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5.0 out of 5 stars
The Scroll of the Vision of Nahum, July 9, 2010
This review is from: Nahum: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (The Anchor Yale Bible Commentaries) (Hardcover)
DUANE L CHRISTENSEN, NAHUM:
A NEW TRANSLATION WITH INTRODUCTION AND COMMENTARY
(THE ANCHOR YALE BIBLE, VOLUME 24F: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2009: 1-xxxiv + 1-423)
A man once dreamed that he died and went to heaven. After a few days he was approached by Ezekiel. `Did you ever read my book?' asked the prophet. `No,' the man replied. `Why not?' asked Ezekiel. `Because it was too long,' the man replied. Soon afterwards the man was approached by Nahum. ``Did you ever read my book?' asked the prophet. `No,' the man replied. `Why not?' asked Nahum. `It was only three pages long.' The man thought for a moment. `Because it was too difficult,' he replied.
Those who neglect Nahum because he is `too difficult' have been deprived of their excuse by the publication of Duane L Christensen's study in the Anchor Yale series. Both inside and outside the academic world, the appearance of a new volume in that series is an event of considerable significance. Here is a handsomely produced clothbound book which will stand a lifetime of use. Any readers who think A new commentary on a minor prophet! will miss the chief achievement of Christensen (henceforth DLC), which is to furnish readers of the Bible with a fresh translation of Nahum. If it is difficult to read Nahum on the three pages of India paper that appear between Micah and Habakkuk in English Bibles, it is wonderfully easy to read him on pages xx to xxxii of DLC's work. Many readers will know the opera Akhnaten by Philip Glass, which begins with a spoken rendering of an ancient Egyptian text.
Open are the double doors of the horizon:
Unlocked are its bolts.
That rendering is very close in spirit to the original. I found myself reminded of Akhnaten when I read DLC's translation of Nahum 3. 13b.
They are wide open /
(Namely) the gates / of your (f. sg.) land //
Fire devours / your (f. sg.) gate-bars //
Some modern translators of the Bible are at pains to write in what they believe to be the popular language of their own day. (It is only a matter of time until someone who has learned his English from television serial dramas renders 'amarti as `I was like.') For his part DLC translates Nahum clearly, but without compromise. He shows as much respect for the original text as Baudelaire showed when he translated Edgar Allan Poe into French: thus his rendering of 3. 2 surpasses even the honest angularity of the Authorized Version:
The sound of a whip / and the sound / of a rattling wheel //
And a horse galloping /
And a chariot / jolting //
DLC subjects every one of Nahum's forty-seven verses to the most rigorous analysis before he translates it. His linguistry is not merely a lexical affair. He does remind us (186) that the definite article is expressly written only fourteen times in the entire book of Nahum. But having ranged in his time beyond the world of Biblical studies, DLC is afraid to adduce neither the Rig Veda (9) nor Japanese haiku poetry (213). And speaking with the experience of a scholar who has lived outside the confines of his own library, he says (192), `.....anyone who has observed volcanic activity knows the appropriateness of a reference to God's judgment being "poured out as fire" '. DLC's translation of Nahum smells not of the lamp, but of the smithy. It deserves to become the libretto of an opera.
At its worst, weak-armed theology delights in abstract nouns. By contrast, the physical realities which largely characterize Nahum's writing are brought to the fore in DLC's translation: whirlwind, storm, clouds, sea, rivers, mountains, fire, rocks, torrent, thorns, vine-branches, juniper arrows, chariots, torches, lightning, doves, pool, lions, torn flesh, whip, wheel, horse, horsemen, sword, spear, corpses, fig-trees, brick-mold, and locusts, Anyone who begins his study of Scripture by reading DLC's rendering of Nahum will realize at once that the Bible is not a narrowly religious book. In short, DLC has cleaned the Sistine Chapel ceiling of Nahum. Now the original colours are revealed to us in all their vigor, vibrancy, and severity.
On several counts the Introduction (1-66) represents a major step forward in Biblical studies. DLC will shock no one by linking Nahum with Jonah and Habakkuk, nor by attempting to reconstruct the prosodic structure of Nahum. But some readers may be surprised to read (6):
For more than forty years now, F. M. Cross and D. N. Freedman have cautiously advanced a new version of the method of syllable-counting as a more effective means for analyzing the structure of Hebrew poetry than the more commonly accepted word-stress notation of the Ley-Sievers system.
DLC goes on to point out (8) that the concept of counting verses, words, and letters in the text of the Old Testament goes back to ancient times. He acknowledges (10) the part played by Casper Labuschagne in showing `the significance of the four primary compositional numbers 17, 23, 26, and 32 in the numerical composition of the Tanakh'. He describes (12) the two primary systems of numerical notation ('22 gematria', and `400 gematria'), and defines the units of logoprosodic analysis. After considering the interpretation of Nahum throughout history, DLC treats at some length (25-39) the matter of how Nahum may be apprehended in terms of archaeomusicology. The co-author of these important pages is Prof. Ernest G McClain, the greatest living exponent of ancient musical science as it relates to world literature. Although he speaks modestly of his own musicianship (ix), DLC is no amateur in the field, for he presented a paper on Jonah and Nahum at the first International Conference of Near Eastern Archaeomusicology in 2008.
Systems are the unseen domes under which those who think may choose to live their obedient lives. For more than fifty years Russian scientists were obliged to apprehend everything in harmony with the notions of Marx and Lenin. Presently, many Western scholars apprehend everything in relation to the all-important fact of colonialism. Both forms of `dome' are artifical and unnatural. In ancient times, by contrast, the world of musical harmonics offered a natural and uncontrived model of the universe. For thousands of years the basic facts of musical physics, which may well have been discovered in the first of humanity's scientific experiments, helped many thinking persons to engage with the complexities of astronomy, the weather, the calendar, and human governance. The science of harmonics was not a theoretical system: it was a living instrument of order.
Modern Biblical scholars, being generally ignorant of mathematics and harmonics, have tended to assume that the ancient authors were as ignorant as themselves. At times, when their musically literate colleagues were able to discern a numerical or harmonical subtext in certain pieces of Scripture, they pronounced those colleagues to be eccentric or fantastical. Now of course we need to be careful not to believe everything. Some of those who call themselves archaeomusicologists are more concerned with building careers for themselves than with finding out facts. But the old edifice of ignorance is beginning to crumble. Gematria is no longer a dirty word. Musical light is being shed on the Biblical texts. I am delighted to know that Prof. McClain, who is not a self-promoter, has lived to see the discipline of archaeomusicology become mainstream. The appearance of McClain's doctrine in the Anchor Yale Bible is a most important fact in the history of scholarship.
DLC's bibliography (67-148) is altogether magisterial. It includes works written in Dutch, English, Italian, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and Spanish, in addition to works relating to ancient languages like Ugaritic. DLC is prepared to learn from anyone: from Gunkel, from Luther, from Noth, and from Spurgeon.
I see the commentary (151-398) as representing the smithy to which I have already alluded. When you have read DLC's translation of Nahum right through nine or ten times, you should read it verse by verse with one finger in the relevant portion of the commentary. Every verse of Nahum's little book has been hammered out on the anvil of DLC's monumental erudition.
What of the author's style? Well, the style is the man himself. Some academic writers are cold fish who make a virtue out of anaemic primness, but DLC writes with his head and his heart. He follows an illuminating passage about the particle gam in Nahum (371-20) with a poignant anecdote which any human being will find profoundly moving.
DLC's Nahum is a wonderful book. Anyone who is interested in the Bible should buy it.
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