Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou read'st black where I read white. — William Blake
How did they come up with that screwball set of answers in the previous chapter — Joan of Arc married to Noah, of the flood story; Harry Potter as a biblical character; Sodom and Gomorrah husband and wife?
A thousand responses jostle the learned tomes on my shelf, as well as the less erudite ones. Since this is not a history of persecution, but rather an exposé of a particular facet of religious terrorism, I reached for an especially lurid gloss on Genesis 19 because it is early, and influential. I found it some years ago among the
remains of my grandfather's library: An Exposition of the Old and New Testament: Wherein Each Chapter Is Summed Up In Its Contents; The Sacred Text Inserted At Large, In Distinct Paragraphs; Each Paragraph Reduced To Its Proper Heads; The Sense Given, And Largely Illustrated; with Practical Remarks and Observations By Matthew Henry.
The Reverend Matthew Henry (1662-1714) was a Presbyterian minister in England whose six-volume Commentary, as the work is called, has remained influential among Protestants since its original publication in 1708-1710. We learn from Wikipedia that "several abbreviated editions of the Commentary were published in the twentieth century," along with a recent version in modern English brought out by the conservative publisher Zondervan in 2010. Various sections of Henry's Commentary are also online.
Before we dip into his exposition, however, let us recall that when Matthew Henry wrote, the world was thought to be some 6,000 years old; his knowledge of Hebrew appears nil; and anyone who digressed from religious orthodoxy risked not only reputation and livelihood, but life and limb as well -- even in "enlightened" England.
The Reverend Henry's opening comments echo the arrogant assurance of those late Christian terrorists, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson: "Lot sat in the gate of Sodom at even; when the rest, it is likely, were tippling and drinking, he sat alone, waiting for an opportunity to do good." This, of course, is embellishment of a piously naive sort: there is no hint in the English text, nor the Hebrew, of consumption of alcohol in Sodom.
Nor is there any suggestion that Lot, like a veteran Boy Scout, was itching to perform good deeds. Since the biblical account is so maddeningly incongruous, however, it's understandable that Matthew Henry, like many others, felt the urge to imagine details not supplied by the author, and to comment on them as though each one were verifiable fact. In so doing, he segued from theology to literary criticism. To be sure, he was a narrow, homespun critic, and an inaccurate one: he fails to mention that, at the end of the chapter, it's Lot who has "tippled" -- in fact, he is dead drunk on wine given him by his daughters, and we know what took place in that dark, horny cave where they sojourned in pornographic family ecstasy.
The Reverend Henry engaged, nevertheless, in the art of criticism, whose best functions are to explore a text with the aim of elucidating it, and to start a conversation with the reader. Since the Bible is a work of literature, any commentary that considers the aesthetics of the biblical text is, by definition, literary criticism. (Among the many non-literary approaches are theological, linguistic, and historical criticism.)
Lot, like most other characters in the Bible, exists only in the words and sentences that describe him, and in the dialogue put into his mouth by whoever wrote the text. No historical proof hints that such a man as Lot ever lived, or that his story is based on anyone who did. Nor was there a flesh-and-blood wife. No nubile daughters, no visiting angels except in the imagination of an ancient Hebrew author, or authors, who wrote what, to present-day readers, resembles an apocalyptic short story with overtones of science fiction, and structured like a comedy. Outside of the biblical text, Lot and his family have no past, no future. They "live" on the same plane of imagination as Emma Bovary, David Copperfield, Scarlett O'Hara, Peter Pan...and yes, Harry Potter and Barbie. And yet, to countless readers who find the story of Lot's family so gripping, the plot and the characters vibrate in their minds. They would argue -- with guns, in some cases -- that these people occupied a particular time, and a definite space, in Palestine.
Back to the Reverend Matthew Henry. To preachers like him, drinking among the Sodomites, even "tippling," might be forgivable. The great sin of Sodom -- never. And while the Bible doesn't disambiguate the sin, sermonizers have no doubts: "It was the most unnatural and abominable wickedness that they were now set upon, a sin that still bears their name, and is called Sodomy." Even as Matthew Henry was writing those lines in London, "Lord Chief Justice Colt ordered the execution of four sodomites at Maidstone, Kent, assizes. In 1707 there was a veritable pogrom. Eight or nine members of the Society for the Reformation of Manners set about the systematic entrapment of homosexuals, and in October 1707 at least eight gay men were convicted on the basis of their [i.e., the Society’s] evidence." 1
These instances, and many like them, no doubt fueled Henry's puritanical outrage as he railed against the Sodomites: "They were carried headlong by those vile affections, which are worse than brutish, and the eternal reproach of the human nature, and which cannot be thought of without horror, by those that have the least spark of virtue. Those that allow themselves in unnatural uncleanness, are marked for the vengeance of eternal fire."
The tone of Henry's commentary on Genesis 19 remains the same throughout, and his interpretations, like his prose, are much of a muchness. Perhaps the real surprise in his writing is how contemporary it sounds. Anyone who has endured a fundamentalist sermon, or stumbled on one while channel surfing, will recognize the smug piety, the wailing rhetoric of condemnation, and the bloodcurdling joylessness of the puritan soul. ("The puritan is such a one," the London lawyer John Manningham wrote in 1602, "as loves God with all his soul, but hates his neighbour with all his heart.") 2
How different is our time from Matthew Henry's England, even knowing, as we do, that the world has existed not for 6,000 years, but for billions? One wonders why that stalwart interpreter did not study at least the rudiments of Hebrew and Greek, the biblical languages. Although he did not attend university, his father provided a good education, and in London at that time an aspiring scholar might well have found a learned clergyman to tutor him in the ancient tongues.
But who among present-day revilers knows a word of Hebrew? Could the late Pat Robertson, in his arrogance, have run the gamut from Alef to Bet? Imagine Rick Warren, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Tim LaHaye, Joel Osteen, the late Billy Graham, his son Franklin Graham, or their legions of sanctimonious scolds explicating Genesis 19:5, pointing out to a grammar-starved audience that, in a Hebrew narrative sentence, the verb normally comes first, or at least near the beginning, as, for example: "Vayikre'u el-Lot vayomru lo ayeh ha'anashim asher-ba'u eleycha halailah hotzi'em eleynu venede'ah otam."
That scenario is better left to Monty Python, as....A flashy chyron, with its 800 money number, crawls across the bottom of the TV screen from left to right as the megachurch preacher -- John Cleese, prim and tight and righteous -- lectures on Hebrew usage. "Do not use the jussive as a simple imperative! Send them out is imperative; Let them be sent out is jussive. What? No, no, not like the chyron! Hebrew goes from right to left. What? Well of course you speak it from left to right! It's only when you write that it goes the other way. (aside) You silly bugger, the verb comes first."
The verb does come first, but not that verb, not the verb "to know," which has caused all the trouble. It's the most controversial verb in the Bible, the one that has been endlessly argued about and fought over: the Hebrew verb "yadah," accented on the second syllable. In the transliterated Hebrew sentence above, the form of "yadah" used in Genesis 19:5 is "venede'ah," and, if translated literally into English, it would be more or less "so that we get to know them," or "let us find out who they are." The first verb in that sentence is "vayikre-u," meaning literally "they called out" [to Lot].
You could write a book about that one verb. I have limited myself to one chapter, which follows this one.
rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/molly2.htm
Nicholson, God's Secretaries, p. 124