Steiner’s Complaint : THE OLD TESTAMENT: King James Version Introduction by George Steiner; Everyman’s Library/Alfred A. Knopf: 1,382 pp., $35

The King James version of the Bible is everywhere. It is part of the furniture of hotel rooms all over the world, even in Asia, where it is usually in the same drawer with a collection of the sayings of Buddha. Why did Everyman’s Library need to republish the King James version of the Old Testament?

This edition is different because it begins with an introduction by George Steiner. The choice of Steiner to write this essay is striking and surprising. It is something of an editorial coup and a coup de thea^tre.

Steiner is an odd choice to introduce the avowedly Christian King James translation because he is not a biblical scholar and he is a Jew. In his essay, there is more than a hint of Steiner’s Jewish discomfort. He points out that the Old Testament is not the Hebrew Bible, even if all the words are the same. Steiner calls attention to the fact that the King James version translated crucial passages of the Hebrew Bible to make them foreshadow the New Testament account of Jesus. Thus, almah, which in classic Hebrew means “young woman,” appears in the King James version as “virgin.” Why, then, did the editors of the series ask Steiner to write this introduction?

Steiner is justly famous as a brilliant, and offbeat, essayist on literature and ideas. He was born in Central Europe, grew up in England and has become a prime interpreter of English literature. Nonetheless, despite his formidable learning, he has never held a permanent academic appointment. To the English he seems, despite his passionate love affair with their culture, to have remained a foreigner. His relationship to his Jewishness has been equally complex, reflecting the cross-pulls of love and stress. Steiner has surmounted this destiny of marginality by producing a body of work of gleaming, and even intimidating, intelligence. Perhaps he consoles himself with the knowledge that originals have almost never have easy lives.

The editor’s choice of Steiner is justified by the result. Though he is not a biblical scholar or a Hebraist, he has written the best short introduction to the Hebrew Bible, if not to “The Old Testament,” that I have ever read. The famous ornateness of Steiner’s manner of writing seems to blend in with the work that he is introducing. Steiner is always striving for a place in the great canon of writing in English, not too far away, so he seems to hope, from the acknowledged peaks: Shakespeare and the King James version of the Bible. There is something of that cadence, and imagery, at the end of his essay. He asserts that the Hebrew Bible is unique; he cannot imagine its being written by even the greatest of human authors.

“What I am unable to do is to arrive at any thought-image, however naive, at any impression of literary technique or rhetorical transport, however masterful, when confronting the author(s) of God’s speeches out of the whirlwind in Job, of much of the Qoheleth, of certain Psalms or of considerable portions of ‘Second Isaiah.’ The picture of some man or woman lunching, dining, after he or she had ‘invented’ and set down these and certain other biblical texts, leaves me, as it were, blinded and off balance. I find myself groping toward some notion of ‘a surrealism,’ of an order of inspiration and dominion over words for which we have no satisfactory analogy elsewhere or any altogether naturalistic explanation.”

Steiner completes this thought a few lines later by turning even more mystical: “ ‘Who is [it] that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?’ I am unable to account wholly rationally for the ways of the man or woman who put the question and who asks me where I was when ‘the morning stars sang together’ or whether ‘the rain hath a father?’ Perhaps this is as it should be. It is the Hebrew Bible, of all books, which most questions man.”

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But Steiner’s essay is a work of appreciation and not divine inspiration. It is subject to the dictum in the Talmud that the work of men can never be perfect. Steiner disclaims being a Hebraist and then goes on to talk about the language of several passages in the text of the Hebrew Bible. I am surprised that neither he nor his copy editors noticed that the Hebrew verb for “he entreated” is vayechal and not vechayel.

The central achievement of this essay is Steiner’s compressed and brilliant account of biblical literature. There are many insights. Commenting on the near sacrifice of Isaac, one of the central stories in Genesis, Steiner quotes Kant, who insisted that “None but an evil demon can ask a father to sacrifice his only son,” and Kierkegaard, who answered that “Only the true omnipotent God can ask the father to sacrifice his only son.” Steiner adds his own questions: Could Abraham ever forgive God for sending him on this journey and could Isaac ever forgive his father? The problem of the story remains very contemporary: “Since the Holocaust, Jewish thought has more than ever before circled around this one chapter in Genesis as around an unendurable but ardent emptiness.”

Steiner is even more Jewish in his paragraph on the book of Exodus: Yes, “Exodus empowers Israel, and the march of the Jewish slaves” toward “a promised land of freedom and national identity is archetypical for many people in the history of the West, but it remains the ultimate image of Jewish experience: Our history is still on that arduous traverse to Canaan.”

Moses, the hero of that story, “incarnates Judaism at its summit. . . . It is in Moses that the dizzying paradox of God’s choice of this people, of this people alone, for His special and terrifying attention, takes on its dialectic of proud suffering.”

Steiner admires Moses beyond all measure (Sigmund Freud shared this sentiment), even as he knows that the Jews did not give their greatest leader an easy time. On the contrary, whenever they had the choice, they elected his enemies, such as Korah and the rebellious elders, to office. Is this a metaphor for Steiner’s own life?

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Steiner emphasizes that the King James version is a translation in which the Hebrew and the Greek are inflected “to tell the story of Jesus.” It is thus “almost impossible” for a reader who is not a specialist to discern the Hebrew Bible “in its overwhelming autonomy and strangeness. The Hebrew Bible is as different from the Old Testament as is the desert of Judea from the baroque squares of Rome or the spires of Canterbury.”

So Steiner urges that we should, “for a moment,” read by the blinding, silent light of that desert. But is there no other light? Is Steiner merely trying to persuade the non-Jewish reader to lay aside all that he has learned about the Hebrew Bible from the Christian tradition, or is Steiner signaling some deep ambivalence of his own?

Steiner has recently been accused by a Canadian Jewish scholar, Arnold Ages, of being ambivalent about his own Jewishness and of even displaying some unhappiness that Jews stood aside from Jesus and refused to accept him, and his reinterpretation of the biblical teaching, when the founder of Christianity and his disciples first appeared. Ages made this charge, with considerable vehemence, last fall in an essay in the Zionist monthly, Midstream.

I have read and reread the essay that Ages has used as evidence (“Through the Glass Darkly,” in Steiner’s new book, “No Passion Spent”) and I find Ages’ outrage to be without justification. The theme of that essay is the parting of the ways between the Jews and the early Christians. Steiner never wavers from the central assertion that Judaism, from its perspective, could not accept “the good news” that the Christians announced. The climax of his essay is that “We Jews have said ‘No’ to the claims made for, and in certain opaque moments by, the man Jesus.”

Steiner does define the Christian view of its encounter with Judaism with awareness of its nuances, but his prose is less involuted than usual and his meaning is unmistakable: Throughout history, the encounter between Judaism and Christianity has been inevitable and inevitably tragic. There is no theological solution to this deep rift and there cannot ever be a dialectic answer. One can only hope to live more peacefully and ultimately transcend the conflict by attaining some higher unity for all of mankind. Otherwise, so Steiner asserts, Kafka’s dictum holds: “There is abundant hope, but there is none for us.”

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So why does Steiner annoy many Jews, especially when he is at his most Jewish? I think I know. Zionist nationalists, like Ages, have long been put off by Steiner’s refusal to make the state of Israel into the climax of Jewish history. He keeps saying that a state acts, and even must act on occasions, in ways that the word from the sacred texts forbids. Steiner affirms the book and not the sword.

Even more annoying to Jewish nationalists, Steiner thinks of a future in which ethnic identities will disappear into “a more humane humanity.” What this age might look like, Steiner does not tell us. He does, of course, talk of wars and of national conflicts in many of his essays, but he never descends from the discourse of an intellectual, and the self-conscious prose of a writer in the grand manner, to deal with such mundane matters as multiculturalism or how faiths or systems of values might live together in this nasty warlike world. Steiner does not regard such immediate worries as his business.

In reading Steiner, even after I am astonished and uplifted by some of the great passages in his introduction to the Hebrew Bible, I keep hearing the sensibility of a central European intellectual. In English literature, he does not seem to appreciate Locke, Hume and John Stuart Mill, for such writers are earthbound; they are tied to the question of what intelligence can make of the human condition.

Rather, Steiner belongs to a sensibility that includes Heinrich Heine, Benjamin Disraeli, Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin--that is, of Jews who were deeply learned in European culture, who remained marginal (i.e. unassimilated) because of their deep, mystical roots in their Jewish heritage. That did not make such men into easily accepted Jews because other, more earthbound Jews pronounced them to be outsiders as Jews, dwelling in some rarefied air of their own invention.

The most glaring and serious problem with Steiner’s essay is that he pays no attention whatsoever to 2,000 years of rabbinic interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. Steiner knows, perhaps supremely well, what the authors of the New Testament and those who followed after in the Western tradition tried to make of the Hebrew Bible.

It is astonishing that he seems to know so little of what his own ancestors made of the text that they began to interpret and reinterpret long, long ago, even before they had decided which of the ancient books belonged in the Bible. Steiner’s understanding of the text, dazzling and learned as it is, is thinner than it ought to be because it lacks that dimension. One example will suffice.

As noted above, Steiner is troubled by the biblical story of the near sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham. He quotes Kant and Kierkegaard and asks some questions of his own about this shattering tale. He does not know the well-established rabbinical comment that the meaning of the story is not in its beginning--that Abraham heard God command him to sacrifice Isaac--but in its end, when God intervenes and stops the drama. This is the proclamation that God does not demand and will not allow human sacrifice. It is the denial of the worst excess of paganism.

Steiner has written the best essay I know explaining to Christians why the Hebrew Bible must be read for itself and not as a preamble to the New Testament. Will he, one day, have read enough of the Talmud and its literature to write an equally brilliant essay on the continuities, and the discontinuities, between the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic Judaism? But there is dignity, and even heroism, in someone who dares to stand nearly naked before the Hebrew Bible. Steiner has written a moving, and instructive, report of what he heard in the words that were first uttered back in the desert, where it all began.