Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 27

Thomas of London

The inchoate and incomplete “theology of the city” that I wrote about last week has always, is my mind, been connected to London as strongly as to Jerusalem and Babylon and Rome. Here’s a new entry in my longstanding if intermittent series about the great city on the Thames. 

He is known to us by another name, and linked in our minds with the city in which he was murdered, but throughout much of his adult life he would have been known as Thomas of London. Thomas, because he was born, probably in the year 1118, on the the feast-day of St. Thomas the Apostle, December 21; and London because he was born in that city, on the street called Cheapside. His father had come to England from Rouen, in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest; his mother was from Caen. Later stories that Thomas was Anglo-Saxon are wholly untrue. He was, as his shrewdest biographer says, “perhaps the first of England’s great men to be essentially and professedly a Londoner.”

“Cheapside” is derived from Old English words meaning “marketplace,” and we know what people would have brought to sell at the market by the nearby street names: Bread Street, Milk Street, Poultry, Honey Lane. When Thomas was born the place was more of an open area in the growing town than what anyone today would call a street, but it was a major thoroughfare, and when the Kings of England made royal progress from the Tower of London at the eastern end of the city to the Palace of Westminster, arcing along the great bend in the River Thames, they always passed along Cheapside.

Just to the west of his birthplace Thomas would have seen, rising above the rest of the town, London’s greatest work in progress: St. Paul’s Cathedral. Construction had begun in 1087, after a great fire destroyed its predecessor and indeed much of the city — a story that would be repeated in 1666, leading to the building of yet another St. Paul’s, the great domed one that we know today. Scholars believe that the church Thomas saw going up, which is usually called Old St. Paul’s, was already the fourth church to be built on that site, which makes one wonder why the people of London didn’t give up and try elsewhere. But the site was both an intrinsically good one — situated on a small hill overlooking the Thames — and one hallowed by sanctity, for St. Erkenwald, a Bishop of London who died in 693, was buried there, and many pilgrims visited his grave to seek his intercession.

Later in life, when Thomas had become a great man, indeed the greatest churchman in England, he had learned clerks who worked for him, and one of them — William Fitzstephen, who was present at his murder — wrote a biography of Thomas that he prefaced with an account of the city in which Thomas was born. London was William’s native city too, and he took great pride in it and believed that its character explains a good deal about Thomas. London was the place of Thomas’s “rising,” as Canterbury was of his “setting.” William’s Descriptio Nobilissimi Civitatis Londoniae — Description of the Most Noble City of London — ranges widely over the customs and practices of the city: for instance, we learn of a magnificent riverside restaurant that not only created lavish feasts but prepared takeaway meals for customers in a hurry. We learn also about commerce, sports and games, green meadows, wells of sweet water, and places of learning.

But William also wishes that we should know how pious a city London was, how “blessed in Christ’s religion.” Though we now believe that no more than 20,000 people lived there, William says that the city boasted thirteen major churches and 126 smaller ones. The major ones were monastic foundations of one kind or another, the smaller ones parish churches. It was this atmosphere of piety, William believes, that nourished the boy who would one day become St. Thomas Becket, St. Thomas of Canterbury. By the time Thomas was ten years old, William says, the boy already radiated holiness. At that age Thomas was sent for his schooling across the river to Merton Priory — situated in what is now a part of the metropolis but then was in the countryside, well beyond what William would have thought of as the boundaries of London — and when Thomas’s father Gilbert came to visit him there he found the prior, Robert, prostrating himself before the boy. When Gilbert expressed horror at this reversal of proper roles, the prior replied, “I know what I am doing. This boy will be a great man before the Lord.”

A likely story, one might be pardoned for thinking. And even at that time there were many in England who doubted that London could such an incubator of holiness. Richard of Devizes, a monk from Winchester and a contemporary of William’s, wrote bluntly: “If you do not wish to dwell with evildoers, do not live in London.” For him, and for many outside the capital, the city was already known as a place of all kinds of sin, but especially of naked avarice. And if one revisits William’s Descriptio with this in mind, one might notice that he spends more time describing the commerce and sports and games than the churches. He is never anything less than admiring of the worldly greatness of his native city. It was that particular greatness to which Thomas of London was a natural heir; but in the end he chose a different inheritance.

•

When Thomas was a very small boy, another Londoner had a vision. We do not know much with certainty about this man, not even his name. He is usually called Rahere or Raherius. He was clearly associated in some way with the court of King Henry I: in the fragmentary and confused records that have come down to us, he is sometimes referred to merely as a courtier, sometimes as Henry’s herald, though most often as the King’s jester. But in a document from 1115 his name is listed as one of the canons of (that is, priests attached to) St. Paul’s Cathedral. The taking of holy orders is not necessarily incompatible with playing the fool in a king’s court, especially in a period when kings had wide latitude to make gifts to their favorites; but the stories about Rahere do make for a curious amalgamation.

In any event, Rahere’s story now takes a turn: When he was on pilgrimage to Rome he fell ill, and when he was near death St. Bartholomew appeared before him and pledged to spare his life, but only on the condition that Rahere return to London and build a hospital. (In some versions of the story, Rahere in his vision is attacked by a terrifying monster, which the saint drives away.) Upon his return Rahere got busy. With royal and episcopal approval, he acquired a site next to the great livestock market of Smithfield, about half a mile north-west of Cheapside, and began, in 1123, to build both a church and a hospital, both named for the saint who has rescued him from death. He became the prior of the church, a position he held until his death in 1144; and there he is buried.

Thanks to the Great Fire of London in 1665 and the general depredations of time, nothing remains of the Cheapside of Thomas Becket, but some of what Rahere built remains to be seen. The site stands just at the northwestern edge of the City of London, which is why the Fire, which started in Pudding Lane in the eastern part of the city and near the river, never reached it; and when Henry VIII chose to re-found the hospital after he had dissolved England’s monasteries, it became formally known as the “House of the Poore in West Smithfield in the suburbs of the City of London of Henry VIII’s Foundation.” The original hospital and its several chapels are long gone — though a late-medieval replacement for one those chapels remains as the church of St. Bartholomew the Less — so the chief embodiment of Rahere’s great project is the church known as St. Bartholomew the Great, or, more familiarly, Great St. Bart’s.

The visitor, or worshipper, today enters the church by passing along a walkway that is almost a tunnel — an urban version of a holloway, an old path sunk below the surrounding ground and overgrown by vegetation. For the city has been built up, level by level, in the nine hundred years since Rahere’s workmen laid the foundation for the church, and the surrounding streets run six fit or more above the entrance. Opening the doors, you find yourself in a tiny area, a dark wooden partition blocking any view. But you may well smell incense. And then you walk through one of the little interior doors and and ancient walls rise up around you, the heavy thick Norman stonework, the rounded arches, the windows that seem small if you have been in Gothic or new-Gothic churches recently. Around you is great mass, and a sense of the numinous, as though prayers that have risen up from this place for nearly a millennium have lest behind some invisible, yet palpable, residue.

I have visited Great St. Bart’s many times, but when I think of it I always recall the time I attended Evensong when a visiting Russian choir sang music from Rachmaninoff’s Vespers. The somber and gorgeous music, which though composed in the twentieth century is shaped by ancient forms and tones of Russian music and prayer, seemed uncannily congruent with the dim and forbidding beauty of the old church. I was almost surprised when I looked around me to see people in modern clothing rather than robed and cowled monks.

Meanwhile, just a few feet away, the work of Barts (as the hospital is now generally called) went on, its multifarious electrical machinery humming, its practitioners generally oblivious not only to the worship going on in the church but to the curious and wonderful fact that that worship and their own labors on behalf of the sick arose from a single impulse, a single obedience, on the part of a man who once had found himself far from home and close to death and helpless in the face of his own suffering. The call of those who served in that hospital at its founding was “to wait upon the sick with diligence and care in all gentleness,” as the call of the monks was to pray for all who suffered in this life, and in the next too, if their place in the next life was Purgatory.

And we should remember too the goings-on a few feet on the other side of the church from Barts, in the great Victorian edifice of Smithfield Market, where the lorries come and go all day and most of the night, where the gods of commerce receive their proper worship as they did when William FitzStephen looked upon his city with such admiration. But this was also once a place of execution too; and also nearby was the site of Bartholomew Fair, that “school of vice which has initiated more youth into the habits of villainy than Newgate itself” (so the Newgate Calendar said). All the world’s wisdom and folly in a few square yards, with an ancient and beautiful church in the middle of it.

Paramount Pictures studio, back in the day

Paramount Pictures studio, back in the day 

more on beauty

Ted Gioia:

Ortega y Gasset’s entire essay [on “The Dehumanization of Art”] is brilliant, and should be required reading in college humanities programs — it’s more relevant now than ever before…. But instead it’s almost never read. Instead, grad students are assigned Walter Benjamin’s essay from 1935 on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” — which embraced mass production as a “progressive” way to provide “visual and emotional enjoyment” in an “intimate” manner to millions of people. I have sympathy for Benjamin, but he was betrayed by the mass producers — much as we are getting betrayed by today’s tech overlords of creative ‘content’.

A great post by Mr. Gioia, and consistent with my recent comment that a Ruskinian account of contemporary culture must begin by attending to beauty. And we might begin that endeavor by considering Aphorism 19 from Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture: “All beauty is founded on the laws of natural forms.” 

starting over

Around a month ago, I mentioned that I had just read and really enjoyed Robin Sloan’s novel Moonbound. And that’s true! But what I didn’t say at the time is that I definitely didn’t get the most out of my reading experience, didn’t have full concentration as I read. And I know why. It was because of one page near the beginning of the galley I read, a page with three words on it: 

As I read, I kept looking back at that page, as though hoping that the words would dissolve and be replaced by the promised cartography. Because when I am reading a work of fiction there are few things I love more than a map. 

I think I would have missed the map even if I hadn’t been told that there would be one, but to know that a map was being made but I did not have it was agonizing. Thus my inconsistent attentiveness. 

But today, this very afternoon, my very own hardcover copy of the book arrived, and when I opened it up I saw this: 

Ah. Ah yes. I will now be re-reading Moonbound, and this time I’ll get the full and proper experience. 

the wanderers and the city

My earlier posts in this series (which began by reading Genesis but has since expanded) are: 

Orientation to the topic On fertility The country and the city An outline of the Pentateuch Character 

The Pentateuch concludes with the death of Moses and the arrival of the children of Israel at the doorstep of the Promised Land. As in the next books (Joshua and Judges) they consolidate their position, we’re moving, as I noted in an earlier post, from a world of nomadic pastoralists to a world of city dwellers — or, anyway, a world in which the embodiment of the Israelite identity is a city, Jerusalem, conceived first as the residence of the King and only later as the center of the cult of Yahweh. 

This change raises certain questions about the theology and ethics of building, especially building a city, and as it happens I wrote a series of posts about that some years ago on my old Text Patterns blog: 

Building Building 2 Building 3: practices of making Building 4: creative fidelity Building 5: cunning works Building 6: diaspora 

The invocation of the Diaspora leads to a reflection on the city that in Scripture opposes Jerusalem: Babylon. Here are the entries in my Encyclopedia Babylonica:

Welcome Belshazzar Daniel Babylon System Hiatus 

I stopped writing then because I was confused about a number of things. But I am now seeing certain connections. The series on building (which focused on the Davidic era) and the series on Babylon (which focused on the era that ended the Davidic line) are, properly speaking, elements in a larger theology of the city, which I explored by writing about Augustine’s City of God: 

The City and the City Archetype and Antithesis Hypothesis Secondary Epic Political Theology City and Church A Digression on Longtermism Causes A Digression on Reading Parallels Ends and Means The City of God Coming Down Last Things

(There’s some overlap to these series because they were written independently of one another and sometimes in forgetfulness.) And I have many other posts and essays that seem to be on unrelated subjects but may not be. For instance, Ruskin — my admiration for whom I recently reaffirmed — begins The Stones of Venice by claiming that three cities associated with the mastery of the sea stand above all others: Tyre, Venice, and London. His theology of art and architecture is also a theology of the city, meant for Londoners, as the successors to the Venetians, to heed. There’s even a strange passage early in Stones in which Ruskin claims that all three of Noah’s sons founded cultures that contributed to the rise of architecture, thereby reconnecting the theme of the City to the book of Genesis.

Related: there is a long and powerful tradition of writing about London as the city, the paradigmatic or exemplary city, the city as a “condensed symbol,” to return to a theme from my last post: this is what Blake does repeatedly, and Dickens, and H. G. Wells, especially in Tono-Bungay. There are some powerful connections between Tono-Bungay and Little Dorrit that I want to explore in a future post. 

It’s strange that I have written a book’s worth of reflections on all this stuff. But what does this non-book say? Heck, what do I even mean by “all this stuff”? 

I think these concerns arose in my mind because (a) I was, and still am, frustrated by the ongoing dominance of H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, a book that still establishes the categories for thinking about how Christians live in “the world”; and (b) I felt that a richer, deeper picture is offered, however obliquely, in the poetry and prose of W. H. Auden in the decade following the end of the Second World War. (It’s noteworthy, I think, that Auden’s work is contemporaneous with Niebuhr’s: that WW2 prompted full-scale reconsiderations of the ideal character of culture and society is what my book The Year of Our Lord 1943 is all about.) Auden, instead of writing about “culture,” writes about “the city,” and that reformulation strikes me as especially resonant and full of promise, especially given the prominence of the Jerusalem/Babylon opposition in the Bible. 

Now, Auden writes about these matters in The Shield of Achilles, which I have edited — but he writes about them more extensively in his previous book Nones, which I may also edit. Even if I don’t get the chance to make a critical edition of that collection, I’m going to be re-reading it, and maybe after I do I’ll have a better idea of how to put all these thoughts, which have obviously been occupying my mind for quite some time, into better order. 

But whether I should try to turn all this into an actual book? I have my doubts about that. For one thing, few if any publishers would be interested in publishing something that is largely available online for free. For another — and this actually may be more important — do all these thoughts really belong in a book, between covers, with a beginning an ending? Some projects ought not to be closed and completed; some projects ought to be ramifying and exploratory. I suspect this is one such project. I may have more to say about that in future posts. 

character

The book of Genesis features a large number of distinct and memorable characters: Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Esau and Jacob, Joseph. Our attention is captured for the longest periods by Abraham and Jacob, but often we see them in relation to their children and other family members. They rarely occupy the stage alone. But the rest of the Pentateuch really only has one character: Moses. A few others hover around the margins, but they are mere sketches of persons. Only Moses is fully a character. 

After the Pentateuch, with Joshua, Judges, and Ruth, the narrative resumes its proliferation of personages — only to narrow its focus again with David. We stay with David for a very long time before the story pulls back out to describe the wide range of kings and prophets who follow him.  

So in the Hebrew Bible we see this regular alternation of (a) sweeping narrative that emphasizes ongoing familial or cultural patterns and (b) intensely focused stories that trace the development of individual lives. Sweep is the default, but you never know when the story will zoom in for an extended close-up. 

One way to think about this: Certain patterns of behavior — most of them involving waxing and waning devotion to YHWH and obedience to His commandments — characterize the children of Israel; but some people seem to embody these patterns in powerful, profoundly exemplary ways. You could say that someone like David is, to adapt a concept from the anthropologist Mary Douglas, a human condensed symbol. (Cf. p. 10: “For Christian examples of condensed symbols, consider the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist and the Chrisms. They condense an immensely wide range of reference summarized in a series of statements loosely articulated to one another.”) The complicated and inconstant history of Israel is condensed and made visible and comprehensible in a handful of key figures. This is how Abraham functions in Paul’s letters: a condensed symbol of faith in action. 

And I wonder if a character can only serve as this kind of symbol if he or she is complex, with hidden depths. Here I am thinking of Erich Auerbach’s famous contrast between the Homeric poems and the Hebrew Bible. The “basic impulse of the Homeric style” is

to represent phenomena in a fully extemalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations. Nor do psychological processes receive any other treatment: here too nothing must remain hidden and unexpressed. With the utmost fullness, with an orderliness which even passion does not disturb, Homer’s personages vent their inmost hearts in speech; what they do not say to others, they speak in their own minds, so that the reader is informed of it. 

By contrast, the narration of Genesis features 

the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and “fraught with background.” 

Perhaps only the character “fraught with background” can become a condensed symbol. 

the Pentateuch in brief outline

Prologue to the whole: The Creation (Genesis 1) The history of humanity (Genesis 2–11) Making and naming Commanding and disobeyingZooming in: Abraham and his descendants (Genesis 12–36) Hospitable and inhospitable Abraham and the three visitors Lot in Sodom AbimelechDinah and the family of Hamor   Barrenness and fertilitySarai/SarahRebekahRachelElder and younger Ishmael and Isaac Esau and Jacob The children of Leah and the sons of Rachel The children of Israel in Egypt (Genesis 37-Exodus 12) Beneficiaries: Genesis 37–50 Slaves: Exodus 1–12 The children of Israel in the wilderness (Exodus 13-Deuteronomy 34)Wandering begun (Exodus 13–18) Ascent to Sinai (Exodus 19-Leviticus 27)Response to Sinai (Numbers 1–8) OrderingCleansingDedicating Remembering Wandering resumed (Numbers 9-Deuteronomy 33)Ascent to Nebo/Pigsah (Deuteronomy 34) 

This kind of thing can seem reductive, and if you rely on it overmuch it certainly will be, but note how it calls attention to the relentless patterning of the narrative. As Robert Alter has pointed out, the long-time obsession with sources among scholars of the Hebrew Bible — their slightly mad-eyed teasing out of the contributions of their posited authors J, E, D, and P — led them to the assumption that “the redactors were in the grip of a kind of manic tribal compulsion, driven again and again to include units of traditional material … for reasons they themselves could not have explained.” Yet if that were true, why does an outline of the Pentateuch look so orderly — indeed, almost excessively so? 

Gabriel Josipovici has argued in his wonderful and lamentably neglected The Book of God that “the inventors of the documentary hypothesis” — the leading biblical scholars of a century to a century-and-a-half ago — 

believed that by trying to distinguish the various strands they were getting closer to the truth, which, in good nineteenth-century fashion, they assumed to be connected with origins. But in practice the contrary seems to have taken place. For their methodology was necessarily self-fulfilling: deciding in advance what the Jahwist or the Deuteronomist should have written, they then called whatever did not fit this view an interpolation. But this leads, as all good readers know, to the death of reading; for a book will never draw me out of myself if I only accept as belonging to it what I have already decreed should be there. 

What my little outline shows is what anyone can see if they read the text — that however many authors and redactors worked on the Pentateuch, it’s anything but a chaotic assemblage of contradictory traditions; rather, it is almost obsessively built upon readily identifiable patterns, patterns that work like musical themes or Wagnerian leitmotifs. 

I’ll conclude with a more general point. You should not be able to get a doctorate in the humanities without having this declaration tattooed on the back of your hand: “A book will never draw me out of myself if I only accept as belonging to it what I have already decreed should be there.”

excerpt from my journal

I want to write a post about why my “Cosmotechnics” essay ended up being a dead end for me. Though I need to think harder about just why I believe that’s the case. I was looking for a way to think about technology that did not involve critique or enthusiasm but rather a kind of ironic detachment. But having made that point I think I exhausted the relevance of Daoism to me. Daoism could teach me ironic detachment from Technopoly but it could not teach me how to get from such detachment to the love of God and my neighbor. 

N. B. I’m posting this excerpt instead of writing that post. 

automating bullshit jobs

Me, a year ago:

Of course universities are going to outsource commentary on essays to AI — just as students will outsource the writing of essays to AI. And maybe that’s a good thing! Let the AI do the bullshit work and we students and teachers can get about the business of learning. It’ll be like that moment in The Wrong Trousers when Wallace ties Gromit’s leash to the Technotrousers, to automate Gromit’s daily walk. Gromit merely removes his collar and leash, attaches them to a toy dog on a wheeled cart, and plays in the playground while the Technotrousers march about. 

And lo, this from Cameron Blevins (via Jason Heppler): 

There is no question that a Custom GPT can “automate the boring” when it comes to grading. It takes me about 15-20 minutes to grade one student essay (leaving comments in the margins, assigning rubric scores, and writing a two-paragraph summary of my feedback). Using a Custom GPT could cut this down to 2-3 minutes per essay (stripping out identifying information, double-checking its output, etc.). With 20 students in a class, that would save me something like 5-6 hours of tedious work. Multiply this across several assignments per semester, and it quickly adds up.

In an ideal world, this kind of tool would free up teachers to spend their time on more meaningful pedagogical work. But we don’t live in an ideal world. Instead, I worry that widespread adoption would only accelerate the devaluing of academic labor. Administrators could easily use it as justification to hire fewer instructors while loading up existing ones with more classes, larger sections, and fewer teaching assistants. 

Alas, I must agree. “Now that we’ve automated grading, we can hire fewer instructors and give them more students!” But then (thinks the same administrator) “Why not train bots on all those lectures posted on YouTube, create professorial avatars — maybe allow students to customize their virtual professors to make them the preferred gender and the desired degree of hotness — and dismiss the instructors also? That’ll free up money to hire more administrators.”  

That will surely be the deanly response. But there’s another way to think of all this, one I suggested in my post of last year. Think about the sales people who use chatbots to write letters to prospective clients, or prepare reports for their bosses. People instinctively turn to the chatbots when they see a way to escape bullshit jobs, or the bullshitty elements of jobs that have some more human aspects as well. For most students, writing papers is a bullshit job; for most professors, grading papers is a bullshit job. (Graeber, p. 10: “I define a bullshit job as one that the worker considers to be pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious — but I also suggest that the worker is correct.”) 

What if we all just admitted that and deleted the bullshit? What if we used the advent of chatbots as an opportunity to rethink the purposes of higher education and the means by which we might pursue those purposes? 

But I suspect is that what universities will do instead is to keep the bullshit and get rid of the humans. 

Genesis: the country and the city

Raymond Williams, in his great The Country and the City, shows how ancient this contrast is, and how standardized its terms are. The contrast is almost always between (a) the innocence and simplicity of the countryside and (b) the noisy corruption of the city. Juvenal begins his third Satire thus: Quid Romae faciam? mentiri nescio — What will I do in Rome? I don’t know how to lie. 

In Genesis, it is Cain, the first murderer, who builds the first city (Chapter 4). Surely the building of the Super-Tall Tower is a classic urbanist project (Chapter 11). In the patriarchal narrative, to visit a city is to expose yourself to sexual temptation (Chapter 39) or assault (Chapter 19). The definitive urban societies of the Hebrew Bible are Egypt and Babylon, morally chaotic places that allure, ensnare, and enslave. (See my earlier Encyclopedia Babylonica, in which I also point out how Rome becomes the New Babylon.) 

But I think the City in the Pentateuch is most fundamentally an image not of corruption but of human self-reliance.

In Chapter 15 of The Country and the City, Raymond Williams says of Dickens’s London that “its miscellaneity, its crowded variety, its randomness movement, were the most apparent things about it, especially whe seen from inside.” But “this miscellaneity and randomness in the end embodied a system: a negative system of indifference; a positive system of differentiation, in law, power and financial control.” The “miscellaneity” is the means by which people are removed from their familial context and made vulnerable to the depredations of the System. The rulers of a city, aided and abetted by most of the residents, build a controlling system that seeks to eliminate uncertainty, to bring everything under human control. 

(It’s not really appropriate here, but at some point I’d like to write about Dickens’s Dombey and Son, which concerns the desperate struggle of those Londoners who have no means of escape from the city to avoid being dehumanized by its incitements to pride, its scorn of all human dependency on one another. The City wants us to depend, not on human kindness and compassion, but on its own financial and social System — and to call that enslavement “freedom.” Williams’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Dombey and Son, borrowed in part from The Country and the City, is one of the best critical essays I have ever read, and it touches on just these themes, and others of great import.) 

By contrast, the pastoral life — the life of those who herd animals and live in tents — is continually aware of its own fragility. The standard-issue pastoralist can but placate the gods and seek their aid, which may or may not come. The children of Israel place their trust wholly in the LORD. They live by faith; that is to say, they entrust their lives and goods to the promises of the LORD. 

I’m looking well ahead, but … is it not significant that when the Israelites finally have a home, when the LORD brings them out of their Egyptian enslavement and their subsequent years of wandering are finally over, they want to build a city and be ruled over by a King? That is: finally to be able to trust in themselves and their own powers of self-protection and self-governance?

It’s impossible to deny the central place of Jerusalem in the Biblical story: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning.” But is not the connection between the city and human “cunning” somewhat problematic? (The right hand is cunning, that is to say, dexterous, capable of manipulation and control.) I understand of course the eschatological hope of the New Jerusalem, that ecstatic vision of the concluding chapters of the book of Revelation, but I can’t help reflecting on the odd fact that from the perspective of the Pentateuch, settlement in a city looks like a catastrophic error and a failure of trust in the LORD.