At the chapel this morning, the first reading was from the Book of Daniel, the seventh chapter. Now, I confess that I tend to feel a bit guilty when I begin hearing echoes of Bob Dylan lyrics in the Scripture readings while I’m in church — is it Beelzebub making my mind wander to things profane? — but hear them I do, and it is, after all, inevitable. Dylan’s lyrics are simply filled with references, echoes, counterpoints to and plain ol’ quotes from the Bible, and there’s no way of stopping the brain of someone who’s been immersed in Dylan’s songs from making those connections. I come from the point of view of someone who was familiar with Dylan’s lyrics long before I was even nominally familiar with the Bible as a whole, so my first reaction tends to be surprise at how much those Old Testament prophets ripped off from Bob.

Christopher Ricks, Michael Gilmour, Veronica Keohane and Michael Gray are among the writers who have detailed the many Scriptural references in Dylan’s work. Without having done any exhaustive checking, however, I don’t believe I’ve seen the following reference or echo documented before.

From Daniel, chapter 7, verses 1-3 (the reading I heard today was from the Revised Standard Version, so that’s the version I quote):

In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon, Daniel had a dream and visions of his head as he lay in his bed. Then he wrote down the dream, and told the sum of the matter. Daniel said, “I saw in my vision by night, and behold, the four winds of heaven were stirring up the great sea. And four great beasts came up out of the sea, different from one another …”

I suppose it was the exact phrase, “came up out of the sea,” which clinched the echo for me. That’s a very specific way of describing such an event. You could say instead, simply, “came out of the sea,” or “came up from the sea,” or “emerged from the sea,” or “sprang from the sea,” or who knows what. But “came up out” — that’s a particular way of saying it. And it is the way that Dylan says it in the first verse of a song of his that constantly haunts me, the song he wrote for the the 2003 film “Gods and Generals;” the song being ’Cross the Green Mountain, a song which also starts with a dream:

I cross the green mountain, I sit by the stream
Heaven blazing in my head, I dreamt a monstrous dream
Something came up out of the sea
Swept through the land of the rich and the free

So, in addition to the notion of the dream, and the phrase, “came up out of the sea,” the two texts share the word head, as in “visions of his head,” from Daniel, and “blazing in my head,” from Dylan. Make of it what you will: a reference or an echo, conscious or unconscious (I tend to think the latter about these kinds of things).

In any case, it fits. ’Cross the Green Mountain is a song about the U.S. Civil War, and it is a song that frames that war (arguably through the eyes of the devout Confederate General Stonewall Jackson) as being something that was in some sense ordained by God. As one verse puts it:

Along the dim Atlantic line
The ravaged land lies for miles behind
The light’s coming forward and the streets are broad
All must yield to the avenging God

There’s no question that what took place between 1861 and 1865 in America was of biblical proportions. I think even an atheist would have to concede that.

So, for what it’s worth, that’s one of the things yours truly got out of Sunday services today.

On YouTube is the rather exceptional video that was made for this song, although the video only includes about three minutes of a song which is actually about eight minutes long. Click here or play below. (… continue reading …)

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