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THE TERRIBLE POWER OF
A
MI OR GUILT. By Abraham B. Yehoshua.
Syracuse University Press.
$26.95.
IN HIS INTRODUCTION to this slim volume of literary essays, Abraham B.
Yehoshua laments the fact that in recent years discussions of literary
works rarely address moral issues. "In writing this book, I am fu lfilling a
modest mission-to arouse renewed interest in the moral and ethical
aspects of the written text." Yehoshua mentions Wayne Booth's
The
Company We Keep
as a fellow worker in the vineyard of ethical criticism;
he could have named other works of criticism. The field is not as barren
as he makes it out to be. In any event, the introduction does not prepare
us for the originality of these essays. Yehoshua's sensibility is unlike the
sensibilities of most critics who address moral issues in literature.
A novelist of great distinction (he has been called Israel's greatest
novelist), he has what I would characterize as a Talmudic mind in its
devotion to explaining and justifying a work . The texts that he treats
challenge and often puzzle the moral intelligence. Consider, for instance,
the subject of the first essay: "The Biblical Story of Cain and Abel in
Genesis." Yehoshua addresses the following puzzles: Why did God
refuse Cain's gifts and accept Abel's? Why did God allow Cain to live
after his murder of Abel? Moreover, in apparently sentencing Cain to
nomadic existence, He in fact permits him to found the first city, hardly
an example of nomadic existence. Cain's story has an apparent happy
ending, whi le Abe l's does not. On the matter of God's refusal of Cain's
gift, Yehoshua peremptorily dismisses the interpretation that Cain's gift
of the fruits of the ground is inferior to Abel's gift of the firstlings of the
flock as unsupported by the text. But what then is the evidence for
Yehoshua's interpretation that God has discerned in Cain an intention
to sin and means to judge him not for an action but for an as-yet
unacted upon motive? "The key sentence" (actually two sentences) for
Yehoshua is:
"If
thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if
thou does not well, sin crouches at the door, and to thee shall be his
desire."
It
is by no means clear how we get from these sentences (not
very perspicuous, at least in translation) to intention. Here God speaks
of doing and not doing. Moreover, the Biblical text, as Erich Auerbach
