‘Every scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven”, says Jesus in St Matthew, “is like a man put in charge of a household, who brings out of his treasury things new and old.” The late Roberto Calasso may have been train-ed more for the studia humanitatis than for God’s kingdom, but the prodigious Florentine author spent a lifetime procuring marvels new and old from the treasure-house of literature.
His best known work of this kind remains The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (1988), which blends a lively retelling of Greek myths with an essayistic reflection on their enduring influences on our culture and society. More recently, The Celestial Hunter (2016) similarly treats the intoxicating powers of hunting and religious ritual; here too the material is largely Greek, albeit with excursions into exotic shamanism and Pharaonic Egypt. In The Book of All Books (published in Italian in 2019, but soon out in a new English paperback edition) Calasso brings his literary energies to bear on sacred Scripture.
From sources old and new, he weaves his retellings of Biblical stories, complete with frequent discursive asides. The main stuff of his work is, of course, the biblical text itself. We meet well-known heroes and villains from the Old Testament: Saul, David, Ahab and Jezebel, Abraham, and so on, all retold in Calasso’s words. They are out of order, and even this is enough to help us re-encounter these grand old acquaintances with fresh eyes. The expected narrative is broken up and reset. After all, one of the pitfalls in approaching Scripture is that, after 2,000 years of Christian reading and rereading, the Bible and its characters have assumed a deceptive familiarity.
Retelling Scripture’s stories has an impressive pedigree. In recent decades, academic biblical scholars have spent much ink on the fertile genres of “rewritten Bible”: texts like the targums, or the midrashim, in which ancient Jewish scribes translated, interrogated and fleshed out their biblical inheritance. Calasso appeals directly to the midrashim when he narrates Abraham’s life, following in the footsteps of midrashic scribes when he expands upon the childhood and youth of Abram.
Such expansions, allusions and alternate versions exist within the Bible itself. Deuteronomy recapitulates much of Exodus, while 2 Samuel 22 provides a near-identical version of Psalm 18. Christians have four lives of Christ: the three intimately-related Synoptic Gospels, and John’s stranger theological meditation on that biographical tradition. Calasso appeals to this phenomenon, too, with regard to Abraham. After the midrashic digression on Abram’s youth, Calasso imagines King Josiah (in whose reign a “Book of the Law” was found in Jerusalem’s Temple) reading in the newly discovered Deuteronomy of his ancient ancestor: “A wandering Aramaean was my father…”
A minor gripe concerns how the book handles its sources. A long appendix provides exhaustive references for biblical verses covered, which seems over-scrupulous given that even an inexperienced reader could easily locate the relevant passages in the Bible. It is unhelpful that no such attention is given to Calasso’s extra-biblical sources. His retelling of David’s death is beautiful and poignant, recounting the king’s demise while briefly distracted from Sabbath-day Torah study. The lay reader must, however, do a bit of digging to discover the details of this scene are drawn from the Talmud (Shabbat 30b).
Further niggles are minor. Historians of the ancient Near East might quibble with Calasso’s unconvincing elision of the alliterative goddesses Asherah, Athirat, and Anat.
Overall, Calasso’s volume is impressive. The Book of All Books will refresh anybody familiar with the Bible, whether as literature or as Scripture. Some Christians might want to insist that biblical stories ought primarily to be encountered when read in the Church’s liturgy, and after that in private devotional reading. Calasso’s book is a welcome supplement to that: an ancillary tool. One might share TS Eliot’s pessimistic view that the Bible being read as literature reflects the mere afterglow of a faithfully Catholic culture. For those who inhabit that living tradition, however, a literary appreciation of Scripture forms part of a faithful listening to the lively oracles of God.
Dr John Ritzema is a theologian and biblical scholar
