On the Nature of Ecological Paradox - Codex Sinaiticus - Michael Charles Tobias & Jane Gray Morrison

[Steven Avery]

On the Nature of Ecological Paradox - Codex Sinaiticus

https://dokumen.pub/on-the-nature-of-ecological-paradox-1nbsped-3030645258-9783030645250.html

Chapter 13

Codex Sinaiticus

13.1  The Holy Mountain Our preconceptions of paradise slide hierarchically from some perfect, pinioned place—a St. Kitts or Litla Dimun in their aboriginal “pristine” state—toward its ideal (a Van Eyck painting), which is a subset of an idea that renders Utopia to scale, human interactions with the Divine. Or, if one prefers, the idea is the subset of the ideal. At the same time, few species details were ignored on canvases of the Renaissance: a Jackass penguin, African lovebird, macaws, gray herons and the Eurasian bittern,1 golden-lion tamarins, every tree, and flower species imaginable: a veritable pictorial inventory of Noah’s Ark. Jan Breughel the Elder painted nearly 800 windows on these easily blurred semantics, paradise scenes scattered across so many floral arrangements, feasts of the Gods, summer harvests, and communities in the midst of their gaieties along a river bank.2 He and his family—a veritable dynasty of paradise-related portraitures—were betrothed to a singular motif that engaged viewers in contemporaneous political, religious, and all entablatures human. His paradise collectives began in earnest with his 1594 painting, “The Creation with Adam,” at the Doria Pamphilj Gallery in Rome.3 Brughel’s work is always contextualized, and much of that scenery is Biblical, a fascinating link directly to the Sinai Peninsula and the oldest thriving monastic library and gallery of icons in the world. As succinctly summarized by the Codex Sinaiticus Project, there are more than 400 leaves in the surviving Codex, including the hand-copied half of the Old Testament and Apocrypha, together known as the Septuagint, or the first Greek translation directly from the Hebrew originals, in addition to all of the New 1  See Jan Brueghel The Elder – The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark, by Arianne Faber Kolb, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2005, p. 27. 2  See the 812 images in the http://janbrueghel.net/ 3  op.cit., See Jan Brueghel The Elder – The Entry of the Animals into Noah’s Ark, by Arianne Faber Kolb, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2005, p. 47.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_13

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Testament. The missing half of the Old Testament from the Codex has never been found; the portions surviving include “2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith 1 and 4 Maccabees, Wisdom and Sirach.”4 Configurative ideals, nostalgic quadrants, ideas of exile, reunion, and the sheer scope of human drama that is portrayed by the epic tale of Moses, the Israelites, and the Christ Passion all figure in our myriad Biblical ideals of paradise. And as David Hume once expressed, if there is an ideal, it must exist, somewhere, in the universe. This interpretation, despite the rigorous formalities imposed by numbers and equations, in human truth suggests a presumed human capacity in touch with the Cosmos, even if it is only our cosmos, the little one confined to our brains. It may be framed in ancient languages, pictograms, idioms, and cultural mores long buried in our subconscious. But, mathematically speaking, those same frames of narrative remain undimmed. A murky translation over time does not alter or diminish the purity or exactitude that was embodied the day the words were conceived and written thousands of years ago. Therein exists the ideal, no less demonstrative and instructive than our ideas of carbon neutrality, minimum standards, the value of a living organism, or value in general. A setting, purpose, and compulsion that comport with that very compelling urge to find a sacred resting place that is both sublime and personal. The romance of an ideal precludes nearby oil refineries, train tracks, sawmills and city views, and the acoustical cacophonies of crowds: a site like Mount Sinai or the Flemish Brigadoons of Jan Breughel and family—isolated to the extent that our conceptual drift engages in an ideal that is as geographical as it is spiritual.5 In the case of the Plain of Er-Raha (in the Sinai),6 the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus (ca. AD 205–70) had been asked by Emperor Gallienus to venture out to just such a remote region (in this instance, somewhere in the Roman Campania whose creative center was Naples) and to found something akin to Plato’s Utopia. It was to be called Platonopolis, an Arcadia—no mere thought experiment—that should comport with Plato’s highest “form” in a real place: an ideal juxtaposition Plotinus named spiritual nature.7 Within a century of Plotinus’ death, several major changes in northeastern Egyptian culture had rendered Er-Raha and the entire southern Sinai, ripe for an ascetic Renaissance. It would be championed by such anchorites as St. Anthony the Great beneath a mountain at the Gulf of Akaba, not far from Mount Sinai. Others involved in this resurgence included St. Basil and St. Ambrose, both of whom celebrated that spiritual nature in demonstrative and lyrical calls of the wild involving the immersion and subsequent transcendence of Self; St. Augustine, whose own Confessions (ca. AD 399) relayed visions of intoxication  http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/codex/content.aspx, Accessed March 11, 2019.  See “Jan Brueghel Complete Catalogue,” https://www.janbrueghel.net/page/about-us, Accessed July 8, 2020. 6  For example, see Frances Frith’s famous, albeit desolate photograph in the Library of Congress, depicting Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the upper heart of the rocky valley, ca. 1862; https:// www.loc.gov/item/00652982. Accessed March 1, 2019. 7  See “A Night Out In The Sinai,” Chapter One, from A Vision of Nature – Traces of the Original World, by Michael Tobias, Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio, 1995, pp. 12–14. 4 5

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Fig. 13.1  Saint Catherine’s Monastery Beneath Mount Sinai, After Lithograph by Louis Haghe, Original Drawing by David Roberts, Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co., London, ca.1889. (Private Collection). (Photo © M.C.Tobias)

with the Creation; Symeon Stylites (AD 390–459), called by followers “the most holy martyr in the air”—the Syrian hermit who lived atop his pillar for 37 years. And there were hundreds of others who flocked to this holy of holies, the Sinai, throughout the fourth and fifth centuries, a period known as the Era of Retreat8 (Fig. 13.1). Mount Sinai was the allure, its in situ extremes ideal for tortured souls, like St. Marcarius of Alexandria, who willingly lived in mosquito marshes of Scete (the Egyptian Nitrian Desert)9 for half-a-year; for St. Mary of Egypt who wandered the

 See The Paradise of the Fathers, Volume 1, by Wallis Budget, Chatto & Windus, London, 1907.  See http://desertfathers.blogspot.com/2010/11/area-known-as-scetis-scetes.html.

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area naked for 47 years, between the towering headwalls of Wady Hamr and the most desolate of stretches near Wady Amârah. A paradise of revelatory masochisms for the monk, Agathonicus, who kept warm in snowy winters living and sleeping in the thickness of a herd of desert gazelles amid the tamarisk (Tarfah) grove at Wadi Feiran or Wady Es Sheikh. And for his colleague who is rumored to have lived years upon a ledge somewhere near the turquoise mines of Maghârah, a ledge so insecure and upon so sheer a cliff as to prevent him from ever sleeping. In their various humilities and abnegations, they were seeking union with God, willing happily to die for that Supreme Being who bid them come to the wilderness of jackals, the Schokari sand racer snake, of locusts and Red-Dwarf honey bees, of Northern Wheatears and White storks; to that simmering topography of granite outcrops including the clustered three peaks comprising Jebel Zebir, Jebel Abu, and Jebel (Mount) Katarína, the site of the Monastery of Saint Catherine’s, 8625′, and the (historically debated) Mount Sinai, 7497′—a reiteration of that calling which so intoxicated Moses, Christ, Mohammed, St. John the Baptist, and countless others.10

Michael Charles Tobias Jane Gray Morrison

 

[Steven Avery]

13.2  The World of Saint John Climacus But for those fragments known as the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in the Caves of Qumran during the period 1946–1956, the amulets of Ketef Hinnom and the En Gedi Scroll, the Codex Sinaiticus remains the oldest known collection of materials bound together from the primeval Hebrew Bible. Written down sometime between AD 326 and 360,11 it was eventually secured within the fortress which Justinian had built to protect the monks in 527 AD beneath Mount Sinai, where earlier had stood a church commissioned by the Empress Helena. And while the monastery’s d octrinal orientation spearheaded Eastern Orthodox Christianity, the Roman Catholic world maintained extraordinarily romantic and formal ties to it. Indeed, Pope Gregory the Great (ca. AD 540–604) wrote a letter to the Abbot of St. Catherine’s, the famed ascetic, St. John Climacus, dated September 1, 600, in which he likened all of humanity to castaways, save for those monks nestled safely at St. Catherine’s Monastery, who lived in harmony upon the shore, in Paradise.12 The Pope lamented the fact that his duties in Rome would not permit him to join Climacus and his fraternity there in Sinai.13  See the Project Noah, https://www.projectnoah.org/missions/11481015, Accessed March 9, 2019; See also, The Natural History of the Bible – An Environmental Exploration Of The Hebrew Scriptures, by Daniel Hillel, Columbia University Press, New York, 2006, particularly Chapter Six, “The Desert Domain – Wanderings in Sinai and the Negev,” pp. 118–139. 11  See http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/codex/history.aspx, Accessed March 13, 2019. 12  op.cit., Tobias, A Vision of Nature, p. 22. 13  See The letters of Gregory the Great, translated, with introduction and notes, by John R.C. Martyn, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, 2004, Hathi Trust Digital Library, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/004917310, Accessed March 8, 2019. 10

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Climacus (AD 579–649) himself exerted one of the most profound influences upon the climate of asceticism in the Sinai through his powerful little book, Κλῖμαξ, Scala Paradisi or Ladder to Paradise, composed in his early 20s or 30s (he’d first arrived at the Holy Monastery in 595 AD, an enthusiastic teenager).14 Climacus’ work illuminates the thirty steps of his ladder to/reunion with God. In it, he summarizes all of the virtues, despondencies, ambitions, and fearlessness that the ascension of the ladder—and by implication and historic evidence, the mountains surrounding the Monastery of Mt. St. Catherine’s where Climacus wrote his book— must necessarily entail. “May this ladder teach you the spiritual combination of the virtues… And now there remain faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of all is love.”15 The famed icon and hundreds of variations on it show the monks of Mount Sinai climbing the steep ladder following Climacus, with God and St. Peter awaiting them, while angels in heaven, monks on the ground rally “round for encouragement,” as a band of devils try plucking the monks from the ladder. Unlike the impenetrable silences that draped the entire Sinai (in terms of modernity’s discovery of its location) even as late as the 1880s when the London publisher of Virtue and Company commissioned Colonel Wilson’s spectacular four-volume edition on Palestine,16 today’s Sinai, while bearing all the predictable resemblances to its Mosaic past, also purports to a checkered contemporary reality. Environmental conditions have changed. Just a mile or so West of where I (mt) had lived in a cave above the monastery, in the southern cliffs of Wady Sho’eib, or Jethro’s Valley, today Egypt’s South Sinai Governate hosts a metropolitan cluster within the El Tur Mountains, St. Catherine, population nearly 6000. There is a highway, a patchwork of dirt roads, hotels, B&B’s, and every incentive for massive international tour groups to St. Catherine’s. On just a single day, Sunday, November 26, 2017, “1295” tourists showed up at the monastery.17 When I resided there, up among the surrounding rock faces, it was truly the “Valley of Refuge.” I saw one visitor in approximately 6 months. Today, not infrequently, the solemn rock walls of Râs Sufsafeh, of Jebel ed Deir, Wad yes Sheikh, and Wady Seba-iyeh are echo chambers during the not infrequent bombings by the Egyptian military to vanquish various rebel groups. It is a shamble of geopolitical obfuscation, harassing the fortress and her adjacent, millennia-old sites, various hermitages, the once flourishing convent of St. Episteme, heavenly gardens just  See Jacob’s Ladder Divine Ascent, P.Pincius, Venice, 1518; See also, L’E’Chelle Sainte, ou Les Degrez Pour Monter Au Ciel, Composez par S. Jean Climaque, Abbe Du Monastere Du Mont Sinai, Traduits Du Grec En Francois par Mr. Arnauld D’Andilly, With George and Louis Josse, Paris, 1688. And Sermoni Di S. Giovanni Climaco – Abbate nel Monte Sinai, Apresso Francesco, Milano 1585. 15  See The Ladder Of Divine Ascent, by Saint John Climacus, Revised Edition, Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Boston, Mass., 1991, p. 229. 16  See Picturesque Palestine -Sinai and Egypt, Edited by Colonel Wilson, Assisted By The Most Eminent Palestine Explorers, Four Volumes, London, Virtue And Company, 1880-1884. St. Catherine’s section, Volume 4, pp. 98–120, by Rev. C. Pickering Clarke. 17  See http://www.egypttoday.com/Article/9/34273/Saint-Catherine-receives-1-295-tourists-in-asingle-day, Accessed March 13, 2019. 14

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Fig. 13.2  A Monk’s Retreat Abase Mount Sinai. (Photo © Eric Alfred Hoffman)

prior to the mouth of Wady Lejâ, Elijah’s Chapel, the “Spring of Moses,” Wady Zawâtin (“The Valley of Olive-trees”), and the very shadows of Jebel Músa overlooking that mythic landscape wherein the Israelites are said to have camped for four decades (Fig. 13.2). In the same decade, Virtue and Company commenced publication of their steel- engraved four-volume edition, picking up on the international glories attendant upon the sensational discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus at the monastery, Cassell, Petter & Galpin published David Robert’s two-volume color masterpiece, The Holy Land (London, 1880) in which its famed author spoke of “freaks of nature”18 “easily seized by fancy or modified by art; and the Mahometan as much entitled to the exercise of his imagination as the Monk.” But this sentiment regarding a landscape of ladders for monks like Climacus and his followers was as spiritual and mythopoetic as it was historical. After all, wrote Roberts, “The whole career of the Israelites, from the passage of the Red Sea [in their Exodus] to the entrance into Palestine, was a display of miracle.”19 Indeed, Roberts added, “the traveler can still imagine the ‘cloud, the lightning, and the trumpet’.”20 Those trappings of the Laws handed down  Roberts, ibid., Volume 11, p. 25.  ibid., Roberts, Volume II, p. 26. 20  ibid., Roberts, p. 28. 18 19

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to Moses on the granite walls above where the Monastery would be built were designed, said Roberts, “to establish the morality of mankind. It was the first instance, from the days of Noah, in which peculiar sins were marked by Divine condemnation. The general impulse of natural justice…”21 had previously prevailed, but—here in this most alluring configuration of spiritual buttresses and topographically intimidating walls of granite piercing a merciless sky—something altogether new was occurring: a vegetable cornucopia of sustenance for the monks—cypresses and Nebek trees providing shade, and a monastery garden teeming with sweetly scented herbs, “oranges, lemons, almonds, mulberries, apricots, peaches, pears, apples, and olives, and all of the finest quality.”22 And the famous Spring itself, the water the Israelites drank to survive, flowing from somewhere in Mount Sinai, emptying into the courtyard of the Monastery adjoining the small basilica with its spherical ceiling of tile spelling out the “Transfiguration of Christ.” This configured sanctuary, wrote Roberts, fit into the perfect equation: “To the observer of Nature, the peninsula of Sinai is one of the most singular anomalies on the globe. It is an immense mass of mountains, without any of the discoverable purposes for which mountains seem to have been formed. It marks no boundary between nations; its summits collect no water to fertilize the surrounding region…. Yet are we not entitled to regard the problem as solved by Scripture, and by Scripture alone.”23 Amongst contemporary photographers, Neil Folberg has dramatically evoked the engaging probity of the Holy Monastery’s unique positioning,24 in tune with the great and exaggerated El Greco painting of St. Catherine’s from 1570, now housed at the Historical Museum of Crete in Heraklion, near to where El Greco (originally known as Theotokopoulos) was born. But the greatest imagery of all comes from an intimate acquaintance with the more than 3300 manuscripts (many written on papyrus, or the skins of goats and antelope and other quadrupeds) and the many hundreds of icons going back to the sixth century, the most famous of them being the St. John Climacus icon. Writes John Rupert Martin, the world’s authority on this ladder tradition, “…John Climacus, living at Sinai, became as it were a second Moses by ascending that mountain to receive instruction from God.”25 The most famed icon treating of Climacus’ treatise dates to the twelfth century, more than 500 years after Climacus’ demise. It remains on site at the Monastery. Writes Martin, “The resurgence of monastic iconography at this time can nowhere be observed more clearly than in the illustrated Climax

 ibid., Roberts, p. 30.  ibid., Roberts p. 32. 23  ibid., Roberts, p. 34. 24  See In a Desert Land – Photographs of Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, by Neil Folberg, Abbeville Press, New York, 1987, particularly pp. 81–120. 25  See The Illustration Of The Heavenly Ladder of John Climacus, by John Rupert Martin, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1954, pp. 7–8. 21 22

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manuscripts.”26 Martin examined 33 icons or fragments of icons—parchment folios—each with Penitential canons or rules laid down by the Church to accompany the images, which are to be found in libraries and museums from the Monastery of Mount St. Catherine’s to the Vatican; from Mount Athos to the Bibliotheque National de Paris, and in every major rare books room from UCLA to Harvard’s Widener. In fact, from the 1491 Venetian edition of Sancto Ioanne Climacho, Altramente Schala Paradisi27 until the late 1800s there were dozens of editions.28 In every instance, the congruence of the painter-monk/mountaineering seer, the surrounding isolated gorges, and that metaphysical fortress, all added up to a majestically sequestered and contiguous spirituality. The iconographic legacies were the perfect illustrations for an essentially pivotal manuscript at their heart, namely, the Codex Sinaiticus. This perfect union of composites heralded humanity’s utterly compelling and dire fixations with the hereafter.

13.3  The Incarnation of Fragments The iconic world of Sinai had so universal an appeal that just 33 years after El Greco painted his illustrious Iraklion triptych of the Holy Mountain and its Monastery, a fellow Cretan, Georgios Klontzas, rendered his marvelous “Transfiguration with Scenes of Monastic Life” (1603, Candia, Crete?).29 Neither El Greco nor Klontzas ever made the pilgrimage to Sinai but the legends spanning the vast timeframe between the composition of the Old Testament, and the book finally arriving in fragments and hundreds of pages (tens of thousands of lines) at the Monastery of St. Catherine’s had long become a kind of certitude in Judeo-Christian history. Not only was the “Ladder to Paradise” and the many mythical qualities attributed to Saint John Climacus instinct with the very essence of a Biblically inflorescent Sinai,  ibid., Martin, p. 3. The great Danish genius, Søren Kierkegaard devoted an entire manuscript to the name of Johannes Climacus, writing in a section entitled, “III: The Absolute Paradox (A Metaphysical Caprice),” “But one must not think ill of the paradox, for the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow. But the ultimate potentiation of every passion is always to will its own downfall, and so it is also the ultimate passion of the understanding to will the collision, although in one way or another the collision must become its downfall. This, then, is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think.” Second Period: Indirect Communication (1843–46) Philosophical Fragments, p. 37, http://sorenkierkegaard.org/philosophical-fragments.html, Accessed August 11, 2019. For Kierkegaard, this passion to know is betrayed by the quest for knowledge, discovering its aspired to precision through faith and experience, not cognition. 27  Publisher: Bernardinus Benabus and Matheo da Parma. 28  See World Cat, https://www.worldcat.org/title/sanc...thelatin/oclc/561777726&referer=brief_results, Accessed March 3, 2020. 29  See Holy Image – Hallowed Ground, Icons From Sinai, Edited by Robert S. Nelson and Kristen M. Collins, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2006, p. 232. 26

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but so was Saint Peter, as conveyed in the remarkable sixth-century icon from the Monastery itself. There is the very stylish half-life-sized Saint, right out of Acts 5:15: possessed of “…the power to cure by the mere passage of his shadow.”30 Other enduring qualities of the monastery’s remarkable collection of paintings can be viewed and compared in the many photographs taken during four research trips to Sinai by Kurtz Weitzmann and George Forsyth from 1958 to 1965, working with Fred Anderegg of the University of Michigan. Many were reproduced in the Weitzmann section on Sinai in the book A Treasury of Icons—Sixth to Seventeenth Centuries.31 The very cult of icon “veneration” blossomed at St. Catherine’s Monastery, first in its utilitarian aspect—the icon as “religious object”—and then “to a new attitude of greater spirituality stressing the transcendental relationship between the image and the holy personage depicted.”32 When I first went to live in a cave above the monastery for many months one winter in the early 1970s, there were but a handful of scholarly works serving as stimulus/guides: Weitzmann’s unprecedented devotion to and widely disseminated knowledge of the icons in Sinai, John Rupert Martin’s exquisite study of the specific icons and commentaries portraying “the heavenly ladder,” Colonel Wilson’s four-volume Picturesque Palestine, the 1688 edition of Arnauld D’Andilly’s translation of the “Ladder to Paradise” and a Life of Saint John Climacus, from the writings of various Greek historians, and a smattering of publications excerpting observations by many of the early travelers to Sinai, as well as the Archimandrite Porphyrius Uspensky’s drawings during his trip to the Monastery in 1857 (Fig. 13.3). In the early Renaissance, two pilgrims en route to Sinai met up in Jerusalem. Bernhard von Breidenbach (1440–1497) was a leading political figure in one of the Holy Roman Empire’s most powerful states, that of the Electorate of Mainz. Felix Fabri (1441–1502) was an influential Swiss Dominican theologian. Both published remarkably detailed accounts of their journeys to the Holy Monastery.33 Such pilgrim’s tales fueled the imaginations of an El Greco, a Breughel…. Of course, there was nothing quite like the biography of Constantin von Tischendorf himself. I had seen some of the 346+ folios of both the Old and New Testaments at the British Library. But behind glass. However, nothing could quite prepare for holding and studying the 1922 Codex Sinaiticvs Petropolitanvs

 ibid., Nelson and Collins, pp. 122–123.  Kurt Weitzmann, Manolis Chatzidakis, Krsto Miatev and Svetozar Radojðic. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1966, Plates 1–36, and p. IX. 32  Breidenbach’s Peregrinatio in terram sanctam, 1486; and Fabri’s Fratris Felicis Fabri Evagatorium in Terrae sanctae, Arabiae et Aegypti peregrinationem, first published in 1484 – https://archive.org/stream/libraryofpalesti07paleuoft/libraryofpalesti07paleuoft_djvu.txt, and eventually consolidated and published in three volumes. 33  Preserved In The Public Library Of Petrograd, In The Library Of The Society Of Ancient Literature In Petrograd, And In The Library Of The University Of Leipzig, Now Reproduced In Facsimile From Photographs By Helen And Kirsopp Lake, With A Description And Introduction To The History Of The Codex By Kirsopp Lake, Oxford, At the Clarendon Press, Oxford UK, 1922. 30 31

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Fig. 13.3  Fragments of the Codex Sinaiticus Petropolitanvs et Friderico-Avgvstanvs Lipsiensis, in the Facsimile Edition by Helen and Kirsopp, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1922. (Photo © M.C. Tobias)

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Friderico-Avgvstanvs Lipsiensis, The Old Testament.34 The ancient library at Caesarea, still flourishing in the third, possibly early fourth century, is the likely location where scribes edited this oldest known Greek translation from the Hebrew before it was moved to St. Catherine’s Monastery. Prior to that, it may have come from Alexandria. Replete with fabulous details—the vellum itself, the inks, notations, palimpsests, styles, corrections, and as yet unaccountable versions, wordtweaks, literal-versus-generic translations—the Codex and its enigmatic history is unquestionably one of the most perplexing and influential books ever written. Tischendorf attributed the entire New Testament portion of the Codex, held by the Vatican, as having been written down by the scribe denominated as “D.” What is generally not fully appreciated, brought to light by Tischendorf and noted at the end of Kirsopp’s own introduction to the Facsimile,35 is the likelihood “that D actually wrote the whole of Tobit and Judith, and probably the Pentateuch in the Old Testament, so that he was clearly a member of the scriptorium.” This places the Codex to within a century or two centuries, probably no more, from the living Christ. And that, in turn, conveys some sense of the sacralities swirling around that garden, those courtyards, the library, the basilica, the monks’ quarters, and the refectory of St. Catherine’s. Of the evening shadows through the olive grove, and the sweet morning songs of the Sinai rosefinch (the national bird of Jordan). Such sentiments are quintessentially logical, because of everything we imagine paradise to be: all those qualia and noumena remote from the here and now, but magnified in our thirst to escape imperfect realities. Of course, that same paradise is at odds with natural history. If evolution, as so many theologians after Darwin would argue, were pointed toward a purposeful, human odyssey, then why obsess so in the interest of renouncing our biological presence in favor of words targeting the unknown? Words amalgamated in the complex tapestry of edits and elusive source material that make up the Codex Sinaiticus? (Fig. 13.3). Of particular interest to us is the Old Testament and its fragmented incarnation in the Codex. As many as 929 chapters were predominantly written during the post- exilic years of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Predictions (of a coming Messiah), ambiguities, and paradise lost. A God as real as any vertebrate, with mood swings, tremendous anger, captivating love, an ability to alter his/her/its thinking, to forgive, to promulgate premonitory warnings (Moses and the Commandments) (Fig. 13.4). Browsing week after week through the monastery’s library and viewing firsthand many of its icons were dazzling enough. I spent days soloing the headwalls of Sinai, and the countless other nearby granite peaks and escarpments, in both snow-covered and blisteringly hot weather. I held up in a cave, a deep crevice which could easily  ibid., p. xxiii.  See “The Cryptic African Wolf: Canis aureus lupaster Is Not a Golden Jackal and Is Not Endemic to Egypt,” Eli Knispel Rueness, Maria Gulbrandsen Asmyhr, Claudio Sillero-Zubiri, David W. Macdonald, Afework Bekele, Anagaw Atickem, and Nils Chr. Stenseth, Thomas M. Gilbert, Editor, PLoS One. 2011; 6(1): e16385.Published online 2011 Jan 26, doi: https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0016385, PMCID: PMC3027653, PMID: 21298107, Accessed March 10, 2019. 34 35

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Fig. 13.4  Rare anonymous seventeenth-century Retablo Depicting Moses at Mount Sinai. (Private Collection). (Photo © M.C. Tobias)

have been inhabited during centuries past by any number of famed ascetics-turned- saints. The cool lambent nights were thick with the gorgeous communal howls of Egyptian jackals, taxa placed genetically within the “grey wolf species complex” as of 2011.36 The hot mornings emerged slowly to the lovely cooing of the Sinai doves. All in retrospect so many years later couches memory in that enigmatic bundle which was the Codex Sinaiticus itself: 188 lines in four columns, on average, per leaf, until, some halfway through, turning to two much thicker columns. A mesmerizing tale told with uncials of Alexandrian text-type. Each of the quaternions comprising four conjugate leaves is signed in red ink by a scribe, of which there were probably four or five, as well as three groups of so-called “correctors.” Nothing quite prepares the reader for the intensity of the manuscript, the density of its importunate style, and the obscurity of its provenance.

  See standard comparisons, see https://www.biblestudytools.com/micah/1-1-compare.html, Accessed March 13, 2019.