Image: Ethiopian Woman by JW Kelly

The Song of Songs is a beautiful, poetic and erotic dialog between two lovers. Verse 1:5 is famous. Here are several English translations:

King James Bible

I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.

Christian Standard Bible

Daughters of Jerusalem,
I am dark like the tents of Kedar,
yet lovely like the curtains of Solomon.

English Standard Version

I am very dark, but lovely,
O daughters of Jerusalem,
like the tents of Kedar,
like the curtains of Solomon.

New Living Translation

I am dark but beautiful,
O women of Jerusalem—
dark as the tents of Kedar,
dark as the curtains of Solomon’s tents.

Jewish Publication Society

I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.

The word in bold face in all these is a translation of the word ‘ve-‘ in biblical Hebrew. What’s special about this word is that its meaning is very context-dependent. In some contexts it means ‘but,’ just as we see it in these translations. In other contexts it means ‘and.’

In this case, context doesn’t give us any clues. It could mean ‘but,’ as the translators above all seemed to think, or it could mean ‘and.’ Consider the different sense of the verse if we translate it as ‘and:’

I am black and comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem . . . .

The ancient Israelites were aware of skin color, but dark skin had no negative connotations. What really mattered in the ancient world was how wealthy your nation was, and whether it was good at war. There was no concept of race.

So why did all of these translators use the word ‘but?’ It implies that there’s something surprising about a dark-skinned woman being beautiful. For the ancient Israelites, though, there was nothing surprising about this. The woman (a young woman, surely) was black, and she was beautiful.

It’s hard to escape the thought that these translators had biases about skin color that shaped their translation choices.

It makes me wonder. If the King James Version had chosen to use ‘and’ where they chose to use ‘but,’ would that first English slave ship have shown up in Jamestown in 1619? Would slavery still have spread in the United States? Would we have had the Civil War? If the other translators had chosen differently, would we be seeing the racial hatreds that we see today?

We must never forget the power of mighty little words.

When Your Characters Talk Back

Authors often say that their characters seem to take on lives of their own. Amos Oz, author of My Michael (Michael sheli מיכאל שלי in Hebrew) reported getting into long, heated arguments with his main character, Hannah.

Below is the record of an argument I had with a character of mine. His name is Zakaryah, and he’s one of the principal characters of my novel Light of Exile, coming this September. I was having trouble fleshing him out. I tried to cheat and he didn’t like it, not one bit.

The story just wasn’t working.

I paused in my typing, looked over at Zakaryah. He had shown up in the chair next to the table while I was concentrating on the manuscript.

He grimaced, fumbling at his left forearm with his right hand. The hand sank through his arm without any obvious resistance, stopping only when it encountered the wood of the table top. He bit his lip, turned to look at me.

I realized he had said something a moment before that I had missed.

– See? This is what I mean.

He sounded like a normal twelve-year-old.

He was wearing a rough wool robe which came down to mid-calf. Where it gapped at the waist I could see the top of a loin cloth. Didn’t the wool make his bare chest itch? He shifted his weight in the seat, squirming right, squirming left, now leaning on one chair arm, now on the other.

I asked if he was uncomfortable.

– I’ve never sat in anything like this . . . this . . . whatever it is.

I told him it was called a chair.

– So you’ve got me sitting in something I’ve never heard of? What sense does that make?

I felt my face reddening. He was right, of course. And what answer was there to that?

– And I have these terrible gaps in my memory. Some things I remember clearly. My sister Hannah who never cries. The ox that crushed my father to death. The fire. Especially the fire. I remember the tablet-house and I remember Gimillu. But I don’t remember my mother’s name. How can I not remember my mother’s name? He buried his face in his hands, elbows resting on the table, his back shaking silently.

I looked down at the floor and mumbled that he had enough.

– What? What did you say?

I thought I had given him enough, I told him, still gazing down.

– Enough? Enough for what? Look at me!

I looked at him. I could dimly see the high back of the chair through his head.

But this wasn’t getting me anywhere. Time for a new approach.

I said he should draw open the bag in front of him.

He started, apparently noticing the linen sack for the first time.

– My mother’s bag!

I told him his mother’s name was Kashaya.

I said she had loved him very much, that giving birth to him and his sister were the two greatest events of her life, that when she knew she was dying her deepest sorrow was that she wasn’t going to see them grow up.

I told him to go ahead and open the bag, that he should reach in and take out the first thing his hand fell on.

He loosened the draw string and tugged at the opening, spreading it wide. He pulled out a round copper mirror.

– I remember it! My grandmother gave it to her. She told . . . Kashaya . . . that it had been given to her when she was just a girl, when she was as sad as she had ever been in her whole life, that she wanted my mother to have it. Every woman should have a mirror, she said.

I told him he obviously remembered more than he thought he did, but he shook his head.

– I need more.

There was a limit to what I could give him, I responded.

I didn’t have enough time to give him everything he wanted. There were others to consider, they needed me too. But I told him about the years his father had spent scraping together enough silver to buy the family ox. I told him about the letter his grandmother had received from the army commander saying that his uncle Gedalyah had died of a fever at his encampment near the border town of Upi. I told him about that day at the tablet-house, when his arch-foe Gimillu had stepped outside to relieve himself, and he had surreptitiously written in the fresh clay of the boy’s tablet that the master was a buffoon. Didn’t he remember how hard it had been to stifle his laughter when Gimillu was thrashed with the switch?

With every story, Zakaryah’s eyes widened a little more and his body became more opaque, until the chair was just a vague shadow behind his torso.

He clasped his hands together. They sank into each other a little. He pulled them apart with a slight effort. He sighed.

– Still not enough.

This was it, this was the moment I needed.

I told him to look in the mirror and tell me what was missing, what I could give him in the time we had.

He peered closely at the polished copper.

– I see my face.

I gestured at him to continue. His brows drew into a V. He stared at his reflection, then stared some more. The silence became thicker, deeper, longer.

– I . . . I see it!

He was fully opaque now.

He had to tell me what he saw, I exclaimed.

It was a demand, not a request. I was desperate to know. My fingers hung poised over the keyboard.

He didn’t speak, just reached over and poked me in the breastbone. It hurt.

Tell me! I insisted, rubbing my chest.

He looked at his finger, looked at me and smirked. Then he faded, the smile lingering long past the point when the rest of him had disappeared. There was a slight pop and it too vanished.

I scratched my head and turned my thoughts back to my manuscript.

I would just have to do it the hard way.

I sighed and closed the laptop.

I grabbed  Characters & Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card, opened it, turned to page 1.

I began to read.

How did the ancient Israelites get their bread to rise? After all, they couldn’t just run out to the grocery store and buy a packet of yeast.

That was the question I posed to Dr. Cynthia Shafer-Elliott a little over a year ago. She’s an archaeologist among whose specialties is diet and food preparation. 

It turns out that they got their yeast from the air around them. They were sourdough bakers.

I am too. 

The thing about using sourdough starter is that it takes time. With commercial yeast, dough needs to rise for a total of about two hours. With starter, dough frequently needs to rise overnight or even longer.

So now the association of unleavened bread with the Exodus from Egypt makes a lot more sense. They had to leave in a hurry and they couldn’t let the dough rise quietly for hours and hours.

Although there’s no evidence that the Exodus happened as described in the Bible, it seems that small groups of prisoners or laborers did escape from Egypt from time to time. If any of these escapes took advantage of sudden opportunities, then surely they would not have had time to let their dough rise.

Our world today is vastly removed from that of ancient Israel. However, if you bake with sourdough you have a remarkable connection to those people and their lives. 

You may even come to understand the Bible in a new way.

The name of the prophet in PaleoHebrew, modern Hebrew and English

In my novel By the Waters of Babylon (available now) there’s a scene in which twelve-year-old Ya’el meets the prophet Jeremiah.

You might be familiar with Jeremiah. He’s famous for his bitter denunciations of the ruling powers of Judah during the beginning of the 6^th century BCE. He’s so famous for this, in fact, that he has his own word in the English language: jeremiad.

In writing the passage, I pictured him as a gruff old man with a long gray beard, of kindly disposition but furious and impassioned when seized by the spirit of God. In thinking back on this portrayal of him, it occurred to me recently that in my imagination he’s awfully similar to my favorite wizard, Gandalf Greyhame, of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

This surely does a disservice to both figures, but there are some similarities. Both were passionately committed to fighting evil and injustice. Both had more than normal human abilities to call on in doing this. Both lived in times of terrible danger and upheaval: Gandalf during the rise of the Dark Lord and Jeremiah during the run-up to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian Exile. And both of them fought these threats with every fiber of their being.

The differences are also worth noting. First and foremost, Gandalf is a fictional character. Sorry, LOTR fans. I regret this too. But what can you do?

Jeremiah, on the other hand, was very real. So far, no direct archaeological evidence for the man has been found. However, seal impressions have been unearthed for many of his contemporaries from the Book of Jeremiah. Among these are his enemies Gedaliah and Yehucal; and his scribe Baruch ben Neriah who wrote down his prophesies.

Another way that they’re different is that we know virtually nothing about Gandalf’s background and birth, or even if he was born. Jeremiah, though, tells us a little about himself. He’s from a landed priestly family from the town of Anatot. He has a cousin from whom he buys a plot of land. And he’s so lonely and distraught from the hatred and ridicule directed at him that he wishes he had never been born.

And their appearance? We don’t need to guess with Gandalf. We know. Without a doubt, he looked like Ian McKellen.

When it comes to Jeremiah, there have been many paintings over the centuries. The artists all thought they knew what he looked like, and they were all wrong.

He looked like Gandalf.

by Christopher Farrar

Have you ever been accused of heresy? It happened to me a few weeks ago. In one of my Facebook groups I had posted a newspaper story about some pottery that was found in the traditional Hebron burial place of Abraham and Sarah. I introduced the story this way: “Was Abraham real? The short answer: It’s hard to say.” And the fact is that every effort to find historical or archaeological evidence has failed, not just for the man himself but also for the time period in which he could have lived.

One reader had this response: “Either you believe ALL SCRIPTURE or none of it. This is HERESY.” Another agreed with him and both indicated that they were unsubscribing. The group has 30,000 or so members so I don’t think they’ll be missed, but the reaction left me scratching my head.

For one thing, we live in a multi-cultural, multi-religious country. Heresy? Really? Isn’t this a notion that properly belongs with the Spanish Inquisition of 1492?

For another, why do some people feel the need to circle the wagons so tightly around their religious beliefs? Why do they care what archaeologists think about the historicity of Abraham? Is their faith that fragile?

And finally, isn’t this symptomatic of a profound intolerance for a deeper understanding of the world we live in? Isn’t this an intolerance that we find not only in the study of the Bible but also in many other spheres of human experience?

The world is a complicated place. We really shouldn’t expect simple explanations. The Hebrew Bible is an amazing record of the relationship between humanity and the God of Israel. What’s wrong with trying to understand it in its full complexity?