Images at work versus words at play: Michelangelo's art and the artistry of the Hebrew Bible

Judaism, Spring, 2002 by Richard S. Ellis

Thus, according to Jerome, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai, the skin of his face did not send forth beams of light, but horned was his face. Cornuta esset facies sua. Like karan or the revocalized keren in the Hebrew original, cornuta appears first in the Latin. But because Jerome does not translate the Hebrew word 'or, meaning "skin," the placement of cornuta first in the sentence emphasizes Moses's weirdness.

The Septuagint, Luther's Bible, and the King James Bible all avoid Jerome's distortion. "The skin of his face shone" reads the King James; Luther's reads similarly as does the Septuagint. However, none of these translations captures the dual perspective of the Hebrew karan 'or panav / keren 'or panav. A parallel situation occurs in Michelangelo's pictorial interpretations of the Biblical narrative of creation. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." So reads the majestic opening verse of the King James Bible, reproducing word for word the translation in Jerome's Vulgate as well as in the Septuagint. But just as Michelangelo's frescoes are limited interpretations, so is the King James translation limited. It does not hint at the astonishing fecundity of the first verse in the Torah, the multiple senses of which are far richer and far more mysterious.

The Language of the Hebrew Bible and the Mystery of Existence

A mystery pervades existence. However, we are excluded from comprehending that mystery because it includes ourselves.

What insights into the mystery of existence are conveyed by Michelangelo's frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? The first five recall the creation of the cosmos and of Adam and Eve, while the sixth portrays the disobedience of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, acts that brought sin into the world. The last three, which depict events in the life of Noah, are a sober reminder that the flood did not cleanse humankind of sin. All nine frescoes point to the birth, Passion, and Resurrection of Christ. As depicted in the overpowering fresco of The Last Judgment on the front wall of the Sistine Chapel, Christ, at the end of days, will resurrect the righteous from the dead and condemn the wicked to eternal punishment. Christ explains history as well as the meaning of existence. In Christ, the mystery of existence is resolved.

"Our entrance here being an Exclusion from comprehension," (11) the open-endedness and unfathomability of the mystery of existence are infinitely beyond the capacity of the human mind to imagine and the human hand to portray. Michelangelo's frescoes have a different agenda, which it shares with much of Christian art, although his iconography is not that of normative Christianity. Appropriate to their placement as didactic images in a chapel, the frescoes are a form of doctrinal enforcement that is meant to impart, in simplified format, a complete and diagrammatic reading of a complex history. (12)

Images at work versus words at play, artistic representations of God and man providing incontrovertible explanations of existence, versus the open-ended play of interpretation on the text of the Torah: these dichotomies illuminate the spiritual chasm separating Christianity from Judaism. The chasm is explored by Susan Handelman in her book The Slayers of Moses, where she writes the following concerning the attitude of the Rabbinic commentators toward the Torah, the Talmud, and other Jewish texts: "We have characterized Rabbinic reading of texts as metonymical--... preferring multivocal as opposed to univocal meanings, the play of as if over the assertions of is, juxtapositions over equivalencies, concrete images over abstractions.... The text, for the Rabbis, is a continuous generator of meaning, which arises from the innate logic of the divine language, the letter itself, and is not sought in a nonlinguistic realm external to the text.... For the Jew, God's presence is inscribed or traced within a text, not a body. Divinity is located in language, not person." (13)