Top five Old Testament prophets? Anyone?
Well, obviously Jonah rates highly on intelligence alone, but it is impossible to imagine him in the flesh without associating him with the strong smell of fish guts. On balance then, I'd have to give pride of place (as, incidentally, did the Israelites) to Elijah.
One of the most interesting stories about Elijah is his confrontation with the Priests of Baal: a gameshow of sorts in which, instead of getting over three oversized red balls, the contestants were required to prove whose god was the more powerful. Given that religious power within the Kingdom of Israel was at this point balanced on a knife-edge between Yahweh, the tribal god of the Israelites, and Baal, the tribal god of Queen Jezebel, the stakes were high.
The nature of the contest was to see which of the two gods (Yahweh or Baal) would accept the sacrifice of a bullock. The Priests of Baal (450 in number) might have done better to choose a task where they could bring their numerical supremacy to bear. A tug of war perhaps. Instead, they fell into Elijah's trap and spent the day doing the best that they could to entreat Baal to signal his acceptance of their sacrificial bullock, which he was required to do by setting it spontaneously alight.
During their vain attempts, Elijah mocked them for the benefit of the audience, saying "Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked." (Irreverence is not a modern invention.)
At the end of this, the Priests gave up, Elijah prepared his own altar (complete, one suspects, with mirrors and a large painted sign saying The Great Elijah) and arranged for his bullock to be inundated with twelve barrels of water (or, as even a mild cynic must suspect, lamp oil).
At this point Elijah called upon Yahweh, at which we are told that the following happened. "Then the fire of the LORD fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that [was] in the trench."
Whether Elijah kept his eyebrows is unrecorded in Biblical history.
Now this story may seem at first to be of little consequence, but it seems to me that it is one of the most important episodes in the history of religion.
Yahweh is a water god: He moves on the face of the waters; He drowns the world; He parts the Red Sea; He brings water out of a stone; He turns water into wine; He walks on water. As befits the god of a desert tribe, He is most strongly associated with the medium that brings life, and when He deals with fire it is often (not exclusively, but often) in opposition to it, as when the three men emerge unharmed from the burning fiery furnace.
Elijah does not only defeat the Priests of Baal, but - by setting a task to be answered by fire - he also dramatises the crucial step for a monotheistic religion from an elemental deity to an all-encompassing God, which is the basis of monotheism. And monotheism is both the greatest strength and greatest weakness of the religions that adopt it.
While I will admit, therefore, that a cackling voiceover from Richard Hammond would probably have improved things ... that's what I call entertainment.
Showing posts with label Judaism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Judaism. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Sunday, April 5, 2009
Lost In Transliteration
However frivolous it may appear to defend the ampersand, the appearance of language on the page does matter, and nowhere more conspicuously than with regard to the perpetual familiarity of Judaism and the perpetual strangeness of Islam in a Christian cultural context.
Within my lifetime, it was once regarded as perfectly proper to speak of Moslems and their holy book, the Koran. These days, however, some Muslims regard the former transliteration as offensive, it having gone the way of Peking and Bombay. Their holy book is The Qur'an. For Western readers - an increasing number of whom are challenged by the distinction between it's and its - the presence of this apostrophe (representing the Arabic letter hamza) is an obstacle too far. For all that Muslims regard their theology as fraternal to Christianity, there is little chance on casual acquaintance that an English-speaking Christian would recognise this while coughing up a glottal stop.
The Jews, of course, have the Tanakh. This title is the acronymic combination of Torah, Nevi'im and Ketuvim, but Western readers are more familiar with this document in the redaction that we know as the Old Testament. Since Western readers are happy to ignore the body of Jewish religious literature aside from the Tanakh, the only Jewish holy book that they are required to encounter is something translated from Greek by, um, Shakespeare. Even the name of the Judaic-Christian holy book, the Bible, is etymologically orthodox, comforting to those bibliophiles amongst us.
So, how absurd is it to treat the relative distances between the three major monotheistic religions as partly, perhaps largely, orthographic?
The counterargument, I suppose, is that the Tanakh became incorporated in the Bible because Jewish religious writings were constitutive to Christianity in a way that Islam (being historically later) could never be. Most Christians have (however inadvertently) a Tanakh in their home; few have a Qur'an. Islam was a world political force long after the Jewish Diaspora, leading to a clash of civilisations that established a long rivalry between Christian and Islam nations. Those looking for substantive reasons for Western Christians to feel that Jews have an underlying similarity to them have plenty of arguments to call upon.
In reality, however, the Tanakh and the Qur'an are not staggeringly different documents, and they draw upon similar material. Muslims draw on Jewish history just as much as Christians do and incidents such as Abraham's near sacrifice of his son (albeit of Ishmael rather than Isaac) is just one of the narrative focal points that are shared. Moreover, while Jesus finds a place both in Islam and in Christian-era Jewish teaching, Islam gives a far more prominent role to Jesus than Judaism does. Theologically speaking, Islam has a much more Christian mindset than Judaism does, not least because Judaism retains its focus on the fate of the Chosen People, whereas Islam and Christianity are both strongly transracial and evangelical religions.
Now that there is a U.S. president with a heteronymic name (however much people try to force it to conform to an Irish-American logic as President O'Bahmer) perhaps the alien nature of Arabic will be somewhat diminished in the public mind. Given, however, the reflex to which many Westerners appear to have become conditioned at hearing the declaration in Arabic that "God is great", there may be some work left to do in reconciling Western fear of the unknown.
Within my lifetime, it was once regarded as perfectly proper to speak of Moslems and their holy book, the Koran. These days, however, some Muslims regard the former transliteration as offensive, it having gone the way of Peking and Bombay. Their holy book is The Qur'an. For Western readers - an increasing number of whom are challenged by the distinction between it's and its - the presence of this apostrophe (representing the Arabic letter hamza) is an obstacle too far. For all that Muslims regard their theology as fraternal to Christianity, there is little chance on casual acquaintance that an English-speaking Christian would recognise this while coughing up a glottal stop.
The Jews, of course, have the Tanakh. This title is the acronymic combination of Torah, Nevi'im and Ketuvim, but Western readers are more familiar with this document in the redaction that we know as the Old Testament. Since Western readers are happy to ignore the body of Jewish religious literature aside from the Tanakh, the only Jewish holy book that they are required to encounter is something translated from Greek by, um, Shakespeare. Even the name of the Judaic-Christian holy book, the Bible, is etymologically orthodox, comforting to those bibliophiles amongst us.
So, how absurd is it to treat the relative distances between the three major monotheistic religions as partly, perhaps largely, orthographic?
The counterargument, I suppose, is that the Tanakh became incorporated in the Bible because Jewish religious writings were constitutive to Christianity in a way that Islam (being historically later) could never be. Most Christians have (however inadvertently) a Tanakh in their home; few have a Qur'an. Islam was a world political force long after the Jewish Diaspora, leading to a clash of civilisations that established a long rivalry between Christian and Islam nations. Those looking for substantive reasons for Western Christians to feel that Jews have an underlying similarity to them have plenty of arguments to call upon.
In reality, however, the Tanakh and the Qur'an are not staggeringly different documents, and they draw upon similar material. Muslims draw on Jewish history just as much as Christians do and incidents such as Abraham's near sacrifice of his son (albeit of Ishmael rather than Isaac) is just one of the narrative focal points that are shared. Moreover, while Jesus finds a place both in Islam and in Christian-era Jewish teaching, Islam gives a far more prominent role to Jesus than Judaism does. Theologically speaking, Islam has a much more Christian mindset than Judaism does, not least because Judaism retains its focus on the fate of the Chosen People, whereas Islam and Christianity are both strongly transracial and evangelical religions.
Now that there is a U.S. president with a heteronymic name (however much people try to force it to conform to an Irish-American logic as President O'Bahmer) perhaps the alien nature of Arabic will be somewhat diminished in the public mind. Given, however, the reflex to which many Westerners appear to have become conditioned at hearing the declaration in Arabic that "God is great", there may be some work left to do in reconciling Western fear of the unknown.
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