Kushner - The grammar of God : a journey into the words and worlds of the Bible

Copyright 2015 by Aviya Kushner

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

S PIEGEL & G RAU and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

An earlier version of the chapter entitled Laughter was previously published under the title Im Not Crazy About That Part in A Public Space.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kushner, Aviya.

The grammar of God : a journey into the words and worlds of the Bible / Aviya Kushner.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-385-52082-9

eBook ISBN 978-0-679-64526-9

1. BibleCriticism, Textual. 2. BibleTranslating. 3. Kushner, AviyaReligious life. I. Title.

BS471.K87 2015

220.4dc23 2014033822

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

randomhousebooks.com

spiegelandgrau.com

Book design by Susan Turner adapted for eBook

Cover design: Eric White
Cover painting: William Strang, Adam and Eve (Roy Miles Fine Paintings/Bridgeman Images)

v3.1

For my mother and father

Grammar is a form of history.

D EREK W ALCOTT ,
What the Twilight Says

CONTENTS

How It All Began

In the hot August of 2002, when the world was still wobbling from the shock of the September 11 attacks, I drove to Iowa with a name in my pocket. I was about to start graduate school, and that scribbled name was the only guidance I had in the thousand-mile journey from New York. It reassured me as I drove past cities, flat fields, and the Mississippi River, then through miles and miles of tall corn. After years of devoting myself to poetry, I was about to start a graduate program in nonfiction writing. On the first day of classes, I went to find the teacher whose name I had been carrying, but I mistakenly arrived at the end of her class instead of at the beginning.

As I listened to the last five minutes of class from the hallway, I thought of a story I had been taught as a child. An old man was too poor to pay for school, so he climbed onto the roof of a yeshiva to learn the Torah. The man became the great sage Hillel, but as a student, he had no choice but to eavesdrop. For the first time I fully understood that Talmudic story. I realized it made no difference whether I was in the room or out of it. I understood that it did not matter whether I had come to Iowa to study non fiction or poetry, or that two poets had sent me to this particular teacher. It did not matter how old I was, or how tired I felt. All that mattered was that I continued to learn, in whatever way possible: in the hallway or on the rooftop, if that was what it took.

I did not feel like a traditional graduate student. Though I was only twenty-eight, I already felt a little old, a little weathered. I felt like an interloper in the safe plains of academia. I had just spent two years in Jerusalem, officially as a travel columnist and a financial journalist, but increasingly, as the second intifada raged on, I was asked to interview victims of the crossfire of history and belief and politics. I interviewed the brother of two teenage girls killed by a bomb in a dance club; I walked into poor neighborhoods and spoke with grieving grandmothers. As I traveled dutifully throughout a country in which tourists were then practically extinct, I narrowly escaped being bombed several times; on a few occasions, gunfire came far too close for comfort. Now and then, I traveled to Europe, exploring historys prior battlegrounds in Berlin, or walking Jews Street in London, writing stories the entire time. I thought I was done with being a student.

But by that hot August, after a year in which the entire world felt overturned, when the tallest buildings of New York crumbled and fell and became ash, I felt a deep desire for safety. And I wanted a second chance to read in the luxurious way a student can. I wanted time. Studying at the University of Iowa, a mecca for young writers with the oldest graduate writing program in the country, was a dream. That teacher I first heard in the hallway, listening and not seeing, was Marilynne Robinson. She usually taught the nineteenth-century writers who meant a great deal to herWhitman, Dickinson, Emerson, Thoreau, Melvilleand I enrolled in those courses. I did not expect that a year later, she would offer a class in the Bible, and that I would take it, too. This meant reading the Bible in Englishsomething I had never done; I had grown up in a Jewish community, reading it in Hebrew. In fact, reading the Christian Bible was widely considered taboo in the small religious town where I grew up.

The first semester focused on the Old Testament, the second on the New Testament. Though Marilynne, as all her students called her, was incredibly learned, I realized she did not have access to certain elements of the Biblea book she had spent decades withbecause she did not read the Bible in Hebrew. Only one of my classmates read Hebrew.

At first, when I seemed surprised or even shocked by what we read or discussed in class, my facial expressions would betray me, and Marilynne would ask: Why are you so surprised?

I would say, I would have to explain so much to you about Hebrew for you to understand why this translation is surprising.

Try.

I did. I took notes on what surprised me; and those notes became letters that eventually became essays. Eventually, those essays became my masters thesis. I figured that would be the end of it. But one day, when I went to discuss the progress of my thesis, Marilynne closed the door to her office.

There were a few tense seconds while she walked from the door to her chair. Then she sat down and said: This will be a book.