stands. I think that the switch of person adds to the drama of the conclusion. The move from the subjective experience of kohelet to his recognition of the limits of religious perception is accentuated by this literary device. There are poems I have read which employ the same technique.
have you read anything by R. Yoel Bin Nun on Qohelet? Sounds like you would enjoy it. I heard him speak about it and he gave out copies of his article that appeared in an Israeli journal - name escapes me.
No I have not. I will check it out.
BTW, I was not talking about the Rashbam above but on the academic world which often points out that the end of kohelet had a different author on conceptual grounds and not linguistic ones.
"...or will you dare
Decide what I have said and what I could
Not say; that once man doubts he can no more
Believe and hence Ecclesiastes has
A forged conclusion?..."
calling XGH...
".....His crown and saffron robes"?
prophetic reference to the Dalai Lama, perhaps? ;-)
There's a good piece in Azure from a little while back by a (Prof?) Dor-shav on the cosmology of Kohelet (based on which he argues for an earlier, pre-Hellenistic composition).
The often quoted but elusive Rashbam can be found in the commentary to Koheles attributed to Rashbam first published by Jellenik.
You won't find it in the Mikraos Gedolos.
Thanks for the reference, Berel.
What a poem! Eminently beautiful.
"This business calls/ For soul besides linguistics."
Brilliant.
It's interesting to think how often we (or others, namely our teachers) distance ourselves from the characters of the Torah. Once we're detached we can pick them to pieces...do you know, I never REALLY thought about what growing up for Shlomo must have been like. Imagine that, with brothers like Avshalom, Amnon and Adoniyahu...quite the childhood, with people trying to usurp your crown- your father running from your family-
I didn't grasp it really until I read this poem. Now I have to go think on it.
Nice piece, S.!
I have a general question on biblical archaeology, if not biblical criticism. To what extent have scholars investigated absolute dating of archaeological artifacts? It seems to me that the remaining differences between biblical accounts and the conclusions of archaeologists may be resolved by establishing absolute dates of some key artifacts. One example that comes to mind is the absolute date of Rameses II which can be gleaned from modern radiocarbon dating of his mummy wrappings (if they have been preserved) or wood from his tomb. Similar dates from other pharoahs of different dynasties in the biblical period would be important. As it is, it seems to me that the relative dates used by Egyptologists are based on histories written millenia after the fact. In fact, one wonders why such histories are deemed more credible than biblical accounts.
I gather that the dates of the destruction of ancient Jericho and Hatzor are said to be in Middle Bronze (15th century BCE). If it should turn out that Rameses II and his son Merenptah were roughly contemporary with those events, that would fit well into the biblical picture.
Y. Aharon
Important comments.
The piece betrays a typical literary sensibility of the times and a heavy influence of Classic and Romantic Biblical poems of the genre. Goldin may have imitated the style deliberately, to add an ironic tone.
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