I’ve long been a fan of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (see this 2011 post), and I like Corey Robin’s take on it:
In that famous first chapter of Mimesis, Erich Auerbach does something that usually drives me insane. Introducing the story of Odysseus’ scar from Homer’s Odyssey, Auerbach writes, “Readers of the Odyssey will remember the well-prepared and touching scene in book 19, when….” Six pages later, when he introduces the story of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac in the Book of Genesis, Auerbach writes, “the story itself begins: everyone knows it….”
When contemporary academics do this kind of thing, make this gesture of knowingness, it drives me crazy, as I said. I want to cry out, no, everyone does not know it, readers will not remember! But in Auerbach’s case, I don’t mind it. Why not?
Because, despite his saying we all know the story, Auerbach always proceeds to narrate the story. He gives you, the reader, the details of the story, its plot, the relevant background. When he then undertakes his analysis, which follows his summary of the plot, we’re all working on the same page. He doesn’t make knowing references, without any support or concreteness. He doesn’t invoke authority to justify his claims. He doesn’t pile up concept upon concept, or context upon context, to get himself out of the work of argument, of demonstrating that what he is saying is indeed true, or at least has a justifiable claim upon our attention and engagement.
So despite his use of the “we,” which a generation of academics has taught us is exclusionary or creates a false idea of readerly consensus and audience, Auerbach actually works, hard, to create that “we.” By setting out his evidence, he invites us to disagree with him, to remove ourselves from that “we” if we have reasons to object to it. Despite our assumptions of the democratic progress we’ve made from the midcentury intellectual/critic to today’s intellectual/critic, the actual style and substance of that midcentury intellectual/critic’s engagement is far more democratic in some ways than that of much of our contemporary world.
I feel that’s exactly right; when I started on the book, I felt intimidated because I’d read hardly any of the works he references, but I found that his account of them gave me enough of a handle that I could immerse myself further if I so desired, and I could easily follow his argument. It wasn’t at all like reading a scholar of these degenerate latter days who constantly drops references to Žižek, Sloterdijk, & Co. for generalized shock and awe. I did not, however, appreciate the commenter on his post who felt compelled to write:
“In that famous first chapter…” Really? I mean, I’ve read a lot of books but I never heard of that one. Pot, kettle, etc.
Smug parading of one’s own ignorance is another blight on our times. Pull down thy vanity!
There’s a certain lack of parallelism in the two examples, because the Odyssey one is explicitly limited to those who have specifically read the book (even if it might be embarrassing in some circles to fess up to having not done so) whereas the Genesis ch. 22 one is sort of “you grew up in this civilization so you must know the highlights reel of its foundational narrative, right”?
As recently as the year of my own birth (more recent than the publication of Auerbach’s work*), some hip young folkie experimenting with going electric could start a song “God said to Abraham ‘Kill me a son'” and assume that his increasingly long-haired and dope-addled audience would nonetheless know what he was talking about, right?
*I’m pretty sure there’s a copy in our living room, but it’s on one of the shelves of books my wife contributed to the household.
Right.
So… what does it add to state that everybody knows what’s about to be explained? How does it help? Why not just skip that part and go ahead with the explanations – just for fear that the readers with the most profound classical education might scoff?
There should be a name for this rhetorical device. It’s a cousin of Hypophora and Apophasis.
I am struck by the first-person-plural in “Despite our assumptions …” Is that an instance of the very same “‘we,’ which a generation of academics has taught us is exclusionary or creates a false idea of readerly consensus and audience”?
This is surely much the same thing as Hattic irony. It would be rude to imply that a fellow-Hatter did not know (for example) that the most widely spoken African language in Ghana is Twi, even if (realistically) there may actually be one or two otherwise perfectly estimable Hatters who have somehow missed this fact (probably because they had been too engrossed in developing new fields in homology theory, or had been too busy exploring new approaches to macroeconomics, or in writing sonnet cycles. Such things are notorious time sinks.) Accordingly, the correct form is something like “as one would expect, much of this conversation took place in Twi …”
It is, similarly, impolite to translate anything one happens to cite in languages like French, Latin or Hausa that any reasonably well-educated person will have acquired in their schooldays.
To be honest, if I took the review’s first line seriously, I would sympathize with the commenter you’re calling ignorant and proud of it. Odysseus is famous, at least at some level, but the first chapter of Auerbach’s Mimesis is decidedly not. So much so that I enjoy Robin’s irony, in a short essay about how Auerbach handles chapters and passages that are indeed famous.
the first chapter of Auerbach’s Mimesis is decidedly not.
The first chapter of Auerbach’s Mimesis is in fact famous among the set of people who know and/or care about Auerbach. That’s exactly the point. No matter how famous someone or something is in a certain set, there is always another set of people who’ve never heard of them or it; if you’re going to use that strict a standard, you might as well retire the word “famous.” The proper way to interpret a phrase like “In that famous first chapter of Mimesis” is to prick up one’s ears and say to oneself “this is something I should pay attention to and learn about.” If one’s response is to say “Well, I’ve never heard of it, so that’s bullshit,” one is fatuous and unlikely ever to learn anything.
I don’t agree about fame. You can say Britney Spears is famous, but you can’t say Los Blue Ventures (similar floruit) are, though most people where I live have heard of the latter (and I can sing something by them, more or less, but nothing by her). Even if you had a stricter standard for fame, you could still use the word by specifying the circle where someone or something is famous, which is not a bad idea.
And I don’t agree about the way to interpret “In that famous first chapter of Mimesis“. I think two valid possibilities are “This looks like an article for people like me” and “This doesn’t look like an article for people like me. I’ll find something aimed at a wider readership.”
@JWB: I’m not sure whether the story of Isaac is one that one could assume the average reader even in today’s Western Civilization (not talking about people without a non-Western educational background) to be familiar with. It’s certainly not on a level of familiarity with Adam & Eve and the apple or the deluge or David and Goliath, which even people not having had a religious education or read a children’s bible will be likely to know by cultural osmosis.
As for Odysseus, while the number of people having read the Odyssey itself is not so large, more will have read popular retellings or watched cartoon versions, but again the story of the scar is probably less well-known to a wider public than the Sirens or the blinding of Polyphem.
I’m also not too convinced by the “set of people” framing. That’s fair if you’re talking about someone like Auerbach, but I expect very nearly every anglophone will at least know something called “The Odyssey” exists, even if they don’t have any impression of it. We’re talking a totally different order of magnitude than Auerbach. One pretty much demands a(n implicit or explicit) qualifier, the other does not.
Warren Cowgill apparently viewed the use of “I” as a matter of intellectual honesty. I’m very glad I read a summary of his views on the matter (in the introduction to his collected writings volume) during my masters — it was some of the most useful (and frankly only) writing advice I got during that time. I’ll try to dig up the exact reference when I’m next in the office.
I do still use “we” sometimes, but generally only when I really want to represent a general scholarly consensus (i.e. “we academics [of X subject]”), or if I’m being particularly didactic. If I’m presenting a new argument, I’ll use “I”. And whatever “a generation of academics” supposedly says about that, I’ve repeatedly gotten pushback for doing so.
… the Genesis ch. 22 one is sort of “you grew up in this civilization so you must know the highlights reel of its foundational narrative, right”?7
Right? Mostly. But… about once or twice a year Public Radio and the NY Times or The Economist cite the Pew Foundation research on religion in the U.S. For the past few tears, allowing for some statistical drift in my aged memory, some 30% of American persons are unaffiliated with any religion, though some chunk of those are spiritually inclined.
There seems to be a growing number of people for whom “the foundational narrative” is unfamiliar. Add to that number, whatever it may be, those whose holy book is not the one you assume.
My impression is that many actual Christians are unfamiliar with this particular story. The kind of detailed knowledge of the Bible that a preacher might take for granted in a congregation a few decades ago is much less common now; including among “Bible-believing” Christians, whose commitment to the text is often more a matter of ideology than of actually reading it.
(Many of them will tell you that “God helps those who help themselves” is from the Bible.)
@cuchuflete et al.: obviously the “this civilization” that Auerbach was presupposing for his intended readership did not have precisely the demographics of the U.S. eight decades in the future. Nor in fact did it have the demographics of actually-existing 1940’s Istanbul, where he was living and working while writing the book. I suppose he would have accepted if asked that the U.S. was part of the “Western” civilization he was writing about, but I don’t know if he was at the time even anticipating his own subsequent post-war relocation to the U.S.
And Auerbach was himself as a practical matter apparently “unaffiliated” at least as to institutional practice, although the internet seems undecided as to whether he was a “cultural Christian of Jewish origins” or a “secular Jewish intellectual.” But he would have assumed that e.g. the aggressively laique Third Republic schoolteacher in some little town in rural France who played the role of stereotypical village atheist (or his equivalents in Germany, Italy, etc.) would have been generally familiar with the plotline of Genesis, because it was part of “Western literature.”
Let me note separately that those so-called “Bible-believing” Protestants whom David E. deprecates usually go to churches where the pastor chooses Bible readings by personal whim rather than accepting the Church’s authority to prescribe what is read to the congregation when. So they cannot be presumed to have attended year-after-year Easter Eve services featuring a long string of OT readings largely chosen for their typological relevance to the Passion and Resurrection. The so-called “Binding of Isaac” passage unsurprisingly is always included in that context.
As Auerbach’s work goes on, the works discussed get a bit less comparatively famous than the Odyssey and Genesis. I daresay that even in our own decadent times many well-educated people will at least claim a general familiarity with e.g. the Decamaron or Gargantua & Pantagruel, even if they don’t claim to have actually read them. But can the same be said about Schiller’s _Luise Miller_ or the Goncourt brothers’ _Germinie Lacerteux_? Even in Auerbach’s own youth, were those books that the proverbial every schoolboy was familiar with?
ETA: the wiki article about _Mimesis_ lists by title 31 works discussed therein, with links to separate articles about 30 of the 31. The one outlier with so little “notability” as not to have its own wikipedia page is _Le Reconfort de Madame du Fresne_ by Antoine de la Sale, which I will freely admit to lacking familiarity with.
My impression is that many actual Christians are unfamiliar with this particular story.
Especially in places where the majority religion is Roman Catholicism. In Italy I’ve learned to never, ever take for granted that anyone is going to be familiar with stories from the Old Testament. Art history may help a little, but not necessarily.
@Biscia: FWIW you can see that one illustrated in a painting attributed to Caravaggio on display in the Uffizi! https://www.uffizi.it/opere/sacrificio-di-isacco
@DM: Grice’s second submaxim of the maxim of quantity is “Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.” So telling someone something suggests that you think it’s required, that the person doesn’t know it already, and people who do know it may very well take it as an insult to their intelligence or knowledge. Of course it’s inescapable in books unless the readership is very specialized, but I think acknowledging that there could be an insult is a good idea for writers.
I expect very nearly every anglophone will at least know something called “The Odyssey” exists, even if they don’t have any impression of it.
You expect that, do you? I don’t. I’ve long since given up making assumptions about what is known to the “general public,” and I’m not sure such a thing exists any more.
I don’t agree about fame. You can say Britney Spears is famous, but you can’t say Los Blue Ventures (similar floruit) are, though most people where I live have heard of the latter (and I can sing something by them, more or less, but nothing by her). Even if you had a stricter standard for fame, you could still use the word by specifying the circle where someone or something is famous, which is not a bad idea.
I’m sorry, but it’s absurd to say that everyone should be constantly qualifying everything they say with explicit acknowledgment of scope of reference, degree of reliability, source of information, and whatever else might come to mind. That’s not how people talk and it’s not how their minds work. We all are constantly saying and writing things with unspoken assumptions about what we expect our hearers or readers will probably know or assume. And there’s no absolute standard of “fame”; every such term is dependent on a given context. Meursault is by no stretch of the imagination a famous French village among the general public, but it is very well known to lovers of Burgundy wine, and if I read a reference to it as famous I would assume that was the intended context and not waste my brain and breath grousing about how the man on the Clapham omnibus has never heard of the place. The Peach Blossom Spring is known to every Chinese person but few foreigners unless they’ve immersed themselves to some extent in Chinese culture; are Chinese then not allowed to call it “famous”? I could go on.
When writing a letter to the judge and sort of rehearsing whatever part of the prior history of the case is relevant to what you’re writing about, lawyers sometimes use the carefully-worded phrase “as the Court may recall.” This formula neither insults the Court by presuming it has forgotten nor insults it by assuming it has definitely remembered the now-relevant minutiae, what with the Court being so busy and important it can’t reasonably be expected to remember everything without being reminded.
ETA: and come to think of it, one can use “as you may recall” to a non-judicial addressee with much the same effect – in a situation where you are confident your audience has some prior lifetime exposure to whatever you’re referencing but may or may not consciously remember it without substantial prompting.
A very good analogy. Similarly, the “famous” wording signals that the item so qualified is not some obscurity pulled in to make a point but is in fact well known to relevant circles, and the curious reader might do well to investigate, but if the reader doesn’t feel like it, no harm, no foul. It carries no implied insult.
@Hat: Some people do qualify their statements a lot. Having learned the same lesson you did about what’s known to the general public, if such a thing exists, I often qualify my references to fame in some way.
Of course you don’t grouse about references to Meursault—you’ve heard of it. The people who grouse are the ones who haven’t. if I started an article with “We all* know about the pilgrimage to Chimayó, but what you may not know is…” you might not be tempted to grouse, but some people would. (Or if that wasn’t obscure enough, “Everyone knows that the best Big Day route in northern New Mexico goes from Ohkay Owingeh Tribal Lakes to the high point of 31 Mile Road…” I admit there are better places for Dusky Grouse.)
My “not a bad idea” was not a statement about what’s allowed, and since I said one can call Britney Spears famous, there’s no reason to think I object to Chinese people calling “Peach Blossom Spring” famous in a Chinese context. And yes, the context matters. One reason I like it here is that I don’t have to explain a lot of things, and people don’t object (aloud) if I refer to an obscure quotation from Gérard de Nerval.
*The version I like the least.
And yes, I agree that formulas such as “Some here may remember” are good ways to mitigate the insult that some people will infer from being told things they learned as schoolchildren and the one that other people will infer from being told that things they’ve never heard of are famous. ETA: Another good method in the modern world is a link, as often used here.
Of course you don’t grouse about references to Meursault—you’ve heard of it. The people who grouse are the ones who haven’t.
Quite so, and my point is that it’s silly to grouse.
Hmm. I had always assumed that the verb “to grouse” was somehow related etymologically to the gamebird of the same name (via some analogy or metaphor obscure to me), but the internet seems to think they’re unrelated.
@J.W. Brewer: sure, I know! But while art history may help, being able to identify a character isn’t the same as knowing the story. I, for one, can pick out a Saint Lawrence in a flash, but if someone asked for details on why he’s being toasted I’d have to turn away and google. I’d also have a hard time telling you off the top of my head just what was going on with Susanna other than hygiene/voyeurism. My personal impression in Italy has been that pivotal OT stories like Abraham and Isaac aren’t much more familiar than Susanna.
The title here, and the title by Robin include Democracy, though neither text repeats the word.
Since he was sacked from teaching by fascists and wrote in exile this great chapter, famous to me and comparative literature students generally–even if his learned student, Fredric Jameson, did not write as clearly–I say, whatever he chose to write for we, demos, I gratefully welcome.
Encouraging in a dark time with a deadly buffoon administration.
I somehow have run over the years into many, many world-famous hamburger stands and pancake joints which I hadn’t heard of before. You all know the ones, I am sure.
No, I can’t say that I’ve ever heard of them.
I was (of course) familiar with both the scene from the Odyssey and the episode with Abraham and Isaac before I ever read Mimesis, but Auerbach pretty rapidly gets into (especially Romance) literature that I have not read, and in some cases, had not actually heard of.
But he is consistent about giving you enough information about the works he’s discussing that you can follow his point anyway, without being in any way patronising about it, all the while adopting the genial convention of writing as if you were just as well-read as he.
if you’re going to use that strict a standard, you might as well retire the word “famous.”
Coincidentally, Benjamin Dreyer just the day before this post said exactly that on his substack: “you shouldn’t use it” (or perhaps he just meant shouldn’t use it attributively?). “If something is famous, you don’t need to tell your reader that it’s famous. If it’s not famous, all the ‘famous’ing in the world isn’t going to make it famous.”
Certainly “famous” can be overused (sometimes by me) in a posturing way, but banning it seemed simplistic, so I appreciated languagehat giving the argument for the defense.
If something is famous, you don’t need to tell your reader that it’s famous. If it’s not famous, all the ‘famous’ing in the world isn’t going to make it famous.
I think this misses the point: there’s usually (if the writer is competent) more going on when one tacks “famous” onto someone or something’s name than just telling your reader that they’re well-known. (By Grice’s Maxims,* as JF said.)
Very often, I think there’s an implied sneer, not necessarily at the person in question but at the vanity of fame and/or the mechanisms by which a person becomes famous in our society.
Sometimes it does function as a sort of parenthetical apology for mentioning someone or something who the reader may not be all that familiar with. And sometimes it’s an unsubtle boast.
* I’m going to start using this as an oath.
Farther away from British Understatement and the stiff upper lip, “famous” is often praise – meaning “famous, and rightly so”.
I guess even the most notable deceased celebrities are these days generally not referred to as “of famous memory.”
I dunno about hamburgers or pancakes, but in the NYC area, “famous” was a common claim among the numerous claimants to be the authentic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray%27s_Pizza
We have a cafe around the corner from our apartment in Vienna that serves “our famous” (sic) pastrami sandwiches. I thought that was a particularly high level of chuzpe given that this cafe only opened a few months ago.
Sports commentators hereabouts often pronounce the match they have just finished watching to be a “famous victory”, which I take to be a prediction that at a minimum the winning team’s fans will fondly remember it for at least a few years. (This may be because the match was prestigious, the opponents formidable and/or hated rivals, the margin of victory wide, etc.)
I think that “famous victory” may be a vague reminiscence on their part of
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45178/the-battle-of-blenheim
Some irony would seem to result from its unironic use.
I’m not that familiar with Viennese pastrami discourse, but there does seem to be a specific use of “our famous” in the specialized restaurant-menu variety of AmEng, which perhaps involves an idiosyncratic or non-standard sense of “famous.” It only takes a moment for the internet to give you pages of hits of different restaurants touting, e.g. (cutting and pasting w/o standardizing capitalization style):
our famous soups;
our famous sweet and spicy glaze;
Our Famous Noodle Kugel;
our famous Corned Beef Hash;
our famous thick milkshakes; and even
Our Famous Garden Salad.
One can certainty imagine objective criteria for fame-in-context for a given restaurant’s given menu item, e.g. “has it been featured on an episode of Guy Fieri’s cable tv series?” But I don’t think one should infer from the use of the “our famous” locution that any such criterion has actually been satisfied.
ETA: it should I think be noted in fairness that the “our” in the “our famous” usage is an exclusive rather than inclusive one, i.e. the underlying “we” refers to the proprietors of the restaurant with no suggestion that the reader is included. The use of “we” objected to in the block quote from Corey Robin is by contrast annoying precisely because it’s taken to be an “inclusive” we, where the writer is presuming to speak for the reader without adequate justification for doing so.
@david eddyshaw
“Many [Christians] will tell you that “God helps those who help themselves” is from the Bible.”
As the Jamie Lee Curtis character said in A Fish Called Wanda, while telling off the ignorant boofhead Kevin Kline character:
“The central tenet of Buddhism is not ‘every man for himself’.”
David,
My impression is that many actual Christians are unfamiliar with this particular story
I want to know more about your sample size, sampling procedures etc. Also, seriously, “actual Christians”? On this day? Come one, dude.
The kind of detailed knowledge of the Bible that a preacher might take for granted in a congregation a few decades ago is much less common now
This depends very much. I have spent the last few years among Pentecostals, Lutherans and Episcopalians, all of them and all of them displayed very detailed knowledge of the Bible.
But I mean, come on, Genesis 22 is so famous that the major event it covers has a name, Binding of Isaac. It is preached on regularly, the reading shows up in lectionaries, etc. etc. Not to mention that it shows up in popular culture regularly, Dan Simmons’s Hyperion is probably the most famous example.
@mollymooly
“There should be a name for this rhetorical device. It’s a cousin of Hypophora and Apophasis.”
Get out your Greek dictionaries, everyone. We need a traditional term for “flattering your interlocutor by implying that they belong to the club of people as clever as yourself”
If only Auerbach had asked around while in Istanbul instead of simply settling in with his own preexisting set of books, he might have learned that “There is significant debate among Muslim scholars and historiographers regarding whether Ishmael or Isaac was the intended sacrifice.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_of_Ishmael
Auerbach in the chapter addressed the Hebrew account. To presume, JWB, that during his stay in Turkey he did not learn more about Islam is presumptuous and false.
@Bulbul
[DE]My impression is that many actual Christians are unfamiliar with this particular story
I want to know more about your sample size, sampling procedures etc. Also, seriously, “actual Christians”? On this day? Come one, dude.
(I nearly responded to DE’s post.)
Star of the Baptist Sunday School quiz team here, 96% in the end of year Scripture Exam.
Can’t claim any more to be “actual Christian” (not sure I ever was), but Sunday School kept us well away from any gory bits, especially in the OT. From Genesis we got the seven days of Creation, Adam and Eve in the Garden, Noah’s Flood, then skipped to Moses out of Egypt. So if I’d not taken up Bible studies in later life as an Atheist to confirm what a load of nonsense it is, I wouldn’t have known the Isaac story.
Then I second DE’s impression.
Pentecostals, Lutherans and Episcopalians, all of them and all of them displayed very detailed knowledge of the Bible.
That has been the exact opposite of my experience. Ask them about Exodus 21:22. Ask them how many sets of Ten Commandments there are (and what are the differences in the versions). Ask them why there’s contradictory stories about the Nativity. Ask them which version of the Crucifixion and Resurrection they believe (since it’s Easter).
Get out your Greek dictionaries, everyone. We need a traditional term for “flattering your interlocutor by implying that they belong to the club of people as clever as yourself”
Heck, isn’t there one for flattering your interlocutor by whatever means? Or is it just “flattery”?
(Flattening your interlocutor is different.)
AntC I’m : only vaguely aware of what an Episcopalian is. A US Anglican?
EDIT: only slightly joking — more like reverse-joking about how Americans confuse Orthodox denominations.
Julian : I never really understood the plot of A Fish Called Wanda but I have not seen it in more than fifteen years. I remember Jamie Lee Curtis was great in it. EDIT: and John Cleese was in it.
I don’t know how familiar Auerbach became in his later American years with the sociology of Anglo-American religion, but to the extent he learned anything about it he no doubt would have agreed that the products of Baptist Sunday Schools could not without further education be presumed to have the sort of basic knowledge of so-called Western Lit (“abendländischen Literatur”) that his work assumed of its readers.
Looking at the Bulgarian wikipedia entry on the Gen. 22 narrative, I see that it’s not described as “famous” but is described as “popular” (популярен).
My own gain in Biblical knowledge for the day was using a concordance to confirm quantitatively my impression that camels are mentioned notably more frequently in the OT than the NT. Although hypocrites are mentioned notably more frequently in the NT than the OT.
Happy Catholic/Protestant Easter. I did not realize that one was now it until a few minutes ago : Orthodox Easter is at the end of the week.
It is true that camels are notably more salient in the Hebrew Testament than the Greek. Another reason to regret the lack of attention paid to the former by so many of the Young Christian People of Today.
A few years after Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisted” there was also Leonard Cohen’s “Story of Isaac,” which I remember discussing with my mother at the time (I was 14 or 15), since I had almost zero religious education.
Just as a data point on “never assume what people know” – I was familiar with the story of the almost-sacrifice of Isaac, but it’s only here, in this thread, that I learnt that it is “generally known” under the name “Binding of Isaac”.
Checking the German version of the WP article bulbul links, the mystery is solved – while the article is titled Bindung Isaaks, it mentions that in the Christian tradition it was known as Opferung Isaaks, which is exactly the name I know it under. The replacement by binding seems due to theological qualms and deference to the Jewish naming convention.
And the version of the WP article in some other languages still use “sacrifice”, so I am not sure how well-known the “binding” version of the name actually is out of a circle of theologically interested people who read the latest memos.
I would personally suspect that perhaps most (English-speaking… I guess maybe especially second-language-English-speaking) people who have heard of the name “Binding of Isaac” know it from the homonymous video game (which was of course named after the Biblical story). I suspect that many people who know of the game are in fact not aware that there is a Biblical story of the same name.
On my own end I don’t think I’d have been able to tell what it was called in English without referring to the video game first (and even then it was a Gricean-adjacent “that’s a weird word for it, so it’s more plausible that they took it from the Biblical original rather than came up with it themselves”), and off the top of my head I wouldn’t be able to tell what, if anything, it’s known as in Russian.
(Russian Wikipedia says it’s just straightforwardly жертвоприношение Исаака “sacrifice of Isaac”, but mentions that the original Hebrew literally translates to связывание “binding”.)
I somehow have run over the years into many, many world-famous hamburger stands and pancake joints which I hadn’t heard of before. You all know the ones, I am sure.
Can’t think of any pancake ones…
I did have this happen with a hamburger joint (MacDavid) and a hot dog stand (Bitzinger Albertina); the latter I was pointed to by my guide, the former I did basically stumble into and only later discovered its world-fame.
McFoxy, in Kiev, was not world famous but rightly should have been. They unfortunately no longer exist any more, having been closed for apparent tax evasion sometime in the late ’10s.
The google books ngram viewer shows a sharp rise in the frequency of “binding of Isaac” starting in the mid-1960’s, which is consistent with the notion that at least in Anglophone texts it is a modern vogue term that’s not particularly traditional. Calquing of the traditional Rabbinical label certainly seems like a plausible explanation. The objection that it shouldn’t be called the “sacrifice of Isaac” because [SPOILER] Isaac eventually gets out of it unscathed seems rather pedantic.
Elsewhere on the “binding” front I heard a brief sermon last night at one of the Holy Week services where the priest jumped ahead as it were to focus on a line from one of the hymns that will come around in tonight’s service. Judas is being compared unfavorably to the sinful woman of Lk. 7:38 and thereabouts,* with the contrast “She loosed her hair while he bound himself with wrath.” (Or, e.g., “She unloosed her tresses, and he bound himself with fury” – there are of course multiple translations.) One of the points being that Judas’ bad behavior was inter alia self-destructive and that “bind” can be a pejorative word describing the damage it caused.
*As relevantly echoed in Jn 12:3 although some pedants will say oh that was a different lady who presumably wasn’t so sinful.
“She loosed her hair and he bound himself with fury”: over 2500 years inspiring would-be comics to make jokes like “Caesar loosened his toga and Cleopatra tightened her resolve” (nudge-nudge, wink-wink).
I was familiar with the story of the almost-sacrifice of Isaac, but it’s only here, in this thread, that I learnt that it is “generally known” under the name “Binding of Isaac”—same except I still haven’t learnt that. Also, I’ve never heard of the video game. I am a multi-faith ignoramus.
Further consultation of the google books ngram viewer suggests that the sharp rise in frequency of “binding of Isaac” noted above was still insufficient for that three-word sequence to become more frequent than “sacrifice of Isaac,” so I advise continuing skepticism as to the “generally known” assertion. The preference of the faction that has most recently controlled what the wikipedia article is titled is not necessarily probative of general usage.
Good to know that I am not further behind the trend in theological discourse than most people.
I am the proud possessor of a certificate of scriptural proficiency from the Methodist Church, which I acquired at the age of around nine or ten after learning about the Sermon on the Mount, Loaves and Fishes, David and Goliath, Water into Wine, and not a whole lot else. I don’t think I learned about the near-sacrifice of Isaac in those studies, I guess because it was deemed too scary and theologically fraught for young minds. I found about the story later, but like Hans, I had never heard it referred to as the binding of Isaac. I wonder if it has been called that to reduce emphasis on the bit about God wanting Abraham to off his beloved son. Wouldn’t want the kiddos getting the idea that God is a Mean Old Man.
Bertie Wooster (of blessed memory) won the prize for Scripture Knowledge at his preparatory school. “A handsomely bound copy of a devotional work whose name has escaped me.”
The facts appear to have remained with him, inasmuch as his Biblical references display greater familiarity with the subject than with … well, any other branch of knowledge. Possibly even greater than the norm for one of his station, I dare say.
Not so much the wife of Bertie’s friend Bingo Little, alleged to have won the Scripture prize by smuggling into the examination room a list of the kings of Judah, “tucked into her middy-blouse”.
(The list of the kings of Judah is a Wodehouse trope.)
Jael the wife of Heber is a personage I know only via Wooster. There are probably more. All I know about Heber is that there were several Hebers, one of whom founded Ireland.
During my early years in the still Christian Norwegian public school system in the late seventies, I learned about the creation, and Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel, Noah’s Arch (but not so much his sons), Abraham’s migration from Ur, his wife Sara, and his near-sacrifice of his son Isaac, and of Isaac’s wife Rebeccah. of Isaac’s son Jacob and his wives and female servants and his 12 sons, of Joseph, the punching-ball of his brothers who would become an important man in Egypt and many years later would save his whole family from starvation. We learned of Sodom and Gomorrha, and of Lot and his wife (but not so much his daughters). All that, and we haven’t even introduced Moses yet.
Too late to fix the typo in Gomorrah.
I have also a fond memory of the teacher who (in year 8 or so) explained that Gonorrhea had it’s name from Gomorrah.
[Edit: And now the edit wondow is back. OK.]
What is the origin of Bingo as a nickname? The interjection and the game are from beano, but the name—whether for Bingo Little, the dog in the song, or Brendan Coyle’s skeevy detective character on Thief Takers—seems to have no known etymology.
@mollymooly: Jael pounding a tent stake into Sisera’s head is a fairly popular topic in religious iconography, but her name is not one of the Biblical names that see much modern use, except among Jews. There was a woman named on WFIU radio in Bloomington when we lived there named Yael, and we liked the name, so we used it for our eldest’s Hebrew name; Lillian Marie was called to the Torah as Yael Miriam bat Barak David. A couple years later, we heard a radio essay on that same station by a middle-aged male writer from Los Angeles and the young Hispanic protege he met while she was doing his nails, named Jael—but she pronounced it ‘dʒeɪ el.
The dog Bingo goes back to at least 1780.
IMHO, Jael/Yael is not so fetching or inspiring a pious killer as the heroine of the Book of Judith, although that lady suffers the disadvantage of having been deemed uncanonical by the rabbis and thus eventually ditto by Protestants. In the immediate aftermath of the Reformation, she was still good enough (Luther had relegated her book to an appendix but not excluded it altogether) to be remembered by painters adhering to the Reformation, as e.g. https://lucascranach.org/en/US_FAMSF_1954-74/.
Although Puritan sticklers would think it didn’t count as a “Bible name,” there were definitely women in earlyish New England etc. named Judith although I don’t have good numbers on how common it was compared to more canonical names. Maybe it skated by as an obvious feminine version of “Judah,” which was unquestionably a “Bible name”? It didn’t really become one of the most common American female names until the 20th century, though, and its peak seems to have coincided with the fame of Frances Gumm under her totally-fabricated stage name of Judy Garland.
I am a multi-faith ignoramus.
Me too, I wouldn’t want to be seen as Sectarian. I also have never heard of the video game. (Indeed I’ve heard of hardly any video games after ‘Snake’ or ‘Space Invaders’.)
Judy?
I’m not going to talk about Judy.
Separately, I see that an 1847 London stage production titled The Wigwam, A Burletta, features fake-American-Indian characters (of the “Tribe of Kutanackem”) named Bingo, Lingo, Mingo, and Jingo. The main “Indian” male lead is Erasmus Lobscouse alias Fondlesquaw, and the Officially White male lead is Pluffy Plumpton, Esq. (“a young Gentleman in independent circumstances”).
This the result of my inquiries into whether anyone had rhymed bingo with lingo before Cole Porter did so circa 1911.
Previous discussion of that Cranach painting (and why I think the stated title is bogus).
The near-sacrifice of Isaac, without any name for it, featured prominently in the Children’s Bible (along with everything else Trond was taught) and Catholic religion class. (I didn’t know the video game.)
The sacrifice of Jepthah’s more or less nameless daughter was nowhere mentioned; I learned of it a few years ago from a 19th-century sculpture exhibited in a museum.
Jael wasn’t either. Judith was in the Children’s Bible.
Gomorrha is just the Greek, thereby Latin, thereby German version.
There was a woman named on WFIU radio in Bloomington when we lived there named Yael
Yael Xander is still very much around.
David M.: Gomorrha is just the Greek, thereby Latin, thereby German version.
So a mis-englishing rather than a typo. It’s Gomorra in modern Norwegian spelling.
There were more stories from Genesis, but that’s what I could write in one near-chronological stream off the top of my mind. Later of course, we got Moses from the Nile to the banks of Jordan, and of Joshua crossing Jordan, fighting the battle of Jericho and becoming king of the Promised Land. We then got all about king David and something about king Salomo, and about the Babylonian exile and the writing on the wall. Very little Judges, and hardly anything about the prophets.
Judges is pretty X-rated. (One feels that there is a royalist propaganda angle going on there, making the many horrors the actual point.)
Still, it saddens me that the Young People of Today do not know why I refer to the Emperor of Mars as “Eglon.”
The Moabite king in question seems to have been kinda rehabilitated in the Talmud, where Ruth gets him foisted on her as a father. Vivian Wilson could probably relate.
https://www.halakhah.com/sanhedrin/sanhedrin_105.html
This is probably in accordance with the exegetical principle of the Conservation of Moabites.
Moabitae non sunt multiplicandi praeter necessitatem.
Nunc judicium est Moab; nunc princeps hujus Moab ejicietur foras.
Moab teŋ sariakadib paae ya, ka ba na kad onɛ sʋ’oe li la bas.
I just read an interview with Roberto Saviano in Die Zeit where the word is spelled both Gomorrha and Gomorra.
German wikipedia sez “Gomorra (hebräisch עמורה; andere Schreibweisen: Gomorrha …” before noting Latin and English spelling possibilities.
David E.: Moabitae non sunt multiplicandi praeter necessitatem.
Moabites have 75% of their DNA from the same source. That’s a LOT!
Well, you know the old saying, “I’ve never kissed a Moabite.”
(Though Boaz did.)
Eglon pinguissimus does look distinctly like Phony Stark.
The article contains a succinct explanation of why Ruth being his daughter is inexorably logical.