The Christian Hebraism of John Donne: Written with the Fingers of Man's Hand

ONE. Christian HebraismSources and Strategies

11 ONE Christian Hebraism Sources and Strategies [Philology] is precisely what the etymology of the word declares, “love of the word”: an appreciative attraction to verbal documents that seeks to understand their meaning, starting with the surface and penetrating to whatever depths are possible, but also alert to the fact that a given text comes from and is shaped by a specific time and place that usually is significantly different from that of the observer. —Siegfried Wenzel, “Reflections on (New) Philology” Reading the Biblical Text As one of the most prominent preachers of the early seventeenth century, John Donne was a participant in the intellectual and religious movement of Christian Hebraism in Reformation England. Hebraic scholarship asserted itself in the creation of the English Reformation Bibles—particularly the Geneva and the King James 12 The Christian Hebraism of John Donne versions1 —as well as in contemporary (Sidneian) psalm translations and sermons (such as those by Lancelot Andrewes).2 This was the period (extending until the outbreak of the English civil war) in which, as David Katz writes, “the interest of these early scholars was biblical alone” (“Abendana Brothers” 30), and this interest encouraged the creation of complex, multilingual systems of biblical and interpretive texts: the original source text, the Hebrew Bible, with its inimitable matrix of hermeneutic gaps; the Targum, the Aramaic interpretative translation of the Hebrew Bible, published (in the original and in Latin translation) in the sixteenth century Complutensian and (Royal) Antwerp Polyglots;3 the medieval Jewish exegetical sources consulted, for example, by the translators of the Geneva and King James Bibles; and the many dictionaries, biblical translations and commentaries —such as the Biblia Rabbinica (see fig. 1),4 Nicholas of Lyre’s Postillae Perpetuae, the Wycliffe and Coverdale Bibles, and John Minsheu’s Ductor in Linguas. There is no more fascinating paradigm of this Hebraic scholarship in England than the “King’s Great Matter,” the protracted annulment of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon during the years 1527–1533, which prefigures and encourages Christian Hebraism in its interconnected exegetical, religious and political aspects. Embroiled in this crisis, the “king-theologian,”5 as Guy Bedouelle writes, “chose to fight the battle in a different [not legal or ecclesiastical] arena, one in which theology and exegesis had a part to play” (22–23).6 The King did so by pitting the Levitical prohibition of marriage to a sister-in-law against the Deuteronomic obligation of a Levirate marriage; as William Tyndale summarizes in his 1530 tract The Practice of Prelates, these“ “two texts seem contrary, the one [Lev. 18:16] forbidding, the other [Deut. 25:5] commanding, a man to take his brother’s wife” (323–24). This contradiction seems apparent in Tyndale’s contemporary translation of the Pentateuch. For while Leviticus 18:16 reads: “Thou shalt not unheale [uncover] the secrettes of thy brothers Fig. 1. Biblia Rabbinica (1525), p. 14. Reproduced by permission of the National Library of Israel. 14 The Christian Hebraism of John Donne wife [eishet-aḥikha], for that is thy brothers [aḥikha] prevyte” (“Leviticus” xxxiii[r]), Deuteronomy 25:5 reads: “When brethren [ahim] dwell together and one of them dye and have no childe, the wyfe of the deed shall not be geven out unto a stranger: but hir brotherlawe [yevamah] shall goo in unto her and take her to wife and marie her [ve-yibmah]” (“Deuteronomye” xliii[v]). Yet Tyndale’s translations elide the semantic crux involving the opaque Hebrew biblical word ‫ם‬ ָ ‫ב‬ְ‫י‬ yevam, which could contextually be read as either “brother-in-law” or “kinsman;” this as a result of its juxtaposition to the Hebrew term aḥim, which can itself be explained as either “biological brothers” who naturally live together, or as the more general, alternative meaning of “kinsman, son of the same family or nation” (Even-Shoshan 1:43). This is readily evident in the various English biblical translations and commentaries (tables 3 and 4), as well as accurately set out in the Genevan scholia (see fig. 2), which note that “the Ebrewe worde [yevam] signifieth not the natural brother, and the worde, that signifieth a brother [ah], is taken also for a kinseman.” Indeed, this semantic confusion is highlighted by the lengthy explanation proposed by the medieval Jewish exegete Abraham Ibn Ezra, who draws on an intertextual reading of three books of the Hebrew Bible (containing the only...