Session 1 - Module 1 - What is Meditation Literature - Reading the Bible as Meditation Literature

Welcome, everybody, here at the table, it's good to have you here. Welcome to those of you taking the class online. This class is called Reading the Bible as Meditation Literature. Why would I name a class that and think that that's an important thing to take a group of people through? Go with me on a thought experiment. Say we could get into a time travel machine, I don't know, picture it in your mind, whatever shape it is, and we can go back to Jerusalem pre-Jesus, like 250 BC, something like that. And we could hang out with Moshe and Yirmeyahu and Esther in the temple courts, and they were going over maybe to the pillared colonnade where Jesus, 200 years later or so, is going to tip over the tables. And so there's like this reading of the Torah that someone reads aloud, like a Levite. And there's a Hebrew word for that, the verb is kara, the noun is mikra, and that means to call out loud. And that actually is the word used in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah for when the Levites get together in the temple courts and they read to the people, which means the kara, they call out. So it's interesting that we come across a word in our English Bibles, read, but what it means is to talk out loud. That's interesting. So you would call that kara, what the Levite is doing as we all sit here and listen, and we call it shema, yeah? We listen. But let's say that you become so privileged, I don't know, maybe your uncle's the Levite or something like that, and he has handmade for you a section of the Torah on a little like papyrus scroll for you to take home after you're there in Jerusalem maybe for like Passover week or something. And so you go back home and you have this little portion of the Torah, maybe it's like, I don't know, the story of the exodus from slavery to Passover. And let's say you want to start, what we would say in English, reading it.

Now if you're not going to read it out loud to a group of people, then what you're, you're not doing kara, because that's a communal reading event. But let's say you do want to do what we would call in English to read it. What would you call the thing that you want to do with that little scroll? What would you say in Hebrew? That's the question. That's our little like mental experiment. So I want to put out there that there actually is a word in the Hebrew Bible itself, and there is a word that was used in later Jewish culture and tradition for what individuals do with biblical texts. The communal event is kara, but the personal engagement in Hebrew is called haggah. And the verb is used actually in the Hebrew Bible two times at really important moments to describe the ideal reader of the collection of biblical scrolls that we call the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible, or what Jewish communities call the Tanakh. Psalm 1 verses 1 and 2. How good is life for the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked, nor stand in the way of sinners, nor does he sit in the assembly of mockers. Instead, in the instruction of Yahweh is his delight. Instruction is the word Torah. And on his Torah, he meditates day and night. And that is very similar to what Moses, excuse me, what God says to Joshua through Moses, right as the torch is being passed. And what God says to Joshua is, be strong and courageous, to observe diligently the whole Torah that Moses, my servant, commanded you. Don't turn aside from it to the right or to the left so you can succeed wherever you go. The scroll of this Torah will not depart from your mouth. You will meditate on it day and night, observe diligently everything written in it, then you will succeed and your ways will prosper. So this little word meditate here, it's explicitly connected to scrolls and Torah and it's talking about what an individual does in terms of their own habits.

And so the Hebrew word here, I already said it earlier but it's here in the notes, is haggah. In our little time travel experiment, if we left the temple and we went due east from Jerusalem down through the hills of Judea and then you are going steep down into the Jordan Valley near the Dead Sea, you would find up in the hills overlooking the Dead Sea this little commune of exiled priests. And they took their Bibles with them and their community literature with them. We call these the Dead Sea Scrolls. And they took a lot of biblical scrolls, which is super cool, but they also took a bunch of community literature that talks about who they are, why they exist, what they're all about. And multiple times in their literature they describe what it means to be like learned in the scriptures. And two times in one of their foundation documents, it's called the Damascus document, they call it being educated in the scroll of hagi, which is the noun of haggah, the verb. So they actually call the Bible, or these scriptural texts, they call them the scrolls of meditation, meditation scrolls. It's like a meta word. It's a word both found in the Bible, but it's a meta word because it's a word in the Bible about what you're supposed to do with the Bible. And it's haggah, to meditate. So what's cool is haggah is used a little over two dozen times in the Hebrew Bible. And if you survey the uses, I just want to show you some examples, and I want us to build up kind of a mental portrait of what is this activity? What are you supposed to be doing? Haggah is used to describe the quiet sounds that animals make. So you can, in Isaiah 38, Hezekiah haggahs like a mourning dove. Or you can haggah sadly like a dove. So think of the sound of a dove. I won't try and make it, I'll butcher it, but you know the sound?

It sounds kind of sad. It's really hard not to do it. Also when a lion has its prey caught, maybe it's in its mouth or it's killed it and it's right there and it's about to start eating it, the sounds that it's making, think of like the low growl of a lion, can be described as haggah. Haggah is used of human speech, especially human speech that is quiet because you're trying to keep something secret. So people who are speaking threats will haggah treachery. Or people who are going to cause trouble for someone, haggah violence. So if you're going to surprise somebody with a trap or a plan, you're not going to say it out loud. You're going to say it like really, really quietly. Haggah is a way of focusing on God. So the poet of Psalm 63 says about God, I haggah about you through the night. The poet of Psalm 77, I will haggah on your works and ponder your mighty deeds. Psalm 35, my tongue will haggah your righteousness. But then also Psalm 37, you can hang out with somebody and they do right by God and right by neighbors so consistently that any time they speak, they just haggah wisdom. That's interesting. It's apparently something an individual does with a scriptural text. It's a multi, what do you say, a multi-sensory activity. Because if you do it with a scroll, you're obviously, you're reading it, so you're intaking like the letters on the scroll, but you're not doing it silently. You're doing it out loud, but quietly. You're doing it regularly, day and night, over the course of a lifetime. So I think what we're supposed to imagine is sitting with a biblical text, reading and saying it out loud quietly to yourself, repetitively over the course of a lifetime. So apparently this is what the biblical authors think you should do with the Bible, and it's how, what the ideal readers of biblical texts are described as doing, it's haggah. I think meditate is a fantastic word.

But it's not a word without problems, because meditate means a lot of things to a lot of people. Many people might associate meditation with emptying your mind of thoughts, and actually that is a really important habit to build, and a good thing to do, but that's not, clearly that's not what Haga means. Haga is about focusing your thoughts, not emptying them of trying to have no thought, but focusing your thoughts so that you think really focused about one thing, that is the words of scripture. And you're doing it out loud, it's like a body, it's a way of reading with your body, to read with your vocal cords, and to say it out loud, and it is, if you've ever had the experience of reading out loud versus just reading silently, it is a different experience. There could be a way to read Psalm 1 and Joshua 1 and say, it's God's word to me, and that's a very pious thing to say, so meditate on it day and night. Of course, focus your thoughts, it's about the wonders of God and God's wisdom, and so, and for sure, that's a part, that's a layer of it, that what it is that scripture is about is worth focusing our thoughts on. I do want to throw out what I think is another layer of meaning in Haggah, which is not just what scripture is about, but also, if something requires a lifetime of daily reading out loud to oneself, is it possible that it also is referring to not just what scripture is about, but how it communicates. In other words, it's the kind of literature that actually requires you to think hard about it for you to discover the layers and depths of meaning that are there. And essentially, the rest of this course is going to be my argument for why I think that second meaning is also part of what Haggah involves. Biblical authors took extreme care and developed a real wide tool set in terms of literary tools for how they want to say what they want to say. They are tools that are not native to how contemporary people, especially contemporary westernized people, tend to read text and read and process literature.

I want to make an analogy that I think has been really helpful for me in helping make the familiar parts of the Bible unfamiliar again. And my own journey with the Bible over the last few decades has been, well, I didn't read it growing up, so it was all brand new and startling in my early 20s, but even a few years go by and it becomes familiar. And the tool set, the reading tool set that I'd like to share with you that I'm referring to as meditation literature has been transformative for me because it's very easy for Scripture over time to become something of like an echo chamber where you're hearing back what you expect to hear. And so a part of developing like a reading tool set for reading Scripture to make sure you're not just hearing your own ideas back at you is to learn how to track with how the biblical authors think, which might be really different than how I think. And the way that they wrote might be really different than how I would think about writing something. And is it possible that it actually requires haggah? Not just because it's about God, but because it actually will take repetition to get accustomed to how the biblical authors are saying what they want to say. So can I put one more thing out there to show you? I want to read you a very strange poem. In France in the 1960s, there was a group of mathematicians and linguists and literature professors who got together and who were so bored with Western poetry and literature, they wanted to bend the categories of what was possible as what counts as literature. And so they got together and began to imagine a whole different tool set for how to write a poem and how to imagine how to write a story. And this poem that I'd like to read to you is kind of... I like the crown jewel of this movement. OULIPO is an acronym for the French phrase Ouvre de Literature Potentielle, the workshop of potential literature.

And here's the flagship poem, called a liminal poem. O to see man's stern poetic thought, publicly espousing recklessly imaginative, mathematical inventiveness, open-mindedness, unconditionally super fecundating, non-antagonistical, hyper-sophisticated, interdenominational interpenetrabilities. And then what follows is a list of names, going down to the initials of the founding member of the group, Raymond Conant. So I just read a string of words. Did the meaning of the poem make itself obvious to you upon a first reading? No. No. Yeah, me neither. Me neither. I've had to stare at this thing for quite a while, so I have that advantage. So let's just notice that visually it's laid out in a way that's obviously intentional. And the visual presentation makes you notice that the poem consists of words that go from one letter to two to three to four, increasing the letters by one all the way until you hit the middle point. And then the poem actually ends, and then the list of names is also a descending number of letters on down to the two-letter initials of the founding member of the group.

The poem itself is one long, like I would have gotten terrible grades from my grammar teacher if I had written a sentence like this in fourth grade. But the poem is about how they're so bored with how poetry is written. They call it man's stern, poetic thought. And what they long to see is poetry that is reckless, imaginative, mathematical, inventive, open-minded, unconditioned, super fecundating, which means infinitely fruitful, non-antagonistical, hyper-sophisticated, interdenominational, and interpenetrable. These are a bunch of linguists and philosophers and mathematicians and literature professors. So what Ulipo is, in the 80s, Warren Mullet, the movement was a few decades in, and they produced hundreds of novels, lots of collections of poetry, but they used constraints and practices that are just, to us, they'll sound bizarre. For example, Jean Parekh wrote an entire novel that doesn't have the letter E. So he chose to take on a constraint of word choice that the words that he choose can never have the letter E. Raymond Queneau wrote a very short story about a guy getting on and off a bus 99 times in a different literary style each time. Jean Lascur wrote a story where every noun chosen was replaced by whatever word is seventh

after it in the dictionary. Imagine trying to write a story that way. My favorite is Raymond Queneau wrote a poem that consists of 10 stanzas of 10 lines, and he made it so that every line is interchangeable with every other line of the equal slot. You can actually swap them back and forth, and it's still coherent. And so he called it a poem of 100 million poems because it's 10 to the 10th power of possible poems that could be generated out of the 100 lines of poetry that he wrote. So that's what potential literature means. But here's what's so interesting, was here was a group of brilliant, brilliant people who had imaginations so expansive that they wanted to dream up a way of writing that no one had ever thought of before. Now, of course, they had to develop practices that already existed. They're using the languages that they write in, but they're doing something new with those preexisting languages. grammars, and also producing something that had never quite been before. I think this is an excellent analogy for how to account for this collection of ancient Hebrew texts and for the Jewish literature produced after the Hebrew Bible that we call Second Temple literature. One sub-collection of Jewish Second Temple literature is what followers of Jesus called the New Testament. It was written entirely by Jewish followers of Jesus who were steeped in this literary

tradition. There is something so unique and remarkable about this collection of texts. I happen to have also a religious conviction about it, that I think it is God's words to his people, guided by God's Spirit through these authors. But also these authors were people who lived in a place and a time. And I would love to understand more how to haggah on these texts and hear in them the unique open-minded, unconditional, super-fecundating, non-antagonistical, hyper-sophisticated, interdenominational interpenetrability of ancient Hebrew literature. This was hard to read. And notice how it communicates on many levels. It's mathematical, it's visual, it's oral, and you have to think about it. And I had to read it many times. But then I actually began to discover layers of meaning in it that were not obvious on the first reading. And I just want to put out there that I think biblical texts are written in such a way as that they require haggah, not just because they're about the most beautiful, remarkable person we could imagine, who has revealed himself to us, the Father, Son, and the Spirit. Like there's an infinity of time to meditate on the beauty and wonder of what Scripture is about. But also there is at least a human lifetime's worth of something to haggah on in how the literature communicates itself. And so what I'd like to do in this class is just give what I've discovered as a basic tool set for how to hear these ancient Jewish authors the way that they expected their readers to hear them. And it requires a set of reading tools that I've been learning about that are so helpful, that have illuminated scriptural texts in the Old and New Testament that I didn't come across at first in my own journey of learning to read the Bible. But I did eventually come across these tools as I learned about ancient Jewish culture, and they've been hugely illuminating, and they are actually fairly intuitive and kind of simple.

Anybody can put them to work, even if you don't know a lick of ancient Greek or Hebrew, even in translation. And so that's what the rest of this course is going to be about, is how to haggah on these texts and hopefully hear a voice that's not our own, which is ultimately, at least that's my goal when I'm meditating on Scripture. Okay, I just threw a whole bunch out there on the table. Let's take some time to process. I'd love to hear your reflections or questions. Something that I found really interesting connects to a theory I call the blue car theory. Like if you ask five people in a room to think of a blue car, they're each going to think of a different kind of blue and a different kind of car. But the words were the same, they were communicated. And so even this idea of speaking the word out loud and meditating on it, the words themselves with the tone that you say them in also carry an extra layer. So I'm really excited. I think even in my own personal study of the Scriptures, how certain Scriptures that I've memorized or recited or read inwardly several times take on a new life and breath, depending on the season of life I'm in or even how I read it that day. So yeah, I'm really excited to explore this further. I appreciate that. There is a, inherently there's a subjective personal element in any act of communication. And you know, depending maybe on the church community, Christian tradition you were brought up in, there may be a value placed on the person. personal element, what does the scriptural passage say to me? Maybe, you know, you're from a tradition where there's a high value placed on what the original author meant, and there's one main meaning I'm supposed to get, and it's the meaning the author had. And those are kind of like extremes. What does it mean to me? What did it mean for Paul the Apostle? And then there's the kind of the in-between, which is to say, but every act of hearing another speak, I have to filter it through me. I'm not Paul the Apostle, I'm me, and you're you. So there'll always be that subjective filtering.

And so maybe more of the goal is not to try and leave behind subjectivity, but to say there is someone other than myself that I want to hear, but I also want what I hear to address the whole of who I am. And that moment is dynamic. Even the you that might read a passage of scripture a year ago is different than the you sitting here right now. Absolutely. And so it's really, haggah is such a great word for it, because it speaks to the moment of the reciting it to yourself, as opposed to just reading an object of communication and I upload it in my brain. It's a much more embodied and objective and subjective way of engaging scripture. So thank you for bringing that up. That's a really, really good observation. I was just thinking, growing up in the evangelical church in the U.S., there was very little focus on some of the questions that you're getting at. I think maybe because we're scared of asking questions. And the how was just not something, like I've been around the Bible my whole life. There's very little much of that time that was focused on the how. And what a beautiful invitation. And an invitation that's okay to receive. Yeah, I was thinking about how, as you were sharing, even reading scripture and haggah feels such a relational invitation from God. As you were talking, even how to hear a voice that's not your own, I think I at least forget that God's giving me an invitation to meditate with his spirit. And so I try to remember when I'm reading scripture, but I don't always like praying even like, Holy Spirit, what do you want to illuminate to me in this? As I'm chewing on this like a lion with their prey, take me out of it. Yes, to subjective filtering. And also, Holy Spirit, what do you want to speak to me? Because I'm doing it in a relationship with you. And that's just convicting because I don't always make that space.

I want to do more. Yeah, thank you for both of those comments. And I think it gives a good opportunity to bring clarity. So when we're engaging scripture, this element of hearing a voice other than my own speak to me, I mean, that happens in so many ways. Like in a conversation with somebody, they don't know, they say something, and based on the day or the year or the life that I've been having, you hear it in a certain way that they maybe didn't have in mind. And so that's a reality of communication. And that happens with scripture all of the time. There's another step that if I attend to the how, and the reason of bringing up the Ulipo group is to say, here's a group that made up a new how, a new how to communicate. And if you didn't have the handbook written by Warren Mott to tell you about the group and how they did what they did and why, what were some of these tools they used, if all you picked up was a number of these poem collections or novels, it would be really difficult to make sense of what on earth is going on. So thank you, Warren Mott. But what we don't have for the Bible is an ancient handbook written by a biblical author to say, hey, here's our how. Here's how we do what we do. And if you knew that, then you could probably understand us better. We don't have that. So there's a whole field in biblical scholarship which is really like recovering the how, doing it inductively. And so that process, you could say,

call, there's a specific kind of nerdy term for it, is called a Poetics of Biblical Literature or Poetics of Literature. So not poetic in terms of it's like poetry, but poetics comes from the Greek term poiesis, which means craftsmanship, the style of how you make a thing. And of course literature is a kind of text that communicates both in terms of its content, what it's about, but also in terms of its form, how it is shaped. The form itself is a part of its meaning. And recovering is in this sentence because we don't have a handbook for how biblical scribes operate it. We have to inductively recover it by reading the literature itself. So in a way you can learn how to recover a Poetics of Biblical Literature by reading biblical literature. In fact there's no better way to do that than to Haggad. So the interpersonal element of something the author of Psalm 1 and 2, which is what we're going to focus on in the sessions ahead, what that author had in mind, that author meant to communicate some things. And I want to know what those things are, because I stand to benefit from that in many ways. But also there will be elements where there will be things the author could have never known about, but that the divine guide for these authors, the Holy Spirit, definitely knows about as I'm interacting with this text. And what I have found is that that second interaction with me in the Spirit through these texts has become infinitely more enriched, not replaced, but enriched, as I've learned to track more with the tool set and the recovering the biblical poetics. So think of this as an invitation to another step deeper, to how to engage these texts another layer deeper. It's not about a right method or a wrong method. It's about, here's something that I think can help somebody deepen their relationship to how to meditate on Scripture. It may be helpful for you at this season of your life, it may not, but I'll offer it nonetheless, because I found it infinitely helpful. So here's some language around that we often use in Bible Project, kind of resources for what we want to do. What I want to do is gain a native competence for how to read ancient Jewish literature, that is biblical literature. What is it that Jesus would have known about how to read and engage the Isaiah scroll, just that he grew up with because it was in his environment, that he didn't ever have to take a class? I would love to learn how to read the Bible on its own terms. I would love to recover a way of engaging Scripture, I'll just use some metaphors, that are in sync with its design, that are along the grain of its composition. And perhaps, really, if I'm honest, the heart for me behind it is

I want to read these texts the way that Jesus and the apostles read them and have the kind of experience that they did. They obviously felt these texts were words of life that revealed a God of infinite beauty and love, and I would love to deepen my tool set for how to do that. So that's what we're going to do in the sessions. We're going to spend the majority of this class working slowly through Psalm 1 and 2, observing the how of how these poems are written so that we can hear even more clearly the what they are about. But before we do that, I want to do one more session on three more theoretical ideas concerning the how that have been so helpful for me to learn how to recover a way of reading literature that is not from my culture and time. So three ideas, and then we're going to dive into Psalm 1 and 2. How you doing? You ready? Ready for action? Okay, so let's pause before we do that, take a brain rest before we look at three foundational ideas for recovering a poetic biblical literature.