"Only Connect"
When the weather turns and the reality of winter approaching is no longer an avoidable event, I find myself foraging for books in libraries. I’m setting up provisions for less daylight. It’s never too early to start the process—lest one be caught unprepared.
My last two unplanned library excursions were typical of my eclectic tastes. Several weeks ago I read The Sisters of Sinai By Janet Soskice, the fascinating story of Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, —two Presbyterian Scotswomen. Educated by a father who believed that girls deserved the same education as boys—these Victorian women learned several languages including Ancient languages.
Loving to travel and having the wealth to do so they are credited with the discovery of a palimpsest containing the Gospels—written in Syriac, “ a dialect of the Aramaic Jesus spoke”. Eventually this document was shown to have preserved a translation from the second century B.C.E.
Their story, their erudition, and the difficulties they encountered when dealing with some male Biblical scholars, although not all, makes for a swashbuckling tale.
While in Cairo they bought, at an open-air market, some rather old Hebrew documents. In time they traced the papers to the Cairo Geniza. Back in Cambridge they brought these documents to Solomon Schechter, a Hebrew Scholar.
There I am in the library looking on the new nonfiction shelves and I read this title: Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole.
The first lines of their book: “When the self-taught Scottish scholar of Arabic and Syriac Agnes Lewis and her no-less-learned twin sister, Margaret Gibson, hurried down a street or a hallway, they moved as a friend later described them —“like ships in full sail.”
I couldn’t pass up this book.
My last two unplanned library excursions were typical of my eclectic tastes. Several weeks ago I read The Sisters of Sinai By Janet Soskice, the fascinating story of Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, —two Presbyterian Scotswomen. Educated by a father who believed that girls deserved the same education as boys—these Victorian women learned several languages including Ancient languages.
Loving to travel and having the wealth to do so they are credited with the discovery of a palimpsest containing the Gospels—written in Syriac, “ a dialect of the Aramaic Jesus spoke”. Eventually this document was shown to have preserved a translation from the second century B.C.E.
Their story, their erudition, and the difficulties they encountered when dealing with some male Biblical scholars, although not all, makes for a swashbuckling tale.
While in Cairo they bought, at an open-air market, some rather old Hebrew documents. In time they traced the papers to the Cairo Geniza. Back in Cambridge they brought these documents to Solomon Schechter, a Hebrew Scholar.
There I am in the library looking on the new nonfiction shelves and I read this title: Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole.
The first lines of their book: “When the self-taught Scottish scholar of Arabic and Syriac Agnes Lewis and her no-less-learned twin sister, Margaret Gibson, hurried down a street or a hallway, they moved as a friend later described them —“like ships in full sail.”
I couldn’t pass up this book.
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