Moving Texts

Abstract

The texts of the Writings in their sometimes bewildering generic variety, and their use through the centuries in multiple changing liturgical and secular contexts, have provided composers and visual artists ample room to blur the lines separating one sensory experience from the next. This is true even for those texts that seem on the surface the most stubbornly discursive and aniconic (like Proverbs)—texts least amenable to sustained visual, musical, narrative, or dramatic treatment. As David Brown has argued, readers in each generation are set free to appropriate what the imagination can discover in the interstices of the moving texts that are a religion’s story. Responding to the Writings as diverse as the Psalms, Daniel, and Job in works like the Utrecht Psalter, the Ludus Danielis, or Blake’s engravings from the Book of Job, the scriptural artist becomes in effect a scriptural performer, imaginatively blurring the boundaries separating exegetical from liturgical, musical, visual, and dramatic practice.