Studies on the reception history of the Bible demonstrate how the same text could be constantly re-coded by Jewish and Christian communities as they interacted with the text, established its meaning, and filled in its gaps. Typ ically, sacred texts have been used as guides for moral behavior, but also to understand a community’s own place in sacred history or to express a longing to transcend theconditions imposed on man in this world (Perrin and Stuckenbruck (eds.), Four Kingdom Motifs). Few, if any, biblical books are used and reproduced as often as Psalms (Hjälm, “Transposed and Thriving”). Psalms are essentially adaptable in their nature in the sense that they, as poetry, aim to “[evoke] a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response”.
nsomebodyelse’s experience. Not all works seem to have this quality, at least not to the same extent. The quality of a piece of literature is admittedly difficult to pin down as it depends onseveral agents (text, author, reader), all embedded in their specific contexts and traditions. Yet, regardless of what a text “really is” and why one work is regarded as “better” than others and by whomsuchjudgmentismade,thefact is that only some works reach the status of classical texts and earn the chance to be actively used and passed on from generation to generation. In classical works, the observer encounters a timeless present, which overcomeshistorical distance,7somethingdeeplyhuman,whichmakestimecollapseorisperceived as transcending it. In his discussion of the Gadamerian concept of the classi cal, Masiiwa Ragies Gunda argues that “what keeps classic texts relevant and alive is their ability to consistently be different as they encounter different sit uations.”8 The best, or only way, to examine this inherent aspect of a text, is reception history, i.e., the study of how various communities and individuals have interpreted and used a given text through the ages. Aspsalmsareclassifiedaspoetry(where meaning is projected through iden tification) and have reached the status of classical texts(where different people easily read themselves into the text), we should expect that they have been interpreted in a variety of ways.
While our knowledge of patristic inter pretations of the Bible is rather advanced, the Eastern reception of the Bible in medievaltimes,especiallytextswritteninlanguagesotherthanGreek,ismuch less well known. Thus, besides a few, mostly Greek, patristic texts, this paper includes two unedited commentaries written in Arabic for Arabic-speaking Christian communities:onebytheEastSyriacpolymathIbnal-Ṭayyib(Ar.Abū al-Faraǧ ʿAbdallāh ibn al-Ṭayyib; d. 1043), and the second by the Rūm Ortho dox (Melkite) writer ʿAbdallāh ibn al-Faḍl ibn ʿAbdallāh al-Muṭrān al-Anṭākī, another preeminent theologian roughly contemporary with Ibn al-Ṭayyib. We will also have a look at the rubrics in a running Psalm translation associ ated with Ḥafṣ ibn Albar, an Andalusi translator from Latin to Arabic (ninth tenth c.), and briefly mention some Syriac and Judeo-Arabic interpretations. ByincludingEasterntraditions, this paperaimsatcomplementingtheseminal study by SusanGillingham onthemainlyWesternreception of this psalm (see below) (See Gillingham, “Reception.” A version of the paper is published by her in “Jewish and Christian Approaches.” For astudyonPsalm137whichincludesseveralexamplesof mod ern reception, see Versluis, “‘Knock the Little Bastards’ Brains Out’”; and de Wit, “‘Your Little Ones against the Rock!’”).
Origen applied to Psalm 137 a partly “psychological” interpretation. Most ingeniously, by applying this strategy he was able to dismantle the immoral sentence that describes as blessed he who dashes infants’ scull against a stone. The infants are confused, sinful thoughts (cf. Babel = confused) caused by evil that need to be eradicated from the mind while they are still only picking at one’s consciousness and dashed against “the rock, which is Christ.”
Daniel of Ṣalaḥ, who was active in the sixth century Syria stated (my translation): He, then, who “takes your little ones and dash them against the rock,” is the one who kills and destroys the sinful seeds he gives birth to in his soul and by Christ the rock suffocates his “children of evil.” This person is blessed, by the help of our Lord.
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