Language is how we build bridges but is also one of the tools of oppression - used by local warlords over dominated populations, mumbled by migrants who struggle to keep safe in a world of words not their own.
The authors of the psalm chose to insert specific and unique words that must have made perfect sense to their poetic moment and yet have left many translators with puzzling options that they’ve tried their best to solve across the chasm of time, space and political realities.
Today’s psalm, another very famous poem that has been translated, composed and adapted to liturgical use in several religious settings both Jewish and Christian, opens up with the admission that language can be a barrier between people - and liberation is at times the only way to break free of its hold. The entire psalm becomes a playground for examining what liberty is about - national, ethnic, individual, linguistic, and spiritual. There are a few layers to every text and several ways to make sense of every poem -- and Psalm 114 has become a roadmap to navigating language towards its farthest shores.
This psalm is the second in the Hallel collection, popular in the Jewish tradition because it’s also part of the Passover Seder, and in Christian traditions because it’s often part of Vespers and of other liturgical moments such as funerals. It’s about the Exodus from Egypt, but also about the crossing of the Jordan into the Promised Land - two moments when bodies of water split to let history happen - nature responding to culture. And it includes images of nature shape shifting in response to the divine demand for human freedom and sovereignty -- hills dancing like cows, bodies of water split in two to enable human redemption.
It begins with a clear time stamp:
בְּצֵ֣את יִ֭שְׂרָאֵל מִמִּצְרָ֑יִם בֵּ֥ית יַ֝עֲקֹ֗ב מֵעַ֥ם לֹעֵֽז׃
When Israel went forth from Egypt,
the house of Jacob from a nation with foreign speech.
Ps. 114:1
Those last two words 'foreign speech’ are hotly contested between translators. The Hebrew ‘Ma’am Loez’ has been also rendered as ‘strange speech’, ‘foreign language’ or ‘barbarous-tongued folk’. This long one, by Alter, takes its cue from the Greek translation that imagined the Barbarians as those whose foreign speech was inteligible to them, just as the Hebrews in Egypt has to contend with Egyptian - not their own.
The Latin Vulgate translation follows forth - with a translation that would enter the Christian liturgy and echoed throughout Western culture:
“ In exitu Israel de Aegypto, domus Iacob de populo barbaro.”
Vulgate Bible
By choosing to insert the politically-specific ‘barbarians’ into this text about another civilization altogether, the translators already made a choice about casting this text not just about its original political context but also about the future and ongoing fantasies of struggles for liberation. It becomes a psalm about what actually happened once to the Hebrew and also a metaphor for what happens when political transitions happen with larger-than-life spectacles or individual liberation rocks one’s once-solid world.
It’s a psalm about the Exodus and its aftermath but the events are described as a curious question directed at the world and at nature itself:
מַה־לְּךָ֣ הַ֭יָּם כִּ֣י תָנ֑וּס הַ֝יַּרְדֵּ֗ן תִּסֹּ֥ב לְאָחֽוֹר׃ הֶ֭הָרִים תִּרְקְד֣וּ כְאֵילִ֑ים גְּ֝בָע֗וֹת כִּבְנֵי־צֹֽאן׃
What alarmed you, O sea, that you fled,
Jordan, that you ran backward,
mountains, that you skipped like rams,
hills, like sheep?
Ps. 114:4-6
The answer is, of course, divine might and glory. But many generations of scholars and sages sought a deeper way to understand what this and other poetic psalms may be about. What’s within this mythic hill-dance and emergence from barbarian reality that is resonant for every age?
Among them was the 14th century Italian poet and philosopher Dante Alighieri whose famous Divine Comedy is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.
Like many other devout Christians, Dante knew the Bible well and since these psalms were popular in many ritual settings - was quite familiar with psalm 114. He quoted the opening verse of this psalm in his famous work in the Latin with which he was familiar.
For Dante, as for many readers over the ages - the text was not just about the Exodus but about what it represents - an allegory for the departure from exile, the possibility of personal and/or public redemption.
He chose to use this praiseful psalm to explain his literary-philosophical method of allegorical thinking. This interpretive method, known as the "four-fold method" or the "allegory of theologians," was commonly applied to the Bible in the Middle Ages. It was also increasingly popular in Jewish methods of interpretation in which it would be known as the Pardes - how to enter and exit the orchard of wisdom - in peace.
It’s not exactly clear who was the originator of this four-layer method but let’s just say cross-cultural influences converged to co-create a fascinating way to make sense of our sacred texts in multi-layered ways that are still meaningful today despite different faiths and perspectives.
In 1319 Dante (most likely) wrote a lengthy letter to his patron Con Grande della Scala, with instructions on how to interpret the Paradiso, the last canticle of the Divine Comedy - dedicated to this wealthy patron:
“Now if we look at the letter alone, what is signified to us is the departure of the sons of Israel from Egypt during the time of Moses; if at the allegory, what is signified to us is our redemption through Christ; if at the moral sense, what is signified to us is the conversion of the soul from the sorrow and misery of sin to the state of grace; if at the anagogical, what is signified to us is the departure of the sanctified soul from bondage to the corruption of this world into the freedom of eternal glory. And although these mystical senses are called by various names, they may all be called allegorical, since they are all different from the literal or historical.”
With time, Dante’s use of this allegorical method would be framed as a simple formula:
The literal sense teaches what happened; The allegorical what you believe; The moral what you should do: The anagogical where you are going.
The Jewish mystical four-layer method called PARDES is the product of the same time as Dante’s, emerging out of Spain. And although the origins and influence of one another is indeed debated, the essence is that what we have here are a few brilliant tools with which to take apart what we’ve inherited and make meaning of myth, and hope out of history.
The emergence from the narrow-places of barbarian speech becomes the human yearning for self definition, emergence of selfhood and a defining voyage, in defiance of obstacles and even despite nature -- to become free, to become one’s very own.
And if we dance with hills along the path, and cross through water to come home?
Maybe this heroic journey through the ages is still waiting for each and every one of us to praise our way through four and many more directions to become who we’ve been waiting for, leaving the Barbarians behind, to arrive at our own inner home.
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