Job 3:6-8 and Hermann Gunkel and Legends of Genesis and cursing

I want to take an important (for me) digression in this mini-essay because it has to do with why "professional" biblical studies never finally allured me. I say "finally," because I did get a Ph. D. in the subject, and I have spent years studying and writing on the Bible, but ever since I left Reed College in 1988, where I was a professor of religion and humanities, I never have gotten "paid" by the academy for teaching biblical studies. As with all my significant losses in life, I have't quite gotten over it.

Thinking About Cursing

My reading of the Hebrew text of Job 3:6-8 today brought back an experience and memory to freshness in my mind, a memory mixed, to be sure, with pain and pleasure. The trigger for the memory was the word "curse" that appears several times in Job 3. I noted that the Hebrew uses three words for curse: qalal (3:1); qabab (3:8); and arar (3:8). The third is the most frequent term used for cursing in the Hebrew Bible and the first is also fairly well-attested, but the second is sparsely used (12X). Qabab only occurs in Job (2X), Proverbs (2X) and the Balaam narrative in Numbers 22-24. When I realized this, I was plunged back in my mind to 1971. Let me tell you why and how. This will take a while, so bear with me.

In the Fall of 1971, my sophomore year at Brown, I took my first university biblical studies course. The professor solemnly announced on the first day of class that the "great" Gerhard von Rad had just died. During the course of the semester the "great" William Foxwell Albright would also die. I saw immediately that I was entering into a field with luminaries and distinguished characters and that the German philologists, historians and theologians, as well as English-speaking archaeologists, would cast a large shadow over the "shape" of the field.

I remember plunging into the Germans and reading with gusto Hermann Gunkel's Legends of Genesis. I don't think I really understood all of what he was trying to do, but I did catch the point Gunkel was making that the various stories of Genesis probably circulated independently, in rather small literary units, and were at home (they had "Ortsgebundenheit") in a variety of social settings of the people of Israel. "Creative" thinkers influenced by this germanic mode of biblical interpretation would then divide the books of the bible into various "forms" of expression and then posit a "home" for each of the forms. Was its "home" in the "cult" (the worship of ancient Israel)? the "schools of the prophets"? a "wisdom circle"? the life of the royal court? simple village life? My imagination was stirred as I began to imagine the variety of loci where various of the biblical stories might have found their original homes. Then, through a second imaginative exercise I could begin to imagine how varioius units of text coagulated with each other to form the present text. Usually this was said to have happened in the "exilic" period, as if the time between 587-539 B.C.E. became a great dumping ground or, to switch metaphors, an artists' atelier, where the text came together.

Emotins

I distinctly remember an incredibly complex jumble of emotions--joy, confusion, incredible desire--I felt upon reading Gunkel and upon diving into professional biblical studies. I was stirred by thinking that this rather "flat" text before me really had "texture;" that is, it had tremedous dimensions of historical depth which I had not even considered. I suppose I was, even at the tender age of 19, already convinced of the layers of psychological depth of the Scriptures, but I never could have imagined how grasping historical levels of a text would exhilarate me. To this day I have a near-photographic memory for dates and events, and I have spent more than one evening running a century through my mind, pausing on each year to recreate significant events of that century in World (mostly Western, I confess) history, trying to recreate that century in my mind's eye. That is, I was a historian in nuce in 1971; I was a historian (or, if you are a snob, "an historian") without knowing it, and Gunkel had lit a fire deep within me that would never be put out. Paraphrasing Jacob of old, I said, surely "history was in this place and I knew it not."

Thus, freezing time in the Fall of 1971, I realized that the Bible, for my purposes, was an incredibly deep book. It had spiritual depth to it. I was already convinced of this. It had remarkable psychological insight which I was just discovering. Now I was learning that it had many historical layers. It was as if I was enchanted by the book, struck into some kind of Bacchic trance by the multiple levels at which I could read this sacred tome. That is why I spent the next decade mastering the Bible. I felt that there was no task more worthy of my attention than that.

The Promise Shatters

But then, things changed for me. And, I realized afresh how much they changed for me this very morning, as soon as I read Job 3:8. Why that is the case is the subject of the next mini-essay.