Getting the Word Out

A exhibition of some of the world's oldest Bibles recently closed at the Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. On display, were fragments of the Aleppo Codex and other early manuscripts. What follows is an XGH style post. It's an abridged version of the very long review of the exhibition by Anthony Grafton which appears in the current TNR.

The numinous objects displayed in "In the Beginning," the exhibition of Bibles from before the year 1000 at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., are beautiful, and their arrangement helps the visitor to the show (and the student of its extraordinary catalogue) see important things in a new light. Beauty first: the archipelago of dimly lit vitrines that stretches through several dark rooms reveals handwritten Bibles as genuine works of art. These illuminated manuscripts really glow. The varied and elegant scripts, the wild decorations and superbly drawn figures that populate their pages, have all been set free for a time, after hundreds of years of incarceration between closed covers. They create a silent riot of gorgeous colors, elegant lines, and stunning, unexpected patterns--as when, in a Hebrew manuscript now in Saint Petersburg, tiny lines of text and rich repeating patterns combine to make a golden image of the Ark of the Covenant... [snip]

In a Byzantine manuscript, the prophet Jeremiah stands against a field of gold, his eyes shadowed by the terrible knowledge that he must carry God's message until it consumes him along with the unbelievers who deny it.... [snip] {At the back of Marc Shapiro's book, The Limits of Orthodox Theology, you will find bible illustrations from a later period. As Shapiro shows, some of those pictures , which appear on Jewish books, written by sages we all know and recognize, illustrate abject kefirah. I wonder if the same can be said of the pictures on the earlier manuscripts discussed here? - DB}

Many curators content themselves with displaying images. The organizers of "In the Beginning" have done something much harder: they have arranged the materials, and explicated them, to educate the public about a lost world. The exhibition, which was executed in partnership with the Bodleian Library in Oxford, begins, magnificently, with a heap of scraps: unidentified bits of papyrus and parchment from the immense haul discovered in the Cairo Genizah in the late nineteenth century, much of which Solomon Schechter brought back to Cambridge. {Over 2 years he brought back more than 140,000 items - DB} Even better, the vitrine that holds them stands before an enlarged photograph of Schechter himself, formally dressed in coat and tie. Bearded and saturnine, the great scholar clutches his forehead as he contemplates one of the thousands of texts that had to be catalogued and identified and reassembled like so many lost mosaics before the Genizah could release its secrets about the history of Judaism and Christianity.... [snip]

"In the Beginning" tells two complex stories, and does so with a wonderful clarity, detail, and lack of condescension. The shorter one is that of the modern scholars and collectors who first assembled these materials and then worked out what they are and what they tell us about the Bible... [snip]

The second--and central--story is that of the Bible itself. In slow steps, laid out with exquisite care and documented with exquisite objects, we are shown that the Bible in all its forms--from the Torah, which Moses, Jews traditionally hold, wrote with his own hand, to the New Testament corpus--is the work of men. {Something I've never quite understood: Even the most pious Christian knows that the Gospels are man-made. Why, then, are they assumed to have been written without error? -DB} Human beings composed these books, long after the events that they described; and copied them; and translated them into language after language. Later generations selected and redacted what their predecessors had written. In the third and fourth centuries, for example, Christian scribes and scholars such as the church historian Eusebius defined the canon of the Christian Bible. {Sort of a Christian Anshei Knesset HaGedolah - DB} They rejected as spurious books that others thought holy, some just as ancient as those they kept, or set them to the side as apocrypha. A few centuries later, the Jewish grammarians of Tiberias, the Masoretes, edited the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and equipped it with vowels and punctuation. The process of collection and correction and excision never ended. Every new Bible, every new version, eventually called for editing and commentary, and every new form of scholarship changed the object that it restored.

For a scholar visiting the Sackler, breath becomes shortest and the spine tingles most sharply not at the cases that hold manuscripts of many colors, but at those that preserve the actual handiwork of the ancient scholars. The Codex Sinaiticus was probably written in Caesarea, in the scriptorium developed by Eusebius himself. Some specialists (though not the curators of "In the Beginning") identify it as one of the fifty Bibles that Eusebius produced, in high style and at high speed, for the new churches of Constantinople, at the direct request of the emperor Constantine...

The range of scholars one meets here is extraordinary: they come from everywhere, from the Latin West to far in the East, and they include women as well as men. Most electrifying of all is a fragment of the Aleppo codex of the Hebrew Bible. Known as HaKeter, or "the crown," this manuscript was copied in the tenth century in Tiberias, the citadel of Hebrew grammar, by Solomon ben Buya'a. Aaron ben Moshe ben Asher, the last member of a distinguished family, added the commentary, vowel points, and accent marks. The oldest Hebrew Bible in one volume, this may also have been the first one ever made as a single, coherent book, by a scribe and a scholar working together from start to finish. {Based on documents found in the Cairo Genizah, some scholars believe both men, and indeed the whole family were Karaites; nonthless the Rambam relied on their text, see Hilchos Sefer Torah 8:5- DB}

So the oldest Tanakh we have was written and corrected by two men whose names we know. And this, in our land of ferocious biblical literalists, matters a great deal. Not long ago, as Peter Thuesen showed in his important book In Discordance With the Scriptures, the Protestant scholars who created the Revised Standard Version of the Bible were accused by politicians of being communists out to subvert America because they dared to translate almah, in Isaiah 7:14, as "young woman" rather than "virgin," the King James rendering--as if that magnificent translation somehow represented the Word of God in its perfect form, rather than a late translation of a Bible in which Christian senses were superimposed on Jewish texts. {In similar fasion, those who try to understand the Torah on its own terms are wrongly slandered as faithless, and worse - DB}

The Bible, in some general sense, may well be the Word of God. That is not a scholarly question. But the materials collected in this show and in its book make clear, beyond any possibility of mistake or confusion, that no single Bible in any language represents that Word without error or impurity. Every Bible we have--in Armenian or Latin, Greek or Hebrew--is the flawed work of human hands. {And for the most part they all disagree with each other, at least in very small ways - DB} Every one of them derives from beautiful but imperfect handwritten books like those displayed here, many of which, perhaps most, omit verses and texts that a modern American would normally expect to find. Only by reading each version--sometimes, each of the many versions of a version--in context can we see what they meant to their creators.

For the Bible has gone through many revolutions. Ancient books were written on rolls, bits of which are on view here. But gradually, in the first centuries of the common era, Christians adopted a new form called the codex--essentially, that of the modern bound book, with hard covers. Jews and others emulated them. Most of the ancient books we have, including the books of the Bible, began life as a roll or rolls. And rolls were hard to preserve. Many fragments of rolls are on display here: mute evidence of their fragility. A majority of the texts have come down to us in later form, as codices, after the original rolls were copied and discarded. Scribes made mistakes, of course; and the thousands of surviving fragments of rolls do not allow us to reconstitute the texts exactly as they were before this media revolution--the most radical change in the way books were made in the Christian and Jewish worlds before printing took off in the fifteenth century.

To err, as always, was human; to make changes of many kinds was easy. Ancient texts were written continuously, without separation between words or punctuation. In the course of the first millennium of the Common Era, scribes learned to divide Hebrew and Greek and Latin words, as printers do now. But doing this required the scribe to make many hard decisions. The problem is easy to illustrate. How would you divide GODISNOWHERE? As GOD IS NOW HERE, or as GOD IS NOWHERE? Much depends on your presuppositions. And much depended on the presuppositions of those who wrote and rewrote and corrected the biblical manuscripts. {A reliable friend tells me "it is *not* true that ancient Hebrew was actually written like that", though until the 20th century this was widley assumed to be the case. It is true, he adds, that the Septuagint translators sometimes read words in the Hebrew divided differently. - DB}

Interpretation also took place at thousands of points in every version. Every translation embodied silent decisions about meaning. {Compare, for instance, Unkolus with Aryeh Kaplan - DB} It wasn't just Christian and Jewish Bibles that differed from one another. The Greek Old Testament used by Hellenistic, or Greek-speaking, Jews took a number of forms, and the most popular of these, the Septuagint, departed at many points from the Hebrew Bible as redacted by the Masoretes. .. [snip]

Scholars have known that the texts varied radically for a long time--at least since the Christian scholar Origen, in the third century of the Common Era, arranged six texts of the Old Testament, Hebrew and Greek, in parallel columns. And there was no end to this glacial movement, this astounding capacity of the text to slip and change. In late antiquity, great libraries, such as the one at the Monastery of St. Catherine at Sinai, held many different versions of the Bible, Greek and Latin, Arabic and Georgian and Slavonic, each with its own textual tendencies and patterns of decoration; and these sometimes flowed together in unexpected ways as scribes and illuminators developed their crafts in dialogue with colleagues hundreds of miles away. And of course the commentaries that filled margins and crept into the spaces between lines... suggested, and sometimes imposed, distinctive new senses on the biblical text at the center of the page. For all the efforts to fix a canon, both the words and their meanings remained amazingly labile.

The only reason to believe that a particular Christian (or Hebrew) Bible represents the Truth is that it supports beliefs drawn from other sources of conviction. To say this is not to attack religion or to say anything against the power and the glory of the Bible. On the contrary, it is to appreciate more fully how much the Bible meant to the men and women--Jewish and Christian, Eastern and Western--who first wrote its books, and their successors through the centuries, who read them and reproduced them with a care and an artistry that are foreign to our own civilization.

Manuscripts were expensive: to make a single codex of the Bible, a scribe might have to use the skins of a hundred sheep--a vast blood sacrifice to give us all that beauty, to say nothing of expensive pigments and skilled labor. Conquest and robbery, pirates and invaders, always threatened. And yet the monks and the nuns who perched on rocky Irish cliffs and rose at midnight in Syrian caves, and the Masoretes in Palestine, and many others, had the discipline and the love to give the Bible material forms of endless beauty, works of art in everything from the parchment on which they were written to the carved ivory and rock crystal of their sumptuous bindings. The sons and daughters of men have given us the Word of God, and kept it for us, in many forms, always believing that they were capturing the highest of truths as they did so. That is all the inspiration that history can reveal. But in its way it is divine.