yah {geperoxideerde Venburgsche hersentjeskebab?}

Reading this way was not just a voluntary act, nor one that was supposed to produce simply 'pleasure': it is not an excitation of the emotions or sentiments but simply a demand that the reader fulfill the obligations that the read document contains.

This is not a claim of lack of literary value & beauty in the biblical text. To our ears & eyes, the poetry of Jeremiah (Yirmeyahu) is FULL of such poetic value; nevertheless, it can hardly be said to have attempted to persuade or seduce its haters with it's poetry.

There is nothing Dulce in the utile of "yah"! It should thus also be made absolutely clear that I (DB) am NOT invoking a positivistic content-form distinction; indeed, I am asserting that the very notion of form is a historicizable practice & not a given of language.

In an extraordinarily suggestive interview, the French Jewish poet & theoretician HM, spoke about the biblical term "Miqra," the word that best translates the English word "reading." Henri Meschonnic's central claim is that reading means something entirely different in biblical Hebrew because the written text is always read orally:

'Keeping the tie between writing and reading is in the biblical name of MIKRA itself. In a manner very characteristic of our European languages, the biblical corpus is called WRITING
...

I think that to say WRITING ~ holy WRITING, WRITINGS, from SCRIPTURA onward ~ makes the texts thus named enter culturally into a field radically different dorm the Hebraic, Jewish field, in the sense that to say WRITING or SCRIPTURA is to conceive fully an opposition, finally, of the subject & the social, of writing & reading, of the act & the word ...

In the Hebraic field it is completely otherwise: the very term MIKRA, which designates the biblical corpus, etymologically & functionally at the same time, signifies READING ~ not reading as we speak of reading by contrast to writing. MIKRA assumes the gathering during which one reads or has read the texts in questio , & since this reading is done out loud, the notion conjoins, I dissolubly to my understanding, orality & collectivity in reading. '

There is great insight in HM's remarks. However, since his claim that SCRIPTURA is unknown in Hebrew is exaggerated ~ we do find, after all "kithvei haqqodesh" (Holy Scripture) as a title for the Bible ~ the relevant distinction seems to be not the designation of the Bible as the Writing or the Reading, but the fact that the word "reading" means as well, the Bible.

In other words, the point is not to situate the text in Jewish culture in the metaphysics of the reading-writing opposite , but to situate reading in that culture in it's sociocultural semantic field.

"Reading," in ancient Jewish culture signifies an act which is oral, social, & collective, while in modern (& early-modern) Europe it signifies an act that belongs to a private or semiprivate social space.