The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible
I am a sucker for stories about the search for lost documents, forgotten cities, hidden antiquities--fictional and non-fictional alike.* As a child I was spellbound by H. Rider Haggard's adventure novels, John Lloyd Stephen's account of his archaeological adventures in the Yucatan, and Heinrich Schliemann's obsessive search for Troy. Enough so that when My Own True Love and I visited Turkey for the first time I insisted on visiting the archaeological site of Troy even though 1) I was hobbling along with my foot in a cast and 2) there really isn't much to see.** Needless to say, I opened my review copy of Israeli journalist Chanan Tigay's The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World's Oldest Bible" with high hopes. I was not disappointed.
In 1883, a Jerusalem antiquities merchant named Wilhelm Moses Shapira offered to sell the British Museum what he claimed was an ancient copy of Deuteronomy for the breathtaking sum of one million pounds. After initial popular and scholarly excitement, the scrolls were dismissed as frauds. Shapira committed suicide soon after and his scrolls disappeared.
Tigay first heard the story of Shapira's scrolls in 2010. The tale caught his imagination, especially when he learned that Shapira's manuscripts were strikingly similar in form and reputed provenance to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the discovery of which six decades after Shapiro's death had fundamentally changed Biblical scholarship. A small group of scholars had come to believe that Shapira's scrolls might have been authentic. But without the scrolls themselves no one could know. Tigay was hooked. (So was I.)
The Lost Book of Moses tells the story of Tigay's attempt to locate Shapira's missing scrolls, a four-continent, fifteen-year trail of red herrings, unexpected leads, and repeated dead ends that led him to academic archives, antiquarian booksellers, museum storerooms, a hotel attic, and a surprising number of Anglican church services. Tigay places his search against the background of not only Shapira's life, but the broader context of the economic revival of Ottoman Jerusalem in the nineteenth century, venomous rivalries in the developing fields of Middle Eastern archaeology and Biblical textual criticism, and the art of faking antiquities.
The Lost Book of Moses is half treasure hunt, half research project, and wholly engaging.
The guts of this review first appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
*I'm sure I'm not alone in this. Otherwise why would the Indiana Jones movies be so popular? Even the bad ones.
**Unless you count the giant wooden version of the Trojan horse.
In Celebration of Nurses
Clara Barton with a class of nursing students
I've spent a lot of the last ten months thinking, reading, writing and talking about nurses.* In the months since Heroines of Mercy Street was published, I've spent a lot of time talking to nurses--and their friends, mothers, daughters, granddaughters and nieces. (I'm sure nurses also have fathers, sons, grandsons and nephews, but the men in their lives have not stepped up and identified themselves.) The experience has confirmed my long-held opinion that nurses rock.
Here in the United States, National Nurses' Week begins each year on May 6 and ends on May 12, Florence Nightingale's birthday.** Take the time to say thank you to the nurses in your life for a hard job well done.
*Like so many subjects, one thing leads to another. Civil War nurses led me inexorably to the formation of the first American nursing schools, nurses in the First World War, nurses in the Second World War, and, less obviously to an old favorite of mine, Mary Roberts Rinehart 's Miss Pinkerton novels. (I own a collection of several stories subtitled Adventures of a Nurse Detective.)Published prior to World War I, the stories give a vivid picture of what it was like to work as a nurse in the early years of the 20th century. To my surprise, it turns out that Rinehart graduated from nursing school in 1893, one of the first 500 trained nurses in the country. But I digress.
**One of history's true shin-kickers. Coming soon to a blog post near you.
Another Year, Another Book Giveaway!
Unlikely though it seems, this image courtesy of the Library of Congress
Gee, where did the last year go?*
It's hard to believe that we've been hanging out here at the Margins for five years. Some of you have been with me from the beginning. Some of you found the blog last week.(And glad we are to have you here.)
Five years ago I was so uncertain about the whole endeavor that my first blog post was an attempt to answer the question "Why Another History Blog?" I don't think my answer has changed much since then. I still have things I want to share with my fellow history nerds: a story that didn't quite fit in a larger piece, an odd connection that's tickled my brain, a book I'm excited about, a piece of news. I'm still delighted when you expand the conversation, whether by e-mail, comments on the blog itself, tweets, or Facebook posts. This year I'm particularly grateful for your support** as I've enjoyed the adventure surrounding my book. (There's one more piece of big news yet to come. Stay posted.)
It wouldn't be a birthday party without presents and I have a stack of books to give away. If you want to put your name in the medium-sized mixing bowl to win, leave a comment or send me an email before midnight Central Time on June 15. Tell me what historical period/event/figure you're reading about today, how you became a history buff, or which of these books catches your imagination:
Niccolò Capponi. The Day the Renaissance was Saved.
Robin Lane Fox. Augustine: Conversions to Confessions.
Keith Jeffrey. 1916: A Global History (THREE COPIES, not including the one I'm keeping!)
David Lough. No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money.
Geoffrey Wawro. A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire
Heroines of Mercy Street: Real Nurses of the Civil War. (I don't have to tell you who wrote that one, right?)
Here's to another year of history!
*Okay, we all know where the last year went. I wrote a book and then went down the promotion rat hole.
**And patience.