Hidden Treasures of the Local Library

Lazy summer days with heat indexes over 100F are not days for Mighty Mouse Projects around the house & yard – but they are fine days to sit in the shade with a glass of ice water that has just a touch of lemon & read.  So when I deliver the trash & recycling to the local county facility for trash & recyclables I also visit my local branch of the regional public library.   It is my custom to wander up & down an aisle or two of the library & pick up 2 or 3 books, whatever catches my fancy at the time.  Recently this rather haphazard selection process netted me a real jewel. 

Now the title would led one to believe this tale concerns some non-canonical text or other, but this is not the case at all.  Rather it’s the tale of  the twin Presbyterian Scot sisters who found  the Sinaitic Pamplimsest  (a Syriac translation of the 4 canonical gospels) while searching for old Syriac manuscripts at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai desert.  The text is c.325 AD & thus rather important to the field of New Testament manuscript studies, but the best part of the story is the story of these 2 remarkable women.

These 2 Victorian Scot ladies were over 50 when they made their first trip to St. Catherine’s and they went unescorted by either husbands (both were widows) or fellow scholars.  The trip involved negotiating all transport from Alexandria on, including arranging for food & staff to prepare it, tents for themselves, camels for the land journey etc.  The year is 1893 & the Ottoman Empire is not a particularly safe place to travel.  Ok, Ok, so they both spoke Greek & Arabic, but that doesn’t make the trip itself safer.

Janet Soskice writes of Agnes & Margaret’s whole lives, not just finding of the manuscript.  It’s a good read whether or not you have any interest in manuscript studies. 

Meanwhile late summer is slowly morphing into early fall.  Only a few lightening bugs are rising each evening & there are no new plants in the understory of my woods.  I haven’t seen the brown skink in awhile but there are at least half a dozen little blue strip baby skinks running around the same brushy stump.  The nightly woods chorus has added insects to the frogs & toads of mid-summer.  The bird’s nest in my front bedroom window now has 4 Carolina wren babies in it.  Both mom & dad are busy keeping them fed.  And of course there are hummers – at least 2 nests of hummingbirds are in the white pines along the property line.  As the late summer orange flowers bloom along the wood line I’m sure I’ll see more hummers of an evening.  So the cycle of the seasons moves at its own pace.