{"id":48143,"date":"2019-01-24T16:21:25","date_gmt":"2019-01-24T14:21:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=48143"},"modified":"2022-08-18T13:14:19","modified_gmt":"2022-08-18T10:14:19","slug":"the-rogues-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/the-rogues-speech\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rogue\u2019s Speech"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Friedrich Nietzsche famously remarked that \u201cthat for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.\u201d Hamlet, snared on the threshold before action, lamented the necessity that \u201clike a whore\u201d he must \u201cunpack his heats with words.\u201d The pungent language with which both the German philosopher and the Danish Prince express their distaste with speaking strikes at what a complicated thing communication can be. Words create and destroy. They sing the authentic and purr falsehoods. Sometimes we want to speak endlessly, and other times even croaking out a few syllables seems beyond our grasp. Torrent or trickle; our words cut to the vein of who we are, and the quick of who we pretend to be.<\/span><\/p>\n

Balaam\u2019s monologues in today\u2019s chapter traverse the whole range of speech. He aspires to curse and extravagantly blesses, twinning metaphor with prophecy in soaring flights of rhetoric proclaimed through gritted teeth and clenched jaw. If Pharaoh\u2019s heart is hardened, Balaam\u2019s tongue is commandeered, with the resulting verbal ventriloquism. Still, we get a clear view of Balaam, and he is one of the most enduringly strange figures in the Bible. A brilliant mercenary, peddling maledictions to the insecure lords of the ancient Near East, he is a source of sublimity unmoored and unbound, set adrift in the high-end prophet market. Rather than covenant, he performs for contract, and his blessings are an aesthetic windfall but a breach of performance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Balaam is an artifact of a world of alchemists and wizards, purveyors of the lucrative intangible that would have been a coin of the realm. By seeing ourselves through his eyes, we grasp a broader horizon of war and witchcraft, blessing and curses hurled as arrows and spears. But in his offering of eloquence to the highest bidder, his struggle with what he means to say and what he says, he is nothing so much as a model for the modern artist, speaking recondite, revelatory, and contemptuous truths.<\/span><\/p>\n

Image: By Philip De Vere. <\/a><\/span>from the Phillip Medhurst Collection of Bible illustrations at St. George\u2019s Court, Kidderminster, England.<\/span>
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