Metabiblical

The image above comes from the book Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy. There are no quotation marks. Why aren’t there any quotation marks?

I think the answer is simple. The quotation mark, at its heart, is a feature of formal reporting. The use of quotation marks assures the reader that whatever is within the quotation marks is a verbatim copy of words used by the original speaker. I would suggest that Cormac McCarthy is depicting the speech of people who do not consider themselves bound by the norms of modern journalism.

So say now to the men of Judah, and to those dwelling in Jerusalem, saying, So says Yahweh, Behold, I am a potter shaping a catastrophe against you, and thinking up a scheme against you. Turn now, all of your, from your evil ways, and improve your ways and doings. And they will say, It is no use! We will follow our own plans, and we will each act according to our stubborn, evil hearts. Therefore so says Yahweh, Ask among the nations. Who has heard anything like this? Virgin Israel has done a horrible thing.

Go ahead. Try putting quotations marks into the words of Jeremiah. Make sure that, in each case, a set of quotation marks contains only the exact reported verbiage of whatever speaker is being quoted.

The fact is that the Hebrew Bible does not claim to engage in verbatim reporting of speech. This may be clearest in prophetic language, where the speaker suddenly shifts in unpredictable ways. But it is also visible in prose.

For one thing, the Bible will sometimes nest quotations in a rapid and casual way that is jarring with added punctuation. Consider the opening of Jeremiah 34.

The word which came to Jeremiah from YHWH, when Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and all his army, and all the kingdoms of the earth of his dominion, and all the people, fought against Jerusalem, and against all its saying, saying, So says YHWH, the god of Israel, Go and speak to Zedekiah king of Judah, and tell him, So says YHWH, Behold, I will give this city into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall burn it with fire. And you shall not escape out of his hand, but shall surely be taken, and delivered into his hand, and your eyes shall behold the king of Babylon, and he shall speak with you mouth to mouth, and you shall go to Babylon. Yet hear the word of YHWH, O Zedekiah king of Judah. So says YHWH of you, You shall not die by the sword. You shall die in peace, and just like the burnings for your ancestors, the former kings who were before you, so they will burn incense for you. And they will lament you: Ah lord! For I have spoken — an utterance of YHWH.

This will get weird quickly with quotations marks.

Here is an easier example. In Ruth 4, Boaz is going to clear up the marriage rites surrounding his intended bride, Ruth. But first, he must deal with a goel. Without going too deep into the meaning of this tricky word, in this case the goel is another man who has the right to marry Ruth before he does. However, the writer of Ruth apparently does not know the name of the goel, or does not assign him a name. This produces the following quote.

And Boaz went up to the gate and sat there, and then here comes the goel, to whom Boaz spoke, saying, Turn aside here, so and so. And he turned aside and sat down.

Should we put “so and so” inside quotation marks?

I think the easiest route through the problem is simply not to use quotation marks in the translation of the Hebrew Bible. People got by fine without them when reading the KJV from 1611 to the 1950’s or so, and people seem to get along fine reading Blood Meridian today.