II.
Quoth a young Sadducee:
“Reader of many rolls,
Is it so certain we
Have, as they tell us, souls?”
“Son, there is no reply!”
The Rabbi bit his beard:
“Certain, a soul have I—
We may have none,” he sneered.
Thus Karshook, the Hiram’s-Hammer,
The Right-hand Temple-column,
Taught babes in grace their grammar,
And struck the simple, solemn.
The first part is an apt version of the saying of Rabbi Eliezer, son of Hyrkanos: “Repent one day before thy death” (Pirke Abot 2. 15). Whereon the Talmud (Shabbat 153a) records that Eliezer’s disciples asked Browning’s very question, and received precisely the same answer. The second group of stanzas introduces us to a young Sadducee who has doubts as to the existence of the soul. The poet obviously got his information from Mark, but was a trifle confused as to what he read there. The Sadducees (Mark 12. 18) denied the resurrection, and some have supposed their denial to have extended to the belief in immortality. (See Dr. Kohler’s remarks in the Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. x, p. 631, top of second column.) To Browning this may have seemed equivalent to questioning the existence of the soul. Assuredly, granted that there be a soul at all, it must be immortal.
What is the point of calling Karshook “Hiram’s Hammer?” Browning is probably drawing on Josephus. Hiram, who helped in building the temple, also interchanged difficult problems with Solomon. (Antiquities, viii, 5. 3). Hence, Browning uses the name in relation to these puzzles, so wisely answered in the poem. It was also Hiram—not identical with the king of Tyre—who constructed the two temple columns Jachin and Boaz. Or, as Dr. Halper has cleverly suggested, the poet may have had in his mind a confused reminiscence of the Rabbinic praise of Johanan ben Zaccai, who (in Berakot 28 b.) is described as Right-hand Temple-column, Strong Hammer. Browning possibly mixed up the Hebrew hazak (strong) with hiram, and so transformed the epithet into “Hiram’s Hammer.” If these and similar reminiscences were passing through Browning’s mind, they might well result in the verse which terminates with the brilliant phrase “struck the simple, solemn.” It needs rare wisdom to make a fool think—or even better, make him silent.
Dr. Jacobs well summed up our indebtedness to Browning when he said that “it is not in the minutiae of Hebrew scholarship that we are to look for Browning’s sympathy with the Jewish spirit,” so markedly shown in his writings. Mr. Stopford Brooke (The Poetry of Robert Browning, 1902, pp. 33-4) puts the case strongly but truly when he declares that “no English poet, save perhaps Shakespeare, whose exquisite sympathy could not leave even Shylock unpitied, had spoken of the Jew with compassion, knowledge and admiration, till Browning wrote of him. The Jew lay deep in Browning.” The writer of those sentences no doubt would not call Richard Cumberland a poet; his plays were friendly enough to the Jew. But Browning’s understanding was more profound than Cumberland’s. It is a mistake to say, as a recent critic has said, that “Browning would have us see that the purest religion is of any creed or none.” That was perhaps Lessing’s view. Browning seems to go further. He saw in Judaism certain elements of absolute truth; therefore he presented those elements through Jewish characters.