A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [22]
“I see,” she said again, but I thought she was not speaking of my last sentence. “Yes, I begin to understand. You were interested in the way I read the stories of the Creation of woman. How might you read them?”
“In a very similar fashion, though I imagine we reached the point by rather different means.”
“The means does not matter if the result is the same,” she said dismissively, reaching down to rub the ash from the tip of her cigarette.
“You are wrong.” She looked up, startled more by the edge in my voice than the blunt words themselves. She could not have known that to my mind sloppiness in textual analysis was absolutely unforgivable, far worse than the deliberate falsification of results from a slipshod chemical experiment. I forced a smile to take the sting out of my words, then tried to explain.
“Interpreting the Bible without training is a bit like finding a specific address in a foreign city with neither map nor knowledge of the language. You might stumble across the right answer, but in the meantime you’ve put yourself at the mercy of every ignoramus in town, with no way of telling the savant from the fool. Finding your way through the English Bible, you’re entirely under the tyranny of the translators.”
“Oh, for subtle distinctions perhaps…”
“And blatant mistranslations, and deliberate obliteration of the original meaning.”
“For example?” she asked sceptically.
“Deuteronomy thirty-two verse eighteen,” I said with satisfaction. One single verb in this passage had occupied me and the librarians of the Bodleian for the better part of a month, and its exegesis was one cornerstone of the paper I had just finished and was due to present in a month’s time. I was very proud of this verse. It took her only a moment to pull the words from her memory.
“Of the Rock that begot thee thou art unmindful, and thou hast forgotten God that formed thee.” She sounded slightly puzzled. The passage was hardly controversial, being merely a segment of Moses’ final exhortation to his wayward people, reminding them to turn from pagan practices, back to the Rock that was their God.
“That’s not what it says,” I told her. “Oh, it’s what the Authorised translation says, but it’s not what the original says. The final phrase, ‘formed thee,’ is nowhere in the Hebrew. The verb used is hul, which means ‘to twist.’ Elsewhere, it is used of the movement in a dance, or, as it is here, in childbirth. The verse ought to be translated, ‘You have forgotten the Rock that begot you; you have forgotten the God who writhed in the effort of giving birth to you.’ The purpose of the verse is to remind the people of the intimacy of God’s parenthood, using both the male and the female forms.”
Well, I thought as I watched her face, if the hardened academics react to my paper with even a fraction of her response, it will prove a memorable gathering.
She came out of her chair like a scalded cat, moved across the room, and pounced on a drawer, emerging with a worn volume of soft white leather. She flipped expertly to the place and stared at the words as if she’d expected them to have changed. They had not. She turned and thrust the open book at me accusingly.
“But that’s… That means…”
“Yes,” I said wryly, pleased with the effect my idea had on her. “That means that an entire vocabulary of imagery relating to the maternal side of God has been deliberately obscured.” I watched her try to sort it out, and then I put it into a phrase I would definitely not use in the presentation in Oxford: “God the Mother, hidden for centuries.”
She looked down at the book in her hands as if the ground beneath her feet had, in the blink of an eye, become treacherously soft and unstable. She turned carefully to the drawer, riffled the gold-edged India paper speculatively, and put her Bible away. She returned to her chair a troubled woman and lit another cigarette.
“Is there more of this kind of thing?”
“Considerably more.”
She smoked in silence and squinted through the smoke. “Yes,