“Mightily impressed with the Hebrew writer’s insight and craftsmanship (though I was only half-conscious of its details; I needed Professor Joel’s help later to know exactly what I had been looking at), I wrote the following:

King David Refuses to Mourn His Son
2 Samuel 12:20-23

I’m dressed. The sky is stone, my path a sea.
I’m going to him, he won’t return to me.

I eat. The shattering waves have calmed the sea.
I’m going to him, he won’t return to me.

I worship, sowing grain across the sea.
I’m going to him, he won’t return to me.

Thus I became a translator of the Bible, sort of, and in doing that found myself reckoning more urgently than ever before with a critical circumstance of ancient literature: form and content are inseparable, and equally important. These languages were not like modern globalized ones, serving mainly to convey information in explicit and interchangeable forms—but with a dimension called ‘style’ for artistic uses on the side. Instead, the original Bible was, like all of ancient rhetoric and poetry, primarily a set of live performances, and what they meant was tightly bound up in the way they meant it.”