MR. ADAMS AND ME

Jerry Harkins

Let it be acknowledged at the outset that Ansel Adams (1902–1984) was one of the greatest of American photographers. His black and white landscapes are without peer and his portraits and still lifes are invariably revealing. His artistry combined a unique visual imagination with equally unique field and darkroom disciplines. Not everyone likes his images, the most famous of which tend to be too romantic for some. But everyone recognizes his genius, myself included.

There is, however, an artificial quality apparent in many of his landscapes as though he was trying to show the world not as it is but as it should be or might be if he were in charge. It is a quality that often inflates one’s first impression but that turns out to be superficial and, in the end, embarrassing. Take, for example, his signature image, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941.

Adams was driving south on what is now U.S. 84 after what he called a “discouraging” day in the Chama Valley. Around 4:00 PM he came upon the scene and instantly visualized it as a photograph. He very quickly set up his 8 X 10 view camera but could not find a light meter. Fortunately, “I suddenly realized I knew the luminance of the moon—250 c/ft2. [1] Using the Exposure Formula, I placed this luminance on Zone VII; 60 c/ft2 therefore fell on Zone V, and the exposure with the filter factor of 3X was about 1 second at f/32 with ASA 64 film.” [2] Even so, the negative proved very difficult to print in a way that would yield something close to his visualization. The concept and the physics were so out of whack that every important factor had to be manipulated in the darkroom. He burned and he dodged. He experimented with various developer-to-water sequences and was still working on it several years later, re-fixing and re-washing the negative and treating the lower section with a dilute solution of Kodak IN-5 intensifier.

He actually knew the luminance of the moon! Are you properly dazzled? Of course you are—at least until you start thinking about it. To begin with, Adams may have imagined the scene as it appears on the print, but the reality was very different. The sky was not black. It was 55 minutes before sunset. The sky was still blue, probably light blue, and the clouds were probably beginning to glow red. He was using a deep yellow filter (Wratten No. 15G) which darkened the sky without affecting the green in the shrubbery. The filter did not, however, render the sky black. We do not need to guess how much grayer it became because, in the end, it was the contrast between the sky and the clouds and the sky and the moon that Adams was interested in. He says the clouds were “two or three times as bright as the moon” which may be true but both were bathed in the light of the sun. And neither was made brighter by the filter which darkened them slightly if anything. The contrast in the print is wrong. The crosses in the cemetery were no brighter than the wall of the structure behind them or the rear wall of the church on the left, and the vegetation in the foreground was not nearly so dark. Overall, the contrast, on which the impact of the image is totally dependent, was nowhere near as high as it is in the prints.

What you have here is a striking photograph that was made almost entirely in the mind of the photographer. The camera, for all the technical talk, was incidental. I suspect a pin camera would have done as well or almost as well. I have no objection to this. Nor do I have a problem with the photographer’s visualization any more than I do with Picasso’s three-headed mistress. I really don’t care about the tensile strength of Picasso’s palate knife or even the dimensions of his brushes even if the artist thinks I need to know it. In the present case, we are dealing with what was in the artist’s head and what the results communicate to the rest of us.

Moonrise is the story of a very particular moment which is not the moment it was taken, but some moment the real moment inspired in the photographer. Whatever else it is, it is a night story, a midnight story: The pitch black sky hovers ominously over everything, occupying more than half of the image area. The laws of nature are suspended. Not even the light of the nearly full moon brightens that imaginary sky (just as the real moon did not an hour before sunset). The clouds and the grave markers are lit. We know intellectually their glow comes from the sun but that knowledge plays no part in the psychological impact of the image. It is a night image. Anything glowing must have its own internal source of light. The feeling is eerie and maybe a little scary. This is surrealism masquerading as realism or, perhaps, romanticism. The important thing, though, is that Adams visualized it all while riding along gazing out a car window—or maybe not. Maybe it was similar to William Wordsworth’s observation that, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” In Adams’ case, the tranquility was in the darkroom which, arguably, is where he “discovered” the photograph.

Monolith, The Face of Half Dome is another image made mainly in the darkroom. Taken in early afternoon on April 17, 1927, it is almost as surrealistic as Moonrise. Once again, the dark sky was created mainly in the lab. (A yellow filter again contributed to this.) The shadow on the right of the monolith is hard to explain. According to Adams, at noon the monolith was in full shadow. Nearly a month after the equinox, that’s hard to believe but, two hours later, the sun was slightly lower in the sky. This calls attention to what seems to be a shadow consisting of two shades of gray while the formation in the lower right hand corner seems to be in full sunlight. Moreover, the shadows of the trees on that formation suggest the sun is at the right rear of the picture. Why then is the right side of the monolith still in deep if not full shadow? The precisely perpendicular border of the shadow divides the image into two parts, light and dark. The same precision also suggests the line was created by a poor job of burning.

This is an early image and, unlike Moonrise, it seems to have no meaning or message beyond being a generic pretty picture. [3] Adams was attached to it, he says, because it was the first time his visualization was realized exactly in the final print. But what visualization? Is he talking about “visualizing” a perfectly straight line dividing the picture in two? I think not. This was a hard picture to take if what caught his eye was the texture of the monolith. My guess is that is precisely what Adams wanted to show and he was elated when he saw he had succeeded. Once again, I suspect his “visualizations” come largely or wholly after the fact, not before it.

Sand Dunes, Sunrise is one of the master’s greatest photographs. It is not at all romantic, although, like Moonrise, it conveys an unsettling mood. It is a hard-edged, almost abstract image taken near Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley in 1948. Unlike Moonrise, this was carefully planned well in advance and, this time, what you see is pretty much the scene as it actually was. The lab work is incidental. Here you see what happens when the process of visualization unfolds pretty much as Adams describes it. He knew in advance that the contrasts on the dunes at sunrise would create a metaphor for the feeling one experiences at moments of high anticipation.

The few minutes just before and just after the sun comes up over the horizon are what Maya Angelou called the “pulse of morning.” [4] During that brief interval, the temperature drops noticeably. In summer, the birds have been singing for about a half hour but now they pause. The wind, if there is any, freshens. If it is calm, a breeze comes up. Experiencing this tiny drama, an observer senses both the possibilities and the uncertainties of a new day. What Adams has done is to re-create these feelings using a straightforward image of a range of shades of gray with just enough context to prod the viewer. You know this is a real landscape, not an abstraction. The photographer took special care to reveal the sand ripples at the bottom of the image in what appears to be an opening in the earth. The ripples are what cues you that the scene is real. Moreover, I believe, they speak to the transience of both the moment and its meaning (although I am not oblivious to the shape of that opening). This is a beautiful image and, if I am right about its meaning, it is also a brilliant one. It is not necessary that Adams’ visualization include my “pulse of morning” analysis, only that his emotional state be consistent with it. The artist feels what the critic then tries to put into words.

Mirror Lake is one of several Adams images of the large lake-like widening in the Merced River about a mile from the trailhead behind the Ahwahnee Hotel. The fullness of the lake tells us this must have been springtime. The brightest light seems to be coming from the upper right. Assuming it is morning, the camera then is looking north. [5] It seems that little or nothing was done to change what the lens saw and it may be that Adams did not even use a filter. In other words, this is an objective photograph in the ordinary sense of the word. What he saw is pretty much what you get. Which brings us to a central problem: just exactly what is Adams trying to do?

Along with other giants of American photography in the 1920’s and 30’s, Adams thought and wrote a great deal about the medium, trying to establish an identity for it as part of the cultural scene. Naturally there were competing schools of thought and disagreements were intense. In 1934, Adams wrote, “Photography is an objective expression; a record of actuality. The photographer who thoroughly comprehends his medium visualizes his subject [as] a thing-in-itself.” [6] And Mirror Lake is objective for the most part. [7] So are his portraits and still lifes—in some cases they are painfully objective.

Joyce Yuki Nakamura, Manzanar Relocation Center, c. 1942 is a thoroughly objective picture of a pretty little girl, obviously of Japanese descent but with the long curly hair and Peter Pan collar speaking of American acculturation. A viewer must inevitably enjoy the image because it is so cloyingly cute. It is not until you realize that the child is an internee in a U.S. concentration camp that you experience any strong emotional reaction. You may then read meaning into several aspects of the picture, the lopsided smile, the partial closure of the right eye, the fancy blouse.

Contrast the portrait of Joyce Yuki Nakamura with the thoroughly non-objective photograph of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay by Berenice Abbott. Millay was a true Greenwich Village bohemian known as much for her voracious bisexual exploits as for her exquisitely sensitive poetry. The image is meant, I think, to highlight the latter and Abbott has posed it brilliantly with the man tailored shirt and tie contrasting sharply with the distant expression on the subject’s face. The same expression appears in many Millay pictures including the famous one of the 22-year old poet under a dogwood tree at Vassar by Arnold Genthe. But it is rare to see her teeth and the slight overbite that suggests vulnerability. The clincher is the knee that tells you she is wearing a skirt. The apparently masculine suit is a façade, a suit, if you will, of armor. Abbott always included the knee in the prints she made. Other darkroom technicians did not, thereby unbalancing the composition and betraying its meaning.

The difference between the two photographs is stark; the meaning of Joyce Yuki is totally dependent on the words of its title and the viewer has to know what a “relocation center” is. The meaning of the Millay portrait is entirely in the photograph. It requires no words. It may help to know who the subject was but, possibly, words would actually detract from the meaning. It is as much a product of the photographer’s conscious planning and intelligence as Moonrise or Sand Dunes and every bit as successful.

As acknowledged in the first sentence, Adams is among the greatest of American photographers. He is also the best known. Twenty-six years after his death, both his coffee table books and his technical works remain best sellers and a print of Moonrise recently sold at auction for $360,000, almost 90 times the price of an Abbott print. He deserves the gratitude of those of us who enjoy his work and those of us who try to learn from it. At the same time, it does no harm to acknowledge with Professor Harold Hill that there is a fine line between magic and flim-flam and that Mr. Adams was a masterful practitioner of both.

Notes

1. Candela per square foot. Until 1948, the measure of luminosity varied but was based on a specified candle or flame. Today it is defined as the luminous intensity (the amount of light emitted or reflected), in a given direction, of a source that emits monochromatic radiation of frequency 540 X 1012 hertz (a yellowish green) and that has a radiant intensity in that direction of 1/683 watt per steradian. (A steradian is a standardized cone-shaped solid emanating from the center of a sphere and, thus, a pin source of light. There are 12.5664 steradians in a sphere.) In other words, luminosity is the brightness of light and is independent of the source’s context, in this case, the sky. The source in Moonrise is the sun the light of which is reflected by the moon. The moon is a tiny fraction of a sterdian so its radiant intensity is a tiny fraction of 1/683 watts. What is more interesting is that business about c/ft2 falling on Zone 5. I’m not expert in Adams’ zone system but it seems a long way from 250 (Zone 7) to 60 (Zone 5) to an exposure factor of 3X with his Wrattan No. 15 (G) filter to the actual exposure. Especially if the 250 is wrong (I suspect he misplaced a decimal point and the actual figure should be 2,500). Adams of course was not the first or last great artist to bullshit people about what he did. Nor was he unaware of what he called “the compelling impulse of photographers…to discuss equipment and materials…down to the smallest detail.” It’s the fine line between the detail and the bullshit that gave him trouble.

2. Adams, Ansel, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, Little, Brown and Co., 1983, p. 41. I’m not sure about that ASA 64. The American Standards Association (now the American National Standards Institute) did not get into photographic standards until after 1946 so my theory is he meant to say “an ASA equivalent of 64.” That would imply a fairly fast film for the time but still agonizingly slow given that both the earth and the moon were moving.

3. Even though Half Dome is the definitive image of Yosemite, this picture could have been taken anywhere. Nothing jumps out and says Yosemite or Half Dome. Adams, of course, had climbed the Dome frequently and knew it intimately. Thus, he recognized this face of it but did not bother to communicate that to the rest of us except in the title he gave it.

4. “On The Pulse Of Morning,” Delivered January 20, 1993 at the Inauguration of President Clinton.

5. There are several untestable hypotheses here. It may be that I have invented the evidence to support a preconceived opinion about the air being not nearly as clear in the afternoon.

6. From an article titled “An exposition of my photographic technique” quoted in Eisinger Joel, Trace and Transformation: American Criticism of Photography in the Modernist Period, University of New Mexico Press, 1995 p. 68.

7. The main exception is the reflection of the tall tree in the center of the image. The tree itself is without detail, its reflection is highly detailed—exactly the opposite of what you might expect. The water at that point is considerably brighter than the sky which suggests that Adams made it brighter specifically to bring out the detail. Not any easy thing to do.

The photographs discussed in this essay are all readily available on the internet and have been omitted here for copyright reasons and because they need to be seen in a size larger than possible here.

HEAVEN HELP US
Jerry Harkins

If you want to get to heaven, let me tell you what to do,
You gotta grease your feet in a little mutton stew.
Slide right out of the devil's hand,
And ease over to the Promised Land.
Take it easy! Go greasy!
—Woody Guthrie, Talking Blues


We are all children of God and heirs of heaven. But the journey is long and the path rocky that leads to salvation. For many are called but few are chosen. Narrow is the gate and hard is the way which leads to life, and there are few who will find it.

Of course it helps to have a map. Or know someone who does.

Sunday, May 1, 2011 was a sad day in the long and depressing history of the Roman Catholic church. In an elaborate spectacle of pomp and pageantry, the Pope kissed a vial of blood entwined in a filigreed reliquary. The blood had been taken from his immediate predecessor Karol Józef Wojtyła, John Paul II, and the kiss was part of his beatification ritual. The church was proclaiming that the late Pope is certainly in heaven and was encouraging the faithful to pray to him to intercede with God for their intentions. It had already certified that John Paul was responsible for at least one miracle, the cure of a French nun from Parkinson’s Disease of which the late Pope had himself been a victim.

According to an ABC News poll conducted in 2005, 90% of Americans said they believe in heaven. Amazon.com currently lists 4,410 books on the subject including several with the title Heaven Is Real or some close variation thereof. One, currently No. 6 on Amazon’s list of bestsellers, tells the story of a four-year old boy, Colton Burpo, who visited heaven while under anesthesia.[1] He returned with descriptions of what he encountered and with the message that the end times are near.

In fact, in almost all religious traditions, an afterlife of one sort or another is the very purpose of earthly life. In Christianity, the New Testament is almost entirely an instruction manual on how to avoid hell and get to heaven. In the words of the old Baltimore Catechism, “God made us to know, love and serve him on this earth and to be happy with him forever in heaven.” Jesus repeatedly stressed heaven as the goal of life and taught his listeners how they must live in order to achieve it. He went so far as to instruct them not to worry about their earthly needs but to seek first the father’s kingdom and his righteousness (Matthew 6:33). [2] The instructions varied over the three years of his ministry but the simplest was merely to believe in him. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved” (Acts 16:31).

Christians have always taken an expansive view of “believe,” maintaining that it includes absolute obedience to a long list of moral precepts, only a handful of which were ever endorsed by the founder. Jesus, for example, never addressed such major taboos as abortion, birth control or in vitro fertilization, and never bothered with such lesser (Protestant) offenses as card playing, dancing and coffee drinking. The Catholic Church claimed the right to expand on Jesus’ teaching and said it was the exclusive gatekeeper of heaven. The Protestant reformers saw this as a gambit for gathering power and riches for a corrupt hierarchy and they preached a return to the doctrine of sola fide—salvation or “justification” by faith alone. We are all sinners and none of us can earn salvation merely through good works.

In the Smalcald Articles, Martin Luther wrote, “All have sinned and are justified freely, without their own works and merits, by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, in His blood (Romans 3:23–25). This is necessary to believe. This cannot be otherwise acquired or grasped by any work, law, or merit. Therefore, it is clear and certain that this faith alone justifies us.” This implies that salvation is easy, that in fact everyone is saved, but it was not Luther’s last word on the subject. He and the others also contrived to believe the teaching of St. Augustine that very few human beings actually go to heaven and, in fact, that God has predestined every person from the beginning of time to heaven or hell. Luther himself understood that predestination raises many uncomfortable questions about the nature of God but he accepted these as mysteries and basically ignored them. John Calvin, on the other hand, embraced the notion that the vast majority of people had been doomed to eternal damnation before the creation of the universe.

If all this reminds you of the Mega Millions Lottery, it is because the psychology is similar. You buy a ticket which costs you relatively nothing but gives you a preposterously long shot at winning indescribable riches. You are buying into a dream and deriving pleasure from anticipating what you will do with the jackpot. There are, however, a number of differences. In one of these games, the house knows who the winners will be before the first ticket is sold. (In the other game, such knowledge would put the sponsor in jail.) In one, the losers are not left free to try and try again but are immediately and permanently banished to hell. Of course you are still free to purchase indulgences promising forgiveness of your sins but indulgences apply only to earthly punishments imposed by the church and purgatorial punishments imposed by God. They will not keep you or get you out of hell which is, in all probability, your destination.

The church has long been aware that its teachings regarding heaven and hell are inconsistent, illogical and embarrassing. On the one hand, it cannot avoid promoting the good news that God loves even sinners. On the other hand, it is obvious that an omniscient God must foresee all things and will their existence. Thus, God must will that some, perhaps the vast majority, of his beloved creatures suffer eternal damnation. Similarly, a creature without free will cannot sin but one with free will is independent of God’s will and, presumably, of God’s foreknowledge. Finally, a church with total power to bind and loose things on heaven and earth must also be a monopoly. And in fact, the church teaches that outside itself there is no salvation. Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. In the words of the 1993 Catholic Catechism, “…all salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body.” The metaphor of something passing from the head through the body need not detain us. Apologists try desperately to suggest that non-Catholics who would want to be part of the church if only they knew about it can somehow gain heaven. Which is the opposite of what John (3:5) says Jesus said: “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” But the gospels are full of ambiguity on this as on many other subjects.

The early fathers and doctors who decided which books constituted the New Testament left out some interesting candidates and included others that are really strange. By the early years of the fourth century, they had pretty much agreed on the twenty-seven books found in modern bibles. What emerged were three versions of the new faith. The first of these, the original orthodoxy, came out of Jerusalem and was recorded in the synoptic gospels and Acts. If current scholarship is correct, Mark is a rendering of certain sermons of Peter delivered perhaps in Rome. Mark founded the church of Alexandria which is today’s Coptic church. It may be that some of his followers encountered the Gnosticism of Marcion of Sinope which inspired those who established the important library found at Nag Hamadi in 1946.

Matthew and Luke are derivatives of Mark, both presenting somewhat more rigorous interpretations of Jesus’ ministry. The church likes to ignore the differences and treat these “synoptic” gospels as the foundation of all its teaching. The second version includes works of John, a gospel, three epistles and Revelation. John, whether he was one writer or two or three or more was both a mystic and a philosopher. Revelation paints a vivid and horrific picture of the end times and clearly implies that few will be saved. The third and most radical version is that presented in the epistles attributed to Paul. This is the legalistic, rule bound Roman Catholic faith we know today, built on a gospel foundation to be sure but much more ascetic in morality and much less dependent on Jewish thought and practice. Pauline theology assimilated the old orthodoxy following the first Council of Nicaea in 325 and the spread of Augustinian pessimism shortly thereafter. (Interestingly, the Nag Hamadi library suggests that the Christian Gnostics considered Paul one of their own or at least a sympathizer. There is no doubt he hit upon some of the same paradoxes that concerned them but it seems highly unlikely that he had ever encountered Gnosticism at first hand.)

The synoptic gospels are said to be in agreement but, aside from a few passages that read like plagiarisms of each other, they differ in many important respects. They actually seem to be second or third hand recollections recorded by people who weren’t there—descriptions of an elephant by the proverbial blind philosophers. For example, Jesus famously spoke in parables. But of the thirty-six or so (depending on how you count) recorded in the New Testament, only thirteen are reported by more than a single evangelist. The gospels are only roughly consistent and each writer had his own agenda which is why the church fought vigorously for fifteen hundred years to keep the Bible out of the hands of lay people. But bear in mind that the church was selling redemption and salvation so it is not surprising that its understanding of the basic gospel message is that this life is merely a rehearsal for the life to come. For fifteen hundred years, princes and prelates fought furiously for control of the lives of the mass of people who lived in poverty and subjugation. Heaven was the church’s trump card. Do as we say. Be humble and docile. And your reward will be infinite joy after you die. To make this promise as credible as possible, the church had to employ the most tortuous logic against what were already ambiguous texts. This required a degree of casuistry that would make the Red Queen blush.

We do not know for certain who any of the evangelists were. Only the fourth gospel claims to have been written by a named author, John the beloved disciple (John 21:24). In any event, the synoptic gospels describe the origins and beliefs of a new (but not radically new) version of the Jewish faith. Jesus said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17). Some of these “fulfillments” seem major. An eye for an eye (Deuteronomy 19:21) becomes turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39, Luke 6:39) and hate your enemy is transformed into love your enemy (Matthew 5:43). [3] Here and elsewhere, if you focus on the changes Jesus is calling for, it is easy to think of the good news as the gospel of love. If, on the other hand, you focus on what you have to do to lead a meritorious life, the news is not so good. It is far more difficult to love your enemy than to hate him. It is relatively easy to avoid adultery but much harder to avoid looking at a woman lustfully and harder still to pay the price of ogling Jesus demands, “If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away” (Matthew 5:29).

Jesus is not so clear as to what we must do to enter heaven. On the one hand, he says, “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:29-30). But then he also says that very few will merit heaven. He tells the apostles, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!” (Mark 4:10-12). Not that the message is a secret. According to Matthew (28:19), he tells the disciples to “…go forth and teach all nations.” It seems he expects that few will understand and follow him, few will pick up that light burden.

Maybe Jesus himself did not intend to give us a blueprint. He used fourteen metaphors to describe heaven, all of them poetic but not one of which makes a great deal of sense. [4] “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough” (Matthew 13:33). Say what? Several times Jesus compared heaven to a mustard plant or a mustard seed. For example, heaven, “…is like to a grain of mustard, which a man having taken, did cast into his garden, and it increased, and came to a great tree, and the fowls of the heavens did rest in its branches.” (Luke 13:18). There are some 3,700 members of the mustard family but only a handful are woody and only one might be considered a tree—a very small tree—in which birds could perch. Assuming that is the species Jesus had in mind, why is heaven like a small seed that grows into a tree?

The answer may be that Jesus thought of heaven itself as a metaphor for God and God, of course, is love. It is not a place to which you go but something—something ineffable—of which you ultimately become a part. It may be similar to the state of enlightenment that is the goal of Buddhism in which the individual seeks to escape the path of reincarnation and reache Nirvana, a state of being free of craving, anger and other stresses. Alternatively, it may be like the reunion of the spark of gnosis with the godhead. In either event, perhaps the good news is that life does have a purpose which is to become one with love. Admittedly, Jesus does not really “listen” as a mystic of any kind but he is often as obscure as any of them. This obscurity, I believe, is why Paul and the apostles misunderstood him in anticipating the imminent arrival of the second coming. More importantly, it may be the solution to Paul’s lament, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12).

The idea of heaven as the universal storehouse of love does not have to be true any more than any other vision of an afterlife or any other myth is true. The value of narrative lies in its ability to engage the higher powers of the mind: empathy, imagination, creativity and, most importantly, our moral sense. It will never appeal to those religionists seeking dominion over others, those to whom power is the greatest good. But the idea that love is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “Point Omega,” the supreme consciousness toward which our lives seem somehow directed can inspire us and give us great delight.

Notes

1. The book by the boy’s father, Todd Burpo, published by Thomas Nelson, is No. 1 on the New York Times paperback and e-books non-fiction lists for June 11, 2011.

2. Biblical quotations are from the New International Version®. Copyright © 1984 by the International Bible Society and available online at biblegateway.com.

3. Matthew 5:43 quotes Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount as saying, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’” However, nowhere in the Old Testament are the Jews explicitly instructed to hate their enemies and nowhere are they told to love them. But it seems reasonable to infer the former from the Lex Talionis of Leviticus 24:19-20: “Anyone who injures their neighbor is to be injured in the same manner: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.” God often intervened to help the Israelis in battle (e.g., Joshua 10) and the custom was to leave no enemy alive even after the battle was won.

4. In fact, most of these are technically similes beginning with such phrases as “The kingdom of heaven is like…”