I
The Bible
Genesis 1: 1–3
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God said, Let there be light.
There has never been a mightier telling of our genesis than this from the King James version of the Bible, nor, quite probably, will there ever be one. It is with us always, incomprehensible in our youth, equally mysterious as we age, a subtle incantation to remind us of our awful beginning.
There is one other telling of it that may last a long time too. It is in The Green Pastures, a play that broke like sunlight between the first and second great wars of the twentieth century. It is told in human terms, about a fish fry held in Heaven but as real with its smells and tastes and table-sounds as any like feast day on Earth. It is a fine reassurance of the dignity of men and angels inside their varicolored skins, of Heaven and the Lord God and how the Earth began.
Since any thinking body knows that angels, like ordinary men, must eat and drink, it opens this way:
From The Green Pastures by Marc Connelly, 1890–1980
In the darkness many voices are heard singing “Rise, Shine, Give God the Glory.” They sing it gayly and rapidly. The lights go up as the second verse ends. The chorus is being sung diminuendo by a mixed company of angels. That is, they are angels in that they wear brightly colored robes and have wings protruding from their backs. Otherwise they look and act like a company of happy Negroes at a fish fry. The scene itself is a pre-Creation Heaven with compromises. In the distance is an unbroken stretch of blue sky. Companionable varicolored clouds billow down to the floor of the stage and roll overhead to the branches of a live oak tree which is up left. The tree is leafy and dripping with Spanish moss, and with the clouds makes a frame for the scene. In the cool shade of the tree are the usual appurtenances of a fish fry: a large kettle of hot fat set on two small parallel logs, with a fire going underneath, and a large rustic table formed by driving four stakes into the ground and placing planks on top of the small connecting boards. On the table are piles of biscuits and corn bread and the cooked fish in dish pans. There are one or two fairly large cedar or crock “churns” containing boiled custard, which looks like milk. There is a gourd dipper beside the churns and several glasses and cups of various sizes and shapes from where the custard is drunk.
The principal singers are marching two by two in a small area at the R. of the stage. Two MAMMY ANGELS are attending to the frying beside the kettle. Behind the table a MAN ANGEL is skinning fish and passing them to the cooks. Another is ladling out the custard. A MAMMY ANGEL is putting fish on bread for a brood of cherubs, and during the first scene they seat themselves on a grassy bank upstage. Another MAMMY ANGEL is clapping her hands disapprovingly and beckoning a laughing BOY CHERUB down from a cloud a little out of her reach. Another MAMMY ANGEL is solicitously slapping the back of a GIRL CHERUB who has a large fish sandwich in her hand and a bone in her throat. There is much movement about the table, and during the first few minutes several individuals go up to the table to help themselves to the food and drink. Many of the women angels wear hats and a few of the men are smoking cigars. A large boxful is on the table. There is much laughter and chatter . . .
And gossip. And tomfoolery. It all sounds fine and real, and when the Lord God enters, and a reverent hush falls over the angels, He is fine and real too. “He is the tallest and biggest of them all,” which is as it should be. “He wears a white shirt with a white bow tie, a long Prince Albert coat of black alpaca, black trousers, and congress gaiters. . . .”
It is quite natural, by now in the telling of the story, that when God rears back and passes a few miracles to improve the flavor of the custard, rain should result, and then the creation of the earth itself. All the angels lean over the railing to see, looking down admiringly at it, and Gabriel says:
GABRIEL
[Gazing down.] Yes, suh. Dat’d make mighty nice farming country. Jest look at dat south forty over dere. You ain’t going to let dat go to waste, is you, Lawd? Dat would be a pity an’ a shame.
GOD
[Not turning.] It’s a good earth. [GOD turns, room is made for Him beside GABRIEL on the embankment.] Yes. I ought to have somebody to enjoy it. [He turns, facing the audience. The others, save for the CHOIR, who are lined up in two rows of six on an angle up right, continue to look over the embankment.] Gabriel! [GOD steps down from the embankment two paces.]
GABRIEL
[Joining him.] Yes, Lawd.
GOD
Gabriel, I’m goin’ down dere.
GABRIEL
Yes, Lawd.
GOD
I want you to be my working boss yere while I’m gone.
GABRIEL
Yes, Lawd.
GOD
You know dat matter of dem two stars?
GABRIEL
Yes, Lawd.
GOD
Git dat fixed up! You know dat sparrow dat fell a little while ago? ’Ten to dat, too.
GABRIEL
Yes, Lawd.
GOD
I guess dat’s about all. I’ll be back Saddy. [To the CHOIR.] Quiet, angels. [The CHOIR stops singing. Those on the embankment circle down stage. GOD goes to embankment. Turns and faces the company.] I’m gonter pass one more miracle. You all gonter help me an’ not make a soun’ caize it’s one of de most impo’tant miracles of all. [Nobody moves. GOD turns, facing the sky, and raises His arms above His head.] Let there be man!
And that was a version of the beginning, since everything must have one, of man and his hungers.
The angels who watched it take shape, below their iron balcony rail, were well-fed happy angels, full of fried fish and biscuits and “custard,” and probably God Himself was the only one who knew, there at the picnic, that the men He created down on earth would not always feast as well.
Things that have meant security and happiness may have been sung in terms of food and drink since The Beginning. David did that in his Psalms. Jesus made miracles with bread and wine and fishes to give strength to the oppressed spirits in Roman Palestine. This was their promise of milk and honey in a better land. . . .
Israel sang a little song: “Spring up, O well; Sing ye unto it”; and the well did spring up to slake his people’s thirst. When we know that wandering tribes still sing thus, there is the whole story of our trust in God to ponder, kept living for us by men who since the first have thought much on it. A table has been set before us, and we can sing with David:
Psalm 23
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
By the time a story five thousand years old, or three thousand, comes to our ears, it has lost its trappings. It is as simple as any story can possibly be, because it is like a piece of driftwood that once has been a tree, with all its boughs and twiglets—a silvery noble fragment now, with faint carvings on it from the long-dead sea worms, but no other outward sign of its illimitable travel.
The Bible is like that, perhaps more so than any other collection of the stories of man. Every old language, though, has its revered lot of them. One mouth after another has discarded ornamentation in the telling; one hurried or persecuted scribe after another has cut off this little descriptive phrase and that little prettiness. What is left for us to read is as straightforward as Genesis, as direct as a Chinese poem.
The problem, then, is whether we are ready to read it. The sins and omissions of everything we have learned about it, from our devout grandmothers to our glib professors, tend to push us away from it into the safe void of disinterest and boredom. Through all our young years we learn the emasculated legends of Joseph’s coat and baby Moses floating in the bulrushes, and we shun the hints of pain and awfulness in the stories of Jesus Christ. Then we retreat angrily, from what we have been told by our elders, or have read dutifully in the family Bible; we laugh in resentment, and call ourselves agnostic with all the enthusiasm of adolescence. That makes it easy and delightful to ape our teachers, a little later, and to agree, with only a sneaked glance over our shoulder at Grandmother’s patient ghost, that the Bible is indeed “literature,” a fascinating collection of myths and fairy tales.
How good it is to be free of the intellectual restrictions of Sunday School! And how disturbing we find it, a little later, to discover a sincere wistfulness, a wish confessed half-mockingly that we could feel devout, credulous, stupid enough to read the Book as some older people seem to! We hate to confess such a lacuna in our chain of culture.
Many people, like me, content themselves with the surety that one day, soon or late, they will be able to read, and mark, and inwardly digest the great feast that awaits. They will hardly suspect, as I did not, that the awaited realization of a true wish may come through some such a thing as the printed word gluttony.
It happened to me when I decided to make a collection of feasts that I had read about. I knew that I must include the first one, about the Apple on the Tree. I could find it, in the Bible I unthinkingly include among my other reference books because of my early and my later educations: easy, because I went to a school where we were taught more about the tribes of Israel and their battles than we ever suspected about Napoleon, or Sherman’s march through Georgia, or Bismarck. I found the passages I wanted, and then, in the New Testament, the ones about the miracles of the loaves and fishes, the water changed to wine, all of those. . . .
And it grew clear to me that the priests and the storytellers, the great singers and the teachers, everywhere and always showed their people real food, real wine, to prove to them the truths of spiritual nourishment. A great catch of fishes from an empty sea, or water springing from a dry stone: such things were told of over and over to sustain men whose hope of Heaven dwindled and grew faint as their stomachs cried out.
I read more, excited at last to have found for myself a thread to follow through the long books. Then I remembered about concordances, on a hot gray day in July, 1945, an important day for me, in the New York Public Library, with the dim roar of a rainstorm outside the enormous room and all about me the rustle and squint and faint sour smell of reading. I found two thick black books on the reference shelves, and sat looking at them for several minutes, timid and inept. Finally I decided to search for the word Gluttony. And that was the beginning of pleasure and joy and great strength for me, because suddenly I was able, after long waiting, to read the Bible and know why and how, without duty to my grandmother or my professor or anything in the world but my own awakened understanding.
It was dark in the wet streets when I went away that night, but I was not tired, and the next days I came back and feasted more, as after a long fast.
I read Maschil’s 78th Psalm about the greedy children of Ephraim, how they mocked God, asking Him to prove Himself by setting up a table for them in the wilderness, and how He rained down the corn of heaven upon them, “flesh also upon them as dust, and feathered fowls like as the sands of the sea,” and how with their mouths still bulging He smote them, those fat lustful pigs. He was a just God, Maschil sang, for He filled them full in their mockery and then roared out with mirth and rage and smote them. . . .
I read about Esau and Jacob, that story so full of treachery and slyness, about the dull-witted hairy man who let his brother and his empty belly cheat him into selling his birthright for a bowl of hot cooked soup, a mess of pottage. There was more to the story, which I had forgotten or never known, and I followed enviously the deft telling of how Jacob and his doting foxy mother made a fool again of Esau, and betrayed him to his blind old father, again with savory meat, but this time cooked as Isaac loved it, “two good kids from the goats.” That was evil in the pot, for fair!
I read of the happy gaffer Abraham, how when he learned that he was to become the father of all the Hebrew race, and he ninety-nine and his wife Sarah an old barren woman, begot ready a little feast for the three celestial strangers who brought him the good news. He asked them to share a morsel of bread with him. Then hospitably, as it tells in Genesis:
Genesis XVIII. 6–8
. . . Abraham hastened into the tent unto Sarah, and said, Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth.
And Abraham ran unto the herd, and fetcht a calf tender and good, and gave it unto a young man; and he hasted to dress it.
And he took butter, and milk, and the calf which he had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree, and they did eat.
This seems in every way a charming simple banquet, right for the Lord Himself, but it has often been questioned by gastronomers, with great respect of course, because of the peculiar sauce served with it. Perhaps the best justification to be found, if one be needed, is in the Reverend Mr. Richard Warner’s Antiquitates Culinariae, which appeared in London in 1791. (The long s used then in printing may add a touch more spice to the discussion, if not to the sauce itself.)
From Antiquitates Culinariae by Richard Warner, circa 1791
. . . In the XVIIIth Chapter of Genefis, we have the picture of a patriarchal entertainment; which, though it does not boaft any of the tricks of modern cookery, nor rife perhaps to the modern idea of good cheer, yet prefents a very pleafing picture of comfortable living. . . . The only fngular circumftance in this beautiful picture of patriarchal fimplicity, is, the kind of fauce ferved up with the calf, butter and milk. This is elucidated, however, by the following anecdote taken from Ockley’s Hiftory of the Saracens. Abdomelick the caliph, upon his entering into Cufah, made a fplendid entertainment. “When he was fat down, Amrou the fon of Hareth, an ancient Mechzumian, came in; he called him to him, and placing him by him upon his fopha, afked him what meat he liked beft of all that he had eaten. The old Mechzumian anfwered, an afs’s neck well feafoned, and well roafted. You do nothing, fays Abdomelick; what fay you to a leg or a shoulder of a fucking lamb, well roafted, and covered over with butter and milk.”
It was exciting, in the big Library, to match such motley, to remember an old English book and fit it into the much older story I could now read with my fresh-opened eyes. I went on much longer than I should, but without impatience at the strictures of time because at last I knew that the Bible was for me. There it was, finally, and there was I, ready for it whenever I wanted it, without boredom or duty or youthful snobbery to hinder me.
I could read stories like the one of Esther, as intricate and bloody and finely constructed as any modern masterpiece of adventure, a book which begins with one of the rowdiest drunken parties I know of, and mounts to its ferocious denouement with a series of craftily arranged intimate suppers, full of fine food and tipsy self-betrayals.
I could hypnotise myself with the singsong of Leviticus, and see how all that Moses taught his wandering children about sanitation and prudence and common animal decency still helps to preserve them in ghettos and refugee camps.
Finally, with a different sense of exhilaration, a kind of humility at my impotence in the face of a mysticism beyond me, I could read the story of Jesus. At least I could understand the ever-present fact, stronger than ever in the books of the New Testament, that the way to teach a new faith and to promise Heaven is to tell it as Christ did, in terms of feasts, of full vineyards, of mighty catches of fish and brimming bottles. I read about how the Devil failed to tempt Jesus to turn a stone into bread, to prove Himself the Son of God, and how He did turn water into wine for a better purpose, at a wedding. And there was the miracle of the five loaves and the two fishes, which fed a multitude . . . God making something from nothing, much from little, Paradise from Hell.
It was all a part of man’s hunger for what is true, and a sign to me of the significance of bread and wine and our intuitive reverence for it and its spiritual connotations. It was there, ready to be known, just as all that anyone can ever know about hunger and nourishment and the feasting of the soul is in the story of the Last Supper, waiting to be read and pondered on:
St. Luke XXII: 7–22
Then came the day of unleavened bread, when the passover must be killed.
And he sent Peter and John, saying, Go and prepare us the passover, that we may eat.
And they said unto him, Where wilt thou that we prepare?
And he said unto them, Behold, when ye are entered into the city, there shall a man meet you, bearing a pitcher of water; follow him into the house where he entereth in.
And ye shall say unto the goodman of the house, The Master saith unto thee, Where is the guestchamber, where I shall eat the passover with my disciples?
And he shall shew you a large upper room furnished: there make ready.
And they went, and found as he had said unto them: and they made ready the passover.
And when the hour was come, he sat down, and the twelve apostles with him.
And he said unto them, With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer:
For I say unto you, I will not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God.
And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves:
For I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come.
And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.
Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you.
But, behold, the hand of him that betrayeth me is with me on the table.
And truly the Son of man goeth, as it was determined: but woe unto that man by whom he is betrayed!