From Philology to Fossils: The Biblical Encyclopedia in Early Modern Europe

From Philology to Fossils: The Biblical Encyclopedia in EarlyModern Europe

Jonathan Sheehan

Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 64, Number 1, January 2003,pp. 41-60 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania PressDOI: 10.1353/jhi.2003.0018

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From Philology to Fossils:

The Biblical Encyclopedia in

Early Modern Europe

Jonathan Sheehan

In his 1672 Two Letters of Advice on the study of divinity the English

polymath and antiquarian Henry Dodwell recommended the diligent pursuit of

“Philological Learning” for all those interested in the biblical text. To read the

Bible properly demanded discipline and a steadfast attention to “the Tongues

and Phrases” of the biblical authors, which “will be gotten by reading ancient

Authors in their own words.” Sometimes, however, words were not enough. To

understand “matters of Fact” in their entirety, readers would have to turn to

“the thing it self.” “It will be necessary to study and compare History, and

Chronology, and Geographical descriptions” of the biblical lands, Dodwell

explained, nor could one neglect either the “Doctrinals ... and the Traditions of

the Jewish Church” or the histories told by the “ancientest Greek Poets.”1 The

deist Anthony Collins was mocking, but at the same time recognizing, this

totalistic ideal that shaped biblical scholarship as it developed in the later sev-

enteenth century when he remarked in 1713 that “there is not perhaps in the

World so miscellaneous a Book, and which treats of such Variety of things as

the Bible does”:

There is a natural History of the Creation of the whole Universe...and

a Civil and Ecclesiastical History of all Mankind from the Beginning

of the World for above 2000 years.... There are contain’d in it the mu-

nicipal Laws of a Country, the Institution of two Religions ... several

natural and miraculous Phaenomena of Nature; Descriptions of mag-

nificent Buildings, References to Husbandry, Sailing, Physick, Phar-

macy, Mathematicks, and every thing else that can be named. 2

1 Henry Dodwell, Two Letters of Advice (London, 16913), 153, 157, 169, 171.2 Anthony Collins, A Discourse of Free-Thinking (London, 1713), 10-11.

41

Copyright 2003 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.

64.1sheehan.7 4/11/03, 2:57 PM41

public.press.jhu.edu

42 Jonathan Sheehan

The idea of ordering this immense variety of information was, for Collins, the

ultimate joke. But other scholars were far more serious about this pursuit, not

least Dodwell himself, who suggested that the “professed Divine ... make the

Bible his Common place Book for all his other Studies.” In doing so, the divine

would find himself able to organize (in memory and on paper) the enormous

quantities of information available about the biblical world.3

Dodwell the antiquarian was not alone in his catholic aspirations for the

pursuit of scholarship. This was, after all, a time when antiquarianism—as

Arnaldo Momigliano reminded us fifty years ago and as the “new antiquarian-

ism” pioneered by scholars like Anthony Grafton, Blandine Barret-Kriegel,

and Peter Miller reminds us today—became a dominant form of literary ex-

pression, as it experimented with new methods of historical research, new evi-

dentiary protocols, and new comprehensive visions of the scholarly task.4

Dodwell was firmly within this context, but his suggestion that the Bible be-

come a pragmatic tool for organizing information nonetheless bears some scru-

tiny. It came at a time of particular anxiety that, as Richard Yeo has put it, “the

growth of books had reached a crisis point.” “How is it possible to understand

the whole universe?” asked one puzzled scholar in 1643, and his voice was

only one of a chorus complaining of the overwhelming amount of sheer data

available for scholarly processing.5 But unlike other scholars content to lament

this state of affairs, Dodwell had in mind a solution, one that was independent

of the materials studied, one that was wholly formal and functional. The quan-

tity of information, he intimated, could be brought to heel through the interces-

sion of a technique of organization that would allow for the flexible arrange-

ment and display of virtually all the materials that might fall into the hands of

the biblical scholar, the commonplace book.

In this article I will focus on techniques for presenting and organizing ma-

terials as they were developed within biblical scholarship in response to what

this forum is calling the “information overload” of the early modern period.

My goal is neither to rehearse the anxieties felt by scholars (nicely detailed

here by Ann Blair and Richard Yeo), nor is it to explore the varieties of theo-

logical, historical, and philological knowledge developed within early modern

biblical scholarship. Rather, I want to investigate the strategies that biblical

scholars used to manage a superabundance of information. Information and

knowledge are, after all, fundamentally different things. As far as knowledge is

3 Dodwell, Two Letters, 239.4 See in particular Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” Studies in

Historiography (New York, 1966); Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of

Classical Scholarship (2 vols.; Oxford, 1983-93); also Blandine Barret-Kriegel, La défaite de

l’érudition (Paris, 1988), and Peter Miller, Peiresc’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seven-

teenth-Century (New Haven, 2000).5 Richard Yeo, Enlightenment Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture

(Cambridge, 2001), 87.

64.1sheehan.7 4/11/03, 2:57 PM42

Early Modern Information Overload 43

concerned, information is only “noise” until it is determined to be part of a

constellation of things relevant to the claims at hand. The problem of informa-

tion overload was not in other words an epistemological problem per se. Rather

it was an organizational one whose functional solutions had epistemological

consequences. It was an organizational problem because it demanded tech-

niques of distribution and control that would allow scholars to present and

articulate meaningful statements about the information they deemed relevant.

And the solutions were functional insofar as they provided—like Kantian cat-

egories—a matrix in which these statements could be generated. One of the

key early modern solutions to abundance, one of the few that still exist in rec-

ognizable form even today, was that inheritor of the tradition of common places,

the encyclopedia.6 As such, the biblical encyclopedia as it emerged and devel-

oped in early modern biblical scholarship can help us to see how the play of

erudition was constrained and channeled, and how formal strategies of organi-

zation helped to overcome (and yet ironically also augment) the problem of

information overload.

Beyond the Map of Knowledge: From Alsted to Bochart

Even in an epoch of compulsive list makers the seventeenth-century Cal-

vinist pedagogue and German scholar Johann Heinrich Alsted stood out. If an

infinite capacity for distinctions and differences were considered wisdom, then

Alsted was the veritable Solomon of his age, frenetically devising intricate

maps of knowledge for every conceivable early modern philosophical, artistic,

medical, and theological topic. Scholarly disciplines, in particular, were a spe-

cial fascination. Imagine, then, his joy at finding so many disciplines in the

Holy Scriptures: pneumatics, physics, metaphysics, arithmetic, geometry, cos-

mography, geography, optics, music, architecture, ethics, economics, politics,

lexicography, grammar, rhetoric, logic, oratory, poetics, mnemonics, and juris-

prudence, among others; and this omits the eight varieties of theological in-

quiry. “There is no book but Sacred Scripture,” he concluded his 1625 Triumph

of the Sacred Books, or, the Biblical Encyclopedia. For those who mistakenly

believe that “there is no profound philosophy in this sacred book” his system-

atic explanation of the foundation of the disciplines in the biblical text would

prove answer enough.7

This biblical encyclopedia was part of the overall project that produced

Alsted’s encyclopedia of philosophy in 1620, and the expanded 1630 Encyclo-

6 Ann Blair, “Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book,” JHI, 53

(1992), 541-51; Richard Yeo, Encyclopedic Visions, 4.7 Johann Heinrich Alsted, Triumphus bibliorum sacrorum seu encyclopaedia biblica (Frank-

furt, 1625), 622. On Alsted, see Howard Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 1588-1638: Between

Renaissance, Reformation, and Universal Reform (Oxford, 2000).

64.1sheehan.7 4/11/03, 2:57 PM43

44 Jonathan Sheehan

pedia, a book that presumed to order all of human knowledge in a comprehen-

sive way. There is nothing “more beautiful or fruitful than order,” sang Alsted

in his introduction to the thirty-eight maps that broke down and reconstituted

the entire corpus of human knowledge. Order expressed the divine in human

knolwedge, just as “in the church of god [order] is the nerves of its mystic

body.”8 Definition, division, method: these were the three pillars of Alsted’s

pedagogy, and the maps of knowledge that began his great synthesis were tes-

tament enough to the systematic impulses that governed his work. The Alstedian

encyclopedia was the “methodical comprehension of all things that should be

learned in a human lifetime,” ranging from habits of mind to optics to the intri-

cacies of Arabic grammar. This “Pandect” of the disciplines gave its reader not

just the content of these disciplines but very intellectual disposition to apply

them profitably to human existence.9

Alsted’s polymathy was unusual even for its day, but his methodological

impulses were not. Through Alsted’s own corpus ran the bright thread of Peter

Ramus’s overweening didacticism, a didacticism whose pretension of encom-

passing the entire corpus of human knowledge was both its attraction and the

cause of its ultimate demise. From Ramus and the Ramists who inhabited the

late sixteenth century, Alsted took the absolute faith that knowledge was ulti-

mately comprehensible within a logical structure, in fact was only comprehen-

sible within a logical structure. In this sense the maps on Alsted’s pages were

the very representation of human thought itself, at least human thought that had

been appropriately disciplined and trained. Trees of knowledge did not bear a

merely metaphorical relationship to the materials they organized; rather they

were essentially connected. Just as for Ramus the “order found within things

themselves” and the order of the “contents of consciousness” were identical, so

too did Alsted see the ordo naturalis—the natural order of things—as the guar-

antee of the “unity of knowledge” and thus of the congruity between the inner

workings of the mind, the divisions of knowledge, and the natural order of the

world.10

If Alsted’s work sought what the later compiler Johann Zedler defined as

the essence of the encyclopedia—“the juxtaposition of all the sciences in order

to represent the order in which one grows from another”—this systematic drive

had an ambiguous relationship to the encyclopedism that later developed in the

Early Modern period.11 To be sure, for a long time, Alsted and the entire late

8 Johann Heinrich Alsted, Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta (Herborn, 1630), 1.9 Ibid.10 Walter Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, 1958), 195; Franz

M. Eybl, “Bibelenzyklopädien im Spannungsfeld von Konfession, Topic und Buchwesen,” in

Enzyklopädien der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. Franz M. Eybl, Wolfgang Harms et al. (Tübingen, 1995),

127.11 Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon (Halle, 1741), s.v.

“encyclopaedia.”

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sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century efforts to regularize and systematize

human knowledge, have been linked by scholars like Walter Ong to the devel-

opment of the modern encyclopedia. The charts found in Ephraim Chambers’s

1728 Cyclopaedia and the 1751 French Encyclopédie do bear more than a pass-

ing resemblance to an Alstedian diagram of the faculties of knowledge.12 But

even a cursory comparison reveals the utter chasm that separated Alstedian

encyclopedism from its later incarnations.

We can see this clearly in the biblical encyclopedia. Specifically, let us

look for a moment at Alsted’s so-called theriologia sacra, “special physics [or

science] of the nature of terrestrial beasts, collected from Scripture.”13 Alsted

broke the theriologia sacra into parts: in good Aristotelian fashion, terrestrial

beasts were “animals made from earth and that live on earth.” There were “vari-

ous kinds” of animals: beasts of the field, wild beasts, reptiles, and so on. Alsted

mentioned a few curiosities—that some think the Behemoth in Job 40 is a

crocodile, for example—and gave the locus classicus for the horse, wolf, mule,

dog and so on. But that’s it! In some sense I suppose it is an “encyclopedic”

treatment of the Bible, but only in the most superficial and pedantic sense.

Indeed, this very superficiality of Alsted’s book—and his entire corpus—is so

mindboggling that it cannot be merely a result of intellectual shallowness. Alsted

may not have been a genius, but he was clearly dedicated and learned enough

to have plumbed the depths of his disciplines more fully.

Instead, this superficiality and pedantry was, I think, itself a programmatic

position, and one that set apart Alsted’s early “encyclopedic” project from those

that followed. Granted, it is hard to think of pedantry as a program, but we have

to wonder at Alsted’s definitions, a day, he said, is when “the sun shines.” A

week is an interval of “seven days,” he announced, and then proved it with

biblical citations.14 Pedantry per se was not, of course, the goal here. Rather,

the project has an insufferably pedantic ring to the modern reader because for

Alsted encyclopedism was a synonym for “structure.” It was an organizational

tool that functioned to generate in a kind of ars combinativa all of the configu-

rations of disciplines possible within a natural order. Content was fundamen-

tally insignificant, in other words, to this larger organizational goal, with the

result that the little “content” present in Alsted’s text was vapid and transitory.

“Information overload” was thus no part at all of Alsted’s universe, since infor-

mation per se was in fact largely irrelevant. Adding more facts was, at root,

unimportant for Alsted’s scheme. As a result, Alsted’s cheerful admission of

incompletion, since “something always can be added from the inexhaustable

spring of the Scriptures,” detracted not at all from his essential confidence

12 See Yeo, Enlightenment Visions, 27ff.13 Alsted, Triumphus, 92.14 Ibid., 121, 133.

64.1sheehan.7 4/11/03, 2:57 PM45

46 Jonathan Sheehan

about his method.15 It was a confidence predicated on the organizational schema

employed by the project, which radically restricted the field of relevant infor-

mation.

In general, however, the psychological precondition to the encyclopedism

that developed in the later seventeenth century had little in common with Alsted’s

brash confidence. Instead it reflected near desperation at keeping the world of

knowledge under and between wraps.16 In Franz Eybl’s words the mid-seven-

teenth century discovered, to its chagrin, that the ordo naturalis “could no longer

practically organize the biblical material.”17 This chagrin and its effects strongly

mark that seventeenth-century monument to “theriologia sacra,” Samuel

Bochart’s Hierozoicon, or Two Part Work on the Animals of Sacred Scripture

(1663). “Because truth cannot differ from truth,” Bochart wrote in his dedica-

tion to the English King Charles II, “I am moved to reconcile the philosophers

with the prophets.”18 The anxiety hidden behind this statement, that (prophetic)

truth might indeed differ from (physical) truth, was the motor of Bochart’s

entire project to combine between two covers a compendium of sacred and

secular “theriology.” There are “innumerable” species of animals, Bochart de-

clared in his preface, and to describe them in detail was an “immense work, and

one for which the powers of a single man are insufficient nor is his life long

enough.”19 As he wrote in his 1651 Geographia sacra, “we are not capable of

everything. To know everything is for God alone.”20 There are animals of the

sea, of the land, of both; there are “complete” animals with five senses, and

incomplete ones with fewer. Some are smooth, some hairy, some feathered,

some scaled, some shelled; some are solitary, some are social, some docile,

some indocile; some love darkness, others light. There are lazy animals, and

industrious ones, herbivores, omnivores, carnivores. And Bochart’s list went

on, a straightforward acknowledgment of the poverty of distinctions as a pri-

mary tool for organizing the infinite world of nature.21

But the Bible narrowed the field for Bochart: it circumscribed a terrain that

might be feasible. Just as “in nature nothing is made in vain,” so too in Scrip-

ture “nothing is written in vain.”22 The written text of Scripture provided—or

at least should have provided—a technique of limitation of a nature whose

15 Alsted, Triumphus: 2v.16 See also Helmut Zedelmaier, Bibliotheca universalis und Bibliotheca selecta: Das Prob-

lem der Ordnung des gelehrten Wissens in frühen Neuzeit (Köln, 1992), 242.17 Eybl, “Bibelenzyklopädien,” 135.18 Samuel Bochart, Hierozoicon, sive bipartitum opus de animalibus sacrae scripturae (Lon-

don, 1663), dedicatory epistle.19 Bochart, Hierozoicon, “Praefatio ad lectorem,” ar.20 Samuel Bochart, Geographiae sacrae pars prior (Caen, 1651), i4r.21 Bochart, Hierozoicon, “Praefatio ad lectorem,” ar.22 Bochart, Geographiae, i4v.

64.1sheehan.7 4/11/03, 2:57 PM46


divisions were dauntingly huge. By looking at Biblical animals, in other words,

the task seemed less daunting, and in a moment of giddy optimism Bochart,

too, provided his readers with a Ramist map of knowledge. But the book itself

immediately belied any ostensible systematicity. Take, just as an example, the

section on the camel, the first of the “domestic quadrupeds,” which is divided

into several sections: names of camels, uses of camels, which camels are called

by the Hebrew word bikrim, on the three species of camels, proverbs about

camels, including the famous camel and the eye of the needle.

Here is what Bochart had to say about the uses of the camel: “That camels

were very common in Judea and nearby locations is clear from Scripture,”

Bochart began, and referred his readers to Job, then to Aristotle, then back to

Moses, and then to Leo Africanus, the book of Judah, and the Roman writer

Publius Papinius Statius. This was all to show that camels were found among

the “Egyptian, Sabians, Ishmaelites, Cedarites,” and so on. Camels, he wrote,

not only carried “people, baggage, food, merchandise, and precious things” but

were also used in war, a claim that precipitated an avalanche of lengthy quota-

tions and references, ranging from Genesis, Samuel, Kings, and Judges, to Pliny,

Strabo, Diodorus, Herodotus, and Julius Pollux. Their hair was used for cloth-

ing, as reported by Aelian, Maimonides, and other Talmudists. They were praised

in “many elogia” and called “ships of the earth,” for without them, the “enor-

mous deserts of Asia and Africa would be utterly inaccessible.” Their milk and

meat were commonly eaten, as Aristotle, Pliny, Jerome, Antiphanes, and a group

of unnamed Arabs reported at length.23

This inundation of details was the signature of Bochart’s work, which pre-

sented an equally rich treatment of mules, cows, lions, hyenas, and the ibex.

What may have seemed a straightforward task, in other words, for Alsted—

essentially providing a lexicon and concordance of biblical animals—exploded

into typographical and scholarly chaos in the hands of Bochart. If you took

seriously the proposition that “there is no book but Sacred Scripture,” as Bochart

and many others in the seventeenth century did, the result was a vast

interannotated encyclopedia of the natural world. From camels to asses to ants,

from the Passover lamb to the Golden Calf: you could find it all in Bochart’s

book. The coherence of the chart was left behind and what was supposed to be

a technique of limitation revealed instead the infinite ramifications that attended

the encyclopedic project.

In general, encyclopedic biblical scholars like Bochart faced a double di-

lemma. On the one hand there was the simple accumulation of more stuff about

the Bible and the biblical world. As Peter Miller has put it, the study of “Israel

and Egypt was stimulated by a profusion of new materials” discovered in the

23 Bochart, Hierozoicon, 77ff.

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48 Jonathan Sheehan

seventeenth century.24 So discoveries of Samaritan manuscripts, Arabic and

Coptic sources, exploitation of the wealth of information in the Talmud, and

even voyages abroad quantitatively added more bricks to the heap. This is the

problem of “more books” discussed by some of the papers in this forum. On the

other hand what counted as information about the Bible qualitatively changed

over the course of the late Renaissance. In an earlier period, for critics like

Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus, scrutiny of the Bible was for the most part limited

to investigation of the biblical text. It entailed philological investigation of

manuscripts, where philology was understood as a discipline about words. For

scholars like Bochart, however, textual philology exploded off the page and

included not just words but also a panorama of natural, historical, political, and

anthropological details. As Bochart put it, in order to move beyond the “dreams”

of those who would distort the words of prophets, “it is necessary to begin

interpretation with words” but then “to move to the things” themselves.25

Momigliano spotted this years ago in the context of Greek and Roman antiqui-

ties when he spoke of a “new humanism” that “altogether subordinated literary

texts to coins, statues, vases and inscriptions.”26 And it was in this period, as

Thomas Kaufmann has recently shown, that the “interpretation of objects” be-

came a cornerstone in the “construction of cultural history” of art.27 Bochart’s

expanded purview was in other words not an isolated phenomenon in the mid-

seventeenth century but rather an important instance of a wider trend that made

antiquarianism into a broadly European intellectual movement.

These two distinct aspects of the problem confronting Bochart, one quan-

titative and one qualitative, were not symmetrical. Instead, the quantitative is-

sue was fundamentally subordinate to the qualitative one. Abundance of stuff

(quantitative) only causes anxiety when the scholar shoulders the burden of

complete inclusion (qualitative). For Alsted, the quantity of information at his

fingertips was nearly identical to that of Bochart and his later peers, but Alsted

was blithely unconcerned because for him the information that later plagued

Bochart was simply irrelevant. It was not, in fact, information at all, but merely

peripheral noise. One might, of course, read Ramism and Alsted’s version of it

as cultural “repressions” of the variety of information available to them. Cer-

tainly the awareness of the diversity of the world’s contents was acknowledged,

as Ann Blair shows in her paper, long before 1650. Yet, for scholars like Alsted

and Ramus this diversity was essentially unimportant. But once it was accepted,

across the scholared world of the mid-seventeenth century, that a complete

24 Peter N. Miller, “The ‘Antiquarianization’ of Biblical Scholarship and the London Poly-

glot Bible (1653-1657),” JHI, 62 (2001), 464.25 Bochart, Hierozoicon, b2r-v.26 Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” 1.27 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, “Antiquarianism, the History of Objects, and the History of

Art before Winckelmann,” JHI, 62 (2001), 531.

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description (or better, history) of a thing required a precise enumeration of all

of its various components, then encyclopedism became, at the same time, the

solution to the problem of this multiplicity and a index of the failure of scholars

ever to achieve their goals. This was as true in classical domains as it was in

biblical ones, where scholars like Bochart used formal techniques to limit the

horizon of their enquiry and yet still found themselves engaged in an infinite

task. The collection of more materials did not, as the enormous volumes of

antiquarian and natural historical researches in the period testified, satisfy any

scholarly appetites. Rather, like magical candy, each object only made scholars

hungry for more. The encyclopedia was born out of this hunger.

This qualitative shift, the creation of this polymathic imperative, was prob-

ably the product of a wide variety of causes, including confessional strife, an

impulse toward ecumenism, anxiety about skepticism, and the disintegration

of the boundaries between Aristotelian disciplines.28 The solutions to the ex-

panding field of knowledge, however, were limited in number. One involved

division of the Bible into kinds of knowledge. Bochart’s books on animals and

geography tried this, as did Wolfgang Franz’s Historia animialium sacra (1613),

Johann Ursin’s Continuatio Historiae plantarum Biblicae (1665) and many

other books about sacred coins, clothing, and architecture. Another solution

was compilation. Instead of specializing in a single domain of knowledge, late

seventeenth-century editors like John Pearson and Matthew Poole attempted to

systematically collect this expanding universe of relevant information. But as

their fourteen folio volumes showed (the nine volume 1660 Critici Sacri and

the five volume 1669 Synopsis Criticorum), collection did not solve the prob-

lem but rather served only to exacerbate it, showing in concrete form the possi-

bility of an endless expansion of relevant information.

And so it was not until the early eighteenth century that a novel technique

of containment was brought to bear on the problem, a technique ultimately

rooted in the biblical text itself. If Alsted and other seventeenth-century

polymaths placed the biblical encyclopedia within a deductive and logically

systematic structure of human and divine knowledge, by the eighteenth cen-

tury, the Bible itself became an organizational structure. Dodwell’s recommen-

dation in 1672 that the divine should “make the Bible his Common place Book

for all his other Studies” was, as it were, taken literally; and the Bible, already

a book of topical commonplaces for the learned, was made into organizational

28 Momigliano famously associated this change with an anti-skeptical imperative (see “An-

cient History,” esp. 10-11); Peter Miller has connected it to ecumenical reactions against reli-

gious fanaticism ( see “London Polyglot,” 471); Amos Funkenstein has described it as a function

of disciplinary metabasis (Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the

Seventeenth Century [Princeton, 1986], 303-7).

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50 Jonathan Sheehan

system for presenting and containing not just knowledge about the biblical

world but also knowledge itself in its humanistic, religious, and natural histori-

cal incarnations.29

The Encyclopedic Bible: Johann Scheuchzer’s Physica Sacra

The Physica sacra, or Copper Bible of the Swiss doctor and natural histo-

rian Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, published between 1731 and 1735 in four fat

folio volumes, was a marvel of eighteenth-century publishing, not least for the

761 folio copperplate engravings of scenes of cosmology, history, numismat-

ics, anatomy, geology, biology, entomology, architecture, anthropology, fash-

ion, zoology, and geometry that adorned its pages. Beside each engraving were

appropriate biblical verses, presented in two parallel German translations, which

nestled atop a vast swamp of scholarly and theological annotations. From Gen-

esis to the end of the New Testament it presented a cornucopia of observations

on the varieties of human and natural history. Supported by thirty-four folio

pages of references to scholars who ranged from Bochart, to the martyr

Anastasius, to the Lutheran scholastic theologian Abraham Calov, and not over-

looking Jean Le Clerc, Hermann Witsius, Claude Salmasius, Pliny, Philo, and

Origen. Works on medicine and geology were arrayed next to oriental lexicons

and histories of ancient Judaism. All jostled uncomfortably together in the notes

that underlay each passage.

For a long time, this monumental production has easily been assimilated to

the tradition of “physico-theology” so common in Germany, Switzerland, and

England in the early eighteenth century.30 Certainly Scheuchzer’s text operated

within this intellectual framework, that is, it attempted to harmonize scientific

findings with the biblical story, it broadly embraced the natural world as evi-

dence of God’s design, and it eschewed the poisonous religious polemics that

had shattered European societies in the seventeenth century. But the focus on

theological dispositions obscures rather than illuminates the novelty of the en-

terprise, for the Physica sacra was not designed to renovate theology but rather

to offer a wholly new technique for presenting scholarship on the biblical world.

It was built, in short, as a tool for managing information overload and its strat-

egies of management were impressed upon its every page.

29 Dodwell, Two Letters, 239.30 All of Scheuchzer’s modern biographers make this point. For Hans Hubschmid, (Gott,

Mensch, und Welt in der schweizerischen Aufklärung) [n.p., 1950], 3-41, Scheuchzer was an

optimist for whom all “science led to God”; see also Hans Fischer, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer:

Naturforscher und Arzt [Zürich, 1973]); Irmgard Müsch (Geheiligte Naturwissenschaft: Die

Kupfer-Bibel des Johann Jakob Scheuchzers [Göttingen, 2000]), is on the cusp of this tradition,

beginning the move away from the “physiotheological functionalization of the mechanical world-

picture as a proof of God.”

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We can start by looking at one of the most dramatic images from the col-

lection, the Homo ex humo, the “man from dust” engraving attached to Genesis

1.26 (fig. 1). Inside the frame, we see the awestruck Adam, suddenly and sur-

prisingly thrown into a paradise of birds, beasts, trees, rivers, and hills. Look-

ing up at the light of God, Adam is bewildered, his hands halfway between

prayerful worship and frightened rejection. But this familiar interior scene is

dwarfed by scenes presented on the frame of the image, a series of ornamented

developmental snapshots of human development from egg in the womb, to

fully formed embryo, to a fetus, stripped of flesh, bearing on the left side a

“fertile egg,” and on the right wiping away tears with a blood enriched pla-

centa. Visually, the frame was apparently a commentary on the interior scene.

But the meaning of this commentary was obscure. It could be, for example, that

the two images were supposed to complement each other. Where the creation

of Adam might function to tell the story of mankind as a whole, the frame

could give us our own personal histories, the forgotten experience of gestation

and repeated daily across the world. But it might also be that the frame is actu-

ally criticizing the image (or vice versa for that matter), and we could read this

as the opposition of biological and theological origin stories. The image is

ultimately unhelpful in deciding this dilemma, for its contents stand in mute

equilibrium with no hint of an interpretive conclusion.

If the interpretive dilemma was unresolved by the image, a reader might

reasonably expect that the commentary would clear the matter up satisfacto-

rily. But not in this case. Instead, the commentary was as steadfastly inconclu-

sive as the image. In it Scheuchzer described how “this noblest and saddest of

creatures,” mankind, stepped onto the “stage of the world” in a moment of

sudden divine intervention, testament to the awesome power of God and the

obligation of man to acknowledge his own “servitude.”31 This theological mo-

ment, corresponding roughly with the interior of the frame, was simply plopped

next to the anatomical commentary, which described the “development of man”

from an embryo the size of an “anise seed” to the child “bemoaning human

sorrow.”32 At no time were the visible or intellectual tensions between these

resolved. Rather they were merely presented as collected information without

logical, scientific, or theological hierarchy, or structure.

The refusal to enforce levels of priority between the different modalities of

commentary typified Scheuzcher’s entire project and led to a tangle of inter-

pretive possibilities. The story of the Tower of Babel, for example, presented a

by no means untypical juxtaposition of different materials. Scheuchzer’s analysis

centered around five separate images related to the Tower. The first detailed

31 Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, Kupfer-Bibel: in welcher die Physica sacra, oder beheiligte

Naturwissenschafft derer in Heil / Schrifft vorkommenden natürlichen Sachen, deutlich erklärt

und bewährt (Ulm, 1731-35), I, 30-31.32 Scheuchzer, Kupfer-Bibel, I, 32

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52 Jonathan Sheehan

Figure 1: Homo ex humo. Scheuchzer, Kupfer-Bibel (1731-35).

Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

64.1sheehan.7 4/11/03, 2:58 PM52


the mythical overthrow of the giants that the Babel legend was supposed to

underwrite, the next three were architectural diagrams, two interior plans and

one exterior, and the final presented the historical event itself, giving a specific

picture of the process of construction. This wide range of information was

recapitulated in the commentary, which deliberated not only on the Tower and

its moral lesson but also on the incredible feats of civil architecture and engi-

neering that such an enterprise required. Scheuchzer’s story began with Nimrod,

supposed monarch of Babel, who built the tower not just out his hubristic de-

sire to scratch the very gates of heaven, but also in order to “unify the surround-

ing tribes … to make citizens out of farmers.” These politico-theological ori-

gins of the tower were not, however, the only accounts available to the Early

Modern scholar. Other possibilities, Scheuchzer’s commentary was careful to

note, included Josephus’s argument that the tower was a monument to the Flood,

Diodorus Siculus’s claim that the tower was an astronomical observatory, and

the possible parallels between Babel and the efforts of Chinese emperor

“Hiaovo” to build a tower to touch the moon.33

From this series of mythological stories, the Physica sacra moved to the

practical: how was the tower built? If actually built to the heavens, Scheuchzer

argued, it would have used fifty times the amount of building material avail-

able on Earth, so it was certainly lower than that. But what shape was it? Per-

haps a cone (fig. 2). Or perhaps a pyramid (fig. 3). He left both possibilities

open. The text seemed to favor a circular plan even as Scheuchzer approvingly

looked to Athanasius Kircher’s argument for the pyramidal shape of structure.

Leaving such considerations unresolved, Scheuchzer toured the pragmatic con-

siderations involved in such a vast project. The Tower of Babel was a civil

engineering nightmare, and to unravel its mysteries the commentary relied on

Leonhard Sturm’s Mathesis ad Sacrae Scripturae (1710). Babelian architec-

ture demanded some general principles, such that, for instance, for every ten

stories, the walls had to increase in thickness by ten feet, that the bottom level

had to be about ten times as high as the topmost level, that the proportion

between height and breadth was about twelve to one, and so on. A table of

measurements—of wall thickness, tower radius, area of the tower, and height—

was helpfully provided.34 Finally, of course, the Tower was not only a problem

of engineering, it was also problem of human organization. To build it would

have taken, Scheuchzer told his readers, about a fifth of the total human popu-

lation alive at the time, or exactly 1,763,128 people. Even with such a vast

work force, this twelve-year task required both great architectural skill and

immense organizational efforts, coordination of men and materials, food for

the workers, and so forth.

33 Ibid, I, 84, 85.34 Scheuchzer, Kupfer-Bibel, I, 86-88.

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54 Jonathan Sheehan

In effect, then, the Tower of Babel, for Scheuchzer, introduced a minor

treatise on mythology, engineering, politics, civil organization, and, not least,

religion. Like Bochart before him—and like the antiquaries of the seventeenth

century more generally—Scheuzcher’s project encompassed the fullest range

of evidentiary possibilities. Its philological excurses on Hebrew etymology were

supplemented by a host of materials, including bones, coins, plants, bugs, maps,

building plans, and clothing. Where Bochart restricted his field of analysis,

however, constraining his work to sacred theriology and geography, Scheuchzer

gaily invited the full plenitude of available materials into his text. Thus Bochart

became mere fodder for Scheuchzer’s own mill, helpfully explaining key trans-

lational problems and geographical conundra, but was no more an authority

Figures 2 and 3: Tower of Babel, Scheuchzer, Kupfer-Bibel (1731-35).

Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

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that, say, Suidas, Pliny, or the Rabbi Kimchi.35 This pattern of ecumenical in-

clusion was repeated throughout the four volumes, as Scheuchzer used pas-

sages from the Bible to explore such various topics as the development of chick-

ens in the egg, the inner structure of plants, the variety of known fossils, the

shapes of mushrooms, the shape of Noah’s arc, the physics of the rainbow, and

the social life of the ants.

The overdetermination of each passage, with the dense network of accom-

panying annotations was only increased when the reader realized that the im-

ages in many of the plates are not “originals” in any sense of the word. Instead

they were themselves citations of other images in other texts, some related and

some foreign to the biblical story. So Scheuchzer’s Homo ex humo, for ex-

ample, pirated the drawings of fetal skeletons from the Dutch doctor Frederick

Ruysch, whose anatomical publications and preparations (particularly of in-

fants and children) were the sensation of late seventeenth-century Europe (fig.

4). This was not a unique episode. On the contrary, many of the images in the

text were unoriginal. Other anatomical citations (from Andreas Vesalius and

others) appeared in Job 10.8-12 and 27.3, stock Renaissance physiognomic

images punctuated Genesis 4, Athanasius Kircher provided Egyptian imagery

in Exodus 32.4, and natural historical plates from Ulysse Aldrovandi, Marcello

Malpighi, Robert Morison, and Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek were scattered liber-

ally throughout the entire work. In their more extreme form, these “citational

images” virtually consumed the entire page. Genesis 20.16—“And to Sarah,

[Abimelech] said ‘Behold, I have given your brother a thousand pieces of sil-

ver’ ”—was not an obvious candidate for imagistic elaboration. Nonetheless,

Scheuchzer came through with twenty-eight different coins that sat on the frame

of his historical picture (fig. 5). The commentary provided the usual scholarly

density. To answer the question “how much was a shekel worth?” he galli-

vanted through Josephus (on the conversion of shekels and drachma) to Benito

Arias Montanus, Juan Villalpandus, and Marin Mersenne (on the conversion

of the weight of a shekel into grains of silver, Roman ounces, and grains of

wheat). And, to add to the complications, the coins secretly carried their own

scholarly entanglements. Some were, Scheuchzer reported, taken from the cabi-

net of the archdeacon of Zürich, Johann Otto, some from unnamed books, some

from Adriaan Reelant’s Four Dissertations on the Coins of the Ancient He-

brews, and some from Scheuchzer’s own collection, donated to him by the

English consul to the Turkey Company in Smyrna, the botanist and antiquarian

William Sherard.36

In a sense the images were as much a library of scholarship as the text

itself. Both worked in concert and functioned to display in an organized fash-

35 See, for example, the commentary on 1 Kings 10.11-12 (ibid., II, 201ff).36 Scheuchzer, Kupfer-Bibel, I, 99ff.

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56 Jonathan Sheehan

Figure 4: Anatomical Tableau. Frederick Ruysch, Thesaurus animalium primus

(1710). Courtesy of Department of Special Collections,

Stanford University Libraries.

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ion a universe of information about the Bible, mankind, and nature. Learned

readers could be expected not just to recognize familiar theological and textual

points but also to recognize the connection between scientific, historical, and

mathematical points and the biblical text. Images were part of this supra-tex-

tual environment, which infused the Physica sacra with the collective knowl-

edge of generations of scholars of the Bible. Throughout all of this Scheuchzer

acted as an editor, collector, and author. His aim was to overcome what he

disdainfully called the “language and word dabbling” (Sprachen und Wörter-

Fischerey) and “all too mystical and allegorical explanation” that character-

Figure 5: Hebrew Coins. Scheuchzer, Kupfer-Bibel (1731-35).

Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

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58 Jonathan Sheehan

ized biblical study.37 Beyond word dabbling was a universe of things, all of

which could be displayed inside the Physica sacra.

In this desire to move beyond mere words and allegory, Scheuchzer echoed

the sentiments of seventeenth-century antiquarian researchers, who deployed

non-literary objects in the service of textual explanation. But Scheuchzer was

also far more ambitious than his predecessors. For his goal was not just to

explain the text but also to explain the world. The biblical encyclopedia “pro-

moted the honor of the great almighty God.” It also sought “finally to open the

treasures of divinely created nature” to full view, and to do this by “combin[ing]

history and nature” on the page of his text.38 The result was to be a “fundamen-

tal investigation, arrangement, and explanation of all those things and places

in Holy Scripture that intersect with natural history, history, the arts of numbers

and measurement, architecture, medicine, botany, anatomy, Jewish and hea-

then antiquities.”39 The biblical encyclopedia was to provide a matrix in which

the learned and unlearned could come to know all of nature, history, and Scrip-

ture.

This widening of scope was, however, just part of the story, for it was only

a product of Scheuchzer’s more interesting innovation: his technique for man-

aging information. Like the antiquarians, Scheuchzer was convinced that words

alone could hardly suffice for an adequate understanding of either the world or

Scripture, and so like them he invited into his explanatory framework a virtu-

ally infinite amount of facts and things, the controlling of which became a

central intellectual problem confronting scholars and natural historians at the

turn of the eighteenth century. But where the antiquaries had restricted their

field of inquiry (to biblical animals and sacred geography, for example) in or-

der to restrict the scope of information required to say anything meaningful—

and still found themselves overwhelmed by the variety of things available to

knowledge—Scheuchzer’s text did something different.

In the first instance the Physica sacra was far more than just a biblical

commentary, at least as the word commentary had long been understood. In

fact the Bible itself was peripheral to an overall project that tried to explain

Scripture, history, and nature in one very long breath. Explication of the text

per se was, in other words, a secondary priority for Scheuchzer. Instead, the

Bible acted as a platform for building an encyclopedia of all things divine,

human, and natural. It was, in Alsted’s sense, a “technology.” Just as, for Alsted,

technologies determined “properties and affections of the disciplines” and thus

provided a primary ordering distinct from any particular content later attached

to the discipline, for Scheuchzer the Bible represented an ordering system ex-

37 Scheuchzer, “Subskriptionsaufruf,” reprinted in Müsch, Geheiligte Naturwissenschaft,

185.38 Ibid., 186.39 Publisher’s advertisement (15 January 1735), reprinted in Müsch, 187.

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isting prior to the material ordered. If the commonplace book was a technical

forerunner to the modern encyclopedia, then here you had—although Henry

Dodwell might not have recognized it—Europe’s most well known collection

of commonplaces functioning as an organizational system for unifying and

containing the information overload of the early modern period.

This precognitive function, as it were, of the Physica sacra helps to ex-

plain why Scheuchzer felt so comfortable with the vast diversity of materials

arrayed on his pages. The compulsion to resolve differing interpretive possi-

bilities (or differing disciplinary discourses or differing material histories) into

a single coherent story was simply absent from the project. Virtually anything

could be included in the pages of the text because the demands of ordered

subordination and logical coherence were cast off. In their place the biblical

text offered nodal points through which a variety of information could be ac-

cessed, nodal points that would be familiar in a culture intimate with the bibli-

cal story. So if you want to know about cosmology, look at Genesis 1, if you

want to know about ants, look at Proverbs 6, if you want to know about hippos,

look at Job 40, and so on. Scheuchzer’s ecumenism was in part the cause and in

part the consequence of this framework. Because the framework itself was

flexible enough to accommodate virtually any piece of information about the

biblical, human, and natural worlds, he felt himself able fully to put aside “par-

tisanship” and “religious affiliation,” leaving the Physica sacra free of theo-

logical commitment. Scheuchzer explicitly embraced, therefore, his own role

as an “arranger” rather than an author of materials. Rebutting the charge of

plagiarism—a common charge against encyclopedists that Pierre Bayle too felt

the need to address—Scheuchzer cited Justus Lipsius: “I take from others stones

and wood, but the edifice and its design is all mine.”40 Insofar as the citation

performed what Scheuchzer claimed to be his own role (putting the words once

more in the mouth of another), it was a perfect symbol of Scheuzcher’s em-

brace of the “architect” as the model of his practice. He was no author, but

instead was an editor and arranger of material around a skeleton provided by

the text of the Bible.

In a fundamental way, then, the Bible became as arbitrary a system of orga-

nization as the alphabet itself. For Scheuchzer—unlike Renaissance biblical

commentators—the commentary was not an original piece of interpretive work.

Rather it was the occasion to assemble and unify in a bibliographic sense the

world of human knowledge. It is this quality of arbitrary unity that marks the

difference between Alsted’s fantasy of a “biblical encyclopedia” and the bibli-

cal encyclopedia as developed in the hands of Johann Scheuchzer. The late

seventeenth-century discovery that there was no inherent or logical way to or-

40 Scheuchzer, Physica sacra, a2V and Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire Historique et Critique

(Rotterdam, 1720), 1br-v.

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60 Jonathan Sheehan

ganize knowledge has to be seen as one of the great shifts in Western intellec-

tual culture, and the response, a technology of organization in the form of a

encyclopedia, one of the most durable inheritances of this period.

Such a transformation could not leave the Bible unscathed. Don Cameron

Allen was surely correct to see this period as one where “the Holy Scriptures ...

were being subjected to the scrutiny of reason.” Rather than look to rationalism

per se as a sufficient cause and expression of such changes, however, I would

like to suggest that “Renaissance rationalism” was only one of a variety of

causes—confessionalism, reactions against rationalism, disciplinary recon-

figurations—that underwrote the new ecumenical sense of relevance driving

the biblical encyclopedia.41 This was a peculiar moment, one in which older

disciplinary structures had failed but new ones had not yet been invented. By

the early nineteenth century, disciplinary specialization would, in its own way,

resolve the confusions that attended the breakdown of the traditional humanis-

tic trivium and quadrivium. In turn specialized dictionaries and encyclopedias

would gain in prominence.42 But this earlier liminal moment was unstructured

by disciplinary tools and thus omnicompetence seemed the minimal require-

ment for sound scholarship, giving rise both to the hyper-erudition characteris-

tic of the period and to new tools for managing the universe of knowledge

suddenly applicable to nearly all natural, historical, and Scriptural questions.

The biblical encyclopedia was one such tool, invented in order to give human

knowledge a formally unifying structure. It was, however, a highly paradoxical

genre. On the one hand it was an explicitly apologetic project, one that sought

to retain the Bible as the foundational text of western culture by inserting it

into the very heart of knowledge itself. On the other hand, the biblical encyclo-

pedia was in many ways not about the Bible, but about human knowledge more

generally. “There is no book but sacred scripture” was still at work here but in

a new way: the Bible was not the only book because of its redemptive theologi-

cal content, but because it could function as an arbitrary, formally unifying

structure. As a result the Bible was left in a kind of epistemological limbo. It

both became the organizing principle of knowledge and as arbitrary as the al-

phabet. The result was an implicit demotion of theology from “queen of the

sciences” to a subfield equivalent to architecture, entomology, or numismatics.

It is here on the level of textual practice that we find the stirrings of what would

become, in the eighteenth century, a thorough transformation of the Bible, from

a book about God to a book about humanity.

Indiana University.

41 Don Cameron Allen, The Legend of Noah: Renaissance Rationalism in Art, Science, and

Letters (Urbana, Ill., 1949), 19.42 See Yeo, Enlightenment Visions, 277ff.

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From Philology to Fossils: The Biblical Encyclopedia in Early Modern Europe

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