Skip to main content

Bibliotheca

Last week, about a year after I had ordered it, my copy of Bibliotheca arrived.

Bibliotheca is an edition of the Bible produced by Adam Lewis Greene. He aimed to restore a way of encountering the Biblical text which we have lost as our approach to the scripture has become more encyclopaedic and more cerebral. So here is a beautifully produced piece of the bookmaker's art, printed on fine paper and in a clear, attractive font, with a sewn binding and cloth covers so that it opens flat. It is printed in four volumes, with one extra containing the Apocrypha, each volume being 400-500 pages, and each about the size and weight of  a hardback novel.



There are no chapter of verse numbers, and no textual apparatus of any kind; there is just the text, beautifully bound and printed on paper which is as lovely to touch as the firm covers. I am already part way through a reading of the whole Bible, so immediately swapped to Bibliotheca and unwittingly and gently brought myself face to face with the issues which gave rise to Adam Lewis Greene's project in the first place.

Greene has chosen to order the books of the Old Testament using the Jewish rather than the accepted Christian system. The Jewish Scripture has three sections: 1. Torah (law) 2. Prophets (including the Former Prophets (what we would call the Historical Books) and the Latter Prophets (what we would call The Prophets)) and 3. Writings (everything else) I had just finished Nehemiah when Bibliotheca arrived, and was about to read Esther, and had to rearrange my projected schedule somewhat, as these two books are part of The Writings, and are amongst the last books of the Jewish Canon, not in the middle as they are for us Christians. I began reading therefore, with the Latter Prophets, with Isaiah.

My reading of the whole Bible is about immersing myself in the vast sweep of the Biblical story, and not in the small fragments of it with which we Christians overwhelmingly deal. A few days of reading Bibliotheca brought a realisation which I should have made decades ago: that the mere reordering of the component parts presents a quite different narrative. It is also a significant shift in perception to name the Books of Samuel and Kings and so forth not as History, but as Prophets: these are not just the mere presentation of the facts of some time past, but a selective and polemical exposition based on those events. The Jewish story is about the establishment of Law, accompanied by prophetic commentary on the way the law is lived, accompanied by devotional reflection on the God who is revealed by The Law and the Prophets. The Christian story is more linear: it is the story of a  revelation unfolding, from a set beginning, over generations and culminating in the person of Jesus Christ.

I have found reading this clear text disconcertingly personal. Over the centuries we Christians have put extreme effort into understanding the text, beginning with the medieval convention of dividing it all up into chapters and verses. Then we have a vast literature of commentary and criticism, some of which is present in almost every printing of the Bible in the form of footnotes and cross references and marginal annotations of various kinds. It is almost impossible to read the Christian Bible without some unknown person telling us what to think and believe about what we are reading. These Bible Helps are useful and educative, but they do have the effect of objectifying the text. The Bible is something, out there, to be studied and thought about. But here, holding this beautiful book, for the first time in many many years, the unadorned, plain text invited me in and let me inhabit it.

The translation used is a slightly revised form of the American Standard Version, which is, to me, comfortably authoritative and yet accessible. I am pleased with the convention used of stating the divine name as YHWH. Over the years the unutterable name has become more holy and precious to me, and I appreciate this avoidance of the theological freighting of any attempt to render it.

When I sit to pray the physical act of going to my study and kneeling on my stool has myriad unconscious effects on me, reminding me in uncountable ways that this is a special act I am doing, and important. In a similar way, the specialness, difference, and quality of the Bibliotheca volumes speaks to my body and soul when I pick them up. I find myself handling them lovingly and reverently, and this attitude seeps into my reading of the text. The prayer of reading is somatised and made a part of me in a way it is not when simply undergoing Bible Study.

This is an expensive book. With handling costs I paid around $250 for my copy, but I'm glad to have it, and slightly awestruck that it has come to me at this point of transition.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...
10 comments
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
3 comments
Read more

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...
8 comments
Read more

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...
Post a Comment
Read more