Lewis on Reading Old Books

Here’s something from a letter, dated October 18, 1919, from C. S. Lewis to his friend Arthur Greeves:

I am not very fond of Euripedes’ Media: but as regards the underworking of the possibilities which you mention, you must remember that the translation has to be rather stiff — tied by the double chains of fidelity to the original and the demands of its own metres, it cannot have the freedom and therefore cannot have the passion of the real thing.  As well, even in reading the Greek we must miss a lot.  We call it “statuesque” and “restrained” because at the distance of 2500 years we cannot catch the subtler points — the associations of a word, the homeliness of some phrazes [sic] and the unexpected strangeness of others.  All this we, as foreigners, don’t see — and are therefore inclined to assume that it wasn’t there. — C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters, 1:467-368.

What Lewis says here may be obvious, but it jumped out at me in this letter as it hadn’t before.  We must miss a lot of allusions and subtle hints, a lot of surprises and a lot of the richness of ancient literature.  Perhaps we think some things are strikingly beautiful when the original audience would have found them rather dull, or vice versa.  Perhaps we think that a conversation in an ancient play is straightforward when an ancient audience would have been able to “read between the lines” and hear how that superficially straightforward conversation operates on several levels at once.

What Lewis writes about here is part of the challenge we face as interpreters of the Bible, too.  We read passages and they mean very little to us, or we conclude that their meaning is very slight and all on the surface, in part because we’re reading these passages thousands of years after they were written.

So, for instance, we read the line in Exodus 15:27 — “Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve wells of water and seventy palm trees; so they camped there by the water” — and we think that Moses must have suddenly felt the urge to provide a bit of color, a bit of description.  Or, at most, perhaps he’s simply emphasizing how well the Lord provided for Israel after the hardships at Marah.  But that’s it.  Most commentaries simply skim over this verse or provide a pious comment (which is not wrong) about God’s provision.  If we’re reading the text as people of our own day, this verse means little to us.

But to someone who was steeped in the Scriptures, the references to twelve and seventy, to trees and water, would stand out.  He might see those twelve springs of water as a symbolic reference to the twelve tribes of Israel, for instance, and the seventy palm trees as a reference to the seventy nations of the world (Gen. 10).  He might think about the connotations of water and trees, going back to the Garden (Gen. 2).  His imagination, shaped by the Scriptures, might run forward to the Temple with its bronze sea and garden imagery, to Ezekiel 47 where the water flows out to the world, to Revelation 22, and so forth.

Here’s another example.  When Mark starts his Gospel, he writes, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”  We read through that verse and barely notice the words.  But all of the words are significant.  What’s the “gospel” here?  Reading this verse superficially, we might think that it’s a reference to the book Mark is writing.  Or we might take it simply as referring to how the good news about Jesus began with the coming of John the Baptist.

But if we were steeped in the Scriptures, we might think back to the prophecies of Isaiah where “good news” is proclaimed (e.g., Isaiah 40), which is, in particular, the good news that Yahweh is returning to rescue and rule His people.  And if we were citizens of the Roman empire, as Mark’s original readers were, there might be another connotation, as well.  A “gospel” was the announcement of the birth or the victory or the rise to power of an emperor.  Mark’s Gospel is a “gospel” in the Isaiah 40 sense, but it’s also a “gospel” in this Greco-Roman sense, since it is the story of the coming of the King.  But it’s easy for us to miss those connotations. 

What Lewis writes may incline us to give up: We can’t understand all the meanings of words, the subtle allusions that a contemporary of Euripedes would have caught, and so forth, and therefore our understanding and appreciation of ancient literature (including the Bible) are always diminished.

I don’t believe that’s necessarily true of the Bible, though.  Perhaps we will struggle to understand some things.  Perhaps certain words won’t jump out at us the way they would to, say, Mark’s contemporaries.  But I do believe that God has given us enough to understand His Word.  That isn’t true of Euripedes, but it is true of Scripture.

We may learn new things as we study the ancient world, and that may help us understand Scripture.  There are words we can’t translate because they appear only once in the Hebrew Bible.  For now, we make intelligent guesses.  But maybe someday we’ll discover something that helps us get the right translation of those words.  But we still know enough to understand God’s Word.

But what is most important is that we be saturated in Scripture so that we catch more of the allusions, so that we know the flow of the story, and so forth.  Will we ever fathom all of Scripture’s depths?  No.  Will our understanding always be that of foreigners who can’t grasp the richness of the story?  Perhaps in some sense.  But not in another.  Scripture wasn’t addressed simply and solely to people of one generation.  It was addressed to us also, and if we are followers of the Word then nothing in the Word can be completely foreign to us.

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