This semester I am teaching Genesis, chapters one through three. Those three chapters, alone, will fill the entire semester. One of the first things I tell students whenever I teach biblical literature, and especially the first eleven chapters of Genesis, is that the Bible does not answer all the questions that we might ask of it. At the risk of further personifying a collection of literary works, we might even say that the Bible is not interested in our questions. We might reasonably ask, for example, why did God bother to put the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden if the Man and the Woman couldn’t eat from it. Or we might ponder who it was that Cain married when his murderous passions led to him being exiled east of Eden. ‘Cain knew his wife’, but we don’t. We don’t know who she was, where she came from, or whose child she was. These details are simply not provided in the biblical text, yet we yearn to know from which root this branch of humanity sprang up. We are hardly the first to seek answers to the unanswerable.
In 1961, the scholar of ancient Judaism, Geza Vermes, coined the term “rewritten Bible” to try and describe Jewish texts of the Second Temple period that were coming to light with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.[1] Scholars have refined, redefined, and debated the term in the decades since Vermes introduced it, yet the general premise remains. These texts are neither translations nor traditional commentaries of biblical texts, rather they are something different and more narrative. A good example of this would be what we call the “Genesis Apocryphon”. This was one of the original seven scrolls found in the caves near Khirbet Qumran in 1946, and is related to 1 Enoch and the Book of Jubilees. It is poorly preserved and fragmentary, but what remains evident is an embellishment and retelling of the stories of Lamech, Noah, and Abraham. The ancient author was using a creative narrative to answer some of the questions that the biblical text presented.
Targum, the literature that has been the subject of my academic efforts, is similar. The Hebrew “targum” (plural, “targumim”) literally means “translation”, but in the rabbinic period (c. 1st century – 7th century CE) the term came to refer specifically to the written Jewish Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament). The targumim are at once both translation and commentary. As translation, a targum is engaged in the task of faithfully representing God’s word by rendering into Aramaic every word of the biblical text in its proper order. Yet in the targumim explanatory material is also frequently woven into the translation and thus moves targum beyond what we might define in modern terms as a “simple translation”.
In each case, rewritten Bible and Targum, the ancient Jewish creators clearly hold the biblical texts in the highest regard. The stories preserved and elaborated upon are sacred and require interpretation and understanding. Rather than provide a simple verse-by-verse commentary – as was found in antiquity no less than in the present day – they developed new creations that were not so strictly bound to text that they could not wander and embellish upon the original. They were both faithful and imaginative.
In the mid 1990s, Frederick Buechner offered his own rewritten Bible. First, he entered into the life and mind of the patriarch Jacob in The Son of Laughter (1993) and then he embodied the archangel Raphael to tell the story of Tobit in On the Road with the Archangel (1997). In many ways, these works followed the same path as Godric (1980) and Brendan (1987) from a decade before where Buechner took the framework preserved by tradition and layered upon it sinews and flesh, and breathed life into those long-dead saints.
In the case of The Son of Laughter and On the Road with the Archangel, however, Buechner was working from existing texts and one that, at least in the case of Genesis, was still considered sacred to the majority of the Jewish and Christian world.[2] While Buechner did not provide an introduction to the former, perhaps rightly assuming that Genesis was better known than Tobit, he did provide one to the latter. In addition to explaining how he stayed as close as possible to the source, he concluded with a sentiment I suspect he would also apply to the earlier work. ‘[I]n terms of what [the original author] had to say about the ways both of God and of humankind, he was entirely serious. And so am I’.[3] By rewriting these biblical works, Buechner is wrestling with God.
Buechner scholar Dale Brown offers excellent summaries and reflections of both books in the sequential chapters of his survey The Book of Buechner (2006).[4] He particularly notes how Buechner’s works from this period are reflections on his own life. ‘Taken together with The Son of Laughter, the two memoirs [The Wizard’s Tide and Telling Secrets] establish Buechner’s preoccupation with filling in the gaps in his own story, gaps remaining even after several excursions into autobiography’.[5] This gap-filling is precisely the work of rewritten Bible and, one might note, that of the preacher as well.
The story of Jacob and the narrative style of the Hebrew Bible have each often led contemporary readers to some erroneous conclusions. This is particularly true of Christian readers who are conditioned by the New Testament to view all texts with the biblical canon to be read directly and simply. The Gospels are taken to present the life, teachings, and actions of Jesus as uncomplicated biography, while Paul’s letters are primarily read as statements of the doctrine and expected behavior of the church. Thus, when one reads the story of Jacob getting Esau to give up his birthright for a bowl of stew and later tricking his father into blessing him instead of his older brother, all too often a Christian reader assumes this is an example of the “ends justifying means”. After all, God had promised their mother Rebekah that ‘two nations are in your womb…the elder shall serve the younger’.[6] Clearly this was what God intended so Jacob’s trickery was divinely justified. I have heard exactly this interpretation preached from the pulpit.
Yet Genesis is literature, it is narrative, and it is to be read sensitively and carefully. How do we know that Jacob and Rebekah’s trickery was not how God intended the elder to serve the younger…? Because of the consequences lived it out subsequently in their lives. Rebekah never sees again the son whom she loved so deeply, and Jacob never again holds his mother whom he faithfully obeyed. The rest of Jacob’s life is plagued by deception and intrigue, from Laban withholding Rachel to his son’s tricking him (with the same tools he used to trick his father) into believing his beloved son Joseph was dead. This is all present within the biblical narrative, but it must be read as story.
In The Son of Laughter Buechner enables the contemporary (and faithful) reader to recover the literary nature of the biblical story. It allows Buechner to explore matters unaddressed by Scripture. Such as, what would it have been like to carry this “promise” throughout life, was it a blessing or a burden? Was Jacob complicit in tricking his father or was it all Rebekah’s idea? Indeed, what were the family dynamics like between two brothers whose parents had chosen sides long before they were weaned? Buechner fleshes out the biblical allusions to this tension in interesting ways, for example, by imagining the following interaction:
“All this I will do for my servant Abraham’s sake,” the Fear said through Laughter’s lips. The tears that had filled his eyes overflowed them. They ran down his gray cheeks.
“It is always for his servant Abraham’s sake. It is never for his servant Isaac’s sake,” my mother said. “It is no wonder the man weeps. He should stand up like a man and demand his just due.”
She was speaking all of this into one of my ears while with the other ear I strained to catch Laughter’s whispering.[7]
By using the first person, the author enters into the mind and emotions of Jacob, allowing him to inhabit the character. In doing this, The Son of Laughter also becomes Buechner’s reflection and recollection of his own life and relationships. It is a kind of remembering.
While this inhabiting of the character brings out the humanity of Jacob, by speaking through the person of the Archangel Raphael in Tobit, Buechner sets aside the first-person narrative of the first chapters of the biblical text to provide the reader with a semi-divine insight into the proceedings of Tobit’s curious life. Like the prologue to the Book of Job, Buechner’s interpretation of Tobit provides insight into the heavenly realm, as Raphael is the one who carries to God, ‘the prayers of all who pray and of those who don’t even know that they’re praying’.[8] This authorial decision allows Buechner to deploy an almost-omniscient narrator, yet one who remains within the narrative and is able to narrate with sympathy. The effect of this approach is much like that found in the Targumim, especially those to books like Esther and Song of Songs. Buechner reports, ‘I have stuck as closely as possible to the narrative as he wrote it’.[9] Even where he is creative, he sought to remain true to the broader canon and the book itself:
My description of the demon Asmodeus is based on the one given in the book of Revelation, where he appears under the name of Abaddon. All other descriptions, both of physical appearance and of character, are my own though based on such clues as the original contains.[10]
This is all very much in keeping with those interpretive techniques found in Targum and rewritten Bible of remaining true to the text, while creatively exploring the gaps within.
The Book of Tobit offers Buechner the opportunity to explore the “beautiful at terrible things” of this world with a wink. Tobit is a good man, seeking to honor and respect “the Holy One”. Yet petty difficulties as well as absolute horrors come upon him and those he loves and he attributes it all, in his faith, to God. Tobit is able to stand for us all as he experiences the vicissitudes of life and seeks to reconcile them with his loyalty to the Holy One, blessed be he. Raphael, reflecting on how people think about such fundamental matters as ‘time’, the good times and the bad times, says, ‘They prefer to think that it is time itself that is terrible and that the terrible things are only another method by which the Holy One afflicts them for their sins’.[11] Through On the Road with the Archangel Buechner challenges this assumption of divine responsibility for all things, while acknowledging the humor of our pretentiousness.
There is no better example of this than his recasting of Tobit’s final prayer of thanksgiving, drawn from the closing two verses of chapter thirteen:
Blessed be God who lives forever, and blessed be his kingdom. For he afflicts, and he shows mercy; he leads down to Hades in the lowest regions of the earth, and he brings up from the great abyss, and there is nothing that can escape his hand.
In Buechner’s hands, however, space is made for the exploration of such ideas. He has Raphael describe these words as “unwieldy utterance”:
“For he afflicts and shows mercy,” [Tobit] went on, “and there is no one who can escape his hand.”
What he saw in his mind was the way he himself sometimes went about in the kitchen swatting flies with a shoe, afflicting them in the sense of squashing them flat because he found their presence irritating.[12]
Buechner stays true to the biblical text he is quoting and imagines the imagining of Tobit himself, as he is composing this hymn to the omnipotent God. The image, as humorous as it is, illuminates our own limited vision of God. Buechner is thus able to examine the thorny problem of theodicy and critique of any simplistic solutions, even as our everyman Tobit is presented with great affection in his fervent faithfulness.
There is no evidence, at least that I could find, that Buechner made any connection between these ancient Jewish retellings of Scripture and his own work in The Son of Laughter and On the Road with the Archangel and I would not suggest a straight line from those ancient exegetes to our modern author. Yet there is a remarkable similarity in their implicit approaches and goals. These texts are holy writ for the creative commentator, being far too important to be ignored or left in a simple translation. They are too interesting, they raise too many questions and have far too many gaps to simply leave them be. They call out for a faithful imagination. Buechner heeded that call, bringing his faith and his imagination to bear and opening Scripture in startlingly new and surprisingly orthodox ways.
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Works cited:
[1] See: Geza Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism: Haggadic Studies. Studia Post-Biblica; V. 4. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1961. Originally published as Studia post-Biblica; v. 4.
[2] The Book of Tobit is part of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox canon but is relegated to the Apocrypha in Protestant traditions and is not present in the Masoretic (Jewish) canon at all. It is, however, present in the corpus of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
[3] Frederick Buechner, On the Road with the Archangel: A Novel, (San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco, 1997), p.x.
[4] Brown, W. Dale. The Book of Buechner: A Journey through His Writings, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006). Brown also provides an excellent summary of the critical response to both works.
[5] The Book of Buechner, p.283.
[6] Genesis 25:23.
[7] Frederick Buechner, The Son of Laughter (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), p.64.
[8] Buechner, On the Road with the Archangel, p.1.
[9] Ibid., p.x.
[10] Ibid., p.x.
[11] Ibid., p.3.
[12] Ibid., pp.127-28.
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