Fable and Fact: Judging the Language of Scripture (Judges 9:8–15) from Antiquity to Modernity

Abstract

In the movement of scriptural interpretation from antiquity to the modern period, critical attention in the Christian world recurrently turns to a provocative passage in the book of Judges. The passage (Judg 9:8–15) is a story about talking trees, a tale that is repeatedly called a “fable” (fabula) by Christian interpreters. In seeking from varying perspectives to explain the role of a fabulous dialogue in the discourse of truth, such interpreters suggest pressing issues in the assessment of figurative language. These issues include the controversial concept of the “literal” sense of Scripture; its potential relation to a “literary” sense of the text; the broader relation between scriptural and literary texts in general; and finally the complex interplay between factual and fabulous modes of expression.

In this expansive movement a decisive turning point is the late-medieval period. During this period commentary on the fundamental test case in Judges displays revealing changes in critical orientation. To assess those changes, it is important to investigate a broad range of interacting developments in exegesis, semiotics, homiletics, rhetoric, and poetic theory. The implications of this formative activity eventually extend far beyond the Middle Ages to the modern period. In the end, what is involved in the historic encounter with the passage in Judges is far more than the interpretation of a story. It is the intricate intersection of fable and fact in the changing poetics of Scripture itself—and beyond Scripture, in the intriguing poetics of imaginative language at large.

Introduction

Nearly two thousand years ago, a writer in the emerging Christian Church sent a letter of cautious exhortation to a leader of the Church at Ephesus. The letter, traditionally ascribed to Paul and eventually included in the New Testament as the Second Epistle to Timothy, no sooner encourages Timothy than it forewarns him. “Preach the word” (λόγον; verbum), reads the letter. “For there shall be a time, when they will not endure sound doctrine … [a]nd will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth (ἀληθɛίας; veritate), but will be turned unto fables (μύθους; fabulas).”¹

The general warning, with its strict distinction between the discourse of “truth” and the diversion of “fables,” is of course not unique to 2 Timothy. In a broad sense, it reflects a claim expressed elsewhere in Christian Scripture about the distinctive validity of the divine word, in contrast to words of less reliable designs.² For hundreds of years, readers in the Christian world invoked that distinction to limit potential comparisons between their Scripture and the scriptures of others, including the “fables” of pagan poets.³ Yet, as suggested by the testimonies below, the more they explored the modalities of those scriptures—their own as well as others’—the more they came to qualify the general distinction, and finally to call into question even the special status of the divine word itself. In the end, in a fateful turn of the prophecy in 2 Timothy, they found that in the very effort to construe the word of Scripture, they themselves tended to turn “unto fables.”

The complex engagement of Christian civilization with discourse that it regards as fabulous has long been examined in an extensive range of scholarship.⁴ But such scholarship has largely concentrated on Christian approaches to fabulation outside Scripture—from the exposition of mythological tales to the composition of fictitious narratives. In this discussion I would like to focus instead on changing treatments of an imaginative passage inside Scripture, a passage that is repeatedly called a fable—fabula—in Christian interpretation itself. While attitudes toward this provocative text partially overlap with attitudes toward imaginative language at large, the scriptural status of the passage places special pressure on critical evaluations of its poetics. I wish to investigate that critical process as the passage is reassessed in diverse interpretive genres over time.

The varying perspectives on this text in the array of commentaries and treatises that I will be considering have never before been coordinated with each other. Some of these accounts, to my knowledge, have scarcely received consideration at all in modern academic settings. The accounts themselves range in scope from brief reflections about the text to elaborate readings of it. Their shared concern with this particular passage is all the more striking in view of their own structural and conceptual diversity. For such discussions not only show how different commentators—sometimes even the same commentator—can reframe a text according to changing interpretive contexts and designs. More extensively, they show how the arresting traits of the text itself can keep claiming anew the attention of commentators, pressing them to try to come to terms with it. Though I will be referring to approaches to the passage during the course of more than fifteen hundred years, I will be focusing on a decisive turning point in its interpretive history: the late Middle Ages. Since the broad movement from antiquity to modernity that I wish to explore is intricate—with interacting developments in exegesis, semiotics, homiletics, rhetoric, and poetic theory—it may be useful to indicate in advance the general lines of my inquiry.

After presenting the passage, I would like first to consider some of the principal ways in which it is approached in the Christian world by the early Middle Ages. I would then like to examine how in the late Middle Ages the conspicuously figurative language of the passage comes to test the very notion of the “literal” sense of Christian Scripture. This development, in turn, implies intriguing questions about the relation between the “literal” sense of the scriptural text and its “literary” sense. Finally, I would like to suggest how from the late-medieval to the modern period such questions raise still broader issues about the relation between scriptural and literary texts as a whole and about the interplay between factual and fabulous modes of expression at large.

The passage itself, which appears in the book of Judges, is a story about talking trees. The very presence of the story in Scripture seems to complicate the kind of distinction that is expressed in 2 Timothy between divine truth and diverting fable, and for generations of Christian interpreters, this passage in Judges is a critical test case for judging the language of Scripture itself.

Scriptural Story

The story is told by an individual named Jotham.⁵ Jotham is one of some seventy sons of a renowned leader in ancient Israel. The leader himself, Gideon—a man also called in Scripture Jerubbaal—had refused an offer of kingship from the Israelites. After Gideon’s death, one of his many sons, Abimelech—born to a concubine from Shechem—kills all the other sons of Gideon except Jotham, and the men of Shechem treat Abimelech as a king.

Jotham, in turn, climbs to the top of mount Gerizim and addresses the men of Shechem. “The trees …,” Jotham cries out at the opening of his fabulous story,

8 The trees went to anoint a king over them: and they said to the olive tree: Reign thou over us.

9 And it answered: Can I leave my fatness, which both gods and men make use of, to come to be promoted among the trees?

10 And the trees said to the fig tree: Come thou and reign over us.

11 And it answered them: Can I leave my sweetness, and my delicious fruits, and go to be promoted among the other trees?

12 And the trees said to the vine: Come thou and reign over us.

13 And it answered them: Can I forsake my wine, that cheereth God and men, and be promoted among the other trees?

14 And all the trees said to the bramble: Come thou and reign over us.

15 And it answered them: If indeed you mean to make me king, come ye and rest under my shadow: but if you mean it not, let fire come out from the bramble, and devour the cedars of Libanus.

As it turns out, God sends an evil spirit between Abimelech and the people of Shechem, and in the raging conflicts that ensue, both he and they are utterly destroyed.

From Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages: Opening Frameworks

The tale of Jotham calls special attention to itself in more ways than one. Though the tale is related in a book traditionally regarded as a historical narrative, the story is situated at a noticeable “remove” from the action—not only because of the speaker’s mountaintop location, but also because of his linguistic mode. Figures of speech and verbal flourishes, of course, appear throughout Scripture, but unlike brief metaphorical turns (e.g., hills rejoicing in a biblical psalm), Jotham brings into the annals of Judges an extended tale of sustained fabulation in which the personified characters operate in their own autonomous foreground. And unlike exemplary tales that may be fictional but remain technically possible (e.g., the parable of misconduct that Nathan tells David), plausibility is hardly a feature of the story of Jotham. In fact, with its talking trees, it suggests the kind of narrative—both untrue and unrealistic—that in ancient rhetorical discussions is repeatedly called fabula.⁶

Nor is the “message” of the tale less oblique than its mode. Not only its general orientation, but its very cast of characters has long had its ambiguities for readers. It is not clear, for example, whether the three figures that reject the offer of kingship are to be correlated with three individuals, and if so, who they might be—though in midrash and related Jewish commentary, for example, the olive, the fig, and the vine sometimes come to be correlated with three previous Israelite leaders, Othniel, Deborah, and Gideon.⁷ Even that thorny character, the “bramble,” has not always been treated as the villain of the piece.⁸ For the late-antique Christian Methodius of Olympus, the bramble refers to “the law which was given to the apostles for the salvation of the world,” since they taught virginity, and the bramble resembles virginity in view of its “strength and firmness against pleasures.”⁹ A recent commentator on Methodius’s argument has given his point about the bramble what might be called a pricklier formulation: the bramble keeps “intruders out.”¹⁰

While such interpretation already suggests something of the semantic instability that a fable potentially introduces into the discourse of truth, my aim is not to focus on early interpretive efforts to redirect the discourse, nor is it to consider only particular interpretations of characters in this passage. For the moment, I want rather to call attention to a broadly formative treatment of the tale by one of the foundational Christian thinkers of late antiquity. The commentator is the rhetorician-turned-theologian Augustine—the first interpreter to situate the story in an extended treatment of semiotics.

The semiotic scope of Augustine’s treatment of the tale is all the more important because of his long-standing ambivalence toward imaginative techniques and texts at large. Despite his early training in the verbal arts and his lingering attraction to the lore and literature of Roman antiquity, he is more cautious, for example, about the extent to which the idioms of mythological discourse can be conceptually adapted by Christians than an earlier interpreter like Lactantius or a later one like Fulgentius.¹¹ He appears to be largely silent about even explicitly Christian poetry composed in his own period but not liturgical in design, such as Prudentius’s expansive personification allegory, the Psychomachia.¹² While his early theorizations of poetic invention suggest tentative defenses of fiction, over the course of his work as a whole he repeatedly qualifies his regard for a poet or a passage by extended critiques of the fabulae or figmenta of the human imagination.¹³ Still more generally, he recurrently indicates pressing opposition to any kind of lying, no matter how commendable the cause.¹⁴

But is Jotham’s tale of talking trees a lie? Writing a treatise Against Lying in the early fifth century, Augustine approaches the tale as one of many forms of indirect signification, among them parables (parabolae); tropical expressions (tropicis … locutionibus), including metaphor (metaphora), whereby a word is transferred “from its proper object to an object not proper” (de re propria ad rem non propriam … translatio); and certain prophetic utterances and actions (locutiones actionesque propheticae).¹⁵ Such forms of signification, designating one thing by another (aliud ex alio), are not lies, maintains Augustine, when they point (albeit indirectly) to what is true. In fashioning of this kind (in quo genere fingendi), even “human deeds or words” have been assigned to “irrational animals or things without sense”—not only in secular letters (saecularium litterarum), as in the cases of Horace and the fables of Aesop (Aesopi … fabulas), but also in Holy Writ (litteris … sacris), “as in the book of Judges,” where “the trees seek them a king …” (ligna sibi regem requirunt). All is fashioned (fingitur) with the aim of reaching the thing intended (intenditur).

Augustine’s influential discussion associates the tale of Jotham with figurative activity at large, including stories in “secular letters,”¹⁶ and it suggestively touches on fundamental issues such as propriety and intentionality in the use of language. But the discussion potentially raises a host of unresolved questions about figuration. For example, though in one sense Augustine distinguishes between what is spoken and what is signified, he tends radically to conflate them with each other in describing how such discourse is actually “true.” “Yet true things, not false, are spoken (dicuntur); because true things, not false, are signified (significantur) … ; the things that are signified (quae significantur) namely, those are the things spoken (ipsa dicuntur).”¹⁷ Intensely determined to show the veracity of apparent falsehoods in Scripture, Augustine scarcely examines here the nuances of their textuality. If a figurative story is ultimately “true,” could any such story—even, for example, a pagan story suitably construed—potentially be as acceptable as a scriptural one?¹⁸ Might there be different genres of fiction that represent the truth with different degrees of probability or clarity?¹⁹ Within the general category of figuration, in what ways might the semiotics of “utterances” differ from the semiotics of “actions”?²⁰ And as for the story of Jotham, just what is the truth that it signifies? Over the course of a millennium and a half after Augustine, such questions will repeatedly try the thoughts of Christians who seek to judge the language of Scripture.

In the assessment of the passage in Judges a crucial intermediary between Augustine and later interpretation is the sixth-to-seventh-century churchman Isidore of Seville. Though Isidore’s foundational comments draw partly on Augustine, his own writing situates the story of Jotham not in a brief treatise on lying but in two diverse compilations that virtually exemplify the expansive range of his interests, from theological investigations to linguistic ones. These generically distinct works present two quite different accounts of the story, reflecting the varying contexts and aims of Isidore’s remarks. To my knowledge, no published study has clearly recognized this duality, but it displays contrasting perspectives that deeply affect Christian reading for hundreds of years.

One of the two accounts might be called a “spiritual” interpretation. It appears in a work of Questions on the Old Testament (Quæstiones in Vetus Testamentum), which discusses what Isidore calls the “mystical sacraments” of scriptural history (plena mysticis sacramentis).²¹ This account calls the tale a parable (parabolam) and treats it as a kind of apocalyptic drama. Gideon, according to the account, is a type of the Lord (typum Domini). His concubine is the Synagogue (Synagogam)—what is called in the book of Revelation (in Apocalypsi) the synagogue of Satan—from which the vilest son, the Antichrist, is to be engendered in the last times (De qua ultimis temporibus nequissimus filius, id est, Antichristus est generandus). By contrast, Jotham signifies the remnant of Israel (figura est residui populi Israel) that ascends to the height of faith and virtues. The restlessly searching trees are vagrant and vacant men (vagos, et vanos), ready for everlasting fire. They merit not the olive (the grace of the Holy Spirit and the unction of peace), nor the fig (the sacred law), nor the vine (the Savior, who says in the Gospel: “I am the true vine”—ipse in Evangelio ait: Ego sum vitis vera). The thorny bramble points to the Antichrist (typus Antichristi); its fire is his iniquity, which will consume all who trust in him as well as himself.

While it would be possible to examine this account in detail, I want only to note in passing that it conspicuously shifts the immediate orientation of the story from the history of ancient Israel to the destiny of humankind, and that it radically diffuses any deep distinctions between objects and figures and words. From its perspective, an actual person like Jotham is no less a sign than figurative characters like the trees, who are themselves no less signs than a brief figure of speech like the “true vine.” Everything is a cipher—both in the sense that it is a code and in the sense that it has virtually no substance of its own. The content of both the story that Jotham tells and the history to which he belongs seems almost programmed, as it were, according to a predetermined model. Even the bramble is related to Abimelech not so much directly as through their shared significance, the Antichrist. Such early Christian interpretation offers one way to accommodate a fable to the discourse of truth. In its approach, it nearly seems as if fables are finally no more or less figurative than facts themselves.²²

This interpretation of the tale of Jotham later passes almost verbatim into the ninth-century work of the expansive early-medieval commentator Rabanus Maurus.²³ With little alteration it eventually passes into the most pervasive commentary on the Christian Bible in the Middle Ages, the Glossa ordinaria, which in its development from the ninth to the twelfth century eventually takes the composite form of both marginal and interlinear glosses that accompany the main text. To the end of the Middle Ages and long afterward, a reader of the glossed Christian Bible encountering the trees’ appeal to the vine, for example, would find written in Latin in the interlinear space above the line with “vine” the word “Christ,” followed by the words “who said ‘I am the true vine.’”²⁴ A format of this kind makes it difficult even to conceive the words of the scriptural text without their “spiritual” glosses.

Yet there is a quite different account of the tale of Jotham in the work of Isidore of Seville, and it has far-reaching consequences of its own. Though part of this account is derived from Augustine, Isidore’s own presentation of it appears in a work that is less theological than philological (as it were) in orientation. The work is the encyclopedic Etymologies, one of the fundamental reference books of Christian learning for a thousand years after its composition near the end of Isidore’s life.

In this work, the fable of Jotham is discussed not in distinctly “mystical” but in broadly moral terms, and it is associated with an account of narrative genres, ordered according to their relative closeness to the realm of fact. One kind of narrative is “fable” (fabula).²⁵ “Fables,” indicates Isidore, are not actual events (res factae), but only verbal inventions (loquendo fictae). Some fables, he continues, concern “human morals” (mores hominum), like “Aesop’s fables,” or a passage “in the book of Judges,” in which “the trees seek a king for themselves.” “The whole story is made up especially for the moral, so that we arrive at the matter (rem) that is intended (intenditur) with the true meaning, though, to be sure, by means of a made-up narrative.”²⁶ Shortly after this account of fables, Isidore closes his general discussion (and the first book of the Etymologies) by distinguishing (under the influence of earlier compositional theory) three orders of narrative. Histories (historiae) are “true deeds that have happened”; plausible narrations (argumenta) are “things that, even if they have not happened, nevertheless could happen”; and fables (fabulae) are “things that have not happened and cannot happen, because they are contrary to nature.”²⁷

Perhaps I could note briefly just two aspects of this approach to the tale of Jotham. First, unlike Isidore’s approaches in Quaestiones, this discussion conceives the tale not from the perspective of apocalypse, or even a specifically Christian spirituality, but from the perspective of generally human ethics—what Isidore calls in the passage cited above mores hominum.²⁸ Second, while the Etymologies of course recognizes that the fable is a figurative tale, it implies more pressing inquiries than the Quaestiones about the status and function of figuration. It is true that even a fable points to a matter (rem—a thing) that is intended (intenditur), but of all forms of narrative it is the furthest removed from factual matters themselves. Though Isidore does not here cite the passage from 2 Timothy, a Christian reader of the Etymologies might well inquire about the conditions under which Scripture itself, the discourse of truth, would turn, in the words of 2 Timothy, “unto fables.”²⁹

Such questions, in fact, increasingly preoccupy Christian interpreters of the fable of Jotham and scriptural figuration as a whole in the later Middle Ages. Their efforts to clarify the functions of such passages eventually promote not only new attitudes toward the relationships between words and things, but more specifically, new approaches to the “literal sense” of scriptural language—and finally, in effect, to its “literary” sense. It can even be argued, it seems to me, that the developing focus on the “ethics” of imaginative narrative is allied with the developing sense of the “poetics” of the scriptural text. Perhaps even a few engagements with this late-medieval movement can suggest something of that provocative—and deeply conflicted—process.³⁰

The Late Middle Ages: Thirteenth-Century Perspectives on Literality and History

Under what critical circumstances do late-medieval interpreters assess the story of Jotham? In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—the very period when the Glossa ordinaria, with its “spiritual” treatment of the story, is broadly institutionalized and widely disseminated in Christian Europe—powerful new forces are reshaping the basic principles of exposition and composition. Sustained studies exploring the styles and genres of texts and, more deeply, their logical, ethical, and psychological rationales develop in a variety of forms, ranging from elaborate “introductions” to authoritative writers—both scriptural and secular—to detailed “arts” of poetry (ars poetriae) and preaching (ars praedicandi).³¹ A case in point is one of the first treatises on the art of preaching, the early thirteenth-century Summa de arte praedicandi of the theologian Thomas of Chobham, which shows how pointedly strategies of scriptural interpretation can interact with theories of imaginative expression during this period.³² More particularly, it shows how Jotham’s fabulous tale of talking trees can become not only an emblem of events in the book of Judges but an exemplum of the dilemmas of fiction in its most radical form.

Already in the prologue of his treatise, discussing ways of signifying in theology, the late-medieval writer investigates the critical implications of fundamental concepts that date back to Augustine and Isidore. Calling attention to the exegetical distinction between signification by words (significationem vocum) and signification by things (significationem rerum), Thomas proceeds to elaborate signification by “words” with the threefold grammatical or rhetorical classification of fabula, argumentum, and historia.³³ But as his subsequent references to non-Christian and Christian sources suggest, such a neat concatenation is limited by the acute falsehood of fabula. “The signification of words is threefold: fable (fabula), plausible narration (argumentum), history (hystoria). Fable is what contains neither truth nor probabilities, and according to Macrobius, the philosophical treatise eliminates this kind of fiction from its sacred precincts; no less does theology reject it (theologia repellit), just as the apostle said to Timothy: ‘avoid old wives’ tales’” (Vulgate: aniles fabulas; 1 Tim 4:7).³⁴

Yet when Thomas proceeds in the treatise to describe the narrative forms appropriate to a preacher, he not only allows fabulae to be included in a sermon, but grants that such a mode of composition is included in Scripture itself. “However, sometimes fables (fabule) are mixed in with the sermon, not for the sake of fictional events themselves, but for the sake of the significations which may be understood through the stories…. The holy writers also mix such fables (fabulas) into their narratives. Thus it is read in Judges that all the trees came to the olive tree, the fig tree, and the vine to choose themselves a king….”³⁵ The tension displayed here between two characterizations of fabula—as outsider or as insider—will persist in Christian interpretation long after Thomas of Chobham, and long after the Middle Ages. It reflects in part the complications of a narrative form at once radically fictive and redeemably true, complications that had been exercising Christian thought at least since Augustine sought to explain how apparent falsehoods could be facts.

In the case of Thomas’s guide for preaching, the complications are inseparable from its late-medieval ambience. By the time his treatise is composed, the term fabula and cognate forms like fable had become widely diffused and acutely ambivalent—invoked by a host of writers to censure various deviations from spiritual responsibility or historical accuracy,³⁶ yet adapted by others to explore the potentialities of imaginative activity.³⁷ However intriguing those potentialities might be, fabula never wholly escaped the liabilities of its own semantic range. Even in the ambitious twelfth-century movement to give certain kinds of “fabulous narrative” (narratio fabulosa) philosophic respectability—a movement drawing upon the influential late-antique writer Macrobius³⁸—a prominent commentator pointedly excluded Aesopic “fables” from the precincts of philosophy, to say nothing of the higher spheres of theology.³⁹ (Macrobius himself had specified that exclusion, as Thomas notes in his prologue, cited above.) As for the tension in Thomas’s own treatment of fabula, the crucial question potentially posed by that treatment is not whether his account has its internal strains but whether even the word of God might have internal strains, with the inclusion of fables in the discourse of truth.

In Thomas’s treatise there are some suggestive but elusive approaches to this question, beyond the remark (cited above) about fictional events used for the sake of their significations (significationes). Referring, for example, to a brief fable elsewhere in Scripture about a thistle and a cedar,⁴⁰ he classifies it not as a fabula but as a kind of “history” (hystoria) that is called “metaphor” (metaphora)—“metaphorical history,” as it were.⁴¹ Later in the treatise he again refers to Jotham’s story itself, this time classifying it as a kind of narratio or expositio that presents not actual deeds (rerum gestarum), as in the case of “histories” (hystoriis), but rather prout (“as”) actual deeds (res prout geste)—although not “according to the letter” (ad litteram) but “according to the understanding” (ad intellectum).⁴² In medieval manuals of composition, combining the word prout with “deeds” at times suggests not only “plausibility,” but also “mendacity”;⁴³ for his part, the mentor Thomas stresses the “understanding” of Jotham’s story. But aside from the question of just what that “understanding” is, it remains unclear from Thomas’s comments whether or not Jotham’s story is (like the thistle/cedar story) a kind of “history,” and if it is, how such a story (not to be construed “according to the letter”) might belong to a Scripture in which the “literal” sense itself had long been regarded as the “historical” sense.

No thirteenth-century inquiries probe such issues more intently than treatments of the tale of Jotham in the systematic theological summae of the period. Beyond approaches to the story in previous settings, their accounts aim not only to justify imaginative language in Scripture, but to integrate it theoretically with the very concept of the “literal” or “historical” sense—a complex concept susceptible to variation over time. The study of such scholastic discussions at large has been especially facilitated by the foundational work of A. J. Minnis, and though my own orientation differs in certain respects, I am deeply indebted to his expansive scholarship.⁴⁴ As for the particular passage in Judges, to appreciate something of how the story can be scholastically reassessed only a short time after Thomas of Chobham’s art of preaching, it is useful to turn to a theological summa composed partly by Alexander of Hales (d. 1245).

The summa tellingly classifies the story of Jotham not as a fabula but as a parabola—a category evocative of parables in the Gospels.⁴⁵ The story is considered in the course of a discussion of the senses of Christian Scripture, including its “literal or historical” sense (litteralis sive historicus).⁴⁶ Noting and then countering the view that the parabolic mode is not “historical,” the summa maintains that the historical understanding (historicum) is spoken of in two ways (dupliciter). It involves not only things (rem) but also likenesses to things (rei similitudinem)—“as in parables” (sicut in parabolis). With regard to the “parables in the Gospels” (parabolicis evangelicis), adds the summa, “Augustine says” (dicit Augustinus) that they must be understood “not in terms of their actually happening but of the possibility of their happening” (non ut essent, sed ut esse possent).⁴⁷ It has been thought that the writer of this part of the summa refers here to the very passage in Augustine’s Against Lying cited near the beginning of my discussion, but that passage has no clear parallel to the argument in the summa about parable and “possibility” (sed ut esse possent).⁴⁸ Whatever the writer’s specific source material, I think his view here evokes a broad notion to which I referred already in the consideration of Isidore of Seville—the notion of “plausible” narration that had long been associated with argumentum (“things that, even if they have not happened, nevertheless could happen,” as Isidore puts it regarding that category in the triad of fabula, argumentum, and historia).⁴⁹ It is revealing that shortly before this thirteenth-century summa, Thomas of Chobham’s account of the triad explicitly associates argumentum with both possibility (“things which, even if they did not happen, nevertheless might have happened”) and “parables” (in parabolis).⁵⁰

But what about the kind of story about which Thomas of Chobham had been noticeably ambivalent—an impossible story? As the analysis in the summa proceeds, it almost seems as if the writer has in mind that question, as he presses the issue of the literal sense (de sensu litterali).

Again we ask the question whether the literal sense is founded on the truth. For it seems at times to be founded on a lie, [as in] Judg 9:8: “The trees of the forests went forth to anoint a king for themselves.” But that seems to be outside of what we know to be true…. We must therefore state that in parables of this sort (in huiusmodi parabolis) there is truth in respect of that purpose to serve which (id propter quod) they are spoken…. Thus, we must note that in historical statements (in historicis) there is truth as far as the signification of words is concerned, while in parables (in parabolicis) there is truth in terms of the signification of things (significationem rerum).⁵¹

The summa, of course, is not the first work to argue that the tale of Jotham is true because of the purpose for which it is told. The basic argument is implied by Thomas of Chobham, and it goes back at least to Isidore and Augustine. But the summa explicitly places that argument in a discussion of the “literal” sense, in effect making what is intentional an aspect of what is literal. From this perspective, the transferred sense of even an elaborately extended tale belongs to the literal sense. As the closing comment suggests—even while it retains a distinction between historically direct and parabolically indirect language—because of this semantic transfer, the words of the tale are finally aligned with things.

This approach to the language of Christian Scripture develops momentum in the slightly later work of Thomas Aquinas. In one of his earliest writings, originally composed in the 1250s, Aquinas briefly cites the tale of Jotham, later indicating that when a speaker uses “figurative expressions” (figurativis locutionibus), the “sense of the words” (sensus verborum) is what the speaker “intends” (intendit), and specifying that words spoken by diverse speakers are to be diversely assessed.⁵² But some ten or more years afterward, near the opening of the Summa theologiae, Aquinas is offering more pointed formulations about what he calls the “parabolical sense” (sensus parabolicus) in general, with reference to the sensus litteralis.⁵³ As he puts it, the

literal sense (sensus litteralis) is that which the author intends (intendit), and … the author of Holy Scripture is God…. The parabolical sense is contained (continetur) in the literal…. Nor is the figure itself (figura ipsa), but that which is figured (id quod est figuratum), the literal sense. When Scripture speaks of God’s arm (brachium), the literal sense (litteralis sensus) is not that God has such a member, but only what is signified by this member (id quod per hoc membrum significatur), namely, operative power (virtus operativa).⁵⁴

There is nothing remarkable in Aquinas’s basic view that in scriptural references to God it is necessary to pass beyond corporeal imagery to theological reality. That general view had been conventional since antiquity. The importance of Aquinas’s account in this influential summa lies in his far-reaching theorization of literality, which he coordinates—via the intention of the author—with the turns of figurative language. His broad argument that the literal sense is what the author intends and that it encompasses the projected sense of figurative expressions has fateful consequences in the Christian world. It helps to enlarge expansively the very category of the “literal” sense, and at the same time to give the “literal” sense a metaphorical density, as it were, thickening it to include significations beyond the surface of the text. In a recent study exploring this momentous change in medieval and modern approaches to literality and textuality, I have offered a composite survey reassessing Aquinas’s approach in the Summa and its historical contexts.⁵⁵ But given the focus of this discussion the issue at stake is the specific case of Jotham.

If the “literal” sense is not the figure itself, but what is figured, just what is figured by the tale of Jotham? What is it that the author of the tale “intends”? Is the tale a figure for a specific moment in the time of the judges, or a cipher for the general movement to the Last Judgment? That this is not merely a theoretical question is dramatized in the revealing treatment of the tale by one of the most important theologians in the generation after Aquinas, the late thirteenth-century thinker Henry of Ghent.

In discussing the senses of Scripture in his Summa of Ordinary Questions, Henry indicates—in what is by this time a standard argument—that the historical truth is expressed sometimes in straightforward terms, sometimes in “transferred” and figurative terms (sermone translato & figuratiuo). In view of such transfer, the “parables in the Gospels” relate to the “historical sense,” and the “metaphor” (metaphora) about “how the trees chose themselves a king (Judg 9[:8]) relates to history (historiam)….”⁵⁶ Yet in the same work, two questions later, when he notes the argument that truth does not inhere in every sense, since, for example, the tale of the trees is “quite at variance with the truth,” the “history,” in at least one respect, seems nearly to disappear. The argument opens conventionally enough: “whenever the text literally interpreted can have no true historical meaning (verum sensum historicum), then recourse must be had to the mystical sense (mysticum)….” Of course—we might think—the text itself has no true historical meaning; its historical sense lies just on the other side of the trees, with the Shechemites and Abimelech. But Henry continues: “So, that text has no true historical sense of its own (Litera ergo illa nullum habet sensum proprium historicum verum), but the words are put there figuratively for the sake of the mystical sense (pro sensu mystico figuratiue), and the passage ought to be understood metaphorically (metaphorice).” And as the notion of mystical transfer virtually assimilates the notion of metaphorical transfer in his account, Henry invokes a revealing authority: “This is how Isidore expounds it in the Gloss [the Glossa ordinaria], for he understands the trees as signifying men according to the allegorical sense (allegoricum sensum) of the text.”⁵⁷ The sudden transport here to the mystical regions of the Glossa ordinaria is bracing,⁵⁸ and the aesthetic consequences are telling. As the tale is oriented toward a higher order, its apparent texture in its immediate historical context tends to be thinned almost into sheer transparency, a kind of gossamer for the Gloss.

Yet the trace of elusiveness about the tale—and more broadly, about the texture of figuration—is not only a function of mystical attitudes. It has its expression even in the somewhat later medieval commentator whose interpretation of Christian Scripture is often considered decisively “literalistic,” Nicholas of Lyra. To explore his attitudes toward the story of Jotham is to investigate some of the dilemmas—and possibilities—of critical activity in a new phase.

The Late Middle Ages: Fourteenth-Century Approaches to Textual Density and Diversity

Though no single commentator completely exemplifies changing views of the tale of Jotham in the fourteenth century, Nicholas’s prominent work offers a number of useful starting points. He considers the story not only in detailed commentaries about it but also in theoretical remarks about its relation to the literal sense, both in his Literal Postill on the Christian Bible, completed in the early 1330s, and in his Moral Postill, completed in 1339.⁵⁹ In the prior work, after citing the verse about the trees appealing to the bramble, he indicates that “from the way the text goes on, it is made abundantly clear that this is understood as referring to the citizens of Sichem and to Abimelech, for they anointed him as their king over them…. And the literal sense is not that which is signified by the words (per voces), but that which is immediately meant by the things signified (per res significatas)—as is illustrated by the example of Abimelech and the Sichemites….”⁶⁰ Such a comment seems a programmatic application of Aquinas’s approach to the sensus litteralis, shifting it from what is apparently said to what is actually meant.

Yet in the prologue to the Moral Postill, the formulation that the literal sense is not what is signified by the words is explicitly reversed.⁶¹ Some passages, Nicholas indicates, have “no literal sense, strictly speaking,” like the passage in Judges about the trees (Ierunt ligna …). The “literal sense, strictly, is that which is signified by the words (Sensus enim literalis est proprie, qui per voces significatur) … and there is no such sense in these passages…. For it would follow that the literal sense of Scripture were false, for trees never did nor could they do any such thing.” Is the literal sense what is not signified by the words (as in the first formulation), or what is signified by the words (as in the second formulation)?⁶² It seems that even the most elemental conceptions of literality have a persistent way of turning back upon themselves.

Yet if Nicholas’s apparent reversal suggests the elusiveness of the sensus litteralis, his approach does not seem to me reducible to indecisiveness. However variable his formulations in this matter—which he seeks to clarify slightly later in the prologue, when he states that “in many places in my writings … I have called a metaphorical sense ‘literal’” (sensum parabolicum vocaui … literalem)⁶³—his general position seems to me at once to have a certain consistency and to mark a significant change in the late-medieval treatment of the story and its implications. Perhaps the point is best illustrated by the continuation of the previously cited passage from the Moral Postill. “For trees never did nor could they do any such thing…. Rather, in these passages there is a mystical sense (sensus mysticus) which is to be understood of the things signified.” A “mystical” sense? At that crucial point, Henry of Ghent turned his eyes up to the Gloss. Nicholas of Lyra, by contrast, turns his eyes down to the text. What is for him the “mystical” sense? “For by ‘the trees’ are to be understood the citizens of Sichem, who made Abimelech their king to rule over them, as is explained in that very place in the text….”⁶⁴ The point is not just that in medieval interpretation the term mysticus can designate not only a spiritually occult reading but, more generally, a verbally oblique one. The point is that in this passage from the Moral Postill, what is called the “mystical” sense in the story of Jotham is basically the same as what is called in the passage from the Literal Postill the “literal” sense: the trees signify the citizens of Shechem. And that sense is “explained,” as Nicholas puts it, “in that very place in the text” (vt ibidem in textu exponitur).

Beyond his theoretical comments, Nicholas’s extensive treatment of the tale of Jotham draws the passage into the texture of the book of Judges in a way that seems to me markedly more intricate than prior Christian interpretation.⁶⁵ Even his approach in the Moral Postill, which abstracts characters in the tale (e.g., the olive, the fig, and the vine as three genera hominum), is in a sense an elaborate modulation of his detailed discussion in the Literal Postill. The bramble, for example, is specifically aligned in the Literal Postill with Abimelech, and generalized ethically in the Moral Postill as men “unworthy of advancement” (indigni promotione)—but in neither case is it the Antichrist.⁶⁶ This is not to say that Nicholas’s ethical perspective on the story in the Moral Postill is necessarily better or worse than the apocalyptic approach in the Glossa ordinaria; each has its own interest. Nor is it to say that Nicholas does not entertain his own extended interpretive speculations, even in the Literal Postill. In that work, for example, he expresses sustained interest in the view of the “Hebrews” (Hebræi) that the olive, the fig, and the vine signify Othniel, Deborah, and Gideon.⁶⁷ In fact, midrashic transfers such as Rashi offers in his comments on the story (e.g., the olive tree as Othniel, because Othniel comes from the tribe of Judah, and “Judah” is called in Jeremiah an olive tree) acquire considerable expansion in Nicholas’s “literal” account.⁶⁸ By its very mode, of course, the figurative tale of Jotham lends itself to metaphorical refraction, and Nicholas of Lyra is not the first to exemplify the phenomenon. But from his recurrent efforts in the Literal Postill to recall specific contexts in the book of Judges⁶⁹ to his general emphasis in the Moral Postill on the dilemmas of governance, Nicholas seems almost to imply that whatever their interpretive turns, readers should not miss the forest for the trees.

To appreciate the extent to which late-medieval approaches to literality can be informed by what might be called the effort to “contexture” imaginative expression, it is possible to turn to a somewhat later fourteenth-century account by Hermann of Schildesche, whose lectures at a cathedral school between 1345 and 1350 are presented in his Compend on the Meanings of Sacred Scripture. The exploration of this account has been facilitated by the pioneering research of Christopher Ocker, who has provided a valuable edition and discussion of part of the text.⁷⁰ In offering some further perspectives on that text, my discussion situates it in an interpretive context considerably different from Ocker’s study—beyond broad distinctions in scope and focus.⁷¹ Whereas Ocker’s work aims to show that late-medieval interpreters blend the “historical” or “literal” with the “spiritual,” my analysis here of late-medieval interpreters investigates a contrasting (at times nearly reverse) process: how such interpreters (confronting the radical test case of Jotham’s “impossible” tale) seek to transform the fictional into the “literal” or “historical.”⁷² While I share with Ocker and others the view that in late-medieval interpretation at large the categories of “literal” and “spiritual” increasingly overlap, there are critical intricacies and ironies in late-medieval “literality” that seem to me to require further investigation.⁷³

This is not to suggest that I wish here to trace in detail Hermann of Shildesche’s own meticulous dissection of the sensus litteralis, which he divides into the literal historical sense (the relating of deeds) and the literal non-historical sense (the specifying of commandments), and then subdivides according to whether the language used in each category of the “literal” sense (historical and non-historical) is proper or figurative—and then, in the case of figurative language, still further subdivides according to whether the figurative signification is “tropical” (tropicus), or “parabolic” (parabolicus), or “symbolic” (symbolicus), or “poetic” (poeticus)—all of them, it should be stressed, still within the sensus litteralis.⁷⁴ In so punctilious a classification there is something worrisomely suggestive of Shakespeare’s Polonius. But Hermann’s argument that the literal sense can present history in either “proper” or “non-proper” language has a special point when applied to the book of Judges.

“For the literal historical sense is proper (sensus litteralis hystoricus proprius),” indicates Hermann,

when under proper words someone’s deeds are told, as in the book of Judges chapter 9: the deeds of Abimelech are told under proper words, where it is said how he killed seventy-two sons of Jerubaal, his brothers…. But the non-proper historical sense (sensus hystoricus non proprius) is when someone’s deeds are told figuratively (figuratiue), namely parabolically or enigmatically, as in the same place in the ninth chapter (ibidem ix. capitulo), where under the figures of a riddle almost poetically (quasi poetice) they are told about him, that “the trees of the forests went out that they might anoint over themselves a king, and then they said to the bramble, rule over us!,” through which tree he was represented.⁷⁵

Hermann’s account does not just show how “proper” and “figurative” language can each relate to history. It suggests how the two modes of language can be used to tell nearly the same history, how they can be not just contrasted with each other, but correlated with one another. In such a coordinating process, “proper” history can modulate into figurative history, and still remain historical—even, in Hermann’s terms, “literal.” And the idiom of that scriptural history is “almost poetical”—a category that Hermann later associates with acute kinds of impossibility, like the attribution of rational properties to irrational things, “as is read,” he indicates later in the treatise, “in Judges 9” (ut Judicum ix. legitur).⁷⁶ For Isidore in his encyclopedic, early-medieval Etymologies, the impossibility of fabula places it at the furthest remove from historia. For Hermann in his late-medieval Compend on the Meanings of Sacred Scripture, not only does the poetic tale of Jotham belong to the historia of Scripture in practice; it belongs there, as a distinct modulation of the literal sense, in theory. The sensus litteralis is increasingly evoking, even in such analytic contexts, another sense of the word litteralis—that which concerns literature, the “literary” sense.⁷⁷

By the time Hermann of Schildesche is locating the story of Jotham in the “literal sense,” several generations have passed since the apparent ambivalence of Thomas of Chobham about whether fables belong in Christian Scripture at all. During that time, as the discussions I have cited suggest, a kind of verbal space increasingly opens between the notion of the “letter” as scriptural history and the notion of the “letter” as grammatical propriety⁷⁸—a space that facilitates the general sense that even an extended episode in Scripture can be presented “non-properly,” obliquely—that is, imaginatively. In the case of Jotham’s story, that opening is reinforced by ethical approaches to the interpretation of the tale. In such approaches, the figures of the story do not just belong to a universal sign system in which everything—from the teller of a tale to a tree to a trope—denotes a single, overarching, spiritual design. Instead, the figures of this specific fable come to summon up at least initially a particular historical configuration—even while they themselves keep their verbal distance, remaining in their own linguistic domain. A realm of “aesthetic” discourse, as it were, is opening up in the very precincts of sacred history. From this perspective, the interplay between the “literal” and the “literary” in late-medieval interpretation is not just a matter of turns in interpretive idiom; it is a matter of turns in imaginative and intellectual orientation.

There is more than one way in which an emphasis on the ethics of Jotham’s imaginative story facilitates the exploration of its poetics. In the late Middle Ages, ethics is the philosophic category with which Christian interpreters repeatedly align poetry.⁷⁹ In light of the topic and technique of Jotham’s cautionary tale, it may be especially pertinent that an influential late-medieval guide for rulers (De regimine principum) promotes the view that the mode of treating moral matters (in toto morali negotio) is by its very nature “figurative and broad” (figuralis et grossus)—using types and figures (typo et figuraliter) to cover variable cases, to stimulate the affections, and to accommodate a wide audience.⁸⁰ It has long been observed that medieval Christian commentary may be wary of particularly emphasizing the “ethics” of Scripture lest the emphasis imply that the sacred text is merely a moral treatise (or a poetic construction).⁸¹ But the recurrent role of Jotham’s tale in the increasing coalescence of scriptural ethics and poetics is finally not governed by biblical interpretation alone. I would not wish to close this discussion of the critical late-medieval period without at least glancing at intersecting approaches to the story of Jotham from the other side of interpretation—the interpretation of imaginative literature itself.

Shortly after Hermann of Schildesche offers his lectures on the senses of Christian Scripture, a quite different expositor, Pierre Bersuire, opens his extraordinarily influential Ovid Moralized, completed by 1362, with a familiar quotation: “ ‘They will turn away from listening to the truth and will turn to fables,’ says Paul … in 2 Tim 4[:4].”⁸² But Bersuire resourcefully turns the warning against fabulous discourse into a defense of engaging it.

I can indeed adduce this quotation to show that often one must use fables, enigmas, and poems so that some moral sense (aliquis sensus moralis) may be extracted from them…. For this is what Holy Scripture appears to have done in several places, where it is commonly acknowledged that it has concocted fables (fabulas … confecisse) to demonstrate some truth. This is seen from the fable of the trees wishing to elect a king in Judg 9[:8]….⁸³

To moralize the fables of the poets is finally to collaborate in the vision of Scripture itself. As Bersuire later continues: “Therefore, because I see that Scripture uses fables to point out some truth … it seemed appropriate for me … to set my hand to moralizing the fables of the poets (moralizandum fabulas poetarum)…. For a man may, if he can, … build and construct the ark of the covenant from the treasures of the Egyptians (de thesauris Egipciorum tabernaculum federis edificet & componat).”⁸⁴ Nearly a thousand years earlier, Augustine had defended the use of pagan lore by observing that by divine authority the Israelites took Egyptian gold and silver, enabling the objects of value to be put to better use.⁸⁵ But Pierre Bersuire—elaborately reworking ancient mythology with his imposing, multifaceted commentary, periodically provided with biblical “prooftexts”—virtually seeks to turn pagan literature into building material for the ark of the covenant itself.⁸⁶

By the early 1370s, when Giovanni Boccaccio is completing his Genealogy of the Gentile Gods, the pagan poets themselves are explicitly and elaborately treated as “theologians” (theologos).⁸⁷ Boccaccio’s conception of fabula passes far beyond Isidore’s inherited (and conspicuously restrictive) category of stories that are “not actual events.” Boccaccio’s approach may draw in part (directly or indirectly) upon the Macrobian view that “fabulous narrative” (narratio fabulosa), broadly conceived, can be a medium not only of expressing the truth, but also of engaging a wide range of philosophic subjects. The general view had been adapted by medieval Christian interpreters to allegorize the fables of pagan mythology,⁸⁸ but Boccaccio extensively applies diverse concepts of fabulous discourse (including the more limited kind of fabula noted by Isidore) to Christian Scripture itself.⁸⁹ For Boccaccio, fabula at large includes forms of imaginatively inflected expression that pagan poetry shares with “nearly the whole of the Old Testament” (omne fere sacrum Veteris Testamenti volumen), as well as verisimilar accounts—describing what “could have occurred, or might at some time” (esse potuere vel possent)—like the parables of Jesus.⁹⁰ With regard to the radical test case of Jotham’s fable, I want only to note a revealing pronouncement in the closing book of the Genealogy in which Boccaccio associates pagan poets with what is called “physical theology,” comprising insights about both the natural and moral realms (naturalia … atque moralia). Even “sacred (sacri) theologians,” he argues, “turn physical (physici) when occasion demands; if in no other way, at least they prove themselves physical theologians as well as sacred when they express truth by the fable of the trees choosing a king.”⁹¹ The fable of Jotham, having acquired by the fourteenth century an emphasis more ethical than apocalyptic, has turned into a prooftext for the poetics and ethics of Christian Scripture itself. In such a passage, it seems, divine Scripture has a mode and a message as human—and as humble—as one of Aesop’s fables.

But not for every commentator. There are periodic warnings in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries against the association of Scripture with fabulous expression.⁹² In 1377–1378, only a number of years after the completion of the Genealogy of the Gentile Gods, the controversial theologian John Wyclif announces that “we must learn a new grammar and a new logic when attempting to explicate or understand Holy Scripture.”⁹³ What Wyclif calls the “truth of Holy Scripture” passes so far beyond any human convention that it breaks the very categories of normal language and thought. When, near the opening of his treatise, he assesses at great length the tale of Jotham, he gives it an explosive range of meanings, ethical and spiritual, ancient and contemporary. The olive, the fig, and the vine signify now Othniel, Deborah, and Gideon, now the three “persons” (persone) pertaining to the three ages (trium temporum) of the state of the Church, with a particular turn on the current age: “the priests of Christ, who ought to be vicars of the true vine, should not hold civil dominion….”⁹⁴ The bramble “mystically signifies Abimelech” (significat mistice Abymalec) but yet is “especially the Antichrist” (specialiter anticristus), who “comes in the time of John the Evangelist, and remains all the way to the Day of Judgment” (durat usque ad diem iudicii)….⁹⁵ It is as if the scriptural historia and the Glossa ordinaria were both running late to a joint appointment and urgently texting each other.

Yet for Wyclif, none of this is either a mere “history” or a mere “gloss.” Scripture, he continues, needs to be comprehended in its “wholeness (integritate), as it pertains to the sense of the author (ad sensum autoris). For then it will be found to be true (vera) in every respect.”⁹⁶ In fact, “any sense (quilibet sensus) which the letter possesses can fittingly be called the literal (literalis) according to the intended literal sense”—in the Latin, de virtute sermonis, according to the underlying force of the discourse.⁹⁷ In effect, all conventional distinctions between “literal” and “figurative,” between the part and the whole, between history and futurity, finally collapse in the plenitude of divine intentionality.

From Early Modernity to the Present: Exploring the Imagination

“What could this passage of Scripture be except a fable or a poem?” asked John Wyclif in the late Middle Ages, after quoting at length Judg 9:8–15—and then he sought urgently to show that conventional notions of “fable” and “poem” were inadequate to the “new grammar” and “new logic” demanded by divine Scripture.⁹⁸ But the grammar and logic of the early-modern period have a distinct momentum of their own. The late-medieval movement toward a “literary” sense of the tale of Jotham expands in scope in the modern era—almost as if scriptural commentary, having provisionally examined some of the relations between the littera of the story and the matter of history, could increasingly explore its imaginative implications. Even a selective glance at the far-reaching reassessment of Jotham’s tale during the course of the modern period reveals provocative changes in approach to judging the language of Scripture.

Already in early Reformation commentary, the story comes to be affiliated with a breathtaking array of imaginative writing at large—secular as well as sacred. This “apologue or fable” (apologum seu fabulam), maintains the influential Protestant theologian Johannes Brenz in commenting on Judges in 1535 (as he employs one of the ancient terms for “stories,” apologus ⁹⁹), belongs to the serious, not the scurrilous, kind of fabulae (genus fabularum).¹⁰⁰ Devised by prudent men for educational and ethical purposes (ad institutionem morum), stories of this kind combine teaching with pleasing. “Hence were born the apologues of Aesop,” and hence “the poetry of Homer about Achilles and Ulysses, likewise of Virgil about Aeneas.” It is this “learned kind” of fabling to which the apologue in Judges pertains (Ad hoc igitur eruditum genus fabularum pertinet hic Apologus). Perhaps more strikingly than in any previous Christian commentary, Jotham’s story now has its place not merely with Aesopic tales but with exemplary literature at large. To this same genus, Brenz continues, prophetic visions (uisiones Prophetarum) can be referred, and he suggests an alignment of Gospel parables (parabolas Euangelicas) with it.¹⁰¹ Though more pressing critical distinctions—e.g., between fabulae that are verisimilar (verisimiles) and those that are remote from probability (a probabilitate longissime)—are specified by Peter Martyr Vermigli some years later in his commentary on Judges, Vermigli’s own sense of the kinds of fabula (Species Fabulæ) remains broad, even while he pointedly notes that Jotham’s story antedates the stories of Hesiod and Aesop.¹⁰² In such commentary, that exceptional fabula in Judges turns virtually into a familiar phenomenon, generically allied with edifying fabulation as a whole.

Even when the scriptural fabula is more narrowly framed, its imaginative features can have telling implications for concepts of sacred history. In the vast sixteenth-century treatise that has been regarded as the first monument to the hermeneutics of the new learning—the Key to Sacred Scripture (Clavis Scripturae Sacrae) of Matthias Flacius Illyricus¹⁰³—a section on kinds of similitudes provides an account of fabula with a revealing turn. The account begins in a customary manner. “A fable is a fictive narrative (Fabula, est narratio ficta) drawn either from inanimate things, or from plants, or from animals, endowed by a certain personification (prosopopœiam) with sense and reason, by which human affairs (humanæ res) are depicted. As when in Judg 9 the trees want to establish a king over themselves….”¹⁰⁴ It may be a sign of humanist education that when Flacius cites a classical example, he turns not to Aesop but to “the fable of Menenius Agrippa about the belly and the contentious members of the body”¹⁰⁵—the kind of fable that Shakespeare dramatizes a few decades later in Coriolanus. But then Flacius directly and intriguingly transfers the classical fable back to his sacred text: “And Paul expresses this to some extent (Quam & Paulus aliquatenus expressit) in Rom 12 and 1 Cor 12.” Rom 12 and 1 Cor 12? Suddenly, even Paul’s discussion in Romans and Corinthians about Christians as members of the body of Christ seems almost to become a fabula.¹⁰⁶

The evaluation of the fabula of Jotham in the historia of Judges gradually acquires newly evocative forms in the continuing reassessment of its poetics. At least as early as the seventeenth century, Jotham’s imaginative story elicits commentary about the originary, “Eastern” ambience of figurative language in Scripture.¹⁰⁷ The tale comes to be an early touchstone for an increasingly “aesthetic” appreciation of the Bible; as Joseph Addison writes at the opening of an early eighteenth-century essay on “fables,” “Jotham’s Fable of the Trees is the oldest that is extant, and as beautiful as any which have been made since that time.”¹⁰⁸ But over the course of the eighteenth century, the assessment of fabula acquires more intensively historicist forms, aiming to clarify far more than the particular historia to which a story may refer. In theories of the human imagination that anticipate the Romantic movement, fabulous discourse in antiquity becomes a vivid testimony to the primal history of humankind, its animated language an expression of elemental sympathy with the natural world. A wide-ranging application of this view to the idiom of Scripture is displayed in Johann Gottfried Herder’s On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, published in the 1780s.¹⁰⁹ Herder finds in the “poetry” of the Hebrew Bible “a community of feeling and sympathy (ein gemeinschaftliches Mitgefühl) between brute animals, men, plants, and all that has life”; in its “sympathy” (Teilnehmung) with the world of plants, he argues, such poetry readily “personifies them” (alles so gern personifizierten).¹¹⁰ As he writes later in the treatise, the Hebrew language is “full of personifications” (Die Ebräische Sprache ist solcher Personendichtungen voll), and it is “undeniable, that this sympathy, this transfer of one’s self into the objects around us” (diese Teilnehmung, diese Versetzung in fremde Gefühle), has formed “not only the inspiring principle of language, of speech, but to a certain extent also the first development and existence of moral principle” (das erste Wesen der Moral).¹¹¹ Animated language so conceived is far more radical than the kind of fabula invoked for nearly a thousand years from Isidore of Seville to Matthias Flacius. It does not just offer a comparison with plants or animals for moral purposes; it expresses a communion with the creaturely world that is itself foundational for moral behavior (das erste Wesen der Moral).¹¹² If there is a kind of mysticism in this view, the mysticism applies not, as in Isidore’s apocalyptic account of the tale of Jotham, to the last age of the human race, but to its primordial stages. In “the beautiful fable of Jotham,” writes Herder, “trees speak and act, for Israel then lived beneath the trees (denn Israel lebte damals unter Bäumen) the life of herdsmen or cultivators of the soil….”¹¹³ In that formative world, fabula is no mere poetic device. Its poetry is by its very nature an exposé of history; the primal act of fabling is itself the crucial fact.

But other ways of “historicizing” the imaginative language of Scripture are destined to displace such effusive views and to relegate the fable of Jotham to a rhetorical flourish of relatively limited interest. One expression of that tendency is an assessment by an influential nineteenth-century philologist-theologian (a clergyman who eventually helps to initiate the project of the New [Oxford] English Dictionary), Richard Chenevix Trench. A fable like Jotham’s story, he argues in a widely circulated work, never passes beyond the framework of earthly morality, and even the orientation of its plot—transgressing the natural order—exposes its strain.¹¹⁴ The fable of Jotham as a narrative invention limited to moral instruction and remote from the factual realm—such a conception might have pleased that early-medieval philologist-theologian of the Etymologies, Isidore of Seville. But by the time of Richard Chenevix Trench, broad interpretive movements are increasingly arguing that even the scriptural historia itself may be remote from the factual realm. Already in the eighteenth century, Voltaire wryly comments that one of the critics of the book of Judges maintains that “the story (fable) of Abimelech’s reign is more of a fable than that of the trees.”¹¹⁵ And with the intensification of the “historical-critical” method in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, commentary on Judges comes to question not only whether Jotham ever uttered such words, but even whether his fable belongs to the “history” of the text in the mere sense of belonging to the original narrative.¹¹⁶ It would be acutely ironic for late-medieval commentators to be told that this is the way in which Jotham’s story finally “fulfills its historical role.”

From such recent perspectives, the fable of Jotham may seem only a minor footnote in a far-reaching controversy about the historical and imaginative dimensions of Christian Scripture at large. But for well over a millennium, the fable acquires an interpretive history in the Christian world that is—if I may use the term—fabulous. Already by the early-medieval phase of that history, the story turns into a figure with two distinct kinds of significance—mystical and ethical. By the late Middle Ages its assigned “significance,” especially as the intended sense of an ethical tale, comes to be a rationale for including figurative meaning within the literal sense itself. Possessed of such metaphorical density, the literal sense of Christian Scripture increasingly converges with a “literary” sense of the text. Conversely, literary expression at large, even in non-Christian texts, comes to be defended by reference to scriptural fable. At times in the movement to the modern period, the fabulous and factual seem almost reflexes of each other—until that interplay between the imaginative and the historical eventually calls into question the very notion of the historicity of Christian Scripture itself.

Still, it is never possible to know for certain when history will return to mystery.¹¹⁷ Not long ago, in the opening decade of the twenty-first century, an article appeared that included an extended investigation of the botanical identity of that “bramble”—Hebrew aṭad (אטד)—in the fable of Jotham.¹¹⁸ The author concluded that the aṭad was quite possibly what is called by botanists Ziziphus spina-christi—that is, in an expression conspicuously highlighted in the article in a bold font, “Christ Thorn.”¹¹⁹ “Its scientific name,” the author continued, “comes from the perception commonly accepted among scholars that its thorns make the tree the most plausible candidate for the plant of which Jesus’ crown was made.”¹²⁰ Could contemporary scholarly methods be returning indirectly to the methods of Methodius—to whom I referred near the opening of this essay—who associated the “bramble” with “the law which was given to the apostles for the salvation of the world”?¹²¹ This is of course not to say that that was the “author’s intention” in his recent article. It is nonetheless striking that the official abstract of the article maintains with regard to the plant in question that “Only such a literal rendering prompts the prophetic value of Jotham’s imprecation …,” and that the title of the article is “Jotham’s Fable and the Crux Interpretum in Judges IX.”¹²² The crux—the cross—of interpreters? Perhaps I am only reading between the lines. But if the history of this fable tells us anything, it is that in reading Scripture, even according to what may be called its “literal” sense, readers are always reading between the lines, composing with their own assumptions their own interlinear glosses. Not that Scripture does not speak in its own right; it talks far more than trees. The question is: how to judge what it says.