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Reading in the Dark: Zechariah, Daniel and the Difficulty of Scripture

2005; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 29; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/0309089205054758

1476-6728

Hugh S. Pyper,

Historical and Linguistic Studies

The relationship between the difficulty of a text and its function as scripture is explored in a juxtaposition of the books of Zechariah, Daniel, A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and the diaries of Sibelius. On this basis, the argument is made that the difficulty of a text for its readers may reflect the difficulty its writers had in reading precursor texts. Zechariah enacts the difficulty that the post-exilic community had in reading its own documents which were coming to be regarded as scripture. The discourse of revelation and immediate vision is itself dependent on previous reading. This, however, does not vitiate the claims of a text to be scripture, as this is a matter not for the author but for the readership to decide. For a text to be scripture describes a mode of reading rather than content. The difficulty of scripture is its point, and what it reveals is the inadequacy of the human grasp of revelation.