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When I first fell under John Freccero's spell in 1973, I was a Yale doctoral student seeking refuge from the English department. I was brought to the first meeting of his year-long Dante course by a refugee from French, but unlike her, I vowed only to sit in on the opening day: I was to be a one-time interloper in Corby Court. Yet by the end of that September day Dante-and his prophet, John Freccero-had me not only for the rest of that academic year but ever since. I have tried a few times in print to express my general gratitude to John for helping me find my life's work.1 In this essay I want to give tribute more particularly to the way he taught me to savor Dante's relationship to the Bible. How to summarize this complex relationship? On the one hand, the poet read the sacred text in a tradition of other readings: patristic, medieval, liturgical-a cloud of earlier witnesses. On the other hand, he invariably left his mark on inherited materials, made them distinctly his own, offered (to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens) "a new account of everything old."2
Take, for instance, what Dante does with Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, who makes a brief and wordless appearance in Paradiso IX. Dante would have known her primarily from the Book of Joshua. She is the brothel keeper who saves two Hebrew spies in Canaan by hiding them on her rooftop and then letting them escape through her window in the city walls (Joshua 2. 1-24). From that window she suspends a crimson cord, a reminder of her mercy to them and a pledge of their protection when the walls come tumbling down. Joshua not only spares her from that destruction but brings her and her household into Israel (6: 15-25).
It is not clear if Dante knew what the rabbis made of this story. Was he aware that they saw her as the archetypal proselyte, married her off to Joshua, made her into a matriarch of Israel-ancestress of eight prophets, including Huldah and Jeremiah?3 But surely he would have known her as one of Israel's matriarchs from her mention in the first chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew, which opens...