‘To Meet with Joy in Sweet Jerusalem’

This engraving is by Gustave Doré (1832–83), a French artist famous for his printed illustrations of over 100 books, among them Dante’s Divine Comedy, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and, most famously, the Bible.

Doré’s illustrated Bible in folio format, published in 1865, was a runaway international bestseller. It is featured in a scene in the Stephen Spielberg film Amistad, in which two imprisoned African slaves, though illiterate, ‘read’ the story of Jesus through Doré’s illustrations of scenes in the Gospels.

Its subject is Nehemiah 8:2–4: ‘accordingly, the priest Ezra brought the law before the assembly ... Ezra stood on a wooden platform that had been made for the purpose’. The ‘book of the law’ that Ezra brings forth should be a scroll. But here Doré gives an iconographic nod to Israel’s first encounter with divine Law at Sinai. Ezra points to what is inscribed on a large tablet with twin lobes at the top, suggesting the two ‘tables of the law’ that Moses delivered to the Israelites after his forty-day audience with God. Doré’s representation concurs with widely held rabbinic esteem for Ezra as a second Moses who delivers the Law of God again to the wayward Israelites: Ezra saved the Law from oblivion (Babylonian Talmud Sukkah 20a); he was the equal of Moses, and would have been the one to deliver the Law to Israel had not Moses done so first (Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin 21b).

This second dispensation of holy Law, however, is attended with none of the sound and fury of the first at Sinai. Ezra stands not at the foot of a volcanic mountain, but atop a handmade pedestal facing the town square. And unlike the cowed multitude at Sinai, Ezra’s hearers do not maintain a horrified distance but instead draw near, some close enough to touch him. At lower left, a woman bows her head as a man standing nearby appears to look disdainfully upon her—an ominous intimation of things to come.

References

Richardson, Joanna. 1980. Gustave Doré (London: Cassell)

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s Ezra Reads the Law is a woodcut that appears in Carolsfeld’s folio edition of the Bible, Die Bibel in Bildern (The Bible in Pictures). It was published in Leipzig in thirty parts from 1852 to 1860. An English edition followed the original German in 1861.

Schnorr von Carolsfeld was associated with a group of painters who called themselves the Nazarenes, or St Luke’s Brotherhood (Lukasbund), that eschewed modern styles along with typology and allegory. Schnorr von Carolsfeld himself especially took a literal, narrative approach to his subjects, finding his inspiration in early Renaissance art and, more specifically, in the works of Albrecht Dürer.

Here Ezra, in ecclesiastical robes and bishop’s mitre, is every inch the medieval Catholic priest. He speaks from an elevated lectern, Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s visual interpretation of Nehemiah 8:4–5:

The scribe Ezra stood on a wooden platform that had been made for the purpose ... And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people, for he was standing above all the people.

The scribe raises his right hand, gesturing in the direction of his rapt audience. Some receive his words with adoration, others, in apparent agony (‘For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law’; Nehemiah 8:9). Ezra is flanked by walls of neatly cut stonemasonry; an open archway at centre right, presumably ‘the Water Gate’ (Nehemiah 8:5), is occupied by some of Ezra’s more distant hearers. At far right, a portion of the wall blocks the sunlight, casting mid-morning shadows on an adjoining wall of the courtyard (‘[Ezra] read from [the law] facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday’; Nehemiah 8:3).

Beyond the wall at upper right, outsiders, some of them no more than diminutive silhouettes on the horizon, go about their business and keep their distance. Earlier in the narrative Nehemiah had rebuffed efforts of the indigenous people to become involved in his project, telling their leaders, ‘you have no share or claim or historic right in Jerusalem’ (Nehemiah 2:20).

The separation enforced by Nehemiah’s walls is met here with the separatism enjoined by Ezra’s words.

References

‎Schiff, Gert et al. 1981. German Masters of the Nineteenth Century: Paintings and Drawings from the Federal Republic of Germany (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art), pp. 272–73 

This miniature illumination in the French Gothic style, dated c.1415, is entitled Ezra: Oath of Children of Israel. It is part of a Bible Historiale, a popular medieval text combining biblical narrative, legend, and religious commentary.

The scene at upper right takes place within the walls of the city: an audience of five men look up to Ezra, who gestures toward them as he holds forth, standing in a draped pulpit. At lower left just above a square ivy-rinceaux foliate decoration, two women are pushed out of the city gate of Jerusalem by man in a turban.

The scene suggests what occurs only later, not in the book of Nehemiah but at the end of the book of Ezra: the annulment of all marriages between Jerusalemite men and indigenous women and the expulsion of those women and the children who are the issue of those unions (see Ezra 10). The illumination reflects the version of the narrative in the deuterocanonical 1 Esdras (canonical in the Greek and the Russian Orthodox Churches, not so recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, though it appears in an appendix to the Latin Vulgate Bible.) There, the expulsion of non-Israelite spouses immediately follows Ezra’s declamation:

Then the men of the tribe of Judah and Benjamin assembled at Jerusalem ... Ezra stood up and said to them, ‘You have broken the law and married foreign women, and so have increased the sin of Israel. Now then make confession and give glory to the Lord the God of our ancestors, and do his will; separate yourselves from the peoples of the land and from your foreign wives’. Then all the multitude shouted and said with a loud voice, ‘We will do as you have said’. (1 Esdras 9:5–10)

1 Esdras leaps at once to where Nehemiah’s narrative is moving more gradually: it is after a period of reading the Law and fasting that the Jerusalemites ‘separated themselves from all foreigners’ (Nehemiah 9:1–3); and ‘[w]hen the people heard the law, they separated from Israel all those of foreign descent’ (13:3).

The man in the turban here, then, may well be expelling from the city his very own wives.