Bible as Book, Anthology, and Concept Introduction

Like many universities, the one where I taught has a central promenade, in this case a covered walkway, through which masses of students pass on their way from one class to another. It is frequently lined by a string of booths, with various organizations competing for attention in support of their particular causes. One day, I noticed a table where representatives were offering free Bibles to anyone who would accept them. As a professor of biblical studies, I, of course, stopped to see who these people were and what version they were giving away. So I gladly accepted the pocket-size Bible they gave me. When I reached my office, I took it out to see which version they preferred, only to discover that the contents were limited to the four gospels and the book of Psalms.

In an odd way, that incident matched my classroom experience, where I do not require any particular version, but encourage students to use whichever edition of the Bible they already own. Invariably, some Jewish students bring Joseph Hertz's Pentateuch and Haftorahs or the more recent versions of Gunther Plaut, Etz Hayim, or Artscroll, all of which contain the Pentateuch divided according to the weekly synagogue lections intermingled with the accompanying prophetic selections and, occasionally, the Five Scrolls. Catholic students, on the other hand, often bring the New American Bible, though I was surprised to discover that different printings vary in their presentation of the conclusion of Mark.

Plainly, popular understandings of the word "Bible" are less congruent than those of us in the biblical studies guild probably assume. And that is before taking into account the differences between the Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish canons, not to mention various less familiar groups, such as those of the Ethiopian or Syrian churches. Nor have we thought through the implications of electronic access, which makes it easy to use any of tens if not hundreds of different editions while seeing only individual verses or paragraphs on screens without the surrounding context, much less their location within the larger collection as a whole. One can only wonder what it means to say that an individual chapter (or sentence) precedes or follows another in such a world, much less the order in which the various books of the Bible appear.

The contributors to this symposium address various aspects of the apparently ever-changing understanding of the concept of sacred Scripture, from holy writings to a fixed list of specific works in late antiquity, then official editions and texts, followed by a defined and then unified collection, which is now dissolving in the wake of electronic media.

Nathan Mastnjak uses Isaiah as a test case to determine whether it is even appropriate to speak of it as "a book." From there, we proceed to ask what it means to speak of a "canon," not in our own time, but in antiquity when the biblical canon was supposedly established. Lee Martin McDonald suggests that the notion of a fixed collection developed much later than is usually claimed. In her contribution, Eva Mroczek demonstrates longstanding awareness of the fragility of the text itself.

Alongside the issue of defining a sacred collection is the question of what it meant to be included in that collection, in other words, what sacred Scriptures were understood to be. Devorah Schoenfeld uses medieval treatments of the Song of Songs to demonstrate what religious communities thought their sacred books were.

Translations are another vehicle for identifying how sacred Scriptures were understood as William Yarchin shows, further illustrating the obvious, if often unrecognized fact that the significance and, subsequently, nature of Scripture is socially constructed. Is it a book or maybe a genre?¹ Even more unsettling is the possibility that it has been different things to different people at different times.

Because changing technology, most conspicuously the codex and the printing press, have affected perceptions of the Bible, it is reasonable to expect that the emergence of digital media will affect perceptions of (the) Bible. Jeffrey Siker describes the possible consequences of this technology and how it should be treated and used.

As...