The ‘speaking well of God [that] already proceeds from God’ has a name: Scripture. Scripture is the already-there of a phrase ‘of which the singularity would have to remain irreducible and its reference indispensable in a given idiom’. With these thoughts, Derrida evokes the question that will be addressed in this chapter: why every historical–political epoch has confronted the particular texts we call Scriptures as a figure of the divine.

Sacred Scriptures are not only the most read and studied scriptures, but also the most translated, and the most transformed into different practices. Literature, art, philosophy, morality and politics have all been significantly ‘steeped’ in biblical imaginaries. God is the unsayable, nobody can reach Him discursively; except Himself. Scripture is not a book about God, but God's speech that has been written down. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God says John at the beginning of his Gospel. We encounter that Word written down in the form of sacred Scriptures. The Scriptures are unique because they speak of God and at the same time claim that it is God who speaks. Other ‘scriptures’, which we find in every political community, such as contracts, covenants, constitutions, core literary texts of every civilisation can be interpreted, in a theological–political transposition, as figures of that trace. In fact, as Derrida asserts, ‘the very idea of institution – hence of the arbitrariness of the sign – is unthinkable before the possibility of writing and outside of its horizon’.