Byzantine Illuminated Manuscripts Of The Book Of Job

Of all the Old Testament books, the Book of Job remains acutely contemporary today. Written between the 6th and 3rd c. B.C., it deals with subjects such as the presence of evil in the world, the misery, the quest for justice, the faith, and the behavior of people when they face sudden twists and turns of life. It seems that the ancient text had been illustrated since the Early Christian period because of its fascinating novel-like narrative style. In her own study on the Book of Job, Stella Papadaki-Oekland probes into all the Byzantine illuminated manuscripts of the illustrated Greek text. The number of miniature illustrations included in these fifteen manuscripts, dating from the 9th to the 16th century, comes to more than 1800 of which 2/3 of the about 380 illustrated herein are previously unpublished manuscript images.The book is an unabridged version with minor changes of Papadaki-Oekland's Inaugural Dissertation at Heidelberg University (1979) and is published posthumously by her daughters, Helen-Aina and Astrid-Zoe -in homage to Byzantine Art. The fifteen Byzantine Illuminated Manuscript Illustrations of the Book of Job studied, illustrated and discussed are: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rome: cod. Vat. gr. 749; cod. Vat. gr. 751; cod. Vat. gr. 1231 and cod. Vat. Pal. gr.230 - The Monastery of St. John the Theologian, Isle of Patmos: cod. Patmos 171 - Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venezia: cod. Marc. gr. 538 - Monastery of St. Catherine, Sinai, Egypt: cod. Siena 3 - Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem and All Palestine, Jerusalem: MS. Taphou 5 - Monastery of Vatopedi, Mount Athos: Vatopedi 590 - Monastery Magisti (Great) Lavra, Mount Athos: Lavra B100 - Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens: MS. 62 - Bodleian Library, Oxford: MS. Barocci 201 and MS. Laud gr. 86 - Bibliothegue nationale de France, Paris: MS. gr. 134 and MS. gr. 135 - National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg: MS gr. 382 (former folio of Taphou 5) The study of the Septuagint Book of Job in Byzantine tradition include comparative analysis of the interrelationship of the individual miniature cycles, their general arrangement and artistic character, the origin and development as well as its contents and significance in the literary and popular tradition. Finally, the six Comparative Tables presented at the end of the volume provide the reader for the first time a complete cross reference interrelationship between the individual 1800 images of the 15 manuscripts and Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton's English translation of the Septuagint Book of Job passages. Further examples of images discussed herein of early Christian Job representations include: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rome, MS.Reg.gr.1 - known as the Bible of Queen Christina of Sweden; Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris, MS gr. 510, MS syr. 341-the Syriac Bible and MS.gr. 923- Sacra Parallela; Biblioteca Nazionale Vittorio Emanuele III, Naples, Coptic MS IB 18, Catacomb of the Via Latina, Rome and the Sarcophagus of Junius Bassus, Basilica di San Pietro, Rome. Furthermore, the book is of invaluable importance due to its methodological approach. As the leading art historian Hans Belting points out, the study of Stella Papadaki-Oekland calls in question Kurt Weitzmann's rigid theory about the process of the Byzantine illuminated manuscripts production. There's no doubt that, even though it was written a lot of years ago, this remains the most complete and comprehensive study about the Book of Job in Byzantine art

This volume offers an overview of Byzantine manuscript illustration, a central branch of Byzantine art and culture. Just like written texts, illustrations bear witness to Byzantine material culture, imperial ideology and religious beliefs, as well as to the development and spread of Byzantine art. In this sense illustrated books reflect the society that produced and used them. Being portable, they could serve as diplomatic gifts or could be acquired by foreigners. In such cases they became “emissaries” of Byzantine art and culture in Western Europe and the Arabic world. The volume provides for the first time a comprehensive overview of the material, divided by text categories, including both secular and religious manuscripts, and analyses which texts were illustrated in Byzantium, and how. Contributors are Justine M. Andrews, Leslie Brubaker, Annemarie W. Carr, Elina Dobrynina, Maria Evangelatou, Maria Laura Tomea Gavazzoli, Markos Giannoulis, Cecily Hennessy, Ioli Kalavrezou, Maja Kominko, Sofia Kotzabassi, Stavros Lazaris, Kallirroe Linardou, Vasileios Marinis, Kathleen Maxwell, Georgi R. Parpulov, Nancy P. Ševčenko, Jean-Michel Spieser, Mika Takiguchi, Courtney Tomaselli, Marina Toumpouri, Nicolette S. Trahoulia, Vasiliki Tsamakda, and Elisabeth Yota.

An extensive history of how the Bible’s story of Job has been interpreted through the ages. The question that launches Job’s story is posed by God at the outset of the story: “Have you considered my servant Job?” (1:8; 2:3). By any estimation the answer to this question must be yes. The forty-two chapters that form the biblical story have in fact opened the story to an ongoing practice of reading and rereading, evaluating and reevaluating. Early Greek and Jewish translators emphasized some aspects of the story and omitted others; the Church Fathers interpreted Job as a forerunner of Christ, while medieval Jewish commentators debated conservative and liberal interpretations of God’s providential love. Artists, beginning at least in the Greco-Roman period, painted and sculpted their own interpretations of Job. Novelists, playwrights, poets, and musicians—religious and irreligious, from virtually all points of the globe—have added their own distinctive readings. In Have You Considered My Servant Job?, Samuel E. Balentine examines this rich and varied history of interpretation by focusing on the principal characters in the story—Job, God, the satan figure, Job’s wife, and Job’s friends. Each chapter begins with a concise analysis of the biblical description of these characters, then explores how subsequent readers have expanded or reduced the story, shifted its major emphases or retained them, read the story as history or as fiction, and applied the morals of the story to the present or dismissed them as irrelevant. Each new generation of readers is shaped by different historical, cultural, and political contexts, which in turn require new interpretations of an old yet continually mesmerizing story. Voltaire read Job one way in the eighteenth century, Herman Melville a different way in the nineteenth century. Goethe’s reading of the satan figure in Faust is not the same as Chaucer’s in The Canterbury Tales, and neither is fully consonant with the Testament of Job or the Qur’an. One need only compare the descriptions of God in the biblical account with the imaginative renderings by Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Franz Kafka to see that the effort to understand why God afflicts Job “for no reason” (2:3) continues to be both compelling and endlessly complicated. “A tour de force of cultural interaction with the book of Job. He guides today’s reader along the path of Job interpretation, exegesis, adaptation and imagining revealing the sheer variety of themes, meanings, creativity and re-readings that have been inspired by this one biblical book. Balentine shows us that not only is there “always someone playing Job” (MacLeish, J.B.) but there’s always someone, past or present, reading this ever-enigmatic book.” —Katharine J. Dell, University of Cambridge “Balentine “considers Job” for the countless ways this biblical book, in all its rich complexities, has inspired readers over the centuries. . . . Balentine’s volume sparkles with insightful theological commentary and rigorous scholarship, and any exegetical course or study on Job would benefit from it.” —Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology

The main themes of this volume are the identification of 'visions', 'messages', and 'meanings' in various facets of Byzantine culture and the possible differences in the perception of these visions, messages and meanings as seen by their original audience and by modern scholars. The volume addresses the methodological question of how far interpretations should go - whether there is a tendency to read too much into too little or whether not enough attention is paid to apparent minutiae that may have been important in their historical context. As the essays span a wide chronological era, they also present a means of assessing the relative degrees of continuity and change in Byzantine visions, messages and meanings over time. Thus, as highlighted in the concluding section, the book discusses the validity of existing notions regarding the fluidity of Byzantine culture: when continuity was a matter of a rigid adherence to traditional values and when a manifestation of the ability to adapt old conventions to new circumstances, and it shows that in some respects, Byzantine cultural history may have been less fragmented than is usually assumed. Similarly, by reflecting not just on new interpretations, but also on the process of interpreting itself, the contributors demonstrate how research within Byzantine studies has evolved over the past thirty years from a set of narrowly defined individual disciplines into a broader exploration of interconnected cultural phenomena.

Biography of the medieval Mediterranean's most cross-culturally significant sculptural monument, the tallest in the pre-modern world.

The Oxford Handbook of the Septuagint features contributions from leading experts in the field considering the history and manuscript transmission of the version, and the study of translation technique and textual criticism.