An Atheist’s Favourite Bible Verses: #2

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?
Jeremiah 17:9

The first time I read this verse I was struck by its simplicity.  It’s written clearly: not prevaricating or making excuses for itself, but putting a fairly extreme claim in as few words as possible.  The meat here is mainly philosophical – aside from the wonderful clarity of expression, there’s little to recommend this verse from an aesthetic standpoint.

Let’s examine the meaning.  The heart, the verse starts, setting a metaphorical tone.  What is the ‘heart’ here?  In my opinion it represents emotion, gut feeling and animal impulse: the Platonian urges that are conquered by Reason.  The heart is deceitful, we hear, which is a little surprising.  The idea that the heart represents a reliable compass, a true guide, is very popular: phrases like ‘follow your heart’ attest to that.  But not only does this verse tell us that the heart is deceitful, it tells us that it’s deceitful above all else.

We know what this means, though.  Hearts are tricky things, not above cajoling or using trickery when simple persuasion fails.  In fact, the extremes of emotion – rage, hatred, fear, passion – are responsible for awful things.  The chilly logic of a utilitarian as he sacrifices lives for the greater good is shocking in its ruthlessness and inhumanity, but for most of us the real ethical challenge is in conquering our knee-jerk fear or anger.  Jeremiah is talking about that animal part of us, what Freud (pronounced ‘fraud) would have called the id.  He judges it to be not just wicked, but desperately wicked – a metaphor that captures the stress that accompanies crimes of passion.  Not for nothing are criminals often called ‘desperate men’.

He finishes with a question – who can know it? – that seems counter-intuitive.  Isn’t the heart the deepest part of ourselves, the part that we know most well?  The heart – that kernel of emotions and passions – is us, insofar as any part of ourselves makes up our identity.  But Jeremiah’s right: what makes our feelings so dangerous is that we too often don’t understand and can’t predict them. 

In a world full of conflict and outside threats, this verse turns the focus inward.  It mocks the kind of person who sits in judgement of other people’s hearts, not understanding his own.  If we can’t set our own house in order, how can we criticize other people?  Perhaps we can’t – but even if we can, we ought to start with ourselves.

An Atheist’s Favourite Bible Verses: #1

Why would an atheist enjoy reading the Bible?  I’m not talking about the kind of smirking enjoyment some people seem to get by cataloguing the verses where God commands his followers to do awful things.  Those kind of lists are useful, I suppose, but in anything other than a theological debate they miss the point: the Bible is first and foremost a story.  Like any story it has its moments of blood and violence, darkness and hopelessness, love and death.  It is interesting; it is beautiful; it is, on occasion, even true.  The King James Version especially is written incredibly well, and it is from that that I wish to draw a verse that is both poetical and insightful.

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Ecclesiastes 9:11

This is, coincidentally, the verse that George Orwell – famously agnostic – cited as an example of excellent writing.  In his essay Politics and the English Language he renders that verse in ‘modern English’.  I believe that the best way to appreciate a skilfully-crafted sentence is to see it in contrast with a sentence of worse quality, so I will reproduce Orwell’s rewording here:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must be taken into account.

There may, of course, be someone who considers this second version better, but I would not wish to discuss poetry with them.  Some of the merits of the original verse – directness of language, clarity of expression, richness of examples – should now be clear. 

Let’s look at the cadence or rhythm of the verse. Each middle clause has two distinct areas of emphasis – and saw under the sun | that the race is not to the swift – which are linked together by meaning.  The first clause – I returned – can be read as a kind of warm-up to the beat of the next six clauses.  After the sixth we have the final clause, separated from the rest of the sentence by a semi-colon.  Rhythmically, I would read it as two iambs, a dactyl and an anapaest:

           but time and chance happeneth to them all.

The sound of it somehow brings a satisfying end to such a long sentence.  Try tapping the strong and weak beats out on a hard surface; it’s almost like a concluding drumroll.

What about the meaning of the verse?  Coming from the most existential chapter of the Bible – the chapter that brought us “vanity, vanity, all is vanity” – it’s a statement about the unreliability of everything.  Spend years building up your strength?  You still might not win the battle.  Study your whole life?  There’s still a significant chance you’ll end up poor and alone.  The verse gives no indication that God will protect the sufficiently devout. “Time and chance” are uncontrollable forces that can, in one stroke, ruin your hopes.

It’s a sobering message, expressed beautifully, and that’s why it’s my favourite Bible verse.  Even though I’m an atheist.