Amos, Ezekiel, Jeremiah and Bob

One of the first original compositions that the young Bob Dylan debuted in folk clubs in New York upon arriving from Minnesota in 1961 was ‘Talkin’ Hava Negilah Blues.’ Introduced by Dylan as ‘a foreign song I learned in Utah,’ the song consists almost entirely of the singer trying to get the words ‘hava nagila’ out of his mouth. ‘Ha… Va…ha…Va… neh … gee…lah,’ he sings, as if the words were strange and foreign, before putting it all together in a slow and carefully enunciated ‘Ha-va Na-gee-lah,’ immediately followed by an anomalous yodel.

What this self-mockery belied was a profound connection to Jewish tradition, one that characterised and influenced Dylan’s entire oeuvre. His work stems from the ancient tradition of Jewish prophecy. The prophet, or navi, was a truth-teller to and an admonisher of his people: literally, a ‘proclaimer.’ The Prophets, whose sermons and declarations are collected in the biblical books of Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others, were, in a sense, social critics—the original protest singers, if you will. They warned against backsliding, immorality and lawbreaking and foretold the bloody consequences of this behaviour. The torah of Dylan and the Torah of Moses share many overlaps: in the book of Prophets, Ezekiel recounts a vision of angels: ‘The soles of their feet… their appearance was like fiery coals, burning like torches’ [Ezekiel 1:7, 13]. In ‘The Wicked Messenger,’ a song about a scorned prophet from his 1967 album, John Wesley Harding, Dylan sings, ‘The soles of my feet, I swear they’re burning.’ In Exodus 33:20, G-d warns Moses, ‘No human can see my face and live’ a warning repeated in the chorus of ‘I and I,’ on the 1983 album, Infidels:

I and I

One says to the other

No man sees my face and lives.

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