The Bible and Modern Writers

I’ve recently been working on a memoir about my return to Judaism starting in my late 20s, and in my research I came across an interpretation of Torah by the Alexandrian (1st century) Jewish philosopher Philo. According to Philo, the story of Abraham banishing Hagar at the insistence of Sarah should be taken to mean that a good person (Abraham) will divest him/herself of the sensual passions (Hagar) in favor of the life of the intellect (Sarah). Now, as much as I like the sensual life and have no plans on discarding it, I still can’t help but be delighted by this interpretation. It reminds me that the Bible is an infinitely fascinating document, that for all its mysteries and vastness, it’s still the closest thing to truth that any of us is likely to encounter. What other book contains poetry as great as that of Psalms and the Book of Job, allegories as provocative as the Song of Songs, ethical guidelines as brilliant as those making up Proverbs, or philosophical musings as stunning as one can find in Ecclesiastes? If there hadn’t been a prohibition against religious theater in Shakespeare’s time (the Protestant/Catholic battles made the subject too incendiary), one can only imagine what the Bard would have made of David and Bathsheba, Ruth and Naomi, Balaam and his Ass. Of course, there’s no such censorship today – but religion is so much on the decline, playwrights and novelists are mostly censoring themselves, refusing to explore the great possibilities for contemporary theater and fiction that the Bible continues to offer. What a loss this is for modern audiences, for whom a work updating Troy or Greek mythology still turns up at times, but who lack anything about Moses or Deborah or Solomon. When if ever will our writers return to the book that more than any other defines the Western mind?