George Eliot begins Middlemarch with a modest prelude, barely over a page. The opening sentence merits careful reading:

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother?

Notice what this sentence assumes. It does not say: some readers may have smiled. It does not say: I have smiled. It says: who has not smiled—meaning everyone who is worth addressing has already done this thing, has already had this response, and the sentence is merely confirming what we all know about ourselves. The rhetorical figure is apophasis in a gentler form: not the denial that introduces, but the negation that includes. To read the sentence as intended is to find yourself already inside its claim, nodding at the thought of the little girl before you have quite decided whether you recognize yourself in the description.

This is the whole argument of Middlemarch in miniature.

The Syntax of Implication

The sentence is constructed as a rhetorical question—who has not smiled—but it functions as a declaration: everyone has smiled. The long subordinate clause that precedes the main question ("who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time") is doing important work. It qualifies the audience before admitting them. Not just anyone is addressed; only those who care much to know the history of man. This is a gentle form of flattery (to be reading at all is to have already demonstrated the caring) but it is also a condition. The sentence builds its community before making its claim on that community.

Then comes the bathetic arrival: “at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother.” After the grandeur of “the mysterious mixture” behaving under “the varying experiments of Time”—phrasing that implies something vast and scientific, the whole human record as a controlled experiment—we arrive at a little girl and her smaller brother, walking somewhere on a particular morning. The contraction is managed with extraordinary care. “Little girl” is the first wholly unpretentious phrase in the sentence, and it arrives like a key change. Whatever large apparatus of historical and moral seriousness has been erected, the sentence ends in something domestic, particular, and slightly tender.

The effect is to make seriousness and smallness feel continuous rather than opposed. This will be Eliot's method throughout: the cosmic framed through the domestic, the question of what a human life can amount to examined through the particular texture of particular lives in a particular English town. The prelude's first sentence is not merely an opening. It is an instruction for how to read what follows.

Saint Theresa and the Problem of History

The prelude's argument becomes explicit by its second paragraph. Eliot invokes Saint Theresa of Ávila, who “found her epos in the reform of a religious order,” as a figure for the kind of epic life that history accommodates: a life with a coherent narrative shape, a clear beginning and end, a great action that can be named and remembered. But there are, she writes, “many Theresas,” born into conditions that provide no such coherence, “helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul.” These later-born Theresas live their “unhistoric” lives and die, “their full nature” spent “in channels which had no great name on the earth.”

The sentence structure of this passage is worth examining for the same reason as the first: Eliot uses a slow, accumulative syntax, a series of participial phrases that pile up around the Theresas before releasing them, that formally enacts the condition she is describing. The “unhistoric” Theresa is hemmed in by subordinate clauses, qualified from every direction, her potential energy contained by syntax that has nowhere large enough for it to go. The form is the argument.

What Eliot is announcing, in the prelude’s compressed space, is the novel’s central problem: that greatness of soul is not matched by the conditions history provides for its expression, and that this mismatch is not a private failure but a social and historical one. Dorothea Brooke will be one of these Theresas, and the novel will be a sustained attempt to make her unhistoric life visible, to give it the narrative attention that history has withheld. But the prelude also contains a more unsettling implication: that the conditions Eliot describes are not exceptional. The later-born Theresa is not an anomaly but a type, recurring in every generation, shaped differently by different historical constraints but always confronted with the same fundamental mismatch between aspiration and form.

The “Who Has Not” Construction

It is worth lingering one moment more on the rhetorical device that opens the prelude, because Eliot uses it with great precision and it will recur throughout the novel.

The construction who has not X—who has not smiled, who has not felt, who has not recognized—performs a very particular social function. It creates community through shared experience, but it is a community assembled under pressure. To admit that you have not had the implied experience is to exclude yourself from the circle of the knowing. And yet the experience being invoked is always something gentle, universal, almost involuntary: smiling at the thought of a small girl, recognizing the stirring of a large ambition in a young person. Eliot is not asking you to have done something difficult or unusual. She is asking you to have done something almost everyone has done, and then, by naming it and giving it the gravity of her prose, she elevates it.

This is the social character of Eliot's moral imagination: the conviction that ordinary feeling, attended to carefully, opens outward into the largest questions. The person who has smiled at the thought of the little girl has already, without knowing it, engaged with the problem of what a human life can contain. The prelude's first sentence catches us in this engagement before we have had time to be self-conscious about it.

By the time Dorothea appears on the first page of the novel proper (“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress”) we have already been told, in one long and carefully managed sentence, that we are the kind of readers who will understand her.

Chapter 20: Rome and the Failure of Grand Form

The prelude promises that Dorothea's life will be a test case for its argument. That test is most severe in Rome, where Eliot places her heroine at the midpoint of what should be the great initiatory experience of an intelligent Victorian woman's life: the honeymoon, the encounter with the classical inheritance, the confirmation of a cultivated self.

Instead, Dorothea finds herself undone. Rome overwhelms her not through indifference but through excess: “the weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society; but Dorothea had no such defence.” The prose accumulates detail the way Rome accumulates history, with clause after clause of overcrowded grandeur until the architecture of sensation itself becomes a kind of oppression. Eliot writes that Dorothea's uneasiness is “not altogether unlike the feeling of a modern age, which has lost the sense of continuity with its former self, and has to live among the ruins of meanings it cannot restore.”

This is the prelude's problem in a new register. Saint Theresa found her epos because the forms available to her were alive with coherent social faith. Dorothea, in Rome, confronts forms that are not merely unavailable but incomprehensible: too much history, too thickly layered, too remote from any living purpose. Her aspiration cannot find purchase not because it is small but because the available forms are monumental and dead. The modern Theresa does not simply lack a convent to reform; she stands in the ruins of the very tradition that produced Theresa, unable to reconnect the ambition to its object.

The syntax of Chapter 20 is Eliot's most sustained demonstration of this condition. Sentences lengthen under the pressure of what they are trying to contain; subordinate clauses proliferate without fully subordinating; the prose itself becomes a version of Rome, accumulating meaning it cannot quite organize. This is deliberate. Eliot is writing a prose equivalent of Dorothea's experience, and she does so through the managed disorder of the sentence rather than through description alone.

What Rome establishes, in terms of the prelude's argument, is that the problem of unhistoric life is not only social but historical in a deeper sense. The channels through which a great nature might flow have not merely been narrowed by convention; they have been blocked by the sedimentation of prior greatness. Dorothea is not Theresa because Theresa and all of her lived reality has already happened.

Chapter 80: The Wakeful Night and the Inward Turn

If Rome represents the failure of grand external form, Chapter 80 represents Eliot's answer: the relocation of moral magnitude from action to consciousness.

The scene in which Dorthea lies awake struggling with her jealousy of Rosamond and gradually transforming that jealousy into something she can act on is perhaps the most technically accomplished passage in the novel. Nothing happens in it, in any conventional narrative sense. There is no confrontation or great revelation. What happens is inward, almost invisible: a movement of feeling through which Dorothea expands her imaginative sympathy until a woman she had resented becomes fully human to her.

Eliot renders this through a prose that is unusually still. The long sentences that characterize her at full power here slow and simplify the nove’s pace. The syntax becomes something close to sequential: and then she felt, and then she saw, and then she understood. This is not the syntax of argument or of social recruitment. It is the syntax of attention: one thing at a time, in order, without subordination, as if consciousness itself were being transcribed rather than interpreted.

The passage that follows—Dorothea's actual encounter with Rosamond in Chapter 81 —produces one of the novel's only moments of fully achieved goodness: Rosamond, for the first and essentially only time, acts against her own interest and tells Dorothea the truth about Will Ladislaw. The proximate cause is Dorothea's sympathy, her refusal to withdraw her attention from Rosamond even after her own suffering. The wakeful night is the cause of the chapter's only heroic act, an act that has no name, no visibility, no record. It will not appear in history. It is, precisely, unhistoric.

What Chapter 80 demonstrates, structurally, is that Eliot has been building a different kind of heroism throughout the novel: not the heroism of great deeds but the heroism of sustained and expanding sympathetic attention. The prelude announced the problem of the unhoused heroic nature. Chapter 80 is the novel's most concentrated answer: the great soul, in modernity, operates through consciousness rather than action, through the quality of its attention rather than the scale of its deeds.

The Finale: Unhistoric Acts

The famous last paragraph of Middlemarch completes the prelude's argument with a precision that retrospective reading makes almost architectural:

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The echo of the prelude is unmistakable. “Unhistoric” returns directly from the second paragraph’s “unhistoric Actium.” “Had no great name on the earth” is answered by “rest in unvisited tombs.” The later-born Theresas, whose aspiration found no heroic form, are not lamented in the finale, but are rather credited. The goodness of the world depends on them.

But something has shifted. The prelude frames the unhistoric life as a social tragedy: aspiration thwarted by inadequate conditions, greatness expended in channels too small to contain it. The finale frames it as a form of moral causation: the hidden life does something, even without record or witnesses. The growing good of the world is “partly dependent” on these acts. Eliot is not offering the comfort of significance to lives that history ignores. She is making an argument about how goodness actually proliferates.

The phrase “partly dependent” is the key. It is exact without being grandiose. Eliot does not claim that unhistoric acts are sufficient, or that they alone produce the good; she claims that the good cannot happen without them. This is a different kind of heroism from Theresa’s — quieter, more diffuse, impossible to locate in any single actor or action—but it is not less heroic. It is heroism reconceived for a world that has lost the conditions under which the older heroism was possible.

The “you and me” of the final sentence returns to the prelude's rhetorical strategy: the second person, the direct address, the reader recruited into the moral community of the text. We have been in this sentence before, on the novel's first page. We were asked then whether we had smiled at the thought of the little girl. We are told now that things are not so ill with us as they might have been. The novel closes by invoking the reader who has been its implicit community throughout—the “who has not” of the opening, grown older, tested by eight hundred pages of Dorothea's life, and offered, finally, a theory of why any of it mattered.

Eliot thus begins and ends in the same place: with the claim that the largest moral questions are found in the smallest visible channels, and that the life which makes no great name on the earth is not therefore wasted. The prelude proposes this as a problem. The finale offers it as a resolution. Between them, in the Rome of Chapter 20 and the wakeful night of Chapter 80, the novel surveys the distance between those two propositions, showing what it costs to live unhistorically and what, in the end, it amounts to.

The sentence that opens Middlemarch recruits you into a moral community. The sentence that closes it tells you what you, as a member of that community, are owed.

In Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez gives Fermina Daza a sentence that seems, at first glance, to be doing little more than registering the motions of an ordinary household, and yet the more closely one reads it the more it becomes clear that the sentence is not merely reporting domestic life but composing it, clause by clause, into a form that can hold the weight of a whole existence. Fermina gives instructions in the kitchen, tends to the practical order of the house, moves from one task to the next with the unhurried exactness of someone whose authority is now so fully established that it no longer needs to announce itself; elsewhere in the novel, the same domestic field opens into a longer chain of coordination, so that “the house still had to be cleaned, and the beds made, and the marketing done, and lunch prepared.” Nothing in this is extraordinary. The diction is plain, the scene familiar, the action domestic. But García Márquez is doing something more exacting than offering atmosphere. He is making accumulation itself the subject, and syntax the means by which the reader is made to feel it.

That is one of the reasons the passage on Fermina feels so central to the novel. Love in the Time of Cholera is often remembered as a novel of love, or of memory, and certainly of aging, and it is all of those things, but it is also one of the great novels of sustained prose motion, and that means it is a novel deeply invested in the way time is lived sentence by sentence, not in abstraction, but in the rhythm of what follows what. García Márquez repeatedly writes in a mode of addition rather than subordination, and the effect of that mode is not just stylistic, but philosophical. A subordinated sentence tells us what depends on what; an accumulative sentence tells us what coexists, what piles up, what remains in view long enough to become part of a larger order. Fermina’s household is rendered in exactly that register. It is not treated as a lesser realm beneath the plot. It is the plot’s subterranean form.

The passage comes after Fermina’s marriage to Juvenal Urbino has passed beyond crisis and settled into form, and that matters because the sentence is not describing a domestic apprenticeship or the beginning of authority, but its mature exercise. The early turbulence is over; what remains is the harder thing, permanence, the construction of a world in which repetition no longer feels like redundancy but like the condition of life itself. García Márquez does not explain that transformation by way of commentary. He lets the sentence do what Fermina does: move from task to task without dramatizing each transition, each clause placed beside the next with the same firm and unhurried composure. The effect is of a life that has been made, not one that is merely happening.

There is a biblical comparison here that is almost impossible to ignore because it also consists of a rhythmic sequence, a sentence that brings a world into being by refusing to rank its parts. The opening of Genesis in Spanish, “Y dijo Dios: Sea la luz; y fue la luz,” has exactly that kind of forward-moving authority, and the King James preserves the same cadence with its grave, coordinated simplicity: “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” What is striking in both is that the repeated conjunction does not merely join clauses; it creates the impression of completion through addition. Nothing is overexplained, nothing is subordinated into an abstract logic of cause and effect, and yet the sentence feels as if it has achieved a totality. García Márquez’s prose about Fermina belongs to that same family. His accumulation is not a defect of precision; it is the form of precision that his subject requires.

Spanish permits this more naturally than English does, and the difference is grammatical as well as tonal. Spanish is hospitable to long paratactic stretches, to clauses laid side by side in a way that does not require the visible machinery of explanation to keep the sentence moving. The recurrent y in García Márquez is not quite the same as the English “and,” at least not in the kind of prose English most often prizes. In English, repeated coordination begins to sound either breathless or deliberately archaic after a point, and the translator has to preserve not just the line of the sentence but its poise. What Grossman has to carry over is the sense that each clause arrives as if it belongs there by right, not as if it has been forced into a chain. That is a subtler task than it looks. The danger in English is always that the sentence will begin to feel like it is merely counting things; the achievement here is that it feels instead like it is revealing the world through the act of counting.

That, in turn, is why the biblical comparison is so useful. Genesis does not proceed by argument, but by sequence; it does not insist that each clause be explained by the one before it, because the authority lies in the act of utterance itself, and in the way the utterance gathers the world into being by standing each element beside the next. García Márquez’s domestic prose has the same syntactic conviction. The kitchen, the supper, the cleaning, the beds, the marketing, the bedroom, the servants, the accounts, the maintenance of the household’s visible order: none of these is permitted to fade into the backdrop, because each receives the same grammatical emphasis. The sentence refuses to rank them. It is a gesture of equality, and also a gesture of fullness, because to list everything is, in this mode, not to reduce life but to honor the way it comes to feel complete only through the pressure of repeated acts.

That pressure is what makes the passage about Fermina more than an account of domestic competence. Competence is not quite the right word, in fact, because it suggests a skill one might isolate from the life that bears it, and García Márquez is interested in something more encompassing: the way authority becomes almost indistinguishable from routine once it has been inhabited long enough. Fermina does not merely manage a house. She has absorbed the house into a form of being. The prose recognizes this by moving with her, not around her. It does not freeze her into emblem. It lets her remain in motion, and in motion it reveals the accumulation of acts through which a life is lived.

It is also no accident that Florentino is absent from the sentence. The completeness of Fermina’s world leaves no structural room for him, and that absence is one of the novel’s quietest cruelties. While he waits, she continues; while he imagines love as interruption and return, she lives it as continuity and maintenance. The difference is not only emotional but grammatical. If Florentino belongs to the rhetoric of suspension, Fermina belongs to the rhetoric of sequence. The sentence about her household keeps moving because her life keeps moving, and because the syntax understands that what is most lasting in a human life is often not the dramatic event but the sediment of repeated acts that do not announce themselves as events at all.

And this is where García Márquez’s accumulation becomes, finally, a theory of prose itself. The sentence does not just describe a life that has been built over time; it enacts the way time is felt when it is lived as succession rather than as summary. One thing, and then another thing, and then another: that is not just a style of listing, but a way of thinking about endurance, about marriage, about domestic labor, about love that has ceased to depend on the theatricality of waiting. The sentence about Fermina’s household matters because it shows that a prose line can hold a life without reducing it, and that the act of keeping things in view long enough for them to accumulate is already a kind of interpretation. García Márquez knows this. Grossman knows it too. And the sentence, in its plainness and its persistence, lets the reader know it as well.

There is a word I sometimes see when a philosophical or political argument has gone on too long or when a lawyer’s brief, for example, has disappeared into its own qualifications: that’s just Jesuitical reasoning. And there is another word, similar in feeling but different in implication, that often gets used when scholarly qualifications have become their own object: that’s Talmudic hairsplitting.

Both phrases function as dismissals, and neither are particularly complimentary to the devotees they invoke. But both words communicate roughly the same idea: that someone has split a distinction too fine, that the argument has lost the thread of ordinary sense in the morass of its own precision. And yet, as I argue in a piece just published in Notes & Queries, these two insults are not the same. They describe different intellectual failures, arising from different causes, carrying different ethical weights. Conflating them, as we routinely do, obscures a distinction worth preserving.

What ‘Jesuitical’ Means and Where It Came From

The word ‘Jesuitical’ is bound to a specific historical moment: the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and the treason trial of Father Henry Garnet that followed it.

Garnet was the Jesuit superior provincial in England. He had learned of the plot to assassinate James I and destroy Parliament; crucially, however, the plot was disclosed to him under the seal of confession. When tried for treason in 1606, he could not deny knowledge without perjuring himself, and could not admit it without betraying the seal of confession. His solution was equivocation: uttering literally true statements while maintaining silent mental reservations. Asked whether he knew of the conspiracy, he could say no, meaning, silently, not in a way I am bound to reveal to the court.

Public outrage was immediate and lasting. Equivocation became synonymous with Jesuit duplicity. Shakespeare, writing Macbeth within a few years of the trial, has the Porter admit an “equivocator” to hell, one who “committed treason enough for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven,” a figure long identified with Garnet. Pascal's Lettres provinciales, translated into English in 1656, later amplified the critique of Jesuit casuistry, and a raft of anti-Jesuit polemic fixed the association permanently.

What ‘Jesuitical’ therefore means, at its etymological root, is not simply excessive precision. It means deliberate precision deployed in the service of deception: a technical truth masking a substantive falsehood. The equivocator is not confused; he knows exactly what he is doing. He has chosen to satisfy the letter of a moral or legal obligation while evading its spirit, and he has made that choice intentionally.

What ‘Talmudic’ Means and Where It Came From

The word ‘Talmudic,’ when used pejoratively, has a different genealogy and a different accusation embedded within it.

The earliest attestation in the O.E.D. refers to Jews’ “Thalmudique skill” regarding argumentation against the Gospel; already, in the seventeenth century, the word carries a sense of argumentative excess, of reasoning that multiplies distinctions past the point of usefulness. A further seventeenth-century tract warns against those who follow “R. Akiba” in the Talmudic method of textual explication, the practice, familiar to anyone who has spent time in a page of Gemara, of extracting meaning from the smallest variations in phrasing and treating every irregularity in the text as a potential interpretive nuance.

By the nineteenth century, this usage had attached itself to the Hebrew term pilpul, a word for the sharp, dialectical mode of Talmudic analysis that, in its critics’ view, substituted cleverness for wisdom, producing conclusions of dazzling technical precision that had long since lost contact with anything the law was supposed to achieve. The ‘Talmudist,’ in this caricature, is not a deceiver. He is not hiding anything. He is, in a phrase the Gospels use to deride the Pharisees, straining at a gnat: making distinctions so minute that the substance of the thing has evaporated in the effort of analysis.

The failure here (real or imagined) is cognitive, not moral. The excess arises not from a decision to deceive but from an epistemological disposition—a habit of mind that values precision for its own sake, that cannot or will not leave a distinction undrawn. If ‘Jesuitical’ connotes a concealing mask, ‘Talmudic’ connotes an obscuring thicket. The former menaces sincerity; the latter menaces clarity.

Why the Distinction Matters

It might seem like the difference between these two accusations is itself a piece of hairsplitting, the very vice under examination. But the ethical stakes are real.

To call someone’s reasoning Jesuitical is to accuse them of bad faith: of knowing the right answer and choosing to evade it through technical maneuver. The accusation implies intent. It is a moral charge. To call their reasoning Talmudic is to accuse them of a kind of intellectual myopia: of having become so absorbed in the mechanism of argument that they have lost sight of what argument is for. This is a charge about method and proportion, not about character.

We need both accusations available with their proper meanings intact, because the two failures require different responses. Bad faith calls for exposure and confrontation. Methodological excess calls for redirection: yes, but what does this actually mean in practice? Conflating them—treating every over-precise argument as somehow dishonest, or every equivocation as merely a failure of proportion—muddles a distinction that is genuinely useful for navigating intellectual discourse.

The seventeenth century understood this, at least implicitly. Garnet’s trial crystallized ‘Jesuitical’ as the graver peril: a conscious choice to place technical truth in the service of moral evasion. Talmudic reasoning, by contrast, was dismissed rather than feared, portrayed as pedantry rather than treachery. Both were rhetorical insults. But they were not interchangeable, and using them as if they were loses something.

The full argument, with scholarly apparatus, appears in Notes & Queries. But the essential distinction is this: one insult accuses you of knowing better and choosing not to act on it; the other accuses you of having forgotten, somewhere in the thicket of your own precision, what you were trying to find out. They are different failures, and they deserve different names.

Recently I finished Joyce’s Ulysses for what I hope is the last time. I don’t enjoy much about the novel, though Joyce is of course famous for his play on language, often expressed by the creation of compounds. The most famous Joycean compound is probably “heaventree,” a delightful word that folds botany, comparative mythology, astronomy, and theology into a single neologism.

Joyce’s word appears in “Ithaca,” near the end of Ulysses: “The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.” The scene is Bloom’s back garden, with Bloom and Stephen looking up at the night sky just before they part.

A few pages later, Joyce pointedly negates is: “That it was not a heaventree, not a heavengrot, not a heavenbeast, not a heavenman.” The word thus oscillates between ravishing image and doctrinal impossibility, an image glimpsed and then withdrawn.

It surprised me to learn that “heaventree” is not a Joycean formation; though it looks like one, it is in fact attested twice before Ulysses was published. The O.E.D. records heaven-tree, or root of heaven, from 1835 for Alianthus altissima, via a Malay expression glossed as “tree reaching to the sky.” A second, “rare” sense names a mythic tree that rises from underworld through earth to heaven in Malay and Polynesian belief.

Victorian anthropology and mythology pick up this heaven-tree, sometimes likened to Yggdrasil and other cosmic trees. One cited 1865 account of Samoa speaks of “a heaven-tree, where people went up and down,” its fall spanning sixty miles, while later writers describe its leaves explicitly as stars.

Stars as leaves, fruit as stars

A mid-nineteenth century poem (John Flavel Mines, 1858) already imagines “Leaves of the great Heaven tree” as “resplendent stars, in purple meadow trembling.” Joyce’s “heaventree of stars” with “nightblue fruit” looks like a compressed, modernist recasting of the same image: the sky as tree, the stars as foliage, then intensified into weighty, humid “fruit.” Martin Amis has called this Ulysses’s “most ravishing sentence.

Logic against heaven

Within the episode’s pseudo-scientific framework, the heaventree is immediately demystified. Bloom decides “that it was not a heaventree … that it was a Utopia, there being no known method from the known to the unknown.” The word thus stages, and then erases, the notion of a physical ladder between earth and heaven.

Critics of the novel have recognized in this cancellation the chapter’s theology: Stephen’s departure is read as an “Ascension,” yet Bloom is left in the “cold of interstellar space.” The heaventree offers, briefly, a mythic continuous cosmos; its withdrawal reasserts discontinuity, a gap between Bloom and Stephen, between Ireland and the world, between human understanding and whatever lies beyond.

In my morning study of Hayom Yom, a daily calendar compiled by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, I came across the word “lave” in a translation of the Yiddish “negel vasser,” denoting the ritual washing of the hands religious Jews complete upon waking. An elevated choice over the more humble “wash,” it feels like a word imbued with sacred meaning, though it isn’t especially and I suppose that speaks to the way we accord privilege to Latinate words in English.

At first glance, I assumed “lave” was of Anglo-Norman pedigree. It looks as if it ought to be related to the French laver and its Anglo-Norman relatives, and so to the familiar Latinate family around lavare: lavatory, lavation, lavage. In that lineage, “lave” would simply be the slightly archaic English cousin of an otherwise ordinary Romance verb, recruited here because “wash” felt too flat for liturgical prose. But the O.E.D. sends one further back. The core verbal sense “to wash; to bathe; to pour water over” is traced to the Anglo-Saxon “lafian,” with attestations beginning in no less a corpus than Beowulf. Whatever visual resemblance it bears to the French verb is a secondary convergence, not an origin.

Once one notices this, the translator’s choice is even more striking. To “lave the hands” instead of “wash the hands” is not only to match the elevated tone of ritual but also to tap a native Germanic lexeme that has existed all along in the margins of the standard lexicon. The word’s survival into modern English has been haphazard, largely literary, and frequently the result of translation: the most recent quotation from the O.E.D. is from Ellis’s 1871 translation of Catullus’s Poems, “Now in waters clear they feet like ivory laving.” An 1858 translation of Rhythm of Bernard de Morlaix reads, “Who … bore with me in defilement, And from defilement laved.” Prior usage includes Gower, Shakespeare, and Milton.

Contemporary examples are few, and tend either toward consciously archaizing prose or toward highly conventionalized collocations: “lapped and laved,” “laved by waves,” and the like. It is the sort of verb that almost never appears in unreflective description of everyday action: no one “laves” the dishes. When it does surface in a religious context, such as in the translation that prompted this note, it functions as a marker of register as much as a bearer of meaning. The action is unchanged; what alters is the perceived distance from the vernacular.

A further complication, which is worth noting in passing, is that “lave” has another history as a noun and verb in Scots, where “the lave” means “the rest, the remainder.” That line is cognate with “leave” rather than “lavare,” and its sense is entirely different. The two words are etymologically distinct, but modern readers encounter them with the same spelling. As with so many such homographs, the potential for unnoticed resonance is always there; but in the context of ritual handwashing, it is the Anglo-Saxon sense which matters. The translator who reaches for “lave” is drawing on a long, if intermittent, tradition of using this verb when water meets the body in a setting that requiring description in more than purely functional terms.