Northrop Frye's Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts (review)

Volume 13 of the Collected Works includes fourteen notebooks (eleven holograph notebooks and three sets of typed notes), most of them written in the 1970s when Frye was working out schemes for The Great Code (published in 1982). An entry in 'Notes 54-55' reads: 'I'm glad I'm not concerned with belief, but only with trying to understand a language.' Mapping the shape and symmetry of The Great Code, Frye is 'concerned' with the imaginative 'language' of the two-part Christian Bible: its recurrent imagery, its ups and downs, its types and antitypes, its ideal and demonic imagery, and so forth. At the same time, he is concerned with Hebrew, the original language of the Old Testament: 'I don't know how much Greek & Hebrew I'm going to have to pretend to know for [chapter] Four,' he writes in Notebook 21, alluding to The Great Code.

Another entry in Notebook 21 reads: 'Ernie Clark [Clarke] says that the accent in a phrase like "king's horse" shifts so as to make the phrase a new word - in other words even the pronunciation of Hebrew is metaphorical.' Ernest Clarke (1939-97), a colleague of Frye's at Victoria College, was a superb linguist whose Aramaic, Hebrew, and Syriac were flawless, I've been told. He was also an accomplished student of Rabbinics and a generous scholar. Instead of trying to conceal his own lack of Hebrew (and biblical scholarship in general), Frye might have consulted Clarke on the textual history of the Hebrew Bible and other Jewish writings, including the Apocrypha and the Greek Septuagint (LXX). Notebook 11c reads: 'Wisdom playing before God is an important medieval conception: I don't know what scholars say about the Hebrew text here' (see Proverbs 8: 31). Nor do I, but it would have been easy to find out.

According to Robert Denham: 'The Great Code derived ultimately from the course on the English Bible that Frye taught for some forty years before the book was published.' In 1981-82, twenty-four lectures on the Bible were transcribed, videotaped, and printed in teaching manuals; in volume 13 of the Collected Works they appear as 'Lectures on the Bible.' Frye informs his students at the University of Toronto: 'The Old Testament was of course written in Hebrew, except for a few passages in the later language Aramaic, which replaced Hebrew as a spoken language and was probably the language spoken by Jesus and his disciples. In Hebrew, only the consonants are written down, so that all the vowels are editorial. Therefore the establishing of the text of the Hebrew Bible took quite a long while, and was still going on in New Testament times.' Hebrew is consonantal (true) and vowels are editorial (true). 'Therefore [Frye concludes, as though achieving a standard text depended on vocalization] the establishing of the text of the Hebrew Bible ... was still going on' in the first century. Moreover, he continues, the Greek text of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint (LXX), translated by Jews around 200BCE, is 'in many respects older than the Hebrew text that we have, and sometimes preserves more primitive readings.' Frye must have presumed: (1) that there was no manuscript evidence for the Hebrew Bible itself; (2) that the Hebrew parent text of the Septuagint coincided with the text preserved in the Masoretic recension.

Like the moa, a flightless bird that resembled an ostrich, Frye's textual history of the Hebrew Bible was extinct by the time these lectures were recorded and transcribed. Hadn't he understood the importance of the (pre-Christian) Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered between 1947 and 1956, and translated into English by Geza Vermes in 1962? As Ernie Clarke could have told Frye, the text of the Hebrew Bible 'in the form in which we have it' (Frye's phrasing) is ancient. To quote Vermes...