My remarks on Liv Lied’s trailblazing new book will focus on its philosophical orientation and approach. I will consider the book as a humanistic work, an invitation to a kind of scholarship normally curtailed by the traditional orientations of our field—its theological roots, its focus on origins, its privileging of certain time periods as more significant than others, its logocentrism—and its implicit or explicit perspectives on who owns the right to claim a past and to determine its meaning.For previous essays in the AJR forum (SBL 2021 panel) on Liv Ingeborg Lied's book, Invisible Manuscripts, see here. For more on Karen Stern's book and her research, see here and links.I will do this in two related parts. First, I place the book in conversation with another work that gets us in touch with the concrete traces of human presence, Karen Stern’s Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity (Princeton UP, 2018). Second, I theorize Lied’s idea of “someone else’s manuscripts” more broadly as a pattern in our access to the past—the idea that we always owe it to “others” who have carried the texts through history, and that we have inherited certain patterns in how these “others” are identified and valued.
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