“The Hebrew Bible: The Twelve Minor Prophets” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter begins his introduction with a most important clarification, “The Twelve Minor Prophets are “minor” only in regard to the quantity of their writings that have come down to us. In fact, in Hebrew they are simply called “the Dozen,” with no mention of minor.”

In Hosea 5:15, Alter explains a bit of theological nuance, “I will go, return to My place. This is an interesting biblical intimation of the idea of deus absconditus. God, in His anger against Israel, withdraws from them to His celestial abode, where He will await the moment they recognize their guilt and seek Him out before He will return to Israel.” In Hosea 6:3, Alter describes a pun in the original Hebrew, “like the latter rain He will shower the earth. As often happens in the Bible, there is a pun hiding close to the surface. God’s instruction to humankind (the word translated as “shower” also means “instruct”) is life-giving, like the rain. But the verb for “teach” or “instruct,” yoreh, is also a homonym of the noun that means “former rain,” often paired with malqosh, “latter rain.” One should also note that in these two lines God is compared first to the sun, then to the rain—both giving life to earth.”

Alter, again, explains the wordplay in the original Hebrew in Joel 1:18, “the flocks of sheep are desolate. The verb here is another reflection of Joel’s fondness for introducing double meanings through similarities of sound. The verb ne’ashmu would ordinarily mean “to be guilty,” but it seems to be a deliberate distortion of nashamu, “to be desolate,” thus intimating a shadow of personifying guilt in the depiction of the desolate animals.” In Joel 4:1, there is more wordplay, “the Valley of Jehoshaphat. The name means “The Lord judges,” and the prophet immediately plays on shafat, “judges,” as he says “come to judgment,” nishpateti.” In Joel 4:10, there is a reference back to another prophet, “Grind your plowshares into swords / and your pruning hooks into spears. This is an obvious—and grim—reversal of the famous verse in Isaiah 2:4 that envisions a wondrous era of peace.”

In Haggai 2:3, Alter details a bit of history, “Who among you remains who saw this house in its former glory? There could be a few in Haggai’s audience who had actually seen the First Temple, but they would be very old because sixty-seven years had passed since its destruction. Is it not as nothing in your eyes? The foundation for the Temple, according to the Book of Ezra, had been laid during the reign of Cyrus, but the work did not go forward, so what met the eye was a half-finished foundation and no structure above it.”

Alter relates the uniqueness of Zechariah’s prophesying in Zechariah 5:1, “and, look, a flying scroll. By this point, it is evident that Zechariah’s mode of prophecy is essentially different from that of his predecessors. They occasionally experience enigmatic visions that are then explained, but their principal vehicle is direct address…. Zechariah, by contrast, witnesses a series of puzzling visions shown him by a divine emissary, and they seem to become progressively more bizarre.” In Zechariah 8:21, Alter notes the biblical introduction of the word Jew, “ten people from all the tongues of the nations shall grasp the border of a Jew’s garment. This vivid image conveys the sense of throngs of foreigners desperate to join the people with whom God dwells. The term yehudi, “Jew,” never appears in earlier biblical literature, although it occurs frequently in Esther, which also belongs to the Persian period. Yehudi is palpably moving toward the meaning of “Jew” because it is now hard to speak of a “Judahite” (Hebrew, ben yehudah), given that the kingdom of Judah no longer exists, having been replaced by the Persian province of Yehud.”

“Vanity Fair” by William Makepeace Thackeray

Thackeray’s most famous novel is a meandering tale which traverses the ballrooms of the aristocracy of London, the dinner clubs of the merchants in the City, the sahibs of India, and the battlefields of Belgium. His narrator, on occasion, breaks the fourth wall. “If, a few pages back, the present writer claimed the privilege of peeping into Miss Amelia Sedley’s bedroom, and understanding with the omniscience of the novelist all the gentle pains and passions which were tossing upon that innocent pillow, why should he not declare himself to be Rebecca’s confidante too, master of her secrets, and seal-keeper of that young woman’s conscience?”

In many ways, this is a novel about gender relations, place, and norms in Victorian society, especially within the dynamics of marriage. “The best women (I have heard my grandmother say) are hypocrites. We don’t know how much they hide from us: how watchful they are when they seem most artless and confidential: how often those frank smiles, which they wear so easily, are traps to cajole or elude or disarm—I don’t mean in your mere coquettes, but your domestic models, and paragons of female virtue. Who has not seen a woman hide the dulness of a stupid husband, or coax the fury of a savage one? We accept this amiable slavishness, and praise a woman for it; we call this pretty treachery truth.”

The novel’s plot centers around Captain Rawdon Crawley, disowned by his rich and eccentric aunt when he marries Rebecca Sharp, his brother’s governess, and, therefore, beneath the family station. Much of the novel centers on the couple’s aims to get back into the benefactress’ good graces. “In all his life he had never been so happy, as, during the past few months, his wife had made him. All former delights of turf, mess, hunting-field, and gambling-table; all previous loves and courtships of milliners, opera-dancers, and the like easy triumphs of the clumsy military Adonis, were quite insipid when compared with the lawful matrimonial pleasures which of late he had enjoyed.”

Some might claim, being disowned was not an easy life; whereas others might claim it was. “The novelist, it has been said before, knows everything, and as I am in a situation to be able to tell the public how Crawley and his wife lived without any income, may I entreat the public newspapers which are in the habit of extracting portions of the various periodical works now published, not to reprint the following exact narrative and calculations—of which I ought, as the discoverer (and at some expense, too), to have the benefit? My son, I would say, were I blessed with a child—you may by deep inquiry and constant intercourse with him, learn how a man lives comfortably on nothing a year. But it is best not to be intimate with gentlemen of this profession, and to take the calculations at second-hand, as you do logarithms, for to work them yourself, depend upon it, will cost you something considerable.” At least, one might be so generous as to say, Captain Crawley was a man of his age and station. “Rawdon Crawley, though the only book which he studied was the Racing Calendar, and though his chief recollections of polite learning were connected with the floggings which he received at Eton in his early youth, had that decent and honest reverence for classical learning which all English gentlemen feel.”

“Theological-Political Treatise” by Baruch Spinoza (translated by Samuel Shirley)

This short text by Spinoza lays out what he sees as the differences in force between religious and civil law. The treatise is also a defense of liberalism, democracy, freedom of conscience, and free speech. As for all of his philosophical works, it was originally written in Latin as the “Tractatus Theologico-Politicus”. Spinoza begins by discussing the Judeo-Christian religious tradition and, specifically, the prophets. “Prophecy is inferior to natural knowledge, which needs no sign, but of its own nature carries certainty…. Moreover, the certainty afforded by prophecy was not a mathematical certainty, but only a moral certainty.” To this end, Spinoza discusses the means of God’s actions and the role of the natural order. “By God’s direction I mean the fixed and immutable order of Nature, or chain of events…. The universal laws of Nature according to which all things happen and are determined are nothing but God’s eternal decrees, which always involve eternal truth and necessity.”

According to Spinoza, it is man’s knowledge of God that makes him a moral creature. “Since the love of God is man’s highest happiness and blessedness, and the final end and aim of all human action, it follows that only he observes the Divine Law who makes it his object to love God not through fear of punishment nor through love of some other thing such as sensual pleasure, fame and so forth, but from the mere fact that he knows God, or knows that the knowledge and love of God is the supreme good. So the sum of the Divine Law and its chief command is to love God as the supreme good…. If we now consider the nature of the natural Divine Law as we have just explained it we shall see: 1. That it is of universal application, or common to all mankind. For we have deduced it from human nature as such…. 2. That it does not demand belief in historical narratives of any kind whatsoever. For since it is merely a consideration of human nature that leads us to this natural Divine Law, evidently it applies equally to Adam as to any other man, and equally to a man living in a community as to a hermit…. 3. We see that the natural Divine Law does not enjoin ceremonial rites, that is, actions which in themselves are of no significance and are termed good merely by tradition…. For the natural light of reason enjoins nothing that is not within the compass of reason…. 4. Finally, we see that the supreme reward of the Divine Law is the law itself, namely, to know God and to love him in true freedom with all our heart and mind.”

For Spinoza, the existence of God is a necessity. “It is only in concession to the understanding of the multitude and the defectiveness of their thought that God is described as a lawgiver or ruler, and is called just, merciful and so on, and that in reality God acts and governs all things solely from the necessity of his own nature and perfection, and his decrees and volitions are eternal truths, always involving necessity.”

After discussing the Torah, Spinoza brings in the teachings of Christ. “Although religion as preached by the Apostles—who simply related the story of Christ—does not come within the scope of reason, yet its substance, which consists essentially in moral teachings, as does the whole of Christ’s doctrine, can be readily grasped by everyone by the natural light of reason.” Spinoza continues on the properties of the Divine Law, “There can be no doubt that the Divine Law has come down to us in this respect uncorrupted. From the Scripture itself we learn that its message, unclouded by any doubt or any ambiguity, is in essence this, to love God above all, and one’s neighbor as oneself…. For this is the basis of the whole structure of religion; if it is removed, the entire fabric crashes to the ground…. Knowledge of God is God’s gift, not a command…. God through his prophets asks no other knowledge of himself than the knowledge of his divine justice and charity…. God is supremely just and supremely merciful, that is, the one perfect pattern of the true life…. The intellectual knowledge of God which contemplates his nature as it really is in itself—a nature which men cannot imitate by a set rule of conduct nor take as their example—has no bearing on the practice of a true way of life, on faith, and on revealed religion, and that consequently men can go far away in this matter without sinning.”

For Spinoza, obedience is the paramount requisite of religion. “The aim of Scripture is simply to teach obedience…. The message of the Gospel is one of simple faith; that is, belief in God and reverence for God, or—which is the same thing—obedience to God…. It is also undeniable that he who by God’s commandments loves his neighbor as himself is truly obedient and blessed according to the Law…. Scripture does not require us to believe anything beyond what is necessary for fulfilling of the said commandment…. Therefore the commandment is the one and only guiding principle for the entire common faith of mankind, and through this commandment alone should be determined all the tenets of faith that every man is duty bound to accept…. All else can legitimately be inferred simply by the process of reason.”

Spinoza expands on the nature of reason and how it complements religion. “Neither is theology required to be subordinate to reason nor reason to theology…. Each has its own domain. The domain of reason, as we have said, is truth and wisdom, the domain of theology is piety and obedience…. Theology defines its religious dogmas only so far as suffices to secure obedience, and it leaves it to reason to decide exactly how these dogmas are to be understood in respect of truth; for reason is in reality the light of the mind…. Theology thus understood, if you consider its precepts and moral teaching, will be found to agree with reason; and if you look to its purpose and end, it will be found to be in no respect opposed to reason, and is therefore valid for all men.”

Finally, Spinoza touches on politics and the nature of the State. “There is nobody who does not desire to live in safety free from fear, as far as is possible. But this cannot come about as long as every individual is permitted to do just as he pleases, and reason can claim no more right than hatred and anger…. In order to achieve a secure and good life, men had necessarily to unite in one body. They therefore arranged that the unrestricted right naturally possessed by each individual should be put into common ownership, and that this right should no longer be determined by the strength and appetite of the individual, but by the power and will of all together…. They had to bind themselves by the most stringent pledges to be guided in all matters only by the dictates of reason…. Every state must necessarily preserve its own form, and cannot be changed without incurring the danger of utter ruin.”

“Psycho-Politics” by Byung-Chul Han (translated by Erik Butler)

Han’s short treatise is a rumination on modernity and the digital age. He covers his usual well-trod themes through the lens of neo-Hegelianism. First, he takes on twenty-first century labor practice. “Today everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself…. Conditions are defined by the solitude of an entrepreneur who is isolated and self-combating and practices auto-exploitation voluntarily…. When production is immaterial, everyone already owns the means of production him- or herself.”

Han is worried about dig data and the end of intimacy, subjectivity, and uniqueness. He is wary of a humanity ruled by averages and correlation without causation. He fears the commoditization of the soul. “Today, we are entering the age of digital psychopolitics. It means passing from passive surveillance to active steering…. Big data is a highly efficient psychopolitical instrument that makes it possible to achieve comprehensive knowledge of the dynamics of social communication. This knowledge is knowledge for the sake of domination and control (Herrschaftswissen): it facilitates intervention in the psyche and enables influence to take place on a pre-reflexive level…. Digital psychopolitics transforms the negativity of freely made decisions into the positivity of factual states (Sachverhalte). Indeed, persons are being positivized into things, which can be quantified, measured and steered.”

For Han, each individual has become an optimizing machine. “Now productivity is not to be enhanced by overcoming physical resistance so much as by optimizing psychic or mental processes. Physical discipline has given way to mental optimization…. The neoliberal regime utterly claims the technology of the self for its own purposes: perpetual self-optimization — as the exemplary neoliberal technology of the self — represents nothing so much as a highly efficient mode of domination and exploitation…. The self-as-a-work-of-art amounts to a beautiful but deceptive illusion that the neoliberal regime maintains…. The neoliberal imperative of self-optimization serves only to promote perfect functioning within the system…. It is not concern for the good life that drives self-optimization. Rather, self-optimization follows from systemic constraints —from the logic of quantifying success on the market.”

The idiot stands opposed to psychopolitics. “Every philosopher who has brought forth a new idiom, — a new language, a new way of thinking — has necessarily been an idiot. Only the idiot has access to the wholly Other…. The history of philosophy is a history of idiotisms. Socrates knows only that he does not know; he is an idiot. Likewise, Descartes — who casts doubt on everything — is an idiot. Cogito ergo sum is idiotic…. The idiot is a modern-day heretic. Etymologically, heresy means ‘choice’. Thus, the heretic is one who commands free choice: the courage to deviate from orthodoxy. As a heretic, the idiot represents a figure of resistance opposing the violence of consensus. The idiot preserves the magic of the outsider…. Idiotism stands opposed to the neoliberal power of domination: total communication and total surveillance.”

“Parfit” by David Edmonds

This is a biography of Derek Parfit, written by Edmonds, who studied philosophy under Parfit’s wife, Janet Radcliffe Richards. Renowned as an intellectual giant from his days at Eton and Oxford, there seemed to be little academically that Parfit could not do with ease. His pivot to devote his life to philosophy as a fellow at All Souls College seemed natural, even though he had never studied philosophy formally before applying. Parfit explained, “I remember wondering whether it was more likely that the continental philosophers would change, by discussing their important subjects in a clearer and better argued way, or that the analytical philosophers would change, by applying their clarity and logic to important subjects. I decided that the second seemed more likely, and I think I was right.” Parfit never finished beyond his undergraduate degree in history. But he saw this as a plus, “Because I never took a degree in philosophy, I have only read those books and articles that I wanted to read. That has helped me to love the subject.”

Parfit’s eccentric personality actually meshed well with his philosophy. His most famous book, only one of two he published, was Reasons and Persons. “Parfit once summed up the entire history of ethics in four neat steps: 1. Forbidden by God. 2. Forbidden by God, therefore wrong. 3. Wrong, therefore forbidden by God. 4. Wrong.” Parfit thought that humanity was relatively new in working out the implications for step 4, a secular morality that was objective. “Reasons and Persons would apply reason and logic to ethics without the distorting influence of God.” Parfit was very hard on himself and his intellect. As he aged, he maniacally focussed more and more on meta-ethics, because he felt that was all that really mattered in life. He truly believed that “everything he had written to date, every philosophical argument he had ever made, every conclusion he had ever reached, was pointless, worthless, and illusory, unless moral reasoning could be moored to solid ground. The solid ground had to be moral objectivity…. If morality was not objective, there was no reason to act in one way rather than another. He went further. If morality was not objective, life was meaningless. His own life was meaningless, and every human and animal life was meaningless.” Parfit explained, “I got increasingly disturbed and alarmed by the number of good philosophers who just assumed that there couldn’t be any normative truths.”

In the final decades of his life, Parfit was consumed by the fact that other very smart philosophers could not see his points and still disagreed with him. He revealed, “I am deeply worried by disagreements with people who seem as likely as I am to be getting things right.” Edmonds explains, “Parfit came to believe that dissent about ethics—especially dissent between leading philosophers—was evidence for its relativism. And he thought that relativism essentially collapsed into nihilism…. For Parfit, the thought that moral values might be merely something we project onto the world caused almost existential anguish. If moral values were relative, then we must conclude, he believed, that almost everything in his life was pointless…. Parfit needed his morality to be anchored in bedrock. There had to be an objective reason to relieve from suffering someone who is needlessly in pain…. It is not mere opinion. It is to do with our relationship to the world.”

Parfit also had a unique perspective on death. Upon a friend’s wife’s death, Parfit tried to console him, “When I think of someone dead whom I loved, it helps me to remember that this person isn’t less real because she isn’t real now, just as people far away aren’t less real because they aren’t real here.” Much of his philosophy was focussed on the nature of persons, the individual, and the continuity of personality. Parfit reassured himself, “I find it very comforting to think that all [death] means is that there will be no future person who is related to me in a certain way.” Finally, Parfit explained, “My life is my work. I believe I have found good reasons for believing that values aren’t just subjective and that some things really do matter. If my arguments don’t succeed, my life has been wasted.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Ezekiel” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter does not mince words. “Ezekiel is surely the strangest of all the prophets.” Next, he gives a little background. “He was a Jerusalem priest, in all likelihood part of the group of an exiled elite that was deported to Babylonia with King Jehoiachin in 597 B.C.E., a decade before the destruction of Jerusalem and the more general exile. His entire activity as a prophet took place in Babylonia.” Ezekiel’s prophecies reflect his vocation in the priesthood. “Ezekiel often exhibits distinctively priestly concerns—with purity and impurity, with the Temple and architectural configurations, and with the regimen of sacrifices. But what most distinguishes Ezekiel is that so much of his prophesying is conducted in a condition that looks like God-intoxicated derangement…. His power as a prophet stems from the hallucinatory vividness and utter originality of his visions.”

In Ezekiel 1:4, Ezekiel seems to see an image of God. Alter explains the uniqueness of Ezekiel’s specific prophecy, “a storm wind was coming from the north, a great cloud, and fire flashing, and radiance all round it…. God reveals himself in fire and lightning and cloud…. It combines the pyrotechnic paraphernalia of divine revelation with imagery evidently borrowed from sundry Mesopotamian sources—the wheeled throne, the four faces of the creatures like the four faces of the Babylonian god Marduk, the iconic animals…. It is visibly poetic prose…. The words do not scan as poetry, yet some of the diction is poetic…. Ezekiel has devised a prophetic prose-poetry that has scant precedents.” Alter then details, in Ezekiel 1:28, exactly how unique this vision is, “the look of fire with radiance all round. Like the look of the rainbow that is in the clouds on a day of rain, this was the look of the radiance all round, the look of the likeness of the glory of the Lord…. Never before in biblical literature has God’s “glory,” kavod, been given such visual realization.”

Alter gives a little historical background and a linguistic lesson in Ezekiel 3:15, “Tel Abib. Though this looks like a Hebrew name, “mound of the sprouting season,” and modern-day Tel Aviv drew the name from here, it is actually Akkadian and means “mound of the flood.”” Ezekiel often repeated himself. In Ezekiel 7:4, Alter relates one such echo, “you shall know that I am the Lord. This is a virtual refrain in Ezekiel. The idea behind it is that until now the people, pursuing its refractory ways, behaved as though YHWH did not exist, but as they bear the terrible punishment for their acts, they will be forced to recognize His existence and power.” Alter describes some more linguistics of note in Ezekiel 9:4, “trace a mark on the foreheads. The word for “mark,” taw, is the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In paleo-Hebrew script, the form of this letter was an X. The saving mark on the forehead recalls the mark that saves Cain from retribution.”

In Ezekiel 20:12, Alter details the history of the time period, “And My sabbaths, too, I gave to them to be a sign between Me and them. In the late monarchic period and on into the era of exile, there was an increasing emphasis on the centrality of the sabbath, as attested in passages in Jeremiah and Trito-Isaiah as well as in Ezekiel. The portability of the sabbath as a community-affirming observance may have made it especially appealing in a time when the Temple was no longer accessible.”

Alter is quick to point out a poetic flourish. In Ezekiel 26:16, he states, “They shall don shuddering. In a shrewd metaphorical move, the Tyrian princes, having shed all their finery, clothe themselves not in garments but in shudders.” In Ezekiel 27:11, Alter points out another bit of poetry—or, rather, lack there of, “Men of Arvad. One should note that Ezekiel readily slips from poetry—virtually required by the qinah, the lament form—into prose, with no real change in content. This is not a prophet who is entirely comfortable in verse.”

In Ezekiel 33:16, Alter describes a finer point of theology, “All his offenses that he committed shall not be recalled for him. In Ezekiel’s vision of divine justice, a person lives in a condition of constant existential choice: the wicked man can reverse the dire consequences of all his previous trespasses by deciding to do what is right, and the righteous man can cancel all the good effects of his acts of justice by sliding into acts of wickedness.” Alter also notes when previous books of the bible are referenced. In Ezekiel 36:10, it is Genesis, “I will multiply humankind upon you. The mountains have been shorn of human population by the devastating conquest. Now they will again abound with people. The verb “multiply” and the term for “humankind,” ‘adam, obliquely recall the Creation story: the national restoration is to be a second Genesis.”

Finally, Ezekiel spends the last few chapters of the book going through the minutia of a second Temple is mystifying detail. In Ezekiel 41:2, Alter helps break it down, “And the width of the entrance was ten cubits, and the supports of the entrance five cubits on each side. Most modern translations seek to impart coherence to this whole account of the layout of the Temple by choosing terms familiar in our own architecture—“vestibules,” ledges,” “porticoes,” and the like—and rearranging the tangled syntax. But, in fact, even if we knew the precise meaning of these architectural terms, which we do not, Ezekiel’s report of spatial entities and their dimensions is quit bewildering. The clarity, then, of the modern translation is illusory, and the present translation is meant to replicate the bewilderment conveyed in the Hebrew.”

“Writings on Philosophy and Language” by Johann Georg Hamann (translated by Kenneth Haynes)

Hamann is an esoteric writer. He peppers in obscure references to biblical passages and philosophical tracts on every page, sometimes even multiple times in one rambling sentence. He had to obfuscate cleverly to say what he wanted to say, to be able to bash the contemporary rationalizing trends of Frederick II, and to not get in trouble. Frederick II was, after all, the man who paid his keep. And Hamann would insist—not well. Therefore, he used allegory and subterfuge to hide his true meanings. Hamann toiled in relative obscurity compared to his friend, Johann Herder, and his most frequent sparring partner, Immanuel Kant. Nonetheless, he was known by some, in his time, as the Magus of the North.

Hamann’s writings are hidden with jewels for those inclined to suffer over the lines and dig them out. He wrote much on the origins of culture and, especially, language. “There must be similarities among all human languages based on the uniformity of our nature…. The natural mode of thinking has an influence on language…. The lineaments of a people’s language will therefore correspond with the orientation of its mode of thinking, which is revealed through the nature, form, laws, and customs of its speech as well as through its external culture and through a spectacle of public actions…. From this orientation of the mode of thinking arises the comparative wealth in some areas of the language and the poverty that runs parallel to it in other areas.”

Hamann was a pietist and a traditionalist. He despised the modern trends towards the primacy of reason cleft from culture. “The man to whom history (by virtue of its name) yields science, and philosophy knowledge, and poetry taste not only becomes eloquent himself but almost always the equal of the ancient orators…. Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race, as the garden is older than the ploughed field; painting, than writing; song, than declamation; parables, than logical deduction; barter, than commerce. A deeper sleep was the repose of our most distant ancestors, and their movement was a frenzied dance…. The senses and passions speak and understand nothing but images. All the wealth of human knowledge and happiness consists in images…. Is all your human reason anything other than tradition and inheritance, and is anything much involved in tracing the pedigree of your trite, bald, and twice dead opinions to the roots of the family tree?”

Tradition, for Hamann, was the wellspring of all morality. Free will was also a necessary condition of humanity. “Without the freedom to be evil there is no merit, and without the freedom to be good no responsibility for one’s own guilt, and indeed no knowledge of good and evil. Freedom is the maximum and minimum of all our natural powers as well as both the fundamental drive and the final goal of their entire orientation, evolution, and return…. Everyone is his own legislator but also the first-born and the neighbor of his subjects…. Without fire and hearth, one is no citizen; without land and people, no prince; and the priestly nation of a mere bookbag-religion is, according to the expression of Scripture, a reproach to God and to divine reason.”

Despite being a Christian preacher and bashing Moses Mendelssohn mercilessly, Hamann had immense respect for Jewish tradition and, especially, the Old Testament. “A philosopher and citizen of the world ought to value the most ancient document because it concerns the entire human race and also because Moses illuminates the human race’s true relationships to his people without selfish prejudices…. However favorable the most recent etymology of the word Adel [“nobility”] from an Arabic root may be to the European centaur-knighthood, the Jew nevertheless is still the authentic first nobleman of the entire human race, and the prejudice of their family and ancestral pride is grounded more deeply than all the titles in the ludicrous chancery style of heraldry.”

Finally, Hamann blends reason and faith into a true complete knowledge. “The spirit of observation and the spirit of prophecy are the wings of human genius. All that is present belongs to the domain of the former; all that is absent, the past and the future, belongs to the domain of the latter. Philosophical genius expresses its power through striving, by means of abstraction, to make what is present absent; it disrobes actual objects into naked concepts and merely conceivable attributes, into pure appearances and phenomena. Poetic genius expresses its power through transfiguring, by means of fiction, visions of the absent past and future into present representations. Criticism and politics resist the usurpations of both powers and ensure that they are balanced, through these positive forces and means of observation and prophecy…. Since the sum of the present is infinitely small as against the manifold aggregate of the absent, and since the spirit of prophecy is infinitely superior to the simple spirit of observation, it therefore follows that our faculty of knowledge depends on the many-headed modifications of the inmost, darkest, and deepest instincts of approbation and desire, to which it must be subject.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Jeremiah” (translated by Robert Alter)

In Alter’s introduction he points out a few traits that are unique about the Book of Jeremiah. First, Alter gets into a bit of history. “Of all the prophets, Jeremiah is the one who conveys to us the most vivid sense of the man behind the words…. Jeremiah, a priest from the town of Anathoth near Jerusalem who was active from the 620s B.C.E. until the destruction of the kingdom of Judah in 586, tells us a good deal about himself because of his continual anguish over his prophetic calling…. A century before the beginning of Jeremiah’s mission, the northern kingdom of Israel had been overwhelmed by Assyrian invaders. A large part of the population was deported to sundry locations elsewhere in the Assyrian empire…. The other major event that stamped a strong mark on Jeremiah’s prophecies was the sweeping religious reforms instigated by King Josiah beginning around 622 B.C.E…. The exclusive centralization of the cult was thus associated with Deuteronomy’s persistent preoccupation with backsliding into paganism and with the notion that the worship of strange gods would lead directly to national disaster and exile as punishment for the people’s failure to honor the covenant with its God…. All this is translated into Jeremiah’s central message…. So often Jeremiah’s prophecies are bitter denunciations of the people’s wayward behavior accompanied by dire predictions that this will lead to scorched earth for the kingdom of Judah and exile for its inhabitants…. This sort of message, delivered at a time when Babylonian forces (597 B.C.E. and again in 587-586) were besieging Jerusalem, could not have made Jeremiah a very popular figure.” Alter describes the language in the Book of Jeremiah specifically, “As a poet he does not exhibit a great deal of either the verbal virtuosity of Isaiah son of Amoz or the metaphoric brilliance of Second Isaiah…. Many of the poems use stereotypical phrases, and a considerable portion of the prophecies is delivered in prose.”

In Jeremiah 1:15, Alter relates what he sees as the deficient poetical style of this prophet, “each set his throne at the entrance of the gates of Jerusalem…. What emerges is a rather surrealistic picture of kings on their thrones sitting in siege against Jerusalem. It should be noted that many scholars, including the editors of the Biblia Hebraica, read all or most of the section beginning with verse 14 as poetry. To this translator, however, all these verses do not seem to be sufficiently tight metrically to qualify as verse; however, as is often the case with high-rhetorical prose, they exhibit loose approximations of the parallel structures of poetry.”

The Book of Jeremiah, like the Book of Deuteronomy, is focused on blasphemous and idolatrous acts more than worldly wrongs. Alter states of Jeremiah 2:34, “the lifeblood of the innocent poor. Remarkably, this is the very first reference in the book to a sin of perpetrating injustice rather than a cultic trespass.” The notion of exile first comes up in Jeremiah 5:19. Alter relates, “thus shall you serve strangers in a land that is not yours. Here the prophecy of exile—an immanent threat throughout Jeremiah’s career—is made explicit. Serving strangers is measure-for-measure retribution for serving alien gods.”

The issue of the worship of pagan gods is a theme that is returned to again and again. In Jeremiah 10:6, Alter points out, “Because none is like you, O LORD. In antithesis to the absurdity of idol worship, the prophet launches on a kind hymn to God’s greatness. The phrase “none like you, O LORD” echoes the “Who is like You among the gods, O LORD” of the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:11), but, significantly, “among the gods” is deleted because Jeremiah, at this relatively late moment, no longer imagines that there may be other, punier gods alongside YHWH.”

Alter kindly details random points of interest in his footnotes. In Jeremiah 10:11, “Thus shall you say to them. This entire verse is in Aramaic, being the only complete sentence in Aramaic in the Hebrew Bible apart from the Aramaic sections of Nehemiah and Daniel. There have been suggestions from Late Antiquity onward that Jeremiah is addressing the group of Judahites exiled to Babylonia in 597 B.C.E., who would have been constrained to speak Aramaic to their pagan captors.” Alter also describes translation decisions and his reasonings in his detailed notes. In Jeremiah 17:9, he reveals, “More crooked the heart than all things. While the adjective ‘aqov certainly suggests “deceitful,” as many translations reflect, the root meaning of “crooked” is worth preserving. This is an etymology of Jacob’s name, as the angry Esau reminds us in Genesis 27:36.” Alter also notes when the scripture holds greater historical significance. In Jeremiah 18:6, he relates, “like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in My hand. This entire sentence was imported for an impressive liturgical poem in the Yom Kippur service. The symbolic use of the potter harks back to the version of creation of humankind in Genesis 2, where God fashioned—the potter’s verb yatsar is used—the human creature from the soil.”

In Jeremiah 25:17, Alter describes an unusual occurrence in prophecy, “And I took the cup from the hand of the LORD. This is a bold and quite uncommon move: the metaphoric cup of wrath seems to become an actual cup that the prophet takes from God’s hand. Such quasiphysical proximity between God and prophet is altogether unusual. But since the cup is, after all, symbolic, the prophet’s taking it from the hand of the LORD finally must be understood as a purely figurative act, and that understanding is confirmed by his making the nations drink from it, an act that could not be literally performed.”

Finally, Alter notes a poetic exception from common biblical form in Jeremiah 50:25, “for the LORD of Armies has a task / in the land of the Chaldeans. This is a striking instance in which instead of the usual semantic parallelism in the second half of the line of poetry, a surprise is sprung. The word “task” in itself might seem innocuous, but when it is followed by “in the land of the Chaldeans,” and after the mention of weapons of wrath, the task turns out to be a grim mission of destruction throughout Babylonia.”

“The Skeptic Way- Outlines of Pyrrhonism” by Sextus Empiricus (translated by Benson Mates)

Sextus Empiricus was a Greek physician who lived in the second century A.D. He was a follower of Pyrrhonean Skepticism and wrote this treatise as a summary of Pyrrhonean thought. As for its influence, Mates claims, “The rediscovery and publication of these works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led directly to the skepticism of Montaigne, Gassendi, Descartes, Bayle, and other major figures.”

Empiricus begins on the fundamentals of truth. “Some people have claimed to have found the truth, others have asserted that it cannot be apprehended, and others are still searching…. The Skeptics continue to search…. As regards none of the things that we are about to say do we firmly maintain that matters are absolutely as stated, but in each instance we are simply reporting, like a chronicler, what now appears to be the case.” With that major caveat, which applies to his entire treatise, he goes on. “The Skeptic Way is called Zetetic [“questioning”] from its activity in questioning and inquiring, Ephectic [“suspensive”] from the pathos that arises concerning the subject of inquiry, Aporetic [“inclined to aporiai [the characteristic of being stumped]”] either as some say, from its being puzzled and questioning about everything or from its being at a loss as to whether to assent or dissent, and Pyrrohnean because it appears to us that Pyrrho applied himself to Skepticism more vigorously and conspicuously than his predecessors…. The Skeptic Way is a disposition to oppose phenomena and noumena to one another in any way whatever.”

The Skeptics had an ambivalent view on the concepts of the Good and the Bad. “The person who believes that something is by nature good or bad is constantly upset; when he does not possess the things that seem to be good, he thinks he is being tormented by things that are by nature bad, and he chases after the things he supposes to be good; then, when he gets these, he falls into still more torments because of irrational and immoderate exultation, and, fearing any change, he does absolutely everything in order not to lose the things that seem to him good. But the person who takes no position as to what is by nature good or bad neither avoids nor pursues intensely. As a result he achieves ataraxia [peace of mind]…. The [first] Skeptics were hoping to achieve ataraxia by resolving the anomaly of phenomena and noumena, and, being unable to do this, they suspended judgment. But then, by chance as it were, when they were suspending judgment the ataraxia followed, as a shadow follows the body. We do not suppose, of course, that the Skeptic is wholly untroubled, but we do say that he is troubled only by things that are unavoidable.” Later, Empiricus continues, “Thus the Skeptic, seeing so much anomaly in the matters at hand, suspends judgment as to whether by nature something is good or bad or, generally, ought or ought not be done…. He follows, without any belief, the ordinary course of life; for this reason he has no pathos one way or the other as regards matters of belief, while his pathe [feelings] in regard to things forced upon him are moderate. As a human being he has sensory pathe, but since he does not add to these the belief that what he experiences is by nature bad, his pathe are moderate…. He who supposes that something is by nature good or bad or, in general, ought or ought not be done, is upset in all sorts of ways…. From what has been said it is evident that there can be no such thing as an art of living.”

As regards to everyday wants, the Skeptics discovered the concept of marginal utility. “Things that are rare seem precious, but things that are familiar and easy to get do not. Indeed, if we thought of water as rare, how much more precious it would appear than all the things that do seem precious! And if we imagine gold simply scattered on the ground like stones, to whom do we think it would then be precious and worth hoarding away?”

The Skeptics spend a lot of time dealing with subjective appearances as opposed to the things in and of themselves, which they realize are impossible to comprehend independently. “For, as the Dogmatists say, the intellect does not of itself get in contact with external objects and receive phantasiai [sensory impressions] from them, but it does so by means of the senses; and the senses do not apprehend the external objects but only their own pathe, if anything. And so the phantasia will be of a sensory pathos, which is not the same thing as the external object…. And since this pathos differs from the external object, the phantasia will not be of the external object but of something different…. Nor again can one say that the soul apprehends the external objects by means of the sensory pathe because the pathe of the senses are similar to the external objects. For from whence will the intellect know whether the pathe of the senses are similar to the objects of sense…. The intellect, looking at the pathe of the senses but not having observed the external objects, will not know whether the pathe of the senses resemble the external objects.”

Empiricus does not put any weight in the mental gymnastics displayed by the Sophists and by apparent paradoxes. There is a simplicity to the Skeptic refutation. “If, therefore, when an argument is propounded in which the conclusion is false we know at once that because of having the false conclusion it is not true and sound, we shall not give our assent to it even though we may not know where the fallacy lies…. If the argument leads us to something unacceptable, it is not we who should give precipitate assent to the paradoxical result because of the plausibility of the argument, but it is the Dogmatists who should desist from an argument that forces them to assent to paradoxes, if indeed they have chosen, as they profess, to seek the truth and not indulge in silly talk like children…. If an argument is leading us to something generally considered paradoxical we shall not assent to the paradox because of the argument, but we shall avoid the argument because of the paradox.”

Finally, Empiricus concludes by returning to the art of living, the supposedly wise, and the restraints of reason on the pathe. “If one cannot come to possess the so-called “art of living” either by learning and teaching or by nature, that art so much vaunted by the philosophers cannot be discovered…. And just as one would not say that a eunuch has self-control with respect to sexual pleasures, nor that a person with a bad stomach has self-control with respect to the enjoyment of food (since for such things they have no craving that they can combat by means of self-control), in the same way one ought not say that the wise man has self-control if he has no natural pathos to restrain by his self-control…. For if he has an impulse toward something, he is certainly perturbed, and if he controls it with reason, he still has the bad in himself…. Thus, insofar as it is up to his prudence, the wise man does not acquire self-control, or if he does, he is the most unfortunate of all, so that the art of living has brought him no benefit but the greatest perturbation.”

“The Hebrew Bible: Isaiah” (translated by Robert Alter)

Alter makes the case that this book should be divided into three sections. “Isaiah son of Amoz, a Jerusalemite, began his career as a prophet in the 730s B.C.E…. Chapters 1-39 in the book that comes down to us incorporate the prophecies of Isaiah but also include much disparate material that is clearly later, some of it reflecting the imminent or actual fall of the Babylonian empire to the Persians in 539 B.C.E. Nothing from chapter 40 to the end of the book is the work of Isaiah son of Amoz. The strong scholarly consensus is that chapters 40-55 were composed by a prophet of the Babylonian exile, whose name is beyond recovery, prophesying a triumphant return of the exiles to Zion through the agency of the Persian emperor Cyrus…. The so-called Second Isaiah is followed by a Third Isaiah in what is now the last eleven chapters of the book. The situation presupposed in these chapters is the predicament of the community in the Persian province of Yehud, or Judah, after the rebuilding of the Temple, so the historical setting would have to be the fifth century B.C.E., although probably before the decisive mission of Ezra and Nehemiah in the middle of that century…. The claim that Third Isaiah is a disciple of Second Isaiah may be questioned because they are far too removed from each other in time—perhaps by as much as three generations.”

The bulk of the Book of Isaiah is written in verse. “It is above all the vehicle of poetry in all these prophets that demands close attention…. There are two reasons for the use of poetry, one theological and the other pragmatic. In most of these texts, the prophet represents himself as the mouthpiece of God’s words… and it is perfectly fitting that God should address Israel not in prose, which is closer to the language of everyday human intercourse, but in the elevated and impressive diction of poetry. The more pragmatic reason for the use of verse is that, as in all poetic systems, poetry is memorable in the technical sense…. All three of the principal poets in the Isaian corpus exhibit a good deal of technical virtuosity, and, of course, this will often not be visible in translation. Isaiah son of Amoz is particularly adept in thematically pointed wordplay…. Plays on words resist even approximation in English. More pervasively, in all of the Isaian poets, the expressive power of the line of biblical poetry, in which the second verset concretizes, intensifies, or focuses what is expressed in the first, is exploited with great resourcefulness.”

In Isaiah 1:3, Alter notes the book’s first use of the complementary versets, “the donkey its master’s stall. This line is a neat illustration of the pattern of focusing or concretization in the movement from the first verset to the second in biblical poetry. The first verset puts forth the general relation of beast to owner; the second verset (with metrical room for an additional word in the parallelism because the verb “knows” does double duty for both halves of the line and need not be repeated) then focuses on the place of nurture connecting beast and master.”

Alter stresses, in Isaiah 6:8, that God speaks through the prophet’s mouth, allowing him the authority to also speak in verse, “Here I am, send me. The obvious implication is that, the prophet’s lips having been cleansed, he is now ready to take up his mission. There is a linguistic note as well as a spiritual one in all of this: poetry, purportedly representing divine speech, is the prophet’s vehicle; now, with his lips purified, he is in a condition to utter this elevated and powerful form of speech.”

Throughout his footnotes, Alter also focuses on the aesthetics of the language. He calls out especially beautiful and powerful images in particular lines of verse. In Isaiah 9:1, he notes, “The people walking in darkness/ have seen a great light. This is one of the most arresting instances of antithetical parallelism in biblical poetry. The line is starkly simple yet haunting.”

In his commentary to Isaiah 24:1, Alter begins by making a historical conjecture and then continues to justify one of his translation choices, “The Lord is about to sap the earth and strip it…. These words mark the beginning of a new large unit that runs to the end of chapter 27. In the judgment of most scholars it is at the very least a century and a half later than Isaiah son of Amoz, but this prophet is also a strong poet…. In keeping with this prophet’s cosmic outlook, ‘erets here means “earth” rather than “land.” This is a poet who exhibits a vigorous inventiveness in emphatic sound-play. Thus, “sap” and “strip” in this translation are only a pale approximation of boqeq and bolqah in the Hebrew.”

Often, Alter explains the origins and history of particular words. In Isaiah 29:1, he gives a bit more background, “Ariel. Although the second verset makes it clear that this is an epithet for Jerusalem, wildly disparate proposals have been made for the etymology of the name. Perhaps the least strained is that it means “lion of God,” which is to say, not an ordinary lion but some sort of heraldic lion; and a good candidate for that would be the cherubs carved over the Ark of the Covenant, which are more or less winged lions. By synecdoche, then, this carved beast in the Temple might have become an epithet for the city in which the Temple stood.”

In Isaiah 37:24, Alter again combines his historical and poetic knowledge to give insight, “I will go up to the heights of the mountains/ the far reaches of Lebanon. Although Sennacherib’s campaign did include Phoenicia, here he is besieging Jerusalem. The mountains of Lebanon, however, are the proverbial loftiest heights in biblical poetry, and yarketey levanon, “the far reaches of Lebanon,” contains an echo of yarketey tsafon, “the far reaches of Tsafon,” the dwelling place of the gods. Sennacherib’s declaration at this point sounds rather like that of the overweening king of Babylonia brought down to Sheol in chapter 14, which may allude to the text here. The cutting down of lofty cedars also figures in chapter 14.”

Alter relates the suddenness with which Second Isaiah begins his prophecy in Isaiah 40:1, “Comfort, O comfort My people. The prophecies of Second Isaiah begin abruptly, with no introductory formula as “The word of the Lord came to me, saying.” If such introductory matter once existed, it would have been editorially deleted in order to encourage the perception that these prophecies are a direct continuation of what had preceded. Scholars have long puzzled over who is being addressed in the first verse…. Perhaps it is simplest to assume that those addressed are people in general, or even nations, enjoined to comfort Israel. In any event, the key word “comfort” at the very beginning of Second Isaiah sounds the great theme of Second Isaiah’s prophecies.”

One of Alter’s repeated themes in his commentaries is the gradual stress away from paganism and towards a devout monotheistic worldview in the biblical text. In Isaiah 40:12, he points out, “Who with his hand’s hollow has measured the waters. With this prophecy, soaring poetry becomes the vehicle to convey God’s magisterial role over all creation. It is perhaps at this point, most likely in the later sixth century B.C.E., that the universalist potential of biblical monotheism is fully realized.”

Much of the Book of Isaiah deals with the impact of the Babylonian exile and the quest to return. In Isaiah 42:14, Alter expands on the conundrums that must have been on the minds of many, “I have been silent a very long time,/ kept my peace, held Myself in check. These words answer a theological quandary that would have plagued the exiles: where is the God of Israel, why does He allow us to be reduced to this lowly state? What God says is that He has chosen to be silent and hold back, but that moment is now past. like a woman in labor now I shriek. This simile marks the startling transition from God’s silence and self-occultation to the moment when a new era is born, with birth pangs like a human birth.”

In Isaiah 43:19, Alter points out another cyclical theme in the Bible, “I will make a way in the desert. The great highway in the desert that God will lay down for the return from exile is a symmetrical antithesis to the “way in the sea” (v. 16) He made for Israel in its first liberation from servitude. History is thus seen in a pattern of cyclical recurrences, with differences.”

Again, in Isaiah 48:1, Alter combines his knowledge of history and poetic structure to make a comment as to the prophetic word choices, “house of Jacob/ who are called by the name of Israel. Although it is a regular procedure in poetic parallelism to use “Jacob” (the primary term) in the first verset and “Israel” (the name to which “Jacob” was changed) in the second verset, the wording here looks as if it may be a gloss on the two names. Formerly “Israel” designated the northern kingdom, but since that kingdom was destroyed, the name has been attached to the Judahites as well, who now constitute the entire people. This adoption of the national name is further explained by the third verset, “who came out from Judah’s womb.””

In Isaiah 56:1, Alter makes the case that the section of Third Isaiah has begun, “Keep justice and do righteousness. This moral exhortation, coupled with the urging to observe the sabbath in the next verse, strikes a new note in the Isaiah collection, one that some commentators have characterized as “sermonic.” It is the strong consensus of biblical scholarship, with only a few dissenters, that Isaiah 56-66 is a later composition than Isaiah 40-55, and almost certainly the work of more than one prophet…. The probable period for these prophecies is the early decades of the fifth century B.C.E., before the arrival from Babylonia of Ezra and Nehemiah.”

Alter explains the significance of a repetition in Isaiah 60:7, which a casual reader might easily miss, “the house of My splendor I will make splendid. This is not a redundancy. The Temple by rights is the house of God’s splendor, but only when it is completely rebuilt and grandly refurbished will it achieve its status as the house of God’s splendor.”

In Isaiah 63:1, Alter describes the monotheistic God, once again still personified with semi-pagan attributes, “Who is this coming from Edom,/ in ensanguined garments from Bosra? The first six verses of this chapter are the most vivid—and grisly—representation in biblical poetry of YHWH as a warrior-god. The image of God trampling the vineyard would be picked up in the Book of Revelation.”

Finally, Alter reminds us of the envelope form so often used in the Bible, this time in Isaiah 66:13, “As a man whose mother comforts him,/ so I Myself will comfort you,/ and you shall be comforted in Jerusalem. The triple insistence on this verb, following “her comforting breast” is an excellent allusion to the comforting, “Comfort. O comfort My people,” at the beginning of chapter 40, bringing all of 40-66 to closure in an envelope structure.”