Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T10:16:11.386Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

INTRODUCTION: IN PRAISE OF VIRTUAL LETTERS

Philip R. Davies
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Philip R. Davies
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Get access

Summary

The title ‘Yours Faithfully’ might be a rather misleading one for this collection. Just as ‘virtual’, which used to mean something like ‘virtuous’, ‘possessing effective power’, now means ‘artificial’, ‘synthetic’ or ersatz (as in ‘virtual reality’), so these ‘virtual letters’ are of course confections. They are certainly not always faithful to historical reality or plausibility, though some do indeed try to represent the implied views of their supposed writers, most of whom have not had the opportunity of expressing these before. Nor are they all ‘faith-ful’, expressing religious values that many readers of the Bible espouse (and perhaps impute to the biblical characters, or at least the virtuous ones). Some, on the contrary, are defiant, and some subversive. But all, I hope, worth reading.

What do we define as a ‘letter’? In his edition of ancient Hebrew letters, Dennis Pardee defines a letter as ‘a written document effecting communication between two or more persons who cannot communicate orally’ (Pardee 1982: 2), but this defines the genre, not the function of each and every letter. Ancient letters serve a variety of writers, addressees and communicative contexts. The letter is not, and never was, always a real communication between two living persons. There are collections of both ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian model letters, provided for the training of scribes and, as Edward Wente says of the Egyptian examples (Wente 1990: 2), ‘it is not always easy to determine which of these letters are copies of real letters and which ones are entirely fictitious’.

Type
Chapter
Information
Yours Faithfully
Virtual Letters from the Bible
, pp. vii - xii
Publisher: Acumen Publishing
Print publication year: 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×