Communicating Catastrophe

Tuvia Ruebner, In the Illuminated Dark: Selected Poems of Tuvia Ruebner (trans. Rachel Tzvia Back; Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2014), 10-11.

Importantly, the ellipses are in the original.

Compare, for example, Leah Goldberg’s poem, כנגד ארבעה בנים “Concerning Four Sons” (Poems [3 vol.; Bnei-Brak: Sifriat Poalim, 1986], 2.203), which voices an array of responses to the Holocaust.  The “one who does not know how to ask” speaks of himself, again like Moses, as כבד-פה, “heavy of mouth.”

On אעידך, see Arnold B. Ehrlich, Randglossen zur hebräischen Bibel (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1968), 4.361.

Instead of כים, “as the sea,” the LXX witnesses כוס, “cup,” evidently a misreading rooted in usages such as in Lam 4:21; Isa 51:17-23.  The fact that the latter shares much vocabulary with Lam 2:13 is just enough reason to give one pause in supposing the priority of the MT.

All translations are NJPS with slight modifications.

Alan Mintz, Ḥurban: Responses to Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 28.

On the difference between the comparison to the sea, which comes “out of the blue,” and other comparisons in Lamentations, see Paul M. Joyce and Diana Lipton,Lamentations Through the Centuries (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 83-84.

T. Yebamot 14:5. Cf. the first reason given in Mekhilta deRabbi Ishmael Vayhi 6 (Horovitz-Rabin ed., 113) to explain why the Israelites had to see the corpses of the Egyptians at the Red Sea.

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).

See also Ps 42:8, and see n. 20 below.

See Adele Berlin, Lamentations: A Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 73.

See also Ps 29:3.

On the myth of the cosmic battle against the sea, but without attentiveness to the role of sound therein, see most recently Noga Ayali-Darshan, Treading on the Back of the Sea: The Combat between the Storm-god and the Sea in Ancient Near Eastern Literature (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2016 [Hebrew]).  I thank Avi Winitzer for drawing my attention to this book.

See also Isa 17:12; Jer 51:55; Ps 89:10.  The sound of the sea also figures in connection with war in Isa 5:30.  In Psalm 74, the speaker begins (vv. 3-4) and ends (vv. 22-23) by highlighting the din of the enemy, so that the recollection of God’s defeat of the sea in the middle of the psalm (vv. 12-17) implicitly figures as an act of silencing, even though the text does not explicitly attribute sound to the sea.

See Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature (3^rd ed.; Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, 2005), 22-65, esp. 239, 263-64.

On ר.ג.ש see, e.g., Ps 2:1 and Targum Jonathan to Isa 5:30.  On ה.מ.י see Ps 46:7 and the commentary of Ibn Ezra ad loc.  Akkadian ḥubūru “noise,” used in the Atra-hasis story, should perhaps be linked to the Hebrew root ח.ב.ר (and cognates), indicating association.  A usage of ח.ב.ר with the sense of noise may be attested in Prov 21:9; see Michael V. Fox,Proverbs 10-31: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 683.  I thank Aaron Koller for consulting with me on this matter.

We tend to think of the end of the Babel story as a scene of commotion, but on the interpretation that I am advancing here, the opposite is the case: the beginning of the story is noisy.  To scatter the united gathering, to disperse the crowd, is to bring silence.  See also Psalm 2.

Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens(New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 128-29.

Other relevant Stevens poems include “Farewell to Florida”; “Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores”; “Infanta Marina,” “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”; and “The Comedian as the Letter C.”

For the sound of the deep, see Ps 42:8 (cited in n. 10 above):

 תְּהוֹם אֶל תְּהוֹם קוֹרֵא לְקוֹל צִנּוֹרֶיךָ כָּל מִשְׁבָּרֶיךָ וְגַלֶּיךָ עָלַי עָבָרוּ.

Deep calls to deep in the roar of your cataracts (?); all your breakers and billows have swept over me. (NJPS)