The Bible in Its Traditions

It’s the (pre-)return to Jerusalem, dear friends and supporters of BibleArt. If the Bible School took a well-deserved rest during the summer, the construction of our digital biblical cathedral is not stopped… Here is some recent news from the construction site!

Like any ongoing project, our tool still needs some small work to improve. We thank you for your indulgence if you encounter some slowness in loading notes.


WORK CARRIED OUT
Foundations

In the translator’s workshop
Various facets of our art of translation

Obelisks and asterisks: ancient typography and comic book heroes
In the workshop of the ferrymen of the ancient scriptures, we are interested this month in the strange signs ÷ and ※ that appear in the Bible.

Obelisks and asterisks: all about ※ and ÷


Words of the month
Words discovered, rediscovered or proposed in the course of our translation work

There are “lakes” and “lakes.” What are the “traps” set by sinners against the righteous, which are spoken of at length in psalms and prophecies… And what do they have to do with the “hell” promised to those who set them up?

Lakes                                        Lake                                         & Tartarus


Walls & buttresses

Religious contexts
Topography, archaeology, sociology, ancient cultures

Beliefs: the “sons of God” in Heaven. The month of September is dedicated to angels. They are “innumerable creatures,” divided into nine great orders. Learn to identify them, in the school of poets and prophets…

Seraphim; Thrones; Cherubim; Dominations; Powers; Virtues; Principalities; Archangels; Angels


Ornaments

Liturgical and musical reception

The creativity of Gregorian composers inspired by the words of the Angel has been almost inexhaustible. Here are a few echoes.

Earthly echoes of the voice of Archangel Gabriel

Anonymous (Yaroslav School, Spassky Monastery), St. Michael the Archangel, (tempera on wood, ca. 1300), 154x90cm), Church of the Archangel Michael, Kotorosl, Tretyakov National Gallery, Moscow, — 17304


MONITORING OF THE WORK

Portrait of the month
The word is given to one of the builders of our biblical cathedral.

Simon Monteillet, Scientific Assistant

BibleArt, for me…

It’s a great translation adventure! Graduate of ENS-PSL and translator, as a scientific assistant at Les bible en ses Traditions, I translate, correct and harmonize the text of many books of the Old Testament.

It is also… a huge list of proper names! Currently following in the footsteps of Jerome, who in his time wrote a Book of Hebrew Names and a Book of Binder Names, veritable onomastic and toponymic dictionaries of the Bible, I am working with Brother Jorge on a register of the proper names of the Bible. This is a long-term task, which allows us to harmonize our translation and to account for the Hieronymian choices concerning onomastics.

It’s finally… full of truly unexpected surprises: in the version of Saint Jerome that we are working on specially, I find at the turn of a sentence… Sirens, Mercury, and Adonis, when I am not plunging Tartarus! Why these Greco-Roman references in the middle of Jewish history? What Masoretic expressions do they convey? Why does Jerome, who is the champion of “Hebrew truth” as he says, allow himself such radical acculturations?

My motto…

I owe it to Spinoza: Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere (Political Treatise, 1§4). Basically: “don’t laugh, don’t cry, but understand”! She invites us to take a step aside, to put first impressions in parentheses, to try to control our passions to finally understand. In addition, it encourages understanding rather than judging, keeping in mind all that this implies!

My favorite book in the Bible…

It is probably the book of Job. Even though I already knew him, this project gave me the opportunity to study him in depth through the edition of the Vulgate. The book of Job is fascinating, because it presents a most firm faith. It is also the paradigm of misfortune, by the yardstick of which we can judge the fate of Ivan Illich or Jean Péloueyre. In a short writing, Simone Weil reminds us that misfortune makes God absent and that the absence of God deprives the soul of love. In misfortune, the soul must force itself and continue to “want to love”, even if this means “loving empty”, provided that one day “God comes to show himself to it and reveal to it the beauty of the world, as was the case with Job”. I must also admit that my preference is for Job, because, as when reading Cioran, I paradoxically feel a kind of joy, even gratitude, in knowing that I am undoubtedly happier than them, and then, of course, less unhappy.


YOUR SAY

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“I admire and use a lot of The Bible in its Traditions and BibleArt — that app is really great! Beyond my own passion for the biblical text, your work as guardians of the spirit and watchers of the Word seems to me essential, a lung of the word and a shattered land and world, as monasteries are a ‘pounon’ of prayer…”
• Saskia P., Greek translator, from Switzerland
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Each month, we share with you the progress of the BibleArt project: a novelty on the biblical text, a novelty on the context around Scripture and a novelty on the reception of the biblical text, especially in the cultural milieu. But also, focus on a theme or a particular point, meetings, portraits, testimonies…


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