Odysseus crosses the world to return home, reclaim his estate, and restore his mastery. Abraham is carried across every boundary, leaving possession behind. One journey ends in conquest. The other begins with surrender.
Hearing Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic as a single grammar, Marc Philip Boulos follows that contrast through the Torah, Prophets, Gospel, and Qurʾan. Paul, he argues, does not imitate Homer. He takes the epic’s lexicon apart word by word, until glory reads as bankruptcy, victory arrives as a gift, and the imperishable is taken from fame and given to the body.
The stakes are not academic. The divorce of Hebrew from Arabic has a date, an address, and a politics. Gladstone governed an empire between drafts of his study of Homer; the philologists’ “Semite” passed into the administrators’ file; and what began as a way of reading a root ends with a bulldozer at the root of an olive tree.
An adīb is not a stylist and not an author. He is a man under discipline, formed by letters, who sets a table he does not own. Man of Letters is a call to abandon the fantasy of mastery and discover the freedom of owning nothing.
“Paul bid his hearers look at the letters, and Fr. Marc does. He sets Homer against Abraham not as rival heroes but as rival grammars: the nostos that returns a man to his inheritance, and the crossing that is done unto him. Scripture, he argues, is a direct critique of the epics: its hearers were schooled in them, and it uses the epics’ own language to subvert them. Western scholarship, formed on the classics, ‘hears its own demolition and calls it homage,’ and so turns the crossing into an identity inherited by birth. That same instinct divided Hebrew from Arabic. Recovering the Andalusian grammarians, he shows that ‘there is no Hebrew grammar that is not Arabic grammar,’ and reveals what was lost when that scholarship split their table. Learned, unflinching, and long overdue.”
—Andrea Bakas, author of Stones over Sand: A Memoir of Place and Return
ISBN 978-1-60191-071-4