In his latest novel Cloud Cuckoo Land, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Anthony Doerr explores, among other things, how stories come to be — not how they are written, but how they survive. He focuses on a (fictional) Greek manuscript and portrays some of the hands and lives that it passes through to survive millennia. Reading this book brought me back to my summer studying ancient Greek in seminary and our conversations around the art and history of translation, the different scrolls that have been debated and combined into our modern versions of the Bible. What a miracle the Bible is. Beyond the God-breathed stories, I’m talking about the physical book. Imagine all the hands that have touched these texts over millennia. The scribes, bent over poor candlelight, tracking words on one papyrus with one hand while they copy the text with their other hand on a new, clean sheet. The dusty, dark rooms that scrolls were kept in, and sometimes forgotten about (as we see when Hilkiah finds the Torah in 2 Chronicles 34:14-16). The stories of ancestors that were told around the firelight, whispered into ears of sleepy children, and proclaimed over meals that, eventually, were written into a narrative. The Bible is a miracle. It is full of human effort, mistakes, and edits. Yet, God blesses it and uses it as a gift to call us to God’s self, to remind us of our history. The Bible is our inheritance. It is a constant reminder that God is with us, in all our humanness. You can find the rest of the commentary on our website. | 
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