The “Documentary Hypothesis” mentioned in today’s entry on The Torah attributes the first five books of the Hebrew Bible to five authors. The Yahwist or “J” writer (“Yahweh” is the primary name used for God in this strand of the Bible) who wrote the earliest work on which the Hebrew Bible is based around 900 BCE, the Elohist or “E” writer (“Elohim” is a plural name for God also used in the Hebrew Bible), “P” for the Priestly Author (or authors) who wrote Leviticus, “D” for the author (or authors) of Deuteronomy and finally “R” for the Redactor who gave the work a final edit around 400 BCE. The most famous of these authors is undoubtedly the “J” writer. (The “Yahwist” is known as the “J” writer because the Documentary Hypothesis was given its final form by the 19th-century German scholar Julius Wellhausen, and “Yahweh” is “Jahweh” in German.) Scholars believe that the Book of J is the lost source (or “ür-book”) upon which the rest of the Hebrew Bible is based.

The Book of J was popularized by the Yale University professor and literary critic Harold Bloom in his 1990 book of the same name. The book included a reconstructed “Book of J” in English by David Rosenberg, along with Bloom’s commentary. The notion that there ever existed an early source for the Hebrew Bible was controversial enough, but Bloom didn’t stop there. He rated the Book of J with Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s King Lear and Tolstoy’s novels as a work of comparable sublimity, but refused to give it any special status. As he put it, “the distinction between sacred and secular texts results from social and political decisions, and thus is not a literary distinction at all.” Furthermore, Bloom proposed that the Yahwist was probably a woman, in face, a princess in the line of King David.

Bloom’s work has been widely criticized, but remains a fascinating approach to this ancient text. More than anything else, he deserves credit for rejecting the notion that there is anything “divine” about the Bible while elevating one strand of that book, and one of its authors, to the pantheon of creative fiction. However, Bloom has achieved this by reconstructing the Book of J, of which no copy exists, and commenting on the reconstruction. The strongest case for the Bible as a great literary work in its current form has been put by Robert Alter, who has produced his own version of the Five Books of Moses and edited an influential collection of essays called The Literary Guide to the Bible. Compare his arguments with Bloom’s book and see what you think…

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A new edition of The Intellectual Devotional, this time with a focus on American History, is now available in stores. (Click here to order your copy.) As well as continuing to expand on posts from the General Edition, “The Devoted Intellect” blog will introduce and expand on material from the American History devotional. Today’s entry on “John Singleton Copley” draws from the new book’s “Arts” section.

Though best known in his lifetime as the portrait artist of the Boston elite, John Singleton Copley’s most famous painting depicts a shark attack that occurred in Havana in 1749, all the more remarkable because Copley had never visited Havana and never seen a shark.

Copley’s painting depicts the rescue of Brooke Watson, who was a young orphan working on a trading vessel when the attack took place. He was repeatedly bitten by the same shark before being rescued, and his leg had to be amputated below the knee. It was rare to survive such traumatic episodes back in the eighteenth century, but Watson survived. In fact, Watson survived long enough to actually see Copley’s 1778 painting. Nor was he a poor trader at the time either. He had moved to London in 1759, become a successful trader, and eventually a Member of Parliament. (All of this after his early life in Cuba, trips to the American colonies before the Revolutionary War and forays into Canada.) Almost a decade after Copley’s painting was finished, Watson went on to his most prestigious post: in 1796, the man known to the world as a young orphan so near death in Copley’s painting served as Lord Mayor of London.

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A new edition of The Intellectual Devotional, this time with a focus on American History, is now available in stores. (Click here to order your copy.) As well as continuing to expand on posts from the General Edition, “The Devoted Intellect” blog will introduce and expand on material from the American History devotional. Today’s entry on “Anne Bradstreet” draws from the new book’s “Literature” section.

One of the oldest questions of philosophy is actually a matter that pertains more to religion: how can a just God allow bad things to happen to good people? By the mid-18th century, European Enlightenment thinkers reached for a simple but revolutionary answer. Tragedies befalling good people (like the horrific Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, which deeply influenced Enlightenment thinking) were simple proofs that a just God was simply a fiction who did not really exist. To this day, few are willing to accept this as a definitive answer. They continue to struggle with this question, a question widespread enough to earn it a special name: the question of theodicy.

Anne Bradstreet, America’s first English-language poet, had many occasions in her life to ponder the question of theodicy. She was a devoted wife best known for her poem “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” and a loving mother who penned some tender verses “Before the Birth of One of Her Children”. Yet she led a difficult life. Her three month voyage to the American colonies in 1630 was extremely arduous, and claimed many lives. Even after she arrived to the colonies, she was given tragic occasion to write a poem titled “Verses Upon the Burning of Our House.” It began with these lines:

In silent night when rest I took,
For sorrow near I did not look,
I waken’d was with thund’ring noise
And piteous shrieks of dreadful voice.
That fearful sound of “fire” and “fire,”
Let no man know is my Desire.
I starting up, the light did spy,
And to my God my heart did cry
To straighten me in my Distress
And not to leave me succourless.
Then coming out, behold a space
The flame consume my dwelling place.

Few would care to find themselves in Bradstreet’s position, and fewer still would respond as she did:

And when I could no longer look,
I blest his grace that gave and took,
That laid my goods now in the dust.
Yea, so it was, and so ’twas just.
It was his own; it was not mine.
Far be it that I should repine,
He might of all justly bereft
But yet sufficient for us left.

She may have suffered the loss of her home, but it, like all things, belonged to God and not to her. Many a philosopher had come to the same conclusion and theologians today return to this conclusion still. Few have been brave enough to state it in the face of their burning home.

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Pueblo peoples in the southwestern United States have preserved their rich cultural and religious heritage thanks, in large part, to their ancestors’ unwillingness to assimilate into Spanish Colonial culture.

The Spanish Crown founded the colony of Northern New Mexico in 1598, and, for the better part of a century, it enjoyed relative peace and prosperity. Much of resentment stemming from the repression of the Pueblo religion and the disruption of traditional economies was pacified by the Europeans’ introduction of advanced agricultural techniques and the military security they provided against raiding by neighboring Apache and Navajo tribes. Earlier examples of Spanish brutalities committed against Native Americans no doubt also played their part in Pueblo tolerance of foreign rule.

However, the 1670s saw a wave of drought and famine (and a consequent drop in the efficacy of colonial security) which destabilized the uneasy accommodation the Pueblo peoples had made with the Christian God. They began to return to the practices still preserved by their medicine men to the great displeasure of the Catholic clergy, who, in 1675, convinced the colonial government to imprison 47 Pueblo religious leaders and execute several of them.

One of the imprisoned medicine men, known to history as Popé, undertook the political organization of the Pueblo civilization upon his release. On August 10, 1680, he organized an general uprising from his base in the Taos Pueblo, ultimately ejecting the Spanish from all of New Mexico. Popé ruled as governor of the Pueblo peoples from the old colonial palace at Santa Fe for eight years; many of his initiatives were directed at excising the presence of anything Catholic or European from his domain, including the eradication of all Christian religious imagery and compulsory divorce without prospect of reunification for all those who had married in a church.

After Popé’s death in 1688, the numerous Pueblo settlements and communities (among which there were no fewer than six discreet languages) squabbled over the allotment of political power. Following yet another cycle of drought and nomadic incursion, the stage was set for the Spanish reconquest of New Mexico in 1692. As was to be expected, there were reprisals; more significantly, the new colonial government adopted a far less meddlesome policy than before as concerned Pueblo lands, custom, and religion, even going so far as to set up a system for Pueblo legal representation in Spanish courts.

Surprisingly, this policy, which aided in the preservation and transmission of traditional culture, was maintained when the United States annexed New Mexico following the Mexican War (1846–48). In an effort to cast doubt upon the legitimacy of the Mexican government, the US, usually notorious for its double-dealings with indigenous peoples, upheld all contracts made between Indians and the old Spanish colonial government in its new territories, thereby ensuring the Pueblo an measure of their patrimony uncommon for North American Indians.

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As 2008 dawns across the Seine, the café-goers of Gay Paris are being asked—well, compelled—to stub out their cigarettes. Although France does not have the highest percentage of smokers in Europe, the cigarette remains something of a French national icon: the ban indicates just how strong anti-smoking sentiment reads on the global barometer these days.

However, before the hue and cry goes up along the rive gauche, before the young boulevardiers and aspiring philosophes loudly bewail the days of leurs ancêtres les Gauloises, they would do best to reread the old history books. Vigorous opposition to the use of tobacco is as old as smoking itself. Some of the early objections to smoking were based on what, today, might be called dubious medical theory; many more were based on Christian moral opposition to “the Devil’s weed,” which was associated with pagan American Indian religious rituals.

King James I of England was a notorious enemy of the habit (and its earliest promoter, Sir Walter Raleigh), so much so that he wrote a treatise entitled “A Counterblaste to Tobacco” where he calls smoking:

“[a] custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.”

However, the English Crown was by no means the most extreme adversary of tobacco—England was the major beneficiary of the new trade and rhetorical denunciation does not have the force of law. Pope Urban VIII, who is probably most renowned for his condemnation of Galileo’s heliocentric world-view, published a 1624 papal bull forbidding the consumption of tobacco under threat of excommunication (on that the grounds that it provoked sneezing, which, as we are all aware, leads to sensations dangerously close to sexual ecstasy). In Turkey and Russia, smoking was a capital offense, though, to be just, it should be noted that the Czar only executed repeat offenders.

Ultimately, the economic power of tobacco, one of the first true “cash crops,” was too great a phenomenon for early Modern guardians of public morality to overcome. Smoking and the taking of snuff became requisite activities, complete with handsomely made accessories, for the gentleman of good breeding. Indeed, it could be hazarded that it was precisely the connotations of over-abundant wealth and devil-may-care irreverence associated with tobacco that infused it with so much of its original allure.

Over the course of the next three centuries, the fortunes of the anti-smoking movement waxed and waned, but it was mostly a losing battle. Only in the last few decades have damning, incontrovertible medical findings brought the wheel around again, to the consternation of tobacco’s devotees, French and otherwise.

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Robert Hughes, the great Australian art critic whose criticism spans from Lascaux to Lichtenstein, suggested an interesting theory about cave paintings in an article in Time Magazine about the Avignon cave paintings on the occasion of their discovery in 1995. Visual art, he mentioned, is generally agreed to have been created about 40 thousand years ago. That is, art was created just as Cro-Magnon man migrated from the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East to Ice Age Europe. The migration spelled the end of the current inhabitants of that continent – the Neanderthals – and the cave paintings provided a clue as to why: Cro-Magnon man was capable of associative thinking.

Compare the two skulls above. On the left is a Neanderthal skull, and on the right is a Cro-Magnon skull. There are numerous differences (as well as obvious similarities) but the one that concerns us is in the forehead, where the Cro-Magnon skull has much more room. This is where the frontal lobe is located, the part of the brain that manages our most complex functions: logical thinking, impulse control, judgment, language, memory, problem solving. It is here that the brain performs the operations that we call “associative thinking,” operations that Hughes saw as crucial to the production of art. As he put it in his article, “art, at its root, is association — the power to make one thing stand for and symbolize another, to create the agreements by which some marks on a surface denote, say, an animal, not just to the markmaker but to others.”

The Neanderthals did not have this power of associative thinking, and this is one of the many reasons why the Cro-Magnon species almost certainly drove them into extinction. In the battle for survival, abstract thought was the most powerful tool that natural selection had evolved yet. And even in its earliest appearance with Cro-Magnon man it was evident that abstract thought could be put to both peaceful use – as in the paintings on the walls of Lascaux – and destructive use – as in the now forgotten and lost history of the conflict and struggle that resulted in the extinction of Homo neanderthalis.

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In the early 1930′s, the American modernist poet Louis Zukofsky (who spent nearly his entire life working on a long poem simply entitled “a”) undertook an extremely daunting task. Along with his friend Jerry Reisman, he spent three years writing a screenplay for a film version of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce did not approve the script and it still hasn’t been published, so very little is known about it today. However, there is one thing we do know for certain. Zukofsky and Reisman knew exactly who they wanted to direct their screenplay and play the role of Leopold Bloom: Charlie Chaplin.

Joyce cannot have been too surprised with their choice; Chaplin was almost certainly an inspiration for Bloom. However, this particular allusion, and many others, has been largely overlooked because of all the energy devoted to uncovering Joyce’s allusions to Homer’s Odyssey. In his lectures on literature at Cornell University, Vladimir Nabokov (the author of one of the few 20th-century novels to rival Ulysses: Lolita) was very insistent about what a waste of time he thought the obsession with Joyce’s “Homeric” parallels was:

“That there is a very vague and very general Homeric echo of the theme of wanderings in Bloom’s case is obvious, as the title of the novel suggests, and there are a number of classical allusions among the many other allusions in the course of the books; but it would be a complete waste of time to look for close parallels in every character and every scene of the book. “

Nabokov is certainly right about this, but Joyce did spend quite a bit of time emphasizing the connections between his book and Homer’s epic. In a sketch he made of Leopold Bloom, for instance, Joyce inscribed the line of Greek verse – “Tell me Muse, of the man of many devices, who over many ways…” – that opens The Odyssey. But look closely at the sketch (below) and another influence on Leopold Bloom should be clear.

Chaplin is not mentioned directly anywhere in Ulysses, though he is described in Joyce’s prodigious Finnegans Wake in the following way: “toothbrush moustache and jawcrockeries, alias grinner through collar … , tar’s baggy slacks, obviously too roomy for him and springside boots.” This description is the key to Chaplin’s influence on Joyce. When Ulysses was published in 1922, Chaplin still hadn’t made his great sound films (or “talkies”) like The Great Dictator, Monsieur Verdoux or Limelight. So it wasn’t anything that Chaplin said that influenced Joyce. It was how Chaplin looked. Or, rather, it was the look of Chaplin’s greatest creation: The Tramp. It’s hard to ignore the connection once you’ve seen it. Black suit, moustache, a bowler hat on The Tramp and a felt slouch hat on Bloom. The media theorist Marshall McLuhan went so far as to name Bloom The Tramp’s “literary twin.” They may not be identical twins, but Bloom and The Tramp are fraternal at least.

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