{"id":81129,"date":"2020-10-07T16:48:29","date_gmt":"2020-10-07T13:48:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=81129"},"modified":"2020-10-07T16:48:29","modified_gmt":"2020-10-07T13:48:29","slug":"o-sons-of-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/o-sons-of-god\/","title":{"rendered":"O Sons Of God!"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[281],"tags":[],"acf":{"old_id":"81129","type":"media","iframe":"","writer":54356,"related_cahpter":"596","type_929":"2","show_author_image":false,"old_create_date":"","old_url":"","post_main_content":{"description":"The flickering literary afterlife of a polytheistic mythology\r\n\r\n","content":"

29:1 \u201cA David psalm. Grant to the LORD, O sons of God, grant to the LORD glory and strength!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

O sons of God<\/span><\/em>: This is the first clue of many that have led a whole line of scholars (H. L. Ginsberg, Moshe Held, Mitchell Dahood, Theodore Gaster) to see this psalm as a translation or close adaptation of a Canaanite psalm. It has been variously claimed that in the original text, it was Baal as thunder-god, not YHWH, who imposed his awesome voice over the whole world. None of these arguments is entirely convincing. Though there are parallels to certain wordings here in Ugaritic poetry (the one cache of Syro-Palestinian poetry, several centuries prior to the Bible, that has physically survived), that scarcely proves that this poem is a translation. The same is true of the proposed linguistic and prosodic evidence (too technical to take up here) that has been put forth to support the same claim. Canaanite poetry was the literary tradition that constituted the most immediate background for biblical poetry. It would be surprising if the biblical poets did not make use of images, phrasing, and even mythological elements from the antecedent tradition with which they and their audiences were acquainted.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The relation of this psalm, and a good many others, to the Syro-Palestinian tradition is roughly like that of <\/span>Paradise Lost<\/span><\/em> to the <\/span>Aeneid<\/span><\/em> and the <\/span>Iliad<\/span><\/em>. Virgil and Homer gave Milton a model, and a repertory of devices and <\/span>topoi<\/span><\/em>, with which he could frame a cosmic epic from his own monotheistic perspective, but he was not merely \u201ctransposing\u201d the pagan epic poets into English.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As to the address to the \u201csons of God\u201d at the beginning of the psalm, it should be noted that these celestial creatures appear not infrequently elsewhere in the Bible (Here they are <\/span>beney \u2018elim<\/span><\/em>; more commonly, they appear as <\/span>beney \u2018elohim<\/span><\/em>). They are best thought of as the flickering literary afterlife of a polytheistic mythology–God\u2019s royal entourage on high, His <\/span>familia<\/span><\/em>, as Rashi called them, invoking a Latin term that had entered Hebrew during the time of the Roman empire. Literal belief in them may have survived in popular religion but is unlikely to have been shared by the scribal circles that produced Psalms.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

From: Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible<\/em>, vol. 3: Writings, W. W. Norton & Co., 2019, ad loc. By permission of the author.<\/span><\/p>\n","image":{"ID":54890,"id":54890,"title":"Alter-Cover","filename":"Alter-Cover.jpg","filesize":0,"url":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Alter-Cover.jpg","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/welcome-to-the-book-of-judges-unbridled-lust-implacable-hostility-mutual-mayhem\/alter-cover\/","alt":"","author":"7","description":"","caption":"","name":"alter-cover","status":"inherit","uploaded_to":54889,"date":"2019-05-05 07:18:18","modified":"2022-01-31 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