Actually, You See Jesus

Robert Alter’s Hebrew Bible

Dear Friends,

I would invite you to step into my study, fill you a pipe and pour you a dram, but I am not in my study. I am in someone else’s study. I was stranded, once again, by an airline yesterday and of course it is never their fault. So I am in Dallas until I can catch another flight home tonight. Thankfully, I have friends here who took pity on me and let me crash. Definitely better than the La Quinta.

Anyway, I am trying to get home after speaking on Saturday morning in Bonita Springs, Florida. My talk was entitled, “How To Save America Without Losing Its Soul.” I am thinking about expanding that talk into a more robust essay to maybe publish somewhere next year as a modest contribution to celebrate America’s 250th birthday. We’ll see how those plans shake out.

My friend does have a lovely library, and this morning I came across something worth sharing with you. Two Sundays ago I gave a homily for evening prayer at our church, and the text, which included Exodus 3—Moses and the burning bush—led me to preach on Christ’s divine identity. It was an unapologetic attempt to demonstrate, as the Apostles themselves did, from the Scriptures themselves that Jesus is divine, the eternal Son, the Second Person of the Trinity. And that this is in the text of the Old Testament Scriptures. The New Testament authors did not invent it. “And beginning with Moses and all the prophets” Jesus “explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). We ought to expect, then, to see him in the text. He certainly claimed to be there.

In my mind this was something of an experiment: is it possible to preach these passages like Justin Martyr and Irenaeus preached them in the 2nd century and have it connect with a 21st century audience? To just skip—or better, jettison—all the historical-critical baggage that has attached itself to our understanding and approach to these texts? No caveats, chin-stroking, nuance or subtleties? To simply point out the clear and obvious fact that the LORD has a “messenger” or “Angel” who from the very beginning displays divine agency, divine prerogatives, divine presence, and is himself addressed and called LORD? Not an ordinary angel at all. This would be the LORD who met Abraham under a tree, called out to him on the mountain to spare Isaac, wrestled with Jacob, and, yes, appeared to Moses in the bush. This “Angel” speaks to Lot and then the text tells us that “the LORD” called down burning sulphur on Sodom and Gommorah out of the heavens “from the LORD.” This figure, this divine Person, has been at work from the beginning. The Father has never been without his Son.

Now, I got to thinking about this again today because my friend has on his shelf Robert Alter’s beautiful, massive, critically acclaimed three-volume translation of the Hebrew Bible. I wondered how he would handle some key Old Testament texts. So I turned to one obvious place: Isaiah 53. And here is what I found:

Don’t believe your lying eyes, in other words. “Virtually no serious scholars today see this as a prediction of the Passion.” Okay, then. That’s true if you just declare that Christian interpreters don’t qualify as serious scholars. Patently self-serving and, well, ridiculous. This is a paragraph that may be summarized thus: We have no idea what this means, but we know (somehow) it doesn’t mean that!

And what does Alter do with the fact that this Suffering Servant appears to somehow survive his own death?

This is a “somewhat perplexing declaration because the Servant is dead.” You think? Do you think maybe, just maybe, that is the point? But we are assured that the text cannot mean what it appears to mean, and must just be “posthumous restoration of his reputation.” This is exceedingly, and depressingly, weak. Really: an “afterlife,” much less resurrection, “was not an available alternative in previous biblical literature”? But maybe the idea was just beginning to form around this time? Alter did, presumably, also translate Ezekiel 37. Does that read like a tentative gesture at something like an afterlife? It’s a pretty dogmatic description of dead bones being made alive again. Oh, let’s see what he says about that: “Early Jewish and Christian interpreters took it as a prophecy of the resurrection from the dead, but it is quite doubtful that this is what Ezekiel meant.” It’s just a “symbolic image” of the exile, you see. No arguments whatsoever marshaled; just his say-so.

I flipped over to Zechariah 2, where the LORD (Yahweh) promises to “come” because he is “sent” by “the LORD.” Alter cannot but help notice this strange feature of the text, and it garners this feeble footnote (13):

“Sent me” is weird, he acknowledges. Because at the beginning of the verse GOD was talking! Alter explains that NOW the speaker is “the prophet,” not God. And this kind of “unmarked transition” is “common biblical usage.” This is willfully obtuse. There is nothing common about this passage—indeed, it may well be one of the most unique passages in the Hebrew Scriptures! The Speaker is the LORD. Let’s read it together:

“Shout and be glad, Daughter Zion. For I am coming, and I will live among you,” declares the LORD. “Many nations will be joined to the LORD in that day and will become MY people. I will live among you and you will know that the LORD Almighty has sent me to you.” (Zechariah 2:10-11)

There is no squinting or head tilting that can make this refer to “the prophet.” To just assure the reader that this “unmarked” (in other words, non-existent-but-I-really-need-it-to-be) transition is “common biblical usage” is simply to wave a shiny object to distract the reader from the plain meaning of the text.

The LORD promises to come, and says that he is sent by the LORD Almighty. But we know better. That’s too sophisticated an expression of plurality in God. Everyone (certainly all the “serious scholars”) knows—just knows!—that Trinitarian theology is purely a later invention imposed on the Hebrew Scriptures. Never mind that Angel of the LORD; pay no attention to that figure who shows up again and again and again in Israel’s history; ignore the LORD’s insistent prophesying about his own coming; don’t allow yourself to make any connections—they are figments of your imagination. It cannot be literally true that “he came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” He cannot—cannot!—possibly be the Holy One of Israel. This is what Paul meant by reading the Scriptures with “veiled face,” and historical-critical “serious” scholars have all too often been a veritable textile industry.

All that said, maybe somewhat ironically, I very much enjoyed the portions I read of Robert Alter’s actual translations of the Hebrew Bible. They should publish a version without any footnotes or commentary or critical apparatus. Because right now some of it looks like an obstacle standing in the way of the text and steering readers in the directions he wants them to go. A sort of hypnotism saying, “You don’t see Jesus. You don’t see Jesus You don’t see Jesus.”

Actually, you see Jesus. I learned that from Jesus himself in Luke 24, and grasped it even deeper by reading the Apostolic Fathers. Yes, we can and ought to follow their example.

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Thanks for joining me in my friend’s study! Hope to see you again soon back safely in my own. Have a great week!