Book

by Ziad Shihab/ May 27th, 2020

Book

see Flower

see Pig

That the word ‘‘book’’ occurs over a hundred times in the Old Testament is not surprising given the importance of sacred books to the Hebrews. Books were far less important to the Greeks, who tended to rely more on oral tradition; for all the care given to editing him even ‘‘Homer’’ was never a holy text. Various particular books are named in the Old Testament, some of them otherwise unknown to us, but when the Lord tells Joshua that ‘‘This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth’’ (Josh. 1.8) he is referring to the Book of Deuteronomy, whose author uses the same name for it (e.g., Deut. 28.61).

The phrase about Joshua’s mouth may have inspired Ezekiel to a more metaphorical usage where the angel in his great vision tells him to eat a scroll written with lamentations -- ‘‘eat this roll, and go speak unto the house of Israel’’ -- which then tastes as sweet as honey (Ezek. 2.8--3.3); this

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commissioning of Ezekiel as prophet combines the oral and the ‘‘literal’’ dimension of his culture with revealing awkwardness.

God is the ultimate author. The two tables Moses brings down from Sinai are ‘‘written with the ﬁnger of God’’ (Exod. 31.18). There is also a book that names the righteous; the Lord threatens, ‘‘Whosoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book’’ (Exod. 32.33). This is ‘‘the book of the living’’ of Psalm 69.28 and ‘‘the book of life’’ of Revelation 3.5. In Daniel’s vision of the Last Judgment, the Ancient of days sits on a throne ‘‘and the books were opened’’ (Dan. 7.10, elaborated in Rev. 20.12). The names of the rebellious angels, according to Milton, were ‘‘blotted out and razed / By their rebellion, from the books of life’’ (PL 1.361--62). God also writes his law within us, says Jeremiah: the Lord promises ‘‘I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts’’ (31.33, echoed by Paul in 2 Cor. 3.3).

The ‘‘book of life’’ easily becomes the book of one’s own life. Vigny’s Jesus, for instance, pleads with his Father to let him live: ‘‘Before the last word do not close my book!’’ (‘‘Le Mont des Oliviers’’ 2.2). When we vow to reform ourselves we ‘‘turn over a new leaf.’’

Pindar has the name of an Olympic victor ‘‘written on my heart’’ (Olymp.

10.3). The same metaphor for memory is used six times by Aeschylus; e.g., ‘‘the wax-tablets of the mind’’ in Prometheus 789. Plato likens the memory to a block of wax, which varies from individual to individual in size and softness (Theaetetus 191c). This is the origin of the idea of the tabula rasa (used by Thomas Aquinas), the ‘‘blank slate’’ made commonplace by empiricist philosophers such as Locke. After the Ghost enjoins him to ‘‘Remember me,’’ Hamlet vows, ‘‘from the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / . . . / And thy commandment all alone shall live / In the book and volume of my brain’’ (1.5.98--103).

Mystical Jewish speculation of the Middle Ages imagined the Torah (Pentateuch) as the foundation of the world, and each of the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet were gates or structural elements in the Creation. In the late Middle Ages the idea arose among Christians that nature or the world is a book to be studied for its truths. That led to the notion of ‘‘the two books of God’’ or ‘‘the two revelations’’ (found also in Islamic thought). As Thomas Browne puts it, ‘‘there are two Books from which I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of His servant Nature, that universal and publick Manuscript, that lies expans’d under the Eyes of all’’ (Religio Medici

1.15). A soothsayer of Shakespeare’s says, ‘‘In nature’s inﬁnite book of secrecy / A little I can read’’ (Antony 1.2.10). Milton’s Raphael tells Adam that ‘‘heaven / Is as the book of God before thee set, / Wherein to read his wondrous works’’ (PL 8.66--68). Thomson asks, ‘‘To me be Nature’s volume broad displayed; / And to peruse its all-instructing page, / . . . / My sole delight’’ (‘‘Summer’’ 192--96).

When the Romantic philosopher Schelling writes, ‘‘What we call nature is a poem that lies locked in a secret marvelous script’’ (Sämtliche Werke [1856--61],

3.628), he is not necessarily invoking God as the author of the script. Coleridge draws from Schelling but takes a more Christian viewpoint: ‘‘all that meets the bodily sense I deem / Symbolical, one mighty alphabet / For infant minds’’; when the mind grows it shall see God unveiled (‘‘Destiny of Nations’’ 18--20). Writing of his infant boy, who will grow up in natural surroundings, he prophesies, ‘‘so shalt thou see and hear / The lovely shapes

33 Boreas

and sounds intelligible / Of that eternal language, which thy God / Utters, who from eternity doth teach / Himself in all, and all things in himself’’ (‘‘Frost at Midnight’’ 58--62). Wordsworth reverses the relation of poem to nature when he argues that a child who grows up knowing Nature will ‘‘Receive enduring touches of deep joy / From the great Nature that exists in works / Of mighty poets’’ (1805 Prelude 5.617--19).

We note ﬁnally that the ‘‘language of ﬂowers’’ cult, which ﬂourished in the nineteenth century, could be assimilated to the ‘‘book of nature’’ metaphor. For example, a sonnet by Lassailly quoted in Balzac’s Lost Illusions has the line, ‘‘Each ﬂower speaks a word from the book of nature.’’ See Flower.

Boreas Bow and arrow

see Wind