Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse: Becoming the Chosen People by Samantha Zacher (review)

At the heart of Samantha Zacher’s book on Old English Biblical verse is the claim that Anglo-Saxon authors intermingle Biblical, classical, and political backgrounds within their poems to produce ideological, adaptational translations of their sources appealing to contemporary concerns in Anglo-Saxon England. The introduction lays the foundation for the following chapters contextually and theoretically, weaving together traditional and innovative methods for examining Old English Biblical poetry. She situates Biblical verse among “a wide array of biblical media” (p. xiv)—including commentaries, histories, and visual arts—that “encompass larger metonymic fields of scriptural tradition” (p. 3). Especially significant to her interpretations is the view that English poets imagined “Israelites [as] deliberately chosen as imaginary ancestors—they represented an idealized past of which the Anglo-Saxons were meant to be the new actualization” (p. 16). Zacher demonstrates innovative interpretations beyond theological readings of the apophatic approach like the allegorical method so often championed by medievalists. Instead, she pulls together contexts like manuscripts, mythological and institutional origins, as well as inherited traditions from Latin Biblical poetry, reading Old English Old Testament poetry through a fresh lens, as part of wider cultural associations with political theology.

Each chapter of this book acts as a study of an individual poem as well as an addition to the cumulative argument that runs throughout. Zacher establishes that Exodus is directly indebted to Moses’s “Song of the Sea” as a key model. Within this framework, the poet links Biblical sources through sophisticated mnemonic techniques, explicated in Zacher’s own sophisticated unraveling of this “governing formal principle” within the poem (p. 64). Revolving around multivalent meanings of the Latin term arca, the Exodus poet’s appeal to ars memoria adds a layer of connective concepts that establishes a complex intertextual network within the poem. In Daniel, Zacher locates a model for the concept that she coins translatio electionis—the idea that the community of God’s chosen people on the post-Resurrection side of Christian history has expanded beyond the original Israelites. Furthermore, in this reading, the poet/narrator adopts the role of prophet parallel to that of Daniel: taking on translatio auctoritatis, he supersedes the biblical figure as “witness, interpreter, and transmitter” (p. 91) of the Biblical story as well as the new ideological function of Christian election woven into the retelling. Along with this interpretation, Zacher poses a series of claims engaging with and challenging Alistair Minnis’s and Rita Copeland’s models of authorship and authority focused mainly on late-medieval texts, in order to remind readers of developments in early medieval literature. In her final chapter on Judith, Zacher demonstrates the uses of looking beyond the Junius Manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11) to consider a wider perspective on Old English Biblical poetry more generally (for more on manuscript contexts and the need to look further afield, see pp. 6–9). Thus, in Judith, she identifies an expansion of the Anglo-Saxon political theology of election to ideologies of holy war and just war. Through an exaggerative rationale for war against enemies of God, and by emphasizing apocalyptic imagery, the Judith poet draws on a long tradition that lies at the heart of “Deuteronomic formulations of Holy War” in the Pentateuch (p. 136) and stretches through patristic commentaries to Anglo-Saxon authors working out the consequences of divine election.

The interpretations in this study largely rest on sustained examinations of key passages, emphasizing stylistic and rhetorical elements. Yet Zacher also deftly navigates between close reading and more general contexts, developing her own frameworks and charting them through the various chapters. Her multidisciplinary methodology especially allows this type of engagement, as she relies on traditional and theoretical means of approaching literature. As highlighted in a number of places, one key notion is flexibility: although there are many ways in which Anglo-Saxon poets might...