Ulysses Essay 1 (3:5)

Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 1

 “Introibo ad altare Dei”  

It is 8 am on Thursday morning, 16 June 1904 (3 Tammuz 5664 by the Hebrew calendar), and in a disused Martello military tower overlooking Dublin’s Kingstown Harbor, medical student Malachi (“Buck”) Mulligan is performing a mock Catholic mass with his shaving bowl, using the then ubiquitous Latin rite. Mulligan parodies the celebrant of the mass as he begins the rite by declaring “Introibo ad altare Dei” - the introductory part of a biblical verse (Psalms 43:4 [Vulgate 42:4]) and constituting the Latin translation of the original Hebrew text: “Ve’avo’ah el mizbach* Elohim” -  “I will go to God’s altar”.

Taking it a bit further, one cannot but note that Joyce’s alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, who is witnessing Mulligan’s antics with less than approbation, does not join in the fun. Discontented with the presence of Haines, (an obnoxious Englishman that Mulligan has slyly sequestered into their rented accommodation and who has disturbed Stephen’s sleep by “raving about a black panther”), the irritated Stephen replies by censuring Mulligan about Haines, and pointedly refrains from making the expected ritual response usually sung by the celebrant’s server: “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam” - “To God who gives joy to my youth.” This phrase, not quoted here by Joyce, but appearing later in the Circe episode in an adulterated version (“Ad deam qui laetificat juventutem meam” - “To the goddess who gives joy to my youth”), is the second part of St. Jerome’s Vulgate Latin translation of the Hebrew verse in Psalm 43, but here things get a bit complicated.

If you look at the original Hebrew text (“El Eil simchat gili”) of the liturgical response “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam” there are two possible English translations. The most literal is: “To God, the joy of my [young?] age”, but in fact it is almost always translated into English (in the King James Version and in all the Jewish translations) as “Unto God, my exceeding joy”. This is because that while the Hebrew word “Gil” does denote a person’s age - as in Modern Hebrew “Gil Ha’Bagrut” (“age of maturity”, i.e., “adulthood”) or “Gil Ha’Zahav” (“golden age”, i.e., “old age”) - “Gil” and its feminine derivative “Gilah” are also synonyms for “Simchah” (joy, happiness). As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that the seventh blessing that concludes the Jewish wedding service mentions six such states of happiness (“created by God”) to denote the joy of the marriage of husband and wife: “Sasson, Simchah, Gilah, Rinah, Ditzah, Chedvah” (these are translated in Singer’s  prayer book as “joy, gladness, mirth, exultation, pleasure and delight”; the last five are common women’ names in Israel, while Sasson, lacking the feminine “ah” suffix, is an occasional man’s name). Actually I have a niece named Gili (“My joy”).

In an apparent effort to prevent the literal but tautological translation of “El Eil, simchat gili” as “Unto God, the joy of my happiness,” the King James and most other English versions translated the phrase as “Unto God, my exceeding joy”. However, one English translation follows the Vulgate version: John Wycliffe the twelfth century English cleric who was the first to translate Bible into English, did so from St. Jerome’s Vulgate Latin and hence he too translated “El Eil simhat gili” as “To God, that gladdeth my youth.” I’m not sure why St. Jerome decided that “Gil” denotes specifically “young age” (we have seen that in Modern Hebrew “Gil” is unqualified and simply means “a person’s age”) but maybe the context of rejoicing suggested youth to these translators. Be that as it may, in 2004, the Latin term “Juventutem” denoting “youth” in the opening response of the mass (as translated from the Hebrew “Gil” by St. Jerome in the fourth century) became the title of an international group of young Catholics who use the original Latin “Tridentine” mass, and who, among their other religious commitments, obligate themselves to recite Psalm 43 once a day.

Still every recent Christian and Jewish translation of the Bible sticks with “joy” as the meaning of “Gil”. Importantly, Abraham Even-Shoshan’s authoritative Hebrew concordance of the Tanach* (the “Old Testament”) goes along with the “joy” translation of "Gil” in Psalm 43. However, almost all the authorities (including the great reviver of Modern Hebrew, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda in his classic etymological seventeen volume dictionary begun in 1908) concur that there is indeed one distinct occasion  in the  Bible where the Hebrew word term “Gil” unequivocally connotes “age”: In Daniel 10:1 the “prince of the eunuchs” says to Daniel (who has refused to eat the non-kosher food proffered to him by the royal household): “I fear my lord the king who has appointed your food and drink: If he sees that you look worse than the other youths of your age [“gil’chem”], my head will be endangered.” (Just to keep things moving the original King James Version here translates “gil’chem” as “your sort” but this solitary exception was corrected in the King James 2000 Bible to “your age” – so now there seems to be a full consensus).

So why did St. Jerome translate “Simchat gili” as “the joy of my [young] age”? Looking through some of the rabbinical commentaries on "simchat gili” a few eyebrows are indeed raised at the rather unusually tautological construction, but no one goes as far as to introduce the concept of “age”. Most say that the unusual possessive case double usage is simply for effect, even if it departs from the familiar “Melech M’lachim” (“King of Kings”) mode (e.g. gloss to Psalm 43 in “Michlal Yofi”– a 1660 commentary by Rabbis Yaakov Evendana and Shlomo Ben Melech written “to explain difficult biblical words and concepts”).

However, modern Israeli slang may come to the rescue. When an Israeli wishes to indicate to someone that the latter’s issues are of no interest to him (or her) a frequent rebuff is "Simchat z’kenti!” (Literally: “The joy of my grandmother”– i.e., “I couldn’t care a ….!”). This vulgar (?Vulgate) grammatical possessive construction is precisely the same as that of the biblical “Simchat gili” suggesting that the Psalmist and native Israeli speakers of Hebrew may indeed have something in common and also perhaps hinting that “The joy of my youth” comes over better than the “The joy of my happiness”. Maybe Jerome had a point. While not all scholars think he was a great Hebraist, Jerome, defying the advice of his contemporaries to translate the Tanach into Latin from the ostensibly “divinely inspired” Greek Septuagint translation, went to Jerusalem to learn Hebrew better so that he could translate from the original source. Jerome must have become familiar with the local patois and I wonder if he overheard a Jew in fourth century Roman Palestine using the expression “Simchat z’kenti” to express his lack of interest in someone else’s travails.

.

---

*Note that in the non-academic Hebrew transliteration that I prefer, the cluster “ch” is intended to sound as it does in the word “loch”.

* Both for economy of space and for reasons of emotional (or - I have to admit – ideological) attachment I prefer the term “Tanach” to “the Old Testament” or “the Jewish Bible”. “Tanach” is a Hebrew acronym that refers to the three parts of the Old Testament to which the Talmud ascribed descending degrees of divine inspiration and intrinsic holiness. The three parts are:

Torah –  the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy); Nevi’im –  “Prophets” incorporating historical narratives (Joshua, Samuel I and II; Kings I and II) and the prophecies of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and those of the twelve “minor prophets” (Hosea, Joel, Amos, Ovadia, Jonah, Micah, Nachum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi – all  considered one book in the rabbinical canon and collectively termed “Trei-Asar” – “The Twelve” in Aramaic);

Ketuvim –  “Writings” – a mixed bag including Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the five “scrolls” (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther – arranged in the order of their annual synagogue reading on Passover, Pentecost, Tisha Be’Av, Tabernacles and Purim respectively); Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah and Chroniclers I and II. (The cluster “ch” at the end of “Tanach” is due to the fact that the Hebrew letter “Kaph”, the first letter of “Ketuvim”, becomes the guttural “Chaf” when occurring at the end of a word.

The Christian canon incorporates all the same material but orders them differently: e.g., the Book of Ruth which starts out by defining its time of occurrence (“When the judges judged”) is chronologically placed between Judges and Samuel. The last two books in the Jewish canon are Chronicles I and II (a sort of recap of all the previous biblical narratives) while in the Christian canon it is the post-exilic prophet Malachi who closes the Old Testament.