Somewhere, on one of my shelves of books, I have a Bible printed in the Devanagari script of India. I can recognize that the characters spilled across the page are deliberate and disciplined. But beyond that, I find the text utterly indecipherable.
It might as well be cuneiform.
You’ve probably seen pictures of cuneiform writing – little wedge-shaped marks pressed into clay tablets. They go back to the Mesopotamian cultures of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, many millennia ago.
In school, I was told, cuneiform was a primitive form of accounting. Lacking pen and paper – let alone computers and spreadsheets – the ancient tribes of what is now called Iraq used soft clay tablets to record the number of sheep or bags of wheat someone had bought or sold. It was just a numbering system, I understood.
Of course, I didn’t bother thinking that those ancient traders also needed symbols for sheep and wheat they were trading.
Most of those clay tablets eventually returned to the mud from whence they came. But a few were baked, to preserve them longer. And some got baked, unintentionally, when marauding tribes burned houses and granaries.
Deciphering dead languages
Later in life, I discovered that my uncle, Dr. Frederick V. Winnett of University College at the University of Toronto, was the world’s foremost translator of Ugaritic languages.
Ugaritic was one of those cuneiform scripts, found mainly in northern Mesopotamia running up into what is now Syria. I wondered why anyone would need to, let alone want to, translate ancient sales slips.
But they were actually much more than sales slips.
Linguist James Harbeck showed me how simple symbols – and there’s no symbol much simpler than a short straight line – could evolve into a formal script. Suppose we had, Harbeck mused, “a technology that lets us make straight lines but not curved ones, so we make cartoonish simplified representations [of those objects]. We also wanted to express more varied and involved things. Sometimes we might add an extra symbol to clarify what we meant. Usages got abstracted and standardized. Over time they lost any representation of the thing they named. But they also got to the level of flexibility that they could represent the same level of detail as you could get with speech.”
Unplanned obsolescence
But then someone else invented a different way of writing. A phonetic alphabet. The word “phonetic” derives from the Phoenicians (or Canaanites, if you prefer biblical names) who devised it .
The new writing style soon supplanted the cuneiform characters that had been used for some 3,000 years.
Then, Harbeck reasons, “historians, using the new phonetic system, know the literature back [only] to when we started using the phonetic system. They will take the oldest works written that way as original. Like the Bible, for example.”
But when people like Uncle Fred started deciphering and translating the old cuneiform scripts, they found – surprise, surprise! – stories that pre-dated the Bible’s phonetic alphabet. Stories about the Garden of Eden. Noah’s flood. The Tower of Babel.
They discovered, Harbeck notes, that “many stories that looked a lot like ones we had always assumed came straight from the mouth of God through the Bible actually dated to centuries before the earliest biblical versions.”
Not unique stories after all.
Oops.
*****************************************
Copyright © 2018 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups, and links from other blogs, welcomed; all other rights reserved.
To comment on this column, write jimt@quixotic.ca
*****************************************
YOUR TURN
Lots of letters about last week’s column on the parables found in Dr. Seuss’s stories.
Isabel Gibson wondered what else the librarian (who refused a donation of Dr. Seauss books from the Trump family) “would have refused to place the Bible on ‘her shelves? I mean, just consider some of the outrageous content! Slavery! Blasphemy! Warring tribes! Human sacrifice! With respect to the Dr. Seuss books, I wonder whether the refusal had more to do with dissing the donor.
“You make a good point about parables in ostensibly non-religious books (although the Loraxis my least favourite Seuss book – ‘Here, let me hit you over the head with my message.’) Maybe we need an expanded canon for our day?”
Stephanie McClellan agreed that “the Bible taken wildly out of context has some pretty damning and derogatory stuff in it as well. It can be read to be full of harmful stereotypes and be misogynist, racist, homophobic, and cruel. Bet that the librarian has plenty of Bibles in the library should someone want to mine them for wisdom or foolishness or down-right damnation of people that are different. I use everything possible to get my people to critique the culture they live in and make it better. Dr. Seuss is more than welcome. I just explain the problem bits and get on with the wisdom!”
Jean Hamilton recalled, “One Sunday our minister read a Dr. Seuss story to the children, and on the way out of church I said, ‘Let’s have a Dr. Seuss Christmas.’ And he agreed.
So Jean wrote four Dr. Seuss-ish reflections for the weekly Advent-candle-lighting ceremonies.
There seem to be quite a few enlightened clergy around, who are looking for holy insights beyond the Bible. Lyle Phillips wrote, “Last year the ministers at our United Church based a whole series of sermons on Dr. Seuss' books. Many of the older congregants thought it rather silly and frivolous, but the younger, especially the children, loved it.”
Laurna Tallman defended Dr. Seuss’s pen: “Every line in all the drawings in the Dr. Seuss books are caricatures that use gentle satire, reflecting the written words. I cannot recall any illustrations that could be considered ‘racist’ any more than every other drawing that incorporates caricatures of stereotypes: babies, pets, good guys, and even forgiven bad guys. Theodore Suess Geisel was a cartoonist and poetic writer of his times.:
“If your starting point is an attitude of aggrievance, you soon will be throwing out the baby with the bath water. Feminists and hypersensitive blacks and fundamentalist Christians and a long list of other wounded people have demanded that their short-sighted sensitivities be coddled at the expense of other profoundly valuable work. Mark Twain's books have been banned from schools (perhaps even from libraries) although Twain also was not a racist Huckleberry Finn should be read in schools today so that children can learn to see themselves and one another more realistically and compassionately, which is the highest aim of well-written satire.”
Sandy Warren: “Thank you for this reminder of Dr. Seuss and the wonderful truths in many of his stories. I loved these books with the meter and rhymes of the textas a child, and even more when reading them to my children and grandchildren. I had not thought about stereotypes reinforced by some of his pictures but I agree fully with your reservation – ‘And yet...’”
Tom Watson – a pretty good storyteller himself -- also said thanks “for a timely reminder of the power of story.”
Richard Groome referred to a book: “The Seuss, the whole Seuss and nothing but the Seuss: a visual biography of Theodore Seuss Geiselby Charles D. Cohen (New York: Random House, 2004) cited sources showing that both ‘The Cat In the Hat’ and ‘Horton Hatches the Egg’ began as single pictures and short stories during Geisel's formative years, decades before the books with those titles were published. Cohen also cited examples of how during different interviews with different reporters Geisel, as Dr. Seuss the storyteller, would invent completely different explanations of the inspiration for writing each of those stories.”
Elwyn Hunt in New Zealand had some thoughts about other cartoon sources: “I had some close Christian friends from my Bible study group warn me about allowing my kids to watch The Simpsons because of some perceived ‘evil’. The kids and I watched The Simpsons together every evening and I found it to be one of the most ‘Christian’ programmes on television. Christian values, joys, strengths, weaknesses, and challenges seem to underpin so many of the episodes, often demonstrated by hilarious, sad, happy, commonplace and everyday situations describing the human condition in all its variances. I think it’s wonderful. You could write Bible studies based on the series! University papers on ethics even...”
*******************************************
PSALM PARAPHRASE
Psalm 130 is a downer, by any reading. I’ve left out verses 7-8, which feels like a manufactured happy ending.
1 From the bottom of a deep black pit, God, I shout at you.
2 The walls rise above my head, shutting out the light.
Can you hear me, God?
I can't get out by my own efforts.
3 I've tried and tried.
I climb part way out, and then I slide back again to the bottom.
Without your help, I'm sunk forever.
4 Don't judge me--forgive me!
Free me from my secret faults.
Give me another chance!
5 I shall lie down in the pit and wait for you.
6 Like parents staying up until a teenager comes home,
like a puppy poised for its master's footstep,
I wait for your response.
I know I will not be disappointed.
For paraphrases of mostof the psalms used by the Revised Common Lectionary, you can order my book Everyday Psalmsfrom Wood Lake Publishing, info@woodlake.com.
*******************************************
TECHNICAL STUFF
If you want to comment on something, send a message directly to me, jimt@quixotic.ca.
To subscribe or unsubscribe, send an e-mail message to jimt@quixotic.ca. Or you can subscribe electronically by sending a blank e-mail (no message or subject line) to softedges-subscribe@lists.quixotic.ca. Similarly, you can un-subscribe at softedges-unsubscribe@lists.quixotic.ca.
I write a second column each Sunday called Sharp Edges, which tends to be somewhat more cutting about social and justice issues. To sign up for Sharp Edges, write to me directly, jimt@quixotic.ca, or send a note to sharpedges-subscribe@lists.quixotic.ca
And for those of you who like poetry, I’ve started a webpage http://quixotic.ca/My-Poetrywhere I post (occasionally, when I feel inspired) poems that I have written. If you’d like to receive notifications about new poems, write me at jimt@quixotic.ca, or subscribe yourself to the list by sending a blankemail(no message) to poetry-subscribe@lists.quixotic.ca(If it doesn’t work, please let me know.)
********************************************
PROMOTION STUFF
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. Some spam filters have been blocking my posts because they’re suspicious of too many links.
Ralph Milton’s latest project is a kind of Festival of Faith, a retelling of key biblical stories by skilled storytellers like Linnea Good and Donald Schmidt, designed to get people talking about their own faith experience. It’s a series of videos available on Youtube. I suggest you start with his introductory section: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u6qRclYAa8
Ralph’s “Sing Hallelujah” -- the world’s first video hymnal – is still available. It consists of 100 popular hymns, both new and old, on five DVDs that can be played using a standard DVD player and TV screen, for use in congregations who lack skilled musicians to play piano or organ. More details at wwwDOTsinghallelujahDOTca
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,”an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. <http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca>
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom
Alva Wood’s satiric stories about incompetent bureaucrats and prejudiced attitudes in a small town -- not particularly religious, but fun; alvawoodATgmailDOTcom to get onto her mailing list.
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony”-- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’sreaders. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom or twatsonATsentexDOTnet