Category Archives: Bob Denham

Male Virgins

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Reubens, Venus and Adonis, c. 1635

Responding to Jonathan Allan.

“Virginity means a transcending of sex”––“Third Book” Notebooks

I suspect that Frye associates females with virginity because that is the typical association he found in the tradition of literature, sacred and secular. But he clearly recognized the category of the male virgin. In Words with Power he writes,

The original adam, alone in his garden, was involuntarily virginal, and illustrates the theme of the virgin who has a peculiarly intimate relationship to an idealized natural environment. The term virgin is usually associated with females, but long before Genesis we have the pathetic story of Enkidu in the Gilgamesh epic, the wild man of the woods made by the gods to subdue Gilgamesh, but so feared by human society that they send a whore to seduce him. After she completes her assignment the link between Enkidu and the animals who once responded to his call was snapped forever.

The figure of Orpheus in Greece, if not strictly virginal, also has a magically close affinity with nature: he is a musician, and music symbolizes the harmony that holds heaven and earth in union on the paradisal level of existence. Female virgins, again, have been credited for centuries with magical powers over nature, including the taming of wild beasts, the attracting of unicorns, and an uncanny knowledge of herbs.

In his notes on Achilles Tatius, The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon, Frye observes that when the

hero is making row about sacrilege in temple he says he’s a free man and a citizen of no mean city (ouk aemou poleos polites), which is quoted from Acts 21:39. Maybe Achilles Tacitus was a bishop after all: his bishop, anyway, if the translation is right, is a most urbane character, said to be familiar with Aristophanes, whose speech in court is full of double entendres about his opponent’s character (Thersander). Note the continuity of Paul’s wanderings around the Mediterranean and later romance. It must mean something that the heroine’s virginity is preserved only by accident and the hero’s isn’t at all.

In Notebook 50, par. 9, Frye writes about the passage in Revelation 14:4––“the business about those not defiled with women.” Later in the same notebook (par. 242) he says, “The male virgins in Revelation [14:4] (I probably have this) are the antitype of the fucking sons of God in Genesis 6.” Then again (par. 453), “It’s bloody confusing to read in Revelation that the redeemed are all male virgins, never ‘defiled’ with women [14:4]. [See Words with Power, 127, 275.] Not that anyone ever took it––well––literally: cf. the 14th c. Pearl. [The Pearl-poet did take the Revelation account literally. See Pearl, ll. 865 ff., where the poet takes pains to insist that the account of the male virgins in Revelation is true.] Its demonic parody, as I’ve said [par. 242], is Genesis 6:1-4: the Rev. [Revelation] bunch are sons of God who stay where they are, & don’t go “whoring” after lower states of being.”

In Words with Power Frye refers approvingly to Meister Eckhart telling “his congregation that each of them was a virgin mother charged with the responsibility of bringing the Word to birth; but then Eckhart did understand the language of proclamation that grows out of myth, and its invariable connection with the present tense.”

The notion of male virginity is implicit in this passage from Notebook 3 (par. 67):

Virginity is of course a Selfhood symbol, and the surrender of virginity in marriage is part of the losing one’s life to gain it pattern. By entrusting their virginities to one another, husband & wife recover their individualities, & advance from the purely generic physical relation to the purely human one of companionship. Possessiveness & jealousy are thus the perversions or analogies of what really happens in marriage. Blake would say that the hymen was the home of the Amalekites.

And then this, from “The Third Book” Notebooks (Notebook 12, par. 394):

Pound’s remark, a far more incisive one than Nietzsche’s, about the difference between those who thought fucking was good for the crops & those who thought it was bad for them, defines the contrast between the shy virginal Adonis, the women lamenting his virginity like Jephtha’s virginal daughter, Attis with his castrating priests, Jesus with his “touch me not” & his homosexual refinement—chaste, anyway—& his elusive ascension, are all in the upper sphere of the purified soul. [Pound’s remark: ““The opposing systems of European morality go back to the opposed temperaments of those who thought copulation was good for the crops, and the opposed faction who thought it was bad for the crops (the scarcity economists of pre-history)” (Ezra Pound, Make It New [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935)], 17).]

In short, I think the notion that “virginity [is] uniquely concerned with the female subject” in Frye needs to be qualified by considering his occasional remarks about male virginity.

Religious Knowledge, Lecture 14

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jonah

Lecture 14. January 20, 1948

The word ritual begins to expand its meaning.  It begins to focus on certain symbols, for example, the killing of the dragon by the hero.  This is the essential theme of the epic.  It is given symbolic expression in the life of Jesus who embodies the character of hero and king.  The theme of the epic takes place in the individual soul.  The antagonists must be interpreted in a certain ways as chaos, sterility, wasteland, sea; that is, the unorganized aspect of nature.  Leviathan in the Bible takes the form of cosmological and political enemy.

The so-called “laws of nature” are sub-human; they are indifferent to the human and the conscious.  God is not in nature.  The order and precision of the stars is still sub-human; there is no conscious purpose of human qualities.  Man’s religious impulse is that he cannot worship a god who is no better than he is.  God in nature is subconscious and sub-human.  In human society, as man lives in nature, human civilization is in the grip of nature.

Psalm 87 contrasts the heavenly city with the earthly one.  Revelation 11 has the symbolism of two cities, and of the city or the temple, as well as the emphasis upon accurate measurements.  The city of God has shape; it is bounded and finite.  There is emphasis upon the indefiniteness of the “outer court” which is our world.  The two witnesses are Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophet.  Verse 7: “the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit.”  Verse 8: the great city is the fallen city of Jerusalem, also called Sodom and Egypt.  (“And their bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified.”)

Leviathan is that which binds man in the fallen state.  The earthly city is part of the body of Leviathan.  The doctrine of the two cities is the subject of St. Augustine’s book, and it also shows in the opposition of light and the power of darkness.  There is also the following contrast, in which the right‑hand side is the physical reflection of the spiritual side, as a type of parody.

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More Cook on Frye

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Thanks to Eleanor Cook, Frye’s long-time colleague, for this exceptionally perceptive entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

For Cook’s other writings on Frye, see:

“Anatomies and Confessions: Northrop Frye and Contemporary Theory.” Recherches sémiotics/Semiotic Inquiry 13, no. 3 (1993): 13–22. Sees Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism as both an anatomy and a confession: the two genres inform each other.

“Against Monism: The Canadian Anatomy of Northrop Frye.” In Agostino Lombardo, ed. Ritratto de Northrop Frye. Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1989. 283–97. On the dialectical, rather than the monistic, nature of Frye’s work, and on his relation to recent Canadian criticism, especially that of Eli Mandel. Concludes with the suggestion that in Frye’s Anatomy there is the strong undercurrent of the confession, out of which emerges the dual image of Frye as both the master interpreter and the gracious servant.

“The Function of Riddles at the Present Time.” In Alvin Lee and Robert D. Denham, ed. The Legacy of Northrop Frye. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. 326–34. Sees the masterplot of Frye’s criticism as a Pauline riddle that ends in recognition and revelation––as opposed to the Freudian masterplot that leads to darkness and obscurity.

“Northrop Frye as Colleague.” Vic Report 19 (Spring 1991): 18.

Branko Gorjup considers Cook’s view of Frye’s Canadian criticism in “Northrop Frye and His Canadian Critics.” Verticals of Frye/Les Verticales de Frye. Ed. Ed Lemond. Moncton, NB: Elbow Press, 2005. 6–15. Also available at http://www.frye.ca/english/northrop-frye/symposia-lectures/01-gorjup.html.

Frye and the Supernatural

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Pillar2-Supernatural-GodCreates-Man-Sistine-Chapel

I’ve been mulling over Clayton’s comment about Frye’s antisupernatruralism. There are close to a hundred places in Frye’s writings where he uses the word “supernatural,” but I don’t get the sense from these references that he’s antisupernatural. Most often Frye’s use of “supernatural” does not point to some transcendent religious realm or being. For him, the supernatural is what is fantastic (ghosts, vampires, omens, portents, oracles, magic, witchcraft, and the like) or above nature––as in the heroes of myth in the Anatomy: superior to other people (superhuman) and to their environment (supernatural). The supernatural would include the “children of nature” (“the helpful fairy, the grateful dead man, the wonderful servant who has just the abilities the hero needs in a crisis,” Anatomy 196–7) that we find in folk tales and romances. For Frye the supernatural is not a term that is opposed to unbelief. It’s simply the antithesis of the natural. In his essay on Emily Dickinson he writes, “the supernatural is only the natural disclosed: the charms of the heaven in the bush are superseded by the heaven in the hand.” Sometimes Frye speaks of the supernatural as phenomena that are difficult to explain. He reports on this episode with his mother:

She has always regarded her mind as something passive, worked on by external supernatural forces, and is very unwilling to think that anything might be a creation of her own mind—besides, it flatters her spiritual pride to think of herself as a kind of Armageddon. She told me that once she was working in her kitchen when a voice said to her “Don’t touch the stove!” So she jumped back from it, and something caught her and flung her against the table. Half an hour later the voice came again, “Don’t touch the stove!” She jumped back again and this time was thrown violently on the floor. When Dad came home for dinner he found her with a black eye and a bruised shin. I have read a story by Thomas Mann in which he tells of seeing a similar thing in a spiritualistic séance [the episode involving Ellen Brand toward the end of Mann’s Magic Mountain—the section entitled “Highly Questionable” in chapter 7]: that story was the basis of the priest’s remark to the ghost in my Acta Victoriana sketch: “If you are very lucky, you may get a chance to beat up a medium or two” [“The Ghost”]. Mother has also heard noises like tapping and so on, and was tickled to get hold of a copy of a Reader’s Digest in which a writer describes having gone through exactly similar experiences [Louis E. Bisch, “Am I Losing My Mind?” Reader’s Digest, 27 (November 1935), 10–14.] The best way to deal with mother is, I think, to get her books telling of similar things that have happened to other people: she’s not crazy, but might be excused for thinking she was if she didn’t realize that such things are more common than she imagines. She was delighted with my Acta story, and I’ll try to get her that Mann thing and C.E.M. Joad’s Guide to Modern Thought, which has a chapter on those phenomena. (Frye-Kemp Correspondence, 13 August 1936).

In Fearful Symmetry Frye speaks of the supernatural as the human creative power: “All works of civilization, all the improvements and modifications of the state of nature that man has made, prove that man’s creative power is literally supernatural. It is precisely because man is superior to nature that he is so miserable in a state of nature” (41). Frye’s reaction to natural religion, with its premise of the analogia entis [anology of being], is almost always negative. Both Word and Spirit, he declares in his Late Notebooks, can be used without any sense of the supernatural attached to them.

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Religious Knowledge, Lecture 13

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Blake's Behemoth and Leviathan

Blake's Behemoth and Leviathan

The complete Religious Knowledge class notes can be found in the Robert D. Denham library at the link above right.

Lecture 13. January 13, 1948

Ritual embodies the ceremonial aspects of the law.  The teaching of Jesus is a commentary on the law. He transforms the action to the understanding of the action; that is, myth explains the ritual.  In the conception of ritual you act according to the law.  In this aspect, sin is a positive act of breaking the law.  But for the Gospel, law is the foundation of the human act, not the super–structure.  Sin is the failure to transmute the law into human life.  All theories of law, justice and judgment are expressed by Jesus in spiritual terms.  The Gospel is not a new law.

The law supposes a judge and a person as prisoner.  The Last Judgment is usually seen as God “up there” with the people below as sheep and goats.  But the sheep and goats are not human, and Jesus does not judge; he casts out devils, and the swine go over the cliff into the “deep,” which is the Hebrew word “tome,” meaning nothingness.  The arena of the Last Judgment is the human soul.  God enters into the human soul and with His help we cast out the goats, the devils within us,

The apocalypse of personality is God’s descent into the human soul.  The Gospel does not bring peace, but a sword.  It discriminates and divides.  It brings the principle of absolute separation of good and bad in the world.  The sheep are the pure, those who have used their talents.  The bad are those who have not used their talents, but have buried them.

The myth of the Gospel is the explanation of ceremonial cleanliness.  The white sheep are separated from the black goats, the light from the dark, the human from the monstrous.  The image to sum up Jesus is the act of casting out devils, the forgiveness of sin.  The power of God descending into the human soul to cast out evil even as Jesus descended into the human and fallen world to cast out devils.  It happens in man.  It is the descent of divine power into man.  You cannot make a sheep out of a goat.  The sheep is a sheep no matter if it has strayed and been lost. Jesus will find the lost sheep.

Sin is the negative act which fundamentally does not exist since all action is positive and good.  The driving out of goats is driving “nothing” out to achieve the complete reality of unfallen man.  I know this sounds like a riddle, but play with it for a while . . . .

If casting out devils is the symbol of Jesus’ activity, then we see the relation between prophet and hero more clearly.  The prophet is the observer, the watcher, the interpreter of the hero’s action.  For the hero or king, what is the heroic act?

Fundamentally, it is the destruction of the powers of darkness.  The Gospel tells you the spiritual aspect of the physical act.  The religious experience is crystallized in the dragon-killing myth.

The Saviour withdraws man from the dragon so that he can see it is not alive after all.  The fairy tale of St. George and the dragon, or the Perseus and Andromache legend, are not just “stories.”  St. George is the symbol of the sun, of life, hence his colour is red.  The dragon and the old man are the same; winter, waste, sterility.  In medieval drama the old king is dressed up inside the dragon.  In most variations of this story there is a sinister old woman to balance off the young daughter.  In the same way, Perseus has to kill Medusa before he can get cracking on the dragon.

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The Chorus of Bethlehem Angels

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nativity-holy-night-correggio

Correggio's Nativity

Frye writes:

If I had been out on the hills of Bethlehem on the night of the birth of Christ, with the angels singing to the shepherds, I think that I should not have heard any angels singing.  The reason why I think so is that I do not hear them now, and there is no reason to suppose that they have stopped.  (The Critical Path, 114)

History tells the reader what he would have seen if he’d been present, say, at the assassination of Caesar.  But what the Gospels tell us is rather something like this: if you had been present on the hills of Bethlehem in the year nothing, you might not have heard a chorus of angels.  But what you would have seen and heard would have missed the whole point of what was actually going on.  Thus, the antitypes of history and of prophecy as we have them in the gospel and the apocalypse give you not what you would have seen and heard, or what I would have seen and heard, but what was actually going on which we don’t have the spiritual vision to reach to.  (“Kerygma,” in Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts, CW 13, 588)

On Belief

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nebuchadnezzar

Blake's Nebuchadnezzar

Northrop Frye letter to Roy Daniells, 20 December 1973:

It seems to me that there are two mental processes which are quite distinct, both called belief.  One is the existence of evidence which seems conclusive, as when I believe that the earth goes round the sun and not vice versa.  The other is a belief derived not from evidence, but from imaginative vision.  A belief of this kind is an axiom of one’s conduct: what a man believes in this sense is only what his actions show that he believes.  Such beliefs represent a voluntary choice from an infinite number of imaginative possibilities.  The gospels present their story as a myth, an imaginative vision.  They are remarkably careless about collecting or appealing to evidence in the form of testimony or reason.  The account of the resurrection is designed to elicit the response “I can believe in a conquest over death achieved by human, backed by divine, power,” or something like that.  I don’t think they are trying to elicit the response “I find that these things happened exactly as described, because I believe that the writers are trustworthy historians.”  They are not trustworthy historians:  they tell four different stories.  But they are all agreed that resurrection is an important subject to decide on for belief, one way or the other.  From this point of view, it is not necessarily a misleading myth to say “in Adam all die,” which simply means that everybody dies.

I agree about the habitual dishonesty of theologians, but of course they are just as confused as everyone else about the distinction between the two kinds of belief.  As long as they could they tried to insist that belief in Christ was the same kind of belief as belief in the global shape of the earth.  Forced out of that position, they find themselves with no standards for any other kind of belief.  Very few theologians know or care much about literature or about the mental processes it calls for.  So they cannot understand that the gospel writers wrote in mythical rather than historical language because they felt that what they had to say was too important to be trusted to factual language.

Northrop Frye letter to Roy Daniells,  19 March 1975

What fills me with horror and terror, to use your words, is the mystery of the corrupted human will.  That is never more corrupt than when it gets to work in the religious area, in obedience to Swift’s principle that we use religion to hate each other and not for love.  The desire to persecute is never founded on “believe in God,” but always on “believe in what I mean by God”––all persecution and inquisition have been products of man’s deifying of his own understanding.  That and the lust for political power.  In the Apocalypse of Peter, one of the earliest NT pseudepigrapha, Peter is shown hell, given a strong hint that the sufferings there may not be everlasting after all, and then cautioned not to say this to anyone when he gets back, because people won’t behave properly unless they’re threatened with this kind of bogie.  That’s the way social institutions operate, and they operate in the same way even in Marxist countries where there’s no re­ligious basis as such.  They all try to paralyze man with fear.

Christianity makes a good deal of sense to me because its myth does.  It identi­fies man and God in a way that doesn’t cripple our critical faculties, and the kind of man it sees as divine is a man who cared enough about what was happening to other men to go through a pretty grim death.  I know that the Christian myth has been treated as fact but the people who did that were repeating the crucifixion when they made martyrs of people like Bruno and Servetus.

Religious Knowledge, Lecture 12

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St George Killing the Dragon, Bernat Martorell, 15th century

St George Killing the Dragon, Bernat Martorell, 15th century

Lecture 12. January 6, 1948

THE HERO AND THE PROPHET

A distinction exists between two types of human beings: the hero and the prophet, and the relationship between them is of primacy importance.  In the hero, humanity has projected a symbol of physical man fighting the forces of the power of darkness.

The Bible contains all literary forms.  It is the super-epic and it deals with the act of the hero.  One of the key ideas is the struggle, with nature or with other men who symbolize the forces of nature.  The development is the great archetype of the hero’s struggle with darkness, such as the dragon, and the victory of light over darkness at every sunrise.  The solar symbolism here is exhaustive.

The Bible centres on a single heroic act: the struggle with darkness and the resultant victory.  In medieval sculpture Jesus is pictured as dragon killer.

The hero, or king, is not fully conscious of what he is doing.  The hero is illusive, inscrutable, and therefore commands loyalty.  Christ as the suffering hero has that illusive quality.  There is a feeling of the distant hero who proceeds to inevitable fate and triumph in the “heroic” Christ who says “touch me not.”  The hero is too preoccupied with his action to know what he is doing, like Achilles brooding in his tent.  The heroes are figures moving in a ritual, not in the myth, and they move with a silent and unconscious quality.

The other type is the prophet who, in a sense, is the opposite.  He has the disinterested view of humanity, and yet is articulate.  He is not known for physical perfectibility and is likely to be stunted or deformed.  He is the observer, the watcher, which the king is not.  The man who is both hero and prophet is such a schizophrenic that he can’t do anything.

The hero and the prophet are different.  The hero is the actor, the prophet is the articulate person who explains the myth.  The poet, then, is the prophet.

The hero is the centre of activity; the prophet is the circumference of activity—the whole range of experience is in his mind.  The hero is always “somebody else,” while the prophet is identical with ourselves because we have to go into his mind and make contact.  All through humanity, in practise the hero and the prophet are separate.  But ideally they are the same.  The hero’s inscrutability is because he knows what is going on.  The prophet must be able to practice what he preaches.

The priest is the intermediary, neither prophet nor hero.  He stands at the point at which the ritual and myth converge. The hero still triumphs but he will be killed.  The prophet will become articulate but never causes.  The poet who enters the social causal sequence contaminates himself.  It is the priest who understands the myth and who performs the ritual.  The thing done and the reason for it are understood by the priest. Continue reading →

Northrop Frye’s Christmas Editorials

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canforum

Below are the four complete Christmas editorials Russell Perkin refers to in his article, “Northrop Frye on Christmas,” newly posted in our Journal (see the live link in the upper right hand corner of our Widgets menu).

MERRY CHRISTMAS (I)

December 1946

Canadian Forum, 26 (December 1946): 195. Reprinted in RW, 378–9, and in Northrop Frye on Religion.

Christmas is far, far older than Christianity, as even the pre-Christian Yule and Saturnalia were late developments of it, and it was never completely assimilated to the Christian faith. Our very complaints about the hypocritical commercializing of the Christmas spirit prove that, for they show how vigorously Christmas can flourish without the smallest admixture of anything that could reasonably be called Christian. Christmas is the tribute man pays to the winter solstice, and perhaps to something in himself of which the winter solstice reminds him. We turn on all our lights, and stuff ourselves, and exchange presents, because our ancestors in the forest, watching the sun grow fainter until it was a cold weak light unable to bring any more life from the earth, chose the shortest day of the year to defy an almost triumphant darkness and declare their loyalty to an almost beaten sun. We have learned that we do not need to worry about the sun, and that there is no monster big enough to swallow it. We have yet to learn that no atomic bomb will ever destroy the human race, that no Dark Age will (as it never has done) totally overspread the earth, that no matter how often man is knocked down, he will always pick himself up, punch drunk and sick and morbidly aware of his open guard, spit out some more teeth, and start slugging again. At that point there is a division between those for whom Christmas is a religious festival, and for whom the new light coming into the world must be divine as well as human if the struggle is ever to be won, and those for whom the festival is human and natural and points to an ultimate human triumph. With this difference in outlook the Canadian Forum has nothing to do, but to all of its readers who recognize the primary meaning of Christmas, and who realize that generosity and hospitality and the sharing of goods make a better world than misery and persecution and the cutting of throats, it wishes a Merry Christmas.

MERRY CHRISTMAS?

December 1947

Canadian Forum, 27 (December 1947): 195. Reprinted in RW, 380–1, and in Northrop Frye on Religion.

A passage in the Christmas Carol describes how Scrooge saw the air filled with fettered spirits, whose punishment it was to see the misery of others and to be unable to help. One hardly needs to be a ghost to be in their position, and as we light the fires for our Christmas they throw into the cold and darkness outside the wavering shadows of ourselves, unable to break the deadlock of the U.N., unable to stop the slaughter in China or India or the terror in Palestine, unable to release the victims of tyrannies still undestroyed, unable to deflect the hysterical panic urging us to war again, unable to do anything for the vast numbers who will starve and freeze this winter, and above all unable to break the spell of malignant fear that holds the world in its grip. Yet Dickens’ ghosts were punished for having denied Christmas, and we can offset our helplessness by affirming Christmas, by returning once more to the symbol of what human life should be, a society raised by kindliness into a community of continuous joy.

Because the winter solstice festival is not confined to Christianity, it represents something that Christians and non-Christians can affirm in common. Christmas reminds us, whether we put the symbol into religious terms or secular ones, that there is now in the world a power of life which is both the perfect form of human effort and all we know of God, and which it is our privilege to work with as it spreads from race to race, from nation to nation, from class to class, until there is no one shut out from the great invisible communion of the Christmas feast. Then the wish of a Merry Christmas, which we now extend to all our readers, will become, like the wish of a fairy tale, a worker of miracles.

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Religious Knowledge, Lecture 11

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The Wailing Wall, Jerusalem

[Ed’s Note: Sorry that we’ve lagged behind in continuing to post the Religious Knowledge lectures.  Having my computer crash a couple of weeks ago without being sure what I’d lost and what I hadn’t double footed me for a bit.  We are now back on track.  M.H.]

Lecture 11. December 16, 1947

After the Babylonian Captivity, prophecy is modulated to the themes of the invisible king, since the Jews could no longer have a visible symbol for a spiritual reality.  The ideal king may be eternal or an ideal to be re-established in the future. Two directions appear here.  The distinction is already present in the exilic prophets and is finally expressed in the conflict of Judaism, which stopped at the exilic age, and Christianity.

With the destruction of Jerusalem, Judaism had to become a permanent exile, completing the idea of the coming Messiah as established in the Captivity.  They rebuilt Jerusalem and staggered on, accepting the future Messiah bound up in time.  The second exile under the Romans completed the pattern of the coming Messiah.

The breakaway started as early as Jeremiah, the first of the exilic prophets, and is carried on in the prophets.  There is ambiguity in Isaiah II and in Ezekiel: they are read by both Christian and Jew.  The prophets speak of a deliverer who is to vanish and return, which could be interpreted as an eternally present fact or one in time.  The Jew and Christian both see it in the future, but it is the difference between resurrection and revival.  The Jews speak of a rebuilt Jerusalem, which the prophets did speak about, and perhaps that is all they thought they were talking about.  However, the conception of hope and confidence is connected with something that is symbolized in the future.

The pattern of exilic prophecy emphasizes that the city and the king have disappeared and must come again, symbolized by the future.  It is important to remember that the Hebrew language has no future tense.  It can differentiate between a complete and a progressive action, but not between the past, present and future. It is an admirable language for expressing a God in an eternally present existence; everything is complete in God’s mind at once,

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