Books in Brief

056

The Bible is perhaps the most interpreted book of all time. Historians, text critics, paleographers, linguists, ministers, rabbis and priests have all wrestled with the text, trying to reveal its meaning. But some of the most moving and beautiful interpretations of scripture have been not in word, but in picture. A medley of recent books selected by BR’s editors celebrates the work of two millennia of artists who have turned to the Bible for inspiration.

The Illustrated Hebrew Bible

Adapted by Ellen Frankel
(New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1999) 240 pp., 136 color illus., $50.00

Ellen Frankel is a storyteller. She is also editor in chief of the Jewish Publication Society, the renowned Philadelphia press best known for publishing a leading English translation of the Hebrew Bible. Which makes her uniquely suited to tackle the task of “adapting” the Bible, that is, retelling 40 stories from the Torah (Pentateuch) and 35 from the Prophets and Writings to make them “as accessible as possible to contemporary readers.”

The stories are good: After all, they’re based on the quintessential good book. Loose translations of too-familiar passages can be disconcerting: “In the very beginning, God created a world—the heavens and the earth—out of nothing. But this world was without rhyme or reason.” Why the very beginning? And rhyme or reason?

Each story in this thick, oversized volume is lavishly illustrated with works of art—many from Jewish tradition, most familiar to BR readers: The artists include Jack Levine, Marc Chagall, David Sharir, William Blake and Rembrandt. Also featured are Hebrew manuscript illuminations and some of the earliest known biblical paintings, from the walls of the Dura-Europos synagogue in Syria.

The Psalms: An Artist’s Impression

Paintings by Anneke Kaai
(Carlisle, UK: Piquant, 1999) 55 pp., 25 color illus., $19.99 (hardback)

In the late Middle Ages, no book of the Bible was illustrated as frequently and fully as the Book of Psalms. But then the practice fell out of fashion. Now, contemporary Dutch artist Anneke Kaai has revived the tradition, creating 25 paintings and collages based on her interpretations of 25 psalms.

The images, however, are not traditional: We find no scenes of David playing his harp in this tall, slim, beautifully printed volume. Rather, the paintings are quite simple and abstract. A single steep, craggy cliff illustrates Psalm 31: “Your granite cliff is a hiding place, your high cliff aerie a place of safety.” In Kaai’s illustration (photo, above) of Psalm 84, two small sparrows nest in the lily-shaped capital of the bronze column named Boaz, which stood outside Solomon’s Temple. The psalm itself lovingly describes God’s home, the Jerusalem Temple: “How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of Hosts!…Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself.”

Accompanying the illustrations are Eugene H. Peterson’s updated and very free (at times jarringly so) English translations of the Psalms. In Peterson’s hands, the traditional “Blessed is the man that walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful” becomes “How well God must like you—you don’t hang out at Sin Saloon, you don’t slink along Dead End Road, you don’t go to Smart-mouth College” (Psalm 1).

057

The Illustrated Jesus Through the Centuries

Jaroslav Pelikan
(New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1997) 256 pp., 150 color, 50 b-&-w illus., $35.00 (hardback)

“Regardless of what anyone may personally think or believe about him, Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of Western culture for almost twenty centuries.” So Jaroslav Pelikan begins his history of the impact of Jesus on civilization. Beginning with the Jesus of the Gospels, Pelikan moves on to consider how successive generations have adopted and adapted Jesus, seeing him as a sort of medieval monk, an 18th-century rationalist, a Romantic poet or a 20th-century liberator.

The book is a revision of Pelikan’s 1985 work, Jesus Through the Centuries, which was unillustrated. The text has been abbreviated, and stunning images of Jesus in painting and sculpture, from medieval to modern times, have been incorporated throughout.

The Religious Art of Andy Warhol

Jane Daggett Dillenberger
(New York: Continuum, 1998) 128 pp., 63 color and 17 b-&-w illus., $39.95 (hardback)

Could Andy Warhol evoke the Sublime? So asks Jane Daggett Dillenberger, an accomplished historian of religion and spirituality in American art. Late in Warhol’s life, the trendy pop artist, famous mainly for his images of Campbell’s Soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, produced what still remains the largest series of religious art produced in America: more than a hundred paintings and studies based on Leonardo’s Last Supper. In so doing, says Dillenberger, Warhol infused Leonardo’s familiar image, which had become a cliché, with new spiritual resonance. (For a preview of Dillenberger’s research, see her “Jesus as Pop Icon: The Unknown Religious Art of Andy Warhol,” BR 12:05.)

The Jews in Christian Art: An Illustrated History

Heinz Schreckenberg
(New York: Continuum, 1996) 400 pp., 16 color + 1100 b-&-w illus., $120.00 (hardback)

This hefty encyclopedia traces Jewish-Christian relations by focusing on the ways Jews have been represented in Christian art from the Middle Ages to modern times. Themes covered include personifications of Ecclesia and Synagoga (Church and Synagogue), the destruction of Jerusalem, the representation of Old Testament figures as medieval Jews and the caricaturization of Jesus’ adversaries as stereotypical Jews.

Extremely rare are images that show Jesus as a Jew, although Joseph is often portrayed wearing the conical hat that distinguishes Jews in medieval art. In a few images, Jesus’ disciples wear these same hats. And in one rare illumination of the resurrected Jesus dining with the disciples he met on the road to Emmaus, Jesus himself wears a conical hat (photo, above). But as Schreckenberg points out, in this biblical episode the disciples have failed to recognize the resurrected Jesus. The hat thus serves as a sort of disguise, paradoxically masking Jesus’ identity by showing him to be a Jew.

The Bible is perhaps the most interpreted book of all time. Historians, text critics, paleographers, linguists, ministers, rabbis and priests have all wrestled with the text, trying to reveal its meaning. But some of the most moving and beautiful interpretations of scripture have been not in word, but in picture. A medley of recent books selected by BR’s editors celebrates the work of two millennia of artists who have turned to the Bible for inspiration. The Illustrated Hebrew Bible Adapted by Ellen Frankel (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1999) 240 pp., 136 color illus., $50.00 Ellen Frankel is […]