Bob Dylan for Lent: 1st Sunday of Lent

“Man Gave Names to All the Animals”

Reproduction of ““Jésus assisté par les anges,” James Tissot

* Johnny Cash’s cover of “Man Gave Names to All the Animals” is one of my favorites.

Even critics who liked “Slow Train Coming” dragged Bob Dylan’s “Man Gave Names to All the Animals,” arguing that it was facile — almost doggerel, one might say, but I loved this song the moment I heard it in 1979, almost for that reason. The Adam figure wakes up in a realm populated more by beasts than versions of what(ever) species of living things he is. What does he know. What is he to make of it? So, maybe he does what God does. Maybe Adam uses his words to name beasts with hopes of parsing, distinguishing among, or glorifying them. What is this work of naming? Is raising our human voices a holy gesture?

The first liturgical reading concerns to Noah’s post-lapserian experience with God. We can’t really think long about Noah without thinking about those pairs of animals on the ark, and we can hardly think about those pairs of beasts without remembering that the ruined — or maybe not — pairing up of Adam and Eve. Those two-by-two beasts do a lot of the work of saving Noah’s world, and future of the Hebrew people, the people of who come to hold the Tanakh holy.