SOMETHING BORROWED, SOMETHING NEW

Abstract

5 5 R S O M E T H I N G B O R R O W E D , S O M E T H I N G N E W P E T E R S . H A W K I N S In a famous adage, Ezra Pound advised modern poets to ‘‘make it new.’’ By this he meant they should not merely be faithful to the past, no matter how monumental it was; they needed to rework it for their own time, place, and language. They had to give a new account of everything old – and, if possible, a better one. There is nothing particularly modernist about this move, however : it is as old as literature itself. Because Homer’s antecedents are lost to us now, it seems as if he was born fully loaded by the Muses, and without anyone ever having sung him a memorable song. Yet somebody most certainly did, and whatever that unrecorded song was, Homer made it new. So too did the writers of Greek tragedy and Latin poetry when they took on Homer’s legacy. Likewise the authors of the Hebrew Bible when, in the magisterial opening of Genesis, they gave us their radical revision of the Enuma elish, the ancient Babylonian creation story, or when they refashioned ancient Mesopotamian accounts of a world-destroying deluge, or when they reinvented King Hammurabi’s Babylonian legal code so that it exploded on Mount Sinai not as a human covenant but as a divine utterance. As Erich Auerbach showed in ‘‘The Scar of Odysseus,’’ however, 5 6 H A W K I N S Y to turn from Homer to the Bible demands major shifts in perspective . In the first place, the ‘‘Good Book’’ is in fact many books in one, written by many di√erent authors over a millennium. It is actually a library rather than a volume. Second, it continues to have an authority in our world that Homer and Virgil never had in theirs, even when they were at the core of their cultures. (Many people die in the Iliad and the Aeneid, but I would venture that no one ever killed or died for those poems, as people have for Scripture .) Furthermore, biblical writers, however artful, were not primarily concerned with making literature. Rather, they had divine truth to reveal, a message from God meant not only to be believed but obeyed. We turn from ‘‘Sing in me, Muse’’ to ‘‘The Word of the Lord came unto me saying.’’ What is particularly remarkable about the biblical writers of the Christian Testament is that, unlike their Hebrew predecessors, they were openly, self-consciously, even programmatically concerned with making a new account of everything old. The term ‘‘New Testament’’ itself was coined only in the second century of the Common Era, but the notion of newness, of re-visioning, was explicit from the start. All Christian writings presuppose an ‘‘old’’ that came before them, an old that had subsequently been augmented , refocused, fulfilled, replaced, supplanted – all terms that represent the di√erent ways that Christian writers (and readers) have dealt over the millennia with the Bible of the Jews. Not that everyone in the early church wanted to ‘‘deal’’ with that Bible at all. The second-century figure Marcion, for instance, argued that the ‘‘new’’ writings should have absolutely nothing to do with the old. For him, the Hebrew Bible and what he took to be its petty, vengeful, legalistic God were a nightmare from which the followers of Jesus were meant to wake up. His argument did not prevail. Marcion was roundly condemned as a heretic by what became normative Christianity because the church concluded that it was impossible to have a New Testament without the Old, that is, without a Scripture that began with the beginning of creation, carried on through the history of Israel, and culminated in the prophets’ vision of a new day. It was inconceivable, therefore, not to have Jesus’ own Jewish Bible, even if early Christians read the sacred text not in Hebrew but in the Greek translation of the Jewish Diaspora, the Septuagint. S O M E T H I N G...