The Old Testament in Byzantium (review)

In December 2006, while Dumbarton Oaks was undergoing major renovation, the Byzantine Studies department hosted a symposium on the Bible in Byzantium in the Freer Gallery of Art to coincide with an exhibition on early Bibles. The present volume includes a selection of the papers presented on that occasion.

In the introduction the editors raise three questions: how did Byzantines, Jews, and Christians “encounter” the text; how did the Christians “use” the text; and how typical was the Byzantine reaction when compared with that of contemporary cultures. Subsequent chapters point to the importance of the prophetologia (books of liturgical readings); James Miller examines the real channels by which most people came to know the Old Testament in auditory fashion, and Georgi Parpulov analyzes the psalters written mainly for the piety of the wealthy. John Lowden presents a more specialized case in the elaborately decorated Octateuch manuscripts, which only very wealthy patrons could afford and probably formed a tiny trickle as far as dissemination of the text was concerned. Two chapters tackle the subject from a historiographical perspective: Elizabeth Jeffreys’s discussion of how the Old Testament account influenced Byzantine chronicles, and Claudia Rapp’s text on how it provided models for emperors in the early period. Clearly, as Derek Krueger discusses, the scripture text was a dominant presence in Byzantine monasticism, but, as Robert Ousterhout points out, it can hardly be said to have had any practical impact on Byzantine architecture. Two final chapters reach beyond the borders of the Empire—Ivan Biliarsky presents the evidence for the impact of Old Testament models on medieval Bulgaria, and Jane Dammen McAuliffe examines their effect on the Qur’ān.

The handsome volume is well up to Dumbarton Oaks standards, with only a few errata noted (p. 12n44, vaut in place of veut; p. 233, perhaps “at” has misplaced “as” on the penultimate line; p. 255n1, misspelling of Complutense). All eleven chapters are the work of specialists, some renowned for their previous publications and clearly of the highest quality. All repay careful study, and all provide new insights. Yet so much remains to be done. Lowden (pp. 110n15, 131) and Jefferies (p. 170n67) only briefly refer to the major question faced by students of the Old Testament in Byzantium—what texts of the Septuagint were commonly available? Certainly not that published in the twentieth century by Alfred Rahlfs, nor indeed that of the Göttingen editions. These attempt to reproduce the earliest text, but presumably it is the “Byzantine” tradition that one should consult, although it has been shown that a late Byzantine exegete, like the monk Malachias, was using a Lucianic text.¹ In second place, so much remains to be said about the questions that ordinary laypeople, not just clerics, were asking about Old Testament texts—questions preserved in the many “Questions and Answers,” erotapokriseis (such as those of St. Anastasios of Sinai), and the catenae with which the Byzantines demonstrated their immense interest in the “divine” text.