The Early Prophets by Everett Fox
Some fine person—a publisher or reviewer—keeps putting publisher galleys of recently published books on the give-and-take shelf at the bakery. This book is the latest score. It is a translation of the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. You know, from The Bible. The book looks like a keeper.
The Bible, as currently incorporated, represents a declining resource for me. I never met a catechism or otherwise had to read or even believe the thing. I felt the point of a moral or spiritual compass, however, and tried to find the flint and tinder supposedly in the book. I mean in the way of a drifty teenager with willing reach. I read most of this bestseller but wow, when Paul shows up in Acts, I am done. Suddenly it becomes a pastille of inconsiderate certainty. You can have your New Testament. The darkness is of unobserved ignorance, blinders to the heart.
I’ve only started meddling with this new translation. It seems fresh and different. So many ancient texts exist, to explain or at least comfort our sense of existence. The Bible seems to have endured a steroid kiss that makes it perfect in its rebuke. It’s value, as with any other similar text, derives from personal moral testament, not how firmly rules can be made to enclose you.
The compelling stories have been co-opted by the rules committee. We can read The Epic of Gilgamesh as if it came from a curious intent. Fundamentalists have blown The Bible into a correctional institute. The mythic texture has been abandoned for Donald Trump certainty. Just as Donald Trump, the terrible tv show, shouldn’t be alive, neither should this bulwark of fear called King James Version, Ltd.
Fox seems to be on a rescue mission, and I’m for it. He has done his home work, if notes and commentary galore make the case. I aint finished the book but I got the sense that someone was thinking in the process of making it.
I say that because I hate The Bible by the weight it is currently wielded. Incontrovertible, my ass. At some point, thinking of the Trump horizon, we will need to respond to thinking. Emotion is a distracting gusset, enabling the lizard to pull the plough. We need a more thoughtful response to an ephemeral world. Anger hides fear. Behemoths called stranger, resource, death, worry our daily day. An angry trumpeting brings no cure. True word, it brings no cure.
The Bible brings nothing if no mind attaches thought. Fox has brought clarity, scholarship, and sensitivity to the undertaking. The Fearmonger For President has attached his graded face to the scared kid who can’t explain. Maybe this Joshua cat was just another pogrom, we shall see. Pogroms don’t work because survivours remember. I also believe they learn. I don’t care about a people, yours, theirs, or mine, I care about the world. That is to say, we are crowded together, beings of purpose, on a momentary world, and we need no fluffy designs of a ruling committee. The indications of the ancients aren’t cut and dried, they were wondering too. Wonder more, explain less, and look again at the fear.
Compassion is the useful tool, not the warded need for loud comfort. Followers of Trump are making their own angry Bible, not even mindful of where their fear really begins. Everett Fox brings these texts back to their vital roots, in freshened language and a directive to understand. Let us place a light on our earliest fears. Together, I mean.