I was interested to see in this Top 10 Types of Sustenance in U2's Lyrics piece from @U2 that "honey" is the most frequently referenced food in U2 lyrics, included in at least 10 songs. It immediately occurred to me that honey turns up in the Bible a lot too, and I thought I'd make a quick stop at Bible Gateway.
Turns out there are 61 uses of "honey" in scripture; when it's not mentioned literally in a story where someone's eating or harvesting honey, it tends to be either describing the Promised Land ("a land flowing with milk and honey"), talking about a woman ("Your lips, my bride, drip honey" from Song of Solomon), or used metaphorically about the Word of God ("How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!" from Ps 119, or the scroll that "was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter" from Revelation 10). For comparison (trying to avoid nouns that have multiple non-eating-related meanings like "lamb") some other random Bible-ish food words and their frequency: "cakes" 19; "loaves" 36; "stew" 7. On the other hand, "wine" turns up 237 times, and the @U2 column noted that it was also frequent in U2 lyrics, but didn't give a count.
But here is my question: Where's the bread? There are 366 uses of "bread" in the Bible, and it's an incredibly rich metaphor there, linked to multiple images in both testaments of meals with the Divine, and an entire complex chapter, John 6, built around the concept. Surely bread is by far the strongest "sustenance" metaphor in Scripture. However, I can only think of 2 citations in U2's work: bread comes up on Achtung Baby in "Until the End of the World" and "Acrobat." [Edit: it dawns on me belatedly that in one case there, I was thinking of live performances; there's no "bread" in the album lyrics for "UTEOTW." So that's only one reference in the whole catalog, unless someone has examples I've missed.] Can that be it? Why?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
8 comments:
Just a guess, but might it be the "I'm comfortable/uncomfortable inside any church" confession of the chief lyricist? Bread is symbolic of communal gathering, and the protagonist of U2 songs is so often a wanderer, an outsider looking in.
I was going to say "wouldn't that apply to bread *and* wine?" but perhaps not; wine is a broader metaphor. Altho, I don't know, you could say that bread is as well - by the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread, etc.
However, now that I look back at the @U2 list, I note that in general there's a preponderance of liquids.... :D
...Yeah, I'm not gonna comment on that one!
A few thoughts. One, "bread" turns up so much in the Bible because it's also a generic term for "food," and we don't really use the word that way any more. Also, food was a more general preoccupation at a time and place when there was a real risk of starvation. The foods in U2 lyrics definitely have an aura of post-industrial decadence to them (all that booze and sweet stuff!).
Another factor may be that bread is just boring. Looking over the list, I see all the foods mentioned evoke a pretty strong sensory reaction, whether in taste, fragrance, color or a combination of the above. You don't add much vividness to your lyrics by mentioning bread. (I don't remember them every mentioning potatoes either, Irish though they may be...)
I did try to correct for metaphorical use of bread to mean "food" by searching a modern translation, but I'm sure several instances still made it in there. LOL at the potato comment, though. Your note about the sensory aspect is very intereting.
What an interesting post! I never would have thought about why honey might be interesting. But as a word used in a song, it has great connotations: sticky, sweet, drippy, thick, natural, odd (is this the only food we consume that comes from flower nectar and is secreted by bees???) and a euphemism for people we love. As food lyrics go, it is even sensual...which helps to tell a story (and sell the songs).
I'm sure scholars have studied this issue more closely than I have, but it does seem to me that the "bread=food" assumption in the Bible goes beyond a translation issue. In the NRSV's John 6, as you mentioned, we start out with literal bread (miracle of the loaves and fishes), move on to "bread from heaven" (manna, which only vaguely resembled bread), and wind up with Jesus declaring himself the "bread of life." The importance of bread here seems to be in its quality as basic sustenance, rather than its breadiness. Unlike, say, the honey metaphors, which call on its deliciousness.
I don't know if that has anything to do with why Bono doesn't write about it, but he does generally avoid pinning his Bible refs to an ANE context. For instance (and speaking of food passages), while he likes to refer to the Revelation line about the stars falling from the sky, I've never heard him quote the full metaphor: "... the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree drops its fruit when shaken by a gale."
If you'll accept toast as bread, then there's this reference to bread in "Winter": "We're like butter on toast.
Post a Comment