The word Bible comes from an Ancient Greek word simply meaning book or books. In one sense, that’s fair enough. It has solid claim to the title ‘The Book’ since it’s hard to imagine a more influential work. In another sense, though, it’s misleading because it’s actually more like a book collection. Still, whilst the many books are of diverse origins and styles, they do come to form a remarkably coherent story. This is clearly the work of skilled editors but also something rather more uncanny.
In his illuminating 2020 poetry podcast, Frank Skinner used a great phrase when describing his experience of the Bible in English translation. He called it the gist of God rather than the Word of God. He was pinpointing the inevitable shortfall and potential distancing that occurs in the translating process. However, through his exploration of select poems by Tadeusz Dabrowski, it became clear that this is true in another even greater sense. No words ever really do justice to reality as experienced, let alone to God. Not even the original Hebrew and Greek of the Bible. All words are shortfalls, learner slopes, translations or gist.
But there’s also a sense in which this isn’t true at all. Words ever stand in relation to Word and some words, in fact, mediate a raw encounter with Word. In other words, they’re beacons in whatever language. Through the meshes of meaning in the Bible and good translations comes an unvarnished voice echoing in the universal language of the human heart. The Un-bested Word seeks for us even whilst we seek the best words. There’s destiny in expression and translation.
Scriptourer is a journey through this destiny of word in the Bible. It’s an attempt to explore the uncanny. It isn’t claiming any expertise in interpretation. There are nowadays myriad excellent commentaries to be found elsewhere. Its focus is, rather, upon the storytelling power of the Bible’s many wonderful books and their reflective wisdom.
It’s truly astonishing that a story, painting, poem, musical piece or single song might change not just the way we look at the world but our whole selves. That first encounter becomes a watershed between an old and new self: more transformed than merely formed. The Bible reveals to us that words themselves are precisely life-changing events and if we’re open to their reality they’ll lead us with hidden power along spangled paths from the earthly many to the great glittering word-banquet of the Ineffable.
In one way or another, this journey’s been the happy preoccupation of my whole life and it’s my hope this also holds true for you.
Header photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
A Bible Gateway Writer
For many years I’ve been dwelling on the meaning of penance in the Abrahamic religions. In Hebrew the verb K-P-R, which is at the root of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) has a sense of lowering one’s eyes before God. In Arabic, the same Semitic root K-F-R (but with an F replacing the P) has the sense of turning one’s face away from God. It’s the origin of the word Kafir, which translates as “thankless”, “heretic” or “non-believer”, but which I suspect originally meant something more akin to “an *Unrepentant* One”. In Islam the word for repentance is “tawba” (from a completely unrelated root). But it appears in the Gospels as “metanoia” in Greek, which means “change your mind”, but the various Latin renderings all go back to the Latin root “paeniteo”, which translates as “feel sorry” or regretful. I feel like there’s something lacking in that, like there should be a breaking down of the individual morphemes. I want to know the original metaphorical sense that was being used. I feel like you can almost see the word “itere” (to go) within it. Was the element “paen-“ part of some word that has been lost to us. Like a sense of regret so bad that you “go back into yourself”?