Goodblatt, Chanita. The Christian Hebraism of John Donne: Written with the Fingers of Man’s Hand. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010. xii + 244 pp. ISBN 978-0820704319. $58.00 cloth.

Since reading biographer R. C. Bald’s speculation that Donne may have studied Hebrew with Dr. John Layfield, “an excellent Hebraist, and … one of the group of divines who sat at Westminster to revise the Pentateuch for the Authorized Version”—and that these study sessions may have influenced Donne’s writing Essayes in Divinity (John Donne: A Life, Oxford UP, 1970, 281-82)—I have brooded over the extent and consequences of Donne’s knowledge of biblical Hebrew. Goodblatt proposes a carefully reasoned solution to this conundrum. Summarizing the ways in which knowledge of Hebrew philology informed “the humanists’ ad fontes (‘to the sources’), Jerome’s Hebraica veritas (‘Hebrew truth’), the medieval sensus literalis or sensus historicus (‘literal or historical truth’), [and] the Reformation’s sola Scriptura (‘sole [authority of] Scripture’),” Goodblatt demonstrates that language study was at the heart of Reformation endeavor (20). Clearly, this is not new. But Goodblatt’s adaptation and application to Donne of Matt Goldish’s definition of “a third-order Hebraist” as one “who could read some Hebrew, but who knew and used significant amounts of Jewish literature in Latin and vernacular translation” (22) allows her to offer an illuminating approach to Donne as theologian and preacher.  Goodblatt argues that while Donne’s actual knowledge of Hebrew words and grammar may have been rudimentary, he learned “the more sophisticated semantic nuances of Jewish medieval exegesis from the intermediate Christian Hebraic sources cited so abundantly throughout his sermons” (26)—sources like Nicholas of Lyre’s biblical commentary Postillae Perpetuae, the Latin translations of the Bible produced by Sebastian Munster and Santes Pagnino, and Johannes Reuchlin’s De Verbo Mirifico and De Arte Cabalistica. The Donne who emerges from Goodblatt’s study is a determined philological and theological lemon-squeezer who astutely zeroes in on the intellectual pressure point of a Hebrew word or phrase, and who proves relentless in draining every drop of meaning possible from the text at hand, only then to use that linguistic analysis as the launching pad for a daring flight of the imagination.

Take, for example, the imaginative stimulation that Donne took from the Hebrew root anah, “groan.” In his sermon on Psalms 6:6-7, Donne finds a link between the psalm’s “I am weary with my groaning” (yagati be-‘anhati”) and the command in Ezekiel 9:4 to “put a mark on the foreheads of the men who moan and groan” (ve-hitvita tav ‘al mitzhot hane’enahim). But, Goodblatt demonstrates, once Donne’s pump is primed, the ideas cannot stop flowing. He jumps from the connection between Psalms and Ezekiel to the inherent ambiguity of the Hebrew term tav, which is a “mark” or a “sign” but which is also “concerned with suffering and redemption” (66), and this leads him finally to visualize the Hebrew letter tav as a cross turned on its side.  “In this manner Donne fashions the central symbol of Christian suffering and salvation out of the very materiality of the Hebrew language” (68)—much in the same way as in his poem “The Crosse” the speaker justifies a Christian’s being “crossed” by adversity by pointing out the omnipresence of the cross in such elements of the material world as a ship’s mast, a swimmer’s stroke, and a bird’s flight. This is heady stuff, as strongly indicative of Donne’s psychology as of his fascination with the religious bases of language.

I find two features of Goodblatt’s book particularly appealing. First, because Goodblatt has been at work on a biography of Evelyn Simpson, co-editor of the standard ten-volume edition of Donne’s sermons (U of California P, 1953-62), she has access to and quotes from Simpson’s correspondence pertaining to her editorial work, thereby illuminating the strengths and weaknesses of Simpson and co-editor George Potter’s procedure. For six decades Potter and Simpson have been the most powerful names to conjure with when working on the sermons, but they are likely to be obscured as volumes emerge in the projected twelve-volume Oxford University Press edition of those texts. How fortuitous that Goodblatt should remind us of Simpson’s accomplishments when her name is in danger of disappearing from our academic lexicon.

Second, thirty-five tables offer a map of what Goodblatt terms “paths of transmission” (35), encouraging the reader to scrutinize differences among translations as well as the repetition of key phrases and ideas from an original source through various intermediary texts to Donne. The best of these tables prove linguistic DNA charts, demonstrating how Donne was able to access Rashi, Abraham Ibn Ezra and David Kimhi through intermediary sources as diverse as dictionaries, Udall’s Hebrue Grammar, the Geneva Bible commentary, and Lancelot Andrewes’s Devotions. These charts prove as exciting in their own way as the investigative tests run by crime scene examiners in television procedural dramas. Mapping the progress of Donne’s literary and intellectual inheritances, Goodblatt’s charts, like her analyses of Donne’s sermons and Essayes, demonstrate the terrier-like determination with which Donne addressed the knottiest problems of language. Incidentally they provide a new context for the linguistic density of Donne’s own poems, suggesting that he expected readers to puzzle over his conceits with as much application as he brought to reading the Hebrew Bible—and with the same promise of illumination. And cumulatively they suggest how Donne, one of the most visible preachers of his day in the established church, escaped the influence of the King James Bible.

Raymond-Jean Frontain

University of Central Arkansas

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