Esther and the Future of the Commentary
Posted on the Web, 30 May 2000Paper originally given to the colloquium Esther 2000, at Creighton University, Omaha and University of Nebraska, Lincoln, April 2000
This paper has not been published, and should be cited only with the permission of the author.
Looking back on my Esther commentary
of 1984, I fell to wondering how differently I would write it
if I were beginning now. It would certainly not be the same book.
What is it that has changed in 15 years, not such a long span
of time, that provokes such a thought?
To tell the truth, when I began working on Esther, it was not
from any love of the book, of which I knew little, but entirely
to get my commentary on EzraNehemiah published, since the
publisher wanted to include Esther with those books. As it turned
out, it was Esther that stole my heart, a much neglected book
in the scholarly community in those days (unlike now), a book
with hidden depths and delights, as I was soon to discover.
Strangely enough, though I knew little about Esther, I had no
doubt about what a commentary on it should look like: like every
other commentary on a biblical book, of which there were abundant
examples (even then). Like every other commentary, its aim should
be to give the reader a clear and concise account of what the
book was about, what its individual sections and verses meant.
It aimed at being correct. Though there were doubtless many differing
interpretations of many of its verses, my task as a commentator
was to sort out the good interpretations from the bad, the better
from the worse, and tell the reader the best. However modest I
might have been as a person (not very, probably), my commentatorial
responsibility was the extremely immodest one of finding the right
interpretation, the best one, which the reader could rely
on as the latest word, the most considered opinion.
But now, at the turn of the millennium, the word on the street
and in the quadrangle is:
1. Farewell to the one right interpretation!
Before I begin to rubbish that traditional
view of the commentator's task, let me say a word about what a
demanding and responsible one it was.
1. In the first place, it required a humble preparedness to read
and consider the previous commentaries, in depth and in detail.
Not, thankfully, all the commentaries ever written, for it was
a facet of the pyramidal view of the accumulation of true knowledge
that the latest was usually the best, and the further back you
went among commentaries the more nonsense and outmoded stuff you
would find. A clever commentator, though, would read back at least
to the beginning of the century (the twentieth, I mean, in case
you are becoming millennially challenged), and would be delighted
to able to parade from a really ancient commentator (a nineteenth-century
one, for example) a telling point, a bon mot, an insight, that
had perhaps dropped out of sight in the commentatorial tradition.
In this way, a laudable respect for one's predecessors could be
niftily combined with a self-serving demonstration of the commentator's
own hard work and breadth of learning.
2. In the second place, this style of commentary writing put a
premium on analysis and evaluation. Weighing up the opinions and
arguments of giants among commentators, forming your own opinion
which must not only be the best argued interpretation of the particular
passage but also be coherent with every other interpretational
position you had adopted or were going to adopt in your snail-like
progress through the book demanded a high order of intellectual
skills and yielded a quite unique kind of pleasure when you were
successful. Managing to combine the best of Commentator A's views
with the best of Commentator B's, while discarding the dross,
not only made you feel a superior kind of person; it actually
made you a superior kind of person. There was always some room
for innovation, but new ideas have never been the most desirable
elements in a commentary. New syntheses, new coherence, new observations
of the detail of the text, new judgments, new angles of vision,
new comparative data-these make a commentary vibrant and vaut
le voyage. But, in the history of interpretation, new interpretations,
like new conjectural emendations of the text, have usually been
wrong, and a prudent commentator will suppress almost every inclination
towards novelty.
3. Above all, the quest for the best and most true interpretation
was an instantiation of that wonderful intellectual project, the
quest for truth, the very reason I myself went to university as
a naïve 17-year-old, and the only reason for my entry into
the academic profession. Compared with a quest for falsehood,
or even with no quest at all, the quest for truth, or, in the
commentator's case, for the right interpretation, can only be
acclaimed and admired. Where would we be without that Enlightenment
Project, as we have to call it these days? Just wait till there
is a theme park called The Enlightenment Experience.
And yet, in those magical days between that apocalyptic Orwellian
year of 1984, with which I began, and the present moment, something
has happened, something of such import as to make even an old
truth-seeker like myself stop in my tracks, and declare that,
after all, there is no truth, only truths, no right interpretations,
only interpretations that are accepted by this community or that,
no commentaries, therefore, that can enshrine the holy grail of
the definitive meaning. Call it the slide to the postmodern if
you will, it was going to happen whatever name we found for it.
As the world expanded and the global village arrived on our doorsteps,
as repressed and underrepresented minorities found their voices,
as pluralism became first a fact and then a virtue, meaning became
pluriform. Not interpretation now, but interpretations must be
the commentator's goal, and the more of them, if not the merrier,
then the richer, the more sensitive, the more rounded the commentary
becomes.
What we are looking for nowadays in a commentary, I decided, is
not the authority of the authorial voice (which author might indeed
be a tyro, as I myself was when I wrote on Esther), not a rightness
of interpretation, but:
2. A symphony of readers' voices
Or perhaps, a cacophony. These readers
who have been reading our book of Esther (and the rest of the
Bible) over all these centuries (millennia, even) will not necessarily
have been singing from the same hymnsheet (as politicians, of
all people, are supposed to). Some of those readers would gladly
have poured boiling oil over others, and a majority will have
done their utmost to discredit the interpretations of all the
rest. But a subtle chef d'orchestre, which is what commentators
of the future must model themselves on, especially a chef of the
atonal variety, will find symphony in this mélange of voices,
and rejoice, if not at every contribution made in the name of
biblical interpretation, at least in their very variety.
Once, it was enough to be yourself as you read and commentated
on the Bible; me Tarzan, you Jane. Today though, we do not read
in private; we are all spokespersons for our reading communities,
torchbearers for pressure groups and interest groups of every
kind, while Jane speaks for feminists in general (though perhaps
only white hetero size 6 feminists) and Tarzan has found that
he represents a 'community' (of tree-loving, inarticulate body-builders),
none of whom he has actually ever met.
What's more, standing over the shoulders of these busy reading
communities to which we are attached whether we like it or not,
know it or not, are the denizens and the guardians of the various
reading traditions that stretch back in time-scholarly traditions
and ethnic traditions and religious traditions that taught us
how to read, brought those reading communities contemporary with
us into being. How like a Hebraist, how like a Jewish scholar,
how like a church father, how like a nineteenth-century commentator,
we chorus as we encounter yet another interpretation of Esther
(or whatever), with a little squeal of recognition .
It is a signal feature of our age that whole tribes of readers,
from every century since the biblical books were written, are
being brought back to life in a mass resurrection of the footnoted.
Kimchi and Rashi, Augustine and Gregory and Thomas, Luther and
Calvin and Oecolampadius, who yesterday belonged to the history
of interpretation have today become our contemporaries. If ethnicity
and gender make no difference to the validity of your interpretation
(since there are no valid interpretations, only adopted or 'bought'
ones), why should deadness? Bring back the old-timers into the
commentators' conversazione (dressed in period costume,
of course, to show we haven't lost our sense of historical context),
for they too are readers, and our business is with readers, not
with rightness. Let us surround ourselves with a vast cloud of
witnesses to the meanings of the text, relish their infinite variety,
and celebrate the fecundity of our classic text that has given
birth to all these readings.
And while we are about it, since we are opening up the circle
of readers to scholars of every age, let us not restrict it by
demanding a PhD (or equivalent) of everyone entitled to join our
conversation. Let's extend a
3. Welcome to all kinds of readers
Commentaries are in the business
of interpretation, which is to say, reading, and are in principle
doing nothing different from what readers of all descriptions,
readers good, bad and indifferent, have been doing with the same
text all through history. Let us not assume therefore that we
can learn only from learned readers, which means, readers who
have been trained to read in a certain way, readers who are not
allowed by their profession to read in the ways unprofessional
readers do. I do not slight professionals. I know, when it comes
to brain surgery, I would rather have my head in the hands of
a professional. On the other hand, for other complaints of the
head that need sorting out, I am not so sure about professionals,
Freudian, Jungian or Gestalt. There are heart problems for which
the last person you want is a PhD.
In fact, I have come to believe that, if I exclude from my bookshelves
and my heap of photocopies the works of non-professional readers,
I do myself a disservice. I restrict my field of vision, and predetermine
what will count as valuable and interesting readings. Look at
the bibliographies with which we commentators have been accustomed
to adorn our commentaries. At the same time as showing off certain
impressionable readers how much learning we have picked up from
our academic, textual, linguistic, orientalist, Christian-theological
(for the most part) resources we have been reading, what we are
silently admitting, to another kind of (more perceptive) reader,
is our imperviousness to rhetoric, poetry, literature, psychology,
philosophy and art-to say nothing of the relative subjugation
of the our own individuality in the interests of a common 'objective'
language of discourse. This does not do us or our texts a favour.
But if our angle of vision is to be enlarged, so also must be
the scope, and yes, the size of our commentaries. Whereupon I
invoke a
4. Hail to the Poly-Commentary
In a vision I have seen the commentary
of the future, and (unlike the Anchor Bible) it is not thick but
thin, its colour is silver, it rolls like the wheels of Ezekiel's
chariot, and the number of its letters is six hundred and fifty
thousands of thousands. It is a CD-unless perhaps it is even more
insubstantial, and is an internet site on a server in a place
you have never heard of. The commentary of the future, in my vision,
is a resource, a treasury, a showcase, a celebration, of all that
the biblical text can generate. Rather than leading inward, to
the one true meaning of the text buried like a pearl at the heart
of the cornucopia of words that have been spoken and written about
the text, the commentary leads outward, to the multiple meanings
the text has engendered in its manifold readers, and the as yet
unrealized potentialities of the text for meaning. If the text
is, as Umberto Eco once called it, a machine for generating interpretations,
the commentary that will suit the text must be a poly-commentary,
multi-voiced, indeterminate, divergent, suggestive and limitless-an
infinite set of variations on the biblical text.
All great music is variations. Antonio Diabelli, composer and
entrepreneurial music publisher, sent his vivacious waltz tune
around to almost all the composers of his day in the Austrian
empire, asking them to write him a variation on it. Four years
later, Beethoven, no great time-keeper, delivered his wonderful
Diabelli Variations, a work not of one but of 33 variations, lasting
45 minutes, his last major work for the piano, and his greatest,
one of the key masterpieces of Western music. I think of the biblical
text as Diabelli's tune, begging to be transposed into as many
keys as possible, transformed rhythmically, tonally, in mood and
in spirit; the variations may be provocative, playful or profound,
but never more than variations on an original, always
identifiably in conversation with the original, and coming to
rest in the end with the original, where it all started, and by
which it is forever, in its entirety, bounded.
The commentary as a hypertext collection of the original, with
all its variations-it is not a new idea. The classic rabbinic
Bible was hypertext devant la lettre. In the centre of
the page, the text, and flowing around it the interpretation of
the Targum and the commentaries of the scholars, the biblical
text and the commentaries on the same page, the work of the creative
artist and of its readers distinguishable be nonetheless of the
same substance. As happens as a matter of course with hypertexts,
the reader was constantly being seduced into reading what one
never intended to, spending yet another minute checking out Rashi
or pondering over what the ancient dragoman had written in the
Targum. Reading could never be linear and was perforce lateral,
each text always in relation to the others-and the thinking that
results from the reading is of necessity lateral thinking, associative
and dialogic, reader-involving. Hypertext is a cool medium, in
Marshall McLuhan's terms, providing you with questions and possibilities
rather than with answers and foregone conclusions, the opposite
of television and the traditional novel. And, even with ancient
hypertext, you could never encounter the Bible pure and simple,
for the biblical text always stood in the midst of a throng of
admirers and interlocutors. Perhaps in a way you could say that
the biblical texts already included all their commentaries within
themselves, like the iridescent feathers of a peacock's tail,
as the Irish theologian Scotus Erigena put it when he argued that
Holy Scripture contains an infinite number of meanings within
itself. Nowadays we might say, less imaginatively, that the study
of the Bible is at the same time the study of its interpretations,
which is, the study of its readers.
How to make a hypertext commentary, a poly-commentatorial set
of variations on Esther? To give some reality to my imagination
I chose, almost at random, one verse on which to spawn my vision.
Esther 7.4 reads:
For we are sold, I and my people, to be destroyed, to be slain,
and to be annihilated. If we had been sold merely as slaves, men
and women, I would have held my peace; for our affliction is not
to be compared with the loss to the king.
For this verse, as for every other in the book, so I suppose, I was able to offer a set of commentatorial choices:
1. Interactive
2. Commentary
3. Translation
4. Hebrew
5. The Arts
6. Intertexts
7. Bibliography
There is no correct order in which
to visit these elements of the polycommentary. There is no need
to consider all of them and the reader is entirely free to browse
as they choose. Because the material is hypertext, organized as
a website in a web browser, the reader is in control of the reading
experience, and can read for all they are worth, for as long as
they like. In the Appendix to this paper, I have reproduced some
of the materials of this website.
Who will read such a commentary, one may well ask, incalculably
wordier than any commentary of our day? No one. No one will read
every word, any more than they do of the telephone directory,
the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the World Wide Web. But everyone
who uses it can find and read what they want, and be perpetually
tempted to read more than they thought they wanted, wander down
avenues they didn't realize existed, waste time (i.e. enjoy themselves)
with the text rather than efficiently pinpoint the answer to the
question with which they had logged on. That is, I suggest, the
future of the commentary, the future of commentary writing and
the future of commentary reading, both of them transformed by
reconceiving the commentary as hypertext.
APPENDIX
1. Interactive
I imagine some readers
might like to be guided through a dialogue with the text, not
being told the 'answers', but having an opportunity to see how
the text raises questions, time to think how one would answer
them oneself, and a chance to see how someone else might answer
them.
Thus, I ask,
1 Why does Esther say, We are sold
[in the passive voice]? Who has sold them?
2 Why does she say sold Has money changed hands?
3 Why does she say, I and my people? She is a member of
her people. Would not my people mean the same thing?
4 Why does she say destroyed slain annihilated? Do they
not all mean the same thing?
The user of the poly-commentary can reflect on these question for themselves before peeking at the answers this commentator offers, such as:
To Question 1, I answer: Well, the king has effectively sold them to Haman, who offered (and presumably paid) the king money for them. Esther can hardly say, You have sold them, for that would sound like an accusation. Anyway, her point is not who has sold them, but the fact that they have been sold.
To Question 2, I answer: Yes, Haman has pledged to give the king 10,000 talents of silver if he will allow him to exterminate the Jews. And on the screen is the text of the passage where that is said:
Esth. 3:8 Then Haman said to King
Ahasu-erus, "There is a certain people scattered abroad and
dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom;
their laws are different from those of every other people, and
they do not keep the king's laws, so that it is not for the king's
profit to tolerate them.
Esth. 3:9 If it please the king, let it be decreed that they be
destroyed, and I will pay ten thousand talents of silver into
the hands of those who have charge of the king's business, that
they may put it into the king's treasuries."
Esth. 3:10 So the king took his signet ring from his hand and
gave it to Haman the Agagite, the son of Hammedatha, the enemy
of the Jews.
Question 4, I answer: She is picking up the exact language in which the decree of extermination had been issued by Haman in the king's name. It sounds like formal, legal language, the language of a royal decree. And on the screen is the text of the passage where that is said:
Esth 3.11 And the king said to Haman, "The money is given to you, the people also, to do with them as it seems good to you." (12) Then the king's secretaries were summoned on the thirteenth day of the first month, and an edict, according to all that Haman commanded, was written to the king's satraps and to the governors over all the provinces and to the princes of all the peoples, to every province in its own script and every people in its own language; it was written in the name of King Ahasu-erus and sealed with the king's ring. (13) Letters were sent by couriers to all the king's provinces, to destroy, to slay, and to annihilate all Jews, young and old, women and children, in one day, the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, which is the month of Adar, and to plunder their goods.
2. Commentary
Here is the place where
the user will find many commentaries on the text, from different
periods and perspectives, arranged as (1) rabbinic, (2) traditional,
(3) popular, (4) scientific.
Under Rabbinic the user will see, for example:
Yosef Lekach
As slaves and servant-girls.
Esther said to the king: Had my people been enslaved, I would
not have objected, for the Jews were warned in the, for the Jews
were warned in the Torah that if they sin they will be sold to
their enemies. Your punishment,
Ahasuerus, would not have been great for you would have been instrumental
in fulfilling the prophecy. But now you have decreed the complete
extermination of the Jews, something the Torah never prophesied.
For session a deed your punishment would have been enormous. The
sar / enemy who instigated the decree did not concern himself
with nzq hmlk / the damage to the king that would result in the
form of divine retribution.
Rashi
The adversary is not worthy
of the king's damage, i.e. he is not concerned with the king's
damage. Had he been concerned with the king's welfare he would
have advised him to sell the Jews and keep the money, or keep
them-and their descendants-s perpetual slaves,
Yosef Lekach
Of course Esther was not
suggesting that her people should be sold as slaves! She merely
wanted to stress the evil intent of the adversary in not having
made this bts suggestion to the king.
Ibn Ezra
The adversary was not concerned
with the financial damage to the king resultant from the enormous
loss of tax revenue.
Under Traditional the user will find, for example:
CORNELIUS A LAPIDE
traditi enim sumus ego
et populus meus ut conteramur iugulemur et pereamus atque utinam
in servos et famulas venderemur esset tolerabile malum et gemens
tacerem nunc autem hostis noster est cuius crudelitas redundat
in regem
For we are delivered, I and my people, that we should be destroyed,
put to death and perish. Would that we had been sold as slaves
and serving-girls! It would have been a tolerable evil, and I
would have held my peace even as I wept. But now there is our
enemy, whose cruelty rebounds against the king.
WOULD THAT WE HAD BEEN SOLD AS SLAVES AND SLAVE-GIRLS] so that,
our life being spared, we could at least have been servants and
serving girls to the king and to the Persians!
BUT NOW THERE IS OUR ENEMY] who wishes to deprive me and the Jews
and everyone of life, WHOSE CRUELTY therefore REBOUNDS AGAINST
THE KING , for by his edict of death to the Jews, who fill his
treasury with enormous tribute, and who provide many services
to the king, and from whom his own safety and the safety of the
kingdom can enlist many valiant soldiers; nay, whom he can set
as wise rulers over his provinces, like Daniel with his three
associates. From these and many other benefits from the Jews that
you can perceive-to say nothing of greater benefits you do not
yet perceive-Haman is depriving you, O Ahasuerus. He is plotting
a grave and lasting calumny against you among all peoples itself
that you would destroy our innocent race, a race that has earned
your goodwill. Against you therefore will the cruelty of Haman
in seeking the extermination of the Jews rebound in the highest
degree.
Under Popular the user will find, for example:
McConville
[Esther's] only hope lies
in displaying the villainy of her antagonist in all its hideousness.
With this in view she makes reference to the sordid financial
transaction that had accompanied the decree (perhaps the king
had taken the money after all, despite his disclaimer, 3:11, which
would then have to be seen as conventional eastern politeness).
Bjornard
[Esther's] petition follows
an interesting Near Eastern tradition of bargaining. If they had
been merely sold away as slaves, Esther would not have complained.
Then their worry would be less than the strain and stress burdening
the great emperor. And their loss of freedom would be smaller
than the king's loss of so many loyal subjects. But since they
are slated to be annihilated, she must be permitted to beg for
her life.
Stafford Wright
[Esther] begs for the life
of herself and her people. She knows the terms of the transaction,
and the loss in money which the king would sustain if he went
back on Haman's plan with its accompanying bribe (4; cf. 3:9);
but it is not evna question of slavery; it is life or death (4).
Under Scientific the user will find, for example:
Moore
In this verse Esther justifies her requests in vs. 3. Unfortunately,
her rationale is far from clear, probably because of corruption
in the MT.
We've been sold. An allusion to the monetary transaction between
Haman and the king (see Note on 3:9), although many scholars understand
'sold to be used here in the sense of 'delivered over to' (as
in Deut 22:30; Judg 2:14; 4:2, 9; 10:7).
Baldwin
For we are sold is a reference to financial gain offered by Haman
as an inducement to the king to grant his request (3:9). The verb
was not always used literally (cf. Deut. 32:30; Jugd 2:14; 4:9;
Ps 44:12), but in the light of the money transaction in this case
it was doubly appropriate.
To be destroyed, to be slain, to be annihilated: the verbs are
exactly those of the decree despite the difference required by
the English translation (cf. 3:13). To emphasize the enormity
of the plot it was appropriate to introduce the idea that the
queen and her people might have been sold as slaves, as though
that would have occasioned no protest.
The meaning of the last clause of verse 4 is problematic for several
reasons. The word translated affliction (Heb. sar) can also mean
'enemy' (RSV 'adversary'), and there is no indication whose affliction
is meant. The word for loss renders a Hebrew term which occurs
only here in the Old Testament, and whose meaning is therefore
uncertain, though in rabbinic Hebrew it means 'damage', 'injury'.
The translator here also has to be interpreter, hence the wide
differences between versions: e.g. 'no such distress would justify
disturbing the king' (NIV); 'for then our plight would not be
such as to injure the king's interests' (NEB); ' I would have
kept quiet and not bothered you about it' (GNB, a very free translation).
The older interpretation appears in the margin of NIV, 'but the
compensation our adversary offers cannot be compared with the
loss the king would suffer', a sense which JB expresses very well:
'but as things are, it will be beyond the means of the persecutor
to make good the loss that the king is about to sustain'. This
reference to the king's concerns is good psychology and the inference
that people are to be valued above money is in keeping with Esther's
cause; so, until more light is shed on the meaning, the last two
translations quoted have most to commend them, with RSV a close
runner-up.
Clines
Esther can hardly say that it is in fact the king himself who
has sold them (see 3:9-11), and so she must put the remark in
the passive: we are sold. She has been well primed by Mordecai,
and knows both the sum of money offered to Haman (see 4:7) and
the exact terms of the edict prepared by Haman (destroyed ...
slain ... annihilated; cf. 3:13).
The reason why she would have kept her peace if the Jews' plight
had simply been to be sold as slaves--a common enough occurrence
(cf. Neh 5:8)--is that such affliction would be not to be compared
with the loss to the king. This can only mean it would be too
trivial a matter to bother the king (on nsq 'trouble', see H.L.
Ginsberg, VTS 16 [1967], p. 81). NEB has 'would not be such as
to injure the king's interests', but this does not adequately
express the force of soweh 'appropriate, fitting'.
3. Translations
This is where translations
ancient and modern may be found. Nothing arms the English reader
better for the work of exegesis than studying the amazing variety
of translations available. The more scholarly reader will also
benefit from having the ancient versions at hand.
The polycommentator will not refrain from engagement with the
variety of translations. Attached to every screen with the text
of translations the attentive reader will find explanations, comments
and criticisms of the translations.
4. Hebrew
There will be readers
who want to read the biblical passage in the original, find help
with the Hebrew, study the language and grammar and text-critical
problems. A whole section of the commentary will be entirely for
their benefit.
5. The Arts
So that the contribution
of the arts to the process of reading should not be overlooked,
this section brings to bear materials from (1) poetry, (2) film,
(3) images, and (4) music. For this text dealing with slavery
and the contemplation of slavery, it is not difficult to summon
up elements from the visual and literary arts that can colour
and enhance the significance of the text.
6. Intertexts
This is the place for
a variety of materials the polycommentator chooses to present
to the reader in order to provoke further reflection through the
juxtaposition of the biblical text with other texts (which are
in most cases not influenced literarily by the biblical text).
The selections under The Arts already are intertexts, but in the
present section I have placed texts I would like the reader to
consider as they meditate on the text.
What I have created already is (1) a short list of literary quotations
on the theme of slavery:
Classic quotations on slavery
So every bondman in his own hand
bears
The power to cancel his captivity.
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, I.ii.101
What more often in nations grown
corrupt,
And by their vices brought to servitude,
Than to love bondage more than liberty,
Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty.
Milton, Samson Agonistes, 268
A cat pent up becomes a lion
Italian proverb
Man is born free; and everywhere
he is in chains
Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762), 1.1 (tr. G.D.H. Cole)
He who is conceived in a cage
Yearns for the cage
Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 'Monologue of a Blue Fox on an Alaskan Animal
Farm', quoted in The New York Times, 18 January 1968
This is what it means
To be a slave: to be abused and bear it,
Compelled by violence to suffer wrong.
Euripides, Hecuba (c. 425 BCE) (tr. William Arrowsmith)
Whatever day
Makes man a slave, takes half his worth away.
Homer, Odyssey, 17.392 (tr. Pope)
Freedom is indivisible, and when
one man is enslaved, all are not free.
John F. Kennedy, address, West Berlin, 26 June, 1963
This is servitude,
To serve the unwise.
Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), 6.178
Servitude debases men to the point
where they end up liking it.
Vauvenargues, Reflections and Maxims (1746), 22
And (2), any other texts that might seem relevant to the biblical text, as for example the following letter to the Times:
Sir, The Prime Minister's proposal
to commemorate the victims of slavery (report, March 3) is welcome,
not least because one of the most pressing issues of the new millennium
is the continuation of this horror.
Today, tens of millions of people remain enslaved around the world,
whilst of the more than 100 million trapped in bonded labour,
many are vulnerable children.
This country needs to remember that much of the wealth which created
'Great Britain' was blood money in the truest sense. I believe
that the greatest tribute would be for Britain once again to lead
the world in campaigning against slavery.
Yours etc.
ZERBANOO GIFFORD
Director
The ASHA Foundation
Herga House, London Road
Harrow-on-the-Hill HA1 3JUDGE
The Times, 9 March, 2000