What if the Bible is the most discarded book of all time? In this article, I explore the social life of bibles as divested objects: donated or discarded, they become secondhand commodities that circulate across owners, contexts, and classifications. Based on anthropological fieldwork in the United States and historical attention to the forging of the bible marketplace in the United States, I argue that secondhand scriptures index a cultural space in which valuation is performed across multiple registers. In particular, I outline three forms of valuation: resale, collection, and heritage making. Each register of valuation reflects and recreates a broadly internalized sense that the Bible is a sacred object that sparks ethical obligation.
India’s unfolding present is characterised by leniency towards the majority of Hindu religious groups’ sentiments, which are apparent in the country’s Central government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Even though the Prime minister himself has been portrayed as the 11th avatar of Vishnu, and many of the enigmas around him are often seen, praised, and often critiqued; one has ignored the slow and steady rise of prominence of the Hindu Sacred Scriptures in India. The paper endeavours to address this rise by analysing the role of sacred scriptures in bolstering nation states and proposes a frame work to understand the rise of a sacred scripture becoming a political scripture, through a comparative analysis of nineteenth century United Kingdom and twenty-first century India.
This article argues that the book of Jeremiah uses ekphrasis to evoke for its audience the pain Yhwh causes the prophet Jeremiah. This pain functions to manifest Yhwh’s presence with the prophet and, by extension, the audience who sense it via the text’s vivid descriptions. The book of Jeremiah further supports the notion of Yhwh’s presence being experienced through its text by establishing a direct line of transmission from the prophet to his scribe Baruch to the scroll. Descriptions of how Baruch and the scroll are attributed with divine authority likewise make use of ekphrasis to draw the audience’s attention to the book of Jeremiah as a ritualized material artefact.
The description of the high priest’s garments inhabits the narrative of the construction of the divine dwelling. The garments are evocatively brought to life in the rhetorical technique of ekphrasis with language that fashions them as an extension of the sacred tent where YHWH’s glory dwells. The high priest is styled as a counterpart to the tabernacle, bringing it to human scale for a personal and intimate encounter with YHWH. Invested in “holy garments… for a display of glory through adornment” (Exod 28:2), he manifests an epiphany of the divine glory that is materialized in textile and ornamentation. A divinely-sanctioned image of God is literarily presenced in the sacred tent through the sacred text. The world of the text continues to invite readers to see and experience the divine presence as it becomes the enduring place of encounter and engagement.
Psalm 115 is among the Bible’s major poems about cult statuary. Scholarship on these poems tends to focus on ontological issues, drawing on Mesopotamian rituals of enlivening and asking to what extent ancient Israelites and Judahites regarded images as alive, instantiating a deity’s presence, or contending with a monotheistic worldview. In such treatments, these poems are considered part of a continuous discourse of “anti-idol polemics,” in which the purpose of these poems is to eradicate or “deface” images with rhetoric. Instead, considering its art of description as an example of ekphrasis, Psalm 115 reveals other potentials within the constellation of ideas about images. The poem certainly denies the liveliness of the image. But by its very denial the ekphrasis manifests the image: it makes a face appear. How do descriptions of images help us to understand the rich and complex world of ancient ideas about the fabricated and the real? Psalm 115 uses ekphrasis as a technology to navigate the real by describing images as votives that correspond not to deities but to their human makers.
