A handful of fragments

I've written here before about the tragedy of lost books -- and that prior to the invention of the printing press, the great likelihood is that most of the books ever written no longer exist.

It's not the overall loss of information, per se, that bothers me.  We certainly have access now to far more extensive information about the universe in which we live than at any time in history.  It's two things that are the real source of grief for me; the loss of knowledge of our own history, and the loss of seeing how the universe looked as filtered through other minds.  Each book is not only a record, it's a glimpse into the soul of the author.

When all of an author's books are gone, in a very real way, (s)he has been erased completely.

The extent to which ancient literature has been lost was driven home to me by the discovery that there are a bunch of instances of writing -- books, letters, poetry, codes of law, and so forth -- that are referenced in the Bible, but for which the originals have been lost.  Despite having read the Bible rather carefully (more than once), I honestly didn't know this.  Perhaps the fact that the references are generally made in passing, and (obviously, now that I know all this) alluding to no-longer-extant works I'd never heard of, the passages slipped by without my noticing.

Don't you have to wonder what was in those works that were referenced by the writers of the canonical books of the Bible, but which seem to have vanished forever?

Here are a few of the more interesting examples:

The Book of Jasher (Sefer HaYashar) is referenced twice -- in Joshua 10:13 ("And the Sun stood still, and the Moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves on their enemies.  Is this not written in Sefer HaYashar?") and in in 2 Samuel 1:18 ("To teach the sons of Judah the use of the bow.  Behold, it is written in the Book of Jasher.").  It's even more mysterious than it might seem; the translation of קָ֑שֶׁת, qāšeṯ, here rendered as "bow," may not have meant a bow as in a bow and arrow, but a name for a stylized form of lamentation.  There have been a number of instances of people "finding" the Book of Jasher that have been quickly identified as forgeries; what the original said is anyone's guess.

The Book of Shemaiah the Prophet and Story of the Prophet Iddo are both mentioned in the Second Book of Chronicles -- but the only thing we know about them are their titles.

The Book of the Acts of Solomon comes up in 1 Kings 11:41 -- "And the rest of the acts of Solomon, and all that he did, and his wisdom, are they not written in the Book of the Acts of Solomon?"  Well, it might well have been, but we'll never know, because the original is lost to history.

1 Chronicles 29:29 mentioned two lost books, and perhaps a third, in a single sentence: "Now the acts of David the king, first and last, behold, they are written in the Book of Samuel the Seer, and in the Book of Nathan the Prophet, and in the Book of Gad the Seer."  The first, the Book of Samuel the Seer, may refer to 1 and 2 Samuel, canonical books of the Old Testament; biblical scholars are divided on the point.  What's certain that the Book of Nathan and the Book of Gad are both lost.

Also mentioned in Chronicles -- 2 Chronicles 26:22, to be specific -- is the Book of the Acts of Uzziah.  All we know of it is its title.

There's even an example from the New Testament.  In Colossians 4:16, Paul writes, "And when this letter has been read among you, have it read also in the church of the Laodiceans; and see that you read also the letter from Laodicea."  There is no Epistle to the Laodiceans -- at least, there isn't now.

I bring this up to highlight how much of the written word we've lost over time.  If a work considered by many to be sacred, which has been carefully preserved and copied and treasured and hidden away when times were bad, still has pieces that have been lost forever, consider how much more of the world's literature is simply... gone.  Plays, stories, histories, scientific texts, maps, poems.  The majority of the creative output of the human race no longer exists.

Sorry to get all maudlin.  But it's why the end of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose gets me every damn time.

I know it's the way of all things; nothing lasts forever.  But the magnitude of the loss is just staggering.  Like Brother William and Brother Adso at the end of Eco's book, we are left with only a handful of fragments.  It's that sense that gives the book its name, and it seems a fitting way to end this rather elegiac piece: "Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus." 

"The rose of old remains only in its name; all we are left with in the end are naked names."

****************************************