ABSTRACT
The central argument of this chapter is that the use of texts proceeds within a specific social, material and spatial context, and that therefore an exclusive focus upon hermeneutics is inadequate if we want to pursue the broader question: what is the place of the Bible in Palestinian Christianity? An ethnographic vignette sets the scene:
Father Butros is the priest of the Syriac Orthodox Church in Bethlehem. Sitting in his office on a weekday evening in March 2010, I ask him about the distinctives of his Church. In response he makes straight for a hardbound volume of liturgy on his bookcase. Opening it at his desk he sings from the printed page, fingering the script as if inviting me, despite my inability to read Syriac, to follow. Abuna Butros knows these liturgies by heart and recalls that it took him over a year to master the melodies and the associated knowledge of where and when to use them.
Later in our conversation he emphasises the importance of the singing, saying that it gives us a taste of Heaven. More than that, ‘our songs are the songs of angels. We don’t celebrate it ourselves on our own but with the saints and the angels’. He begins to list significant aspects of sung worship: ‘We sing because it draws the singer into the atmosphere of the Mass; it dispels tiredness; a melody can be loved and learned and sung even while doing work, and it is good for the children’. He adds that the deacons sing liturgical and biblical texts with him for two hours prior to the Mass on a Sunday, which also consists mostly of singing by the clergy and lasts for around two hours.
