Anon

[ron_drummond]

I saw Anonymous today. I liked it! Great sets and costumes. The cgi-derived evocation of Elizabethan London is fabulous -- I would have been happy if the whole movie had just wandered those streets, evocating away -- and many of the views and scenes set in the various Globe-style theaters do a magnificent job of evoking what it must have been

Comments

[ron_drummond]

I'd be fascinated to read more about the fudging of the Abraham and Isaac story; could you recommend a good commentary that specifically examines that aspect of it, the blending of the two previously contradictory stories? I would think it would require a newly-written bridge passage to smooth away the join; that kind of redaction, and the scholarship that uncovers it, or attempts to, is deeply fascinating to me. I was aware that the author(s) of the Book of Jubilees rewrote the narrative portions of the Torah to write Satan or the devil into many of the tales where he hadn't been before, and that the tale of the sacrifice was rewritten so that it was the devil, pretending to be God, who told Abraham to sacrifice his son, with the real God distracted and only noticing at the last possible moment what was happening and swooping in just in time to stay Abraham's hand. Whew! You gotta love it. And yet ultimately not nearly so compelling, even though (or especially because!) the "original" Torah version basically lets us know that God is a paranoid, manipulative, untrusting God who cannot Himself be trusted.

[kalimac]

The bridge passage is right there in the story. As I suggested, we have one story in which Abraham sacrifices his son, and another in which the same son succeeds him. Therefore we need an awkwardly-inserted bridge passage in which an angel shows up just in time to stop the sacrifice and says, "Hey, God was only kidding; can't you take a joke?" It's Genesis 22: 11-13.

Biblical commentators have been trying to explain God's peculiar behavior here ever since, and even more so that in the Book of Job (where we, the readers, know that the answer to Job's anguished question of why this happened to him is, "Because God and Satan were sitting around one day shooting the breeze and decided it would be fun to see how much misfortune it would take to piss you off").

[kalimac]

Oh, and have you read this?

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
by Wilfred Owen

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb, for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.