Alan Jacobs gave a brilliant lecture at NSA yesterday afternoon – beautifully written and constructed, enormously informative, exploding with insight. Everything you’d expect from Jacobs.
The thrust of the lecture was an exploration of the reading habits that are encouraged by the development of the book. He started with the scroll cabinet of the ancient Jewish synagogue. Given the nature of scrolls and cabinets, the books of the Bible did not have a fixed order or sequence. Quite late in pre-Christian Judaism, rabbis were still debating the proper order of the canon.
With the book, decisions about canonical order are made and fixed. Books are today economical and portable, but the earliest codices were huge and expensive. Whatever the practical reasons for Christians adopting the book, there were important theological and hermeneutical ramifications. Jacobs pointed out that books also physically express the unity of the Bible and its sequentiality. The sheer physical form of a book that includes both Old and New Testament between two covers was a standing renunciation of Marcionitism.
The book has a fixed order, which encourages sequential reading. At the same time, the book allows one to read back-and-forth. You can put your finger in Jeremiah, check Hebrews, and flip from one to the other quite readily. Try that with a scroll. So, the book encourages sequential reading, but a complex zig-zag, reading-forward-and-back reading that is characteristic of Christian typology. The book, Jacobs said in an arresting formula, is the technology of typology.
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