Naked I came out: Skaryna’s Book of Job, chapter one (Prague, 1517)

The title leaf announces Книга светого Иова, “the book of holy Job”, and adds that it has been “set out in full” by “doctor Francysk Skaryna of Polotsk”. As in the Psalter, he puts his name and his town on the book, and his profession is again medicine.

What the preface promises

We do not yet have an open transcription of Skaryna’s preface to Job in full, so it is not in L0. The 19th-century scholar P. V. Vladimirov quotes long passages from it, and they show what Skaryna thought the book was for.

He begins with patience. The apostle James had held up Job as the model of it, and Skaryna tells his reader that if you want to know how much Job endured, you should read this book often, and then you will agree that the apostle spoke the truth.

Then he lists the “great mysteries” that God opened through Job. The list is a set of hard questions:

• why good and just people meet misfortune and sickness, while the wicked and unjust get luck and health;
• the poor and bitter life of people in this world;
• how the good and the wicked end;
• what God allows to happen to those who wrong the poor;
• and the wonders of God in beasts, birds and fish.

He does not answer them in the preface. He sends the reader to the book.

The close of the preface is the part a doctor would write. Skaryna calls the book a mirror of our life and a medicine for the soul. He calls it a comfort to all who are sad, and above all to those who are in misfortune and illness. Then he names himself once more, “son of Skaryna, of Polotsk, doctor in the medical sciences”, and gives his reason for printing it: he knows that the highest wisdom is to think about death, to know yourself, and to remember what is to come.

It is a striking thing for a printer to put on the first leaves of a book. The Psalter preface sold the psalms as useful for everyone. The Job preface is addressed to people who are suffering, and it is signed by someone whose trade was treating the sick.

Chapter one, as he printed it

The L0 layer this time is the whole of chapter 1, together with the short summary Skaryna printed above it. The summary says the chapter tells how rich Job was, about his children and their feasts, and how the devil, with God’s permission, destroyed everything he had.

The chapter itself is the famous one. There is a man in the land of Uz whose name is Job, blameless and upright, who fears God and turns away from evil. He has seven sons and three daughters, seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, five hundred she-asses. His sons hold feasts in turn, and after every round of feasting Job rises early and offers a sacrifice for each of them, in case they have sinned in their hearts.

Then the scene moves to heaven. The angels come before the Lord, and the devil comes with them. “Where have you come from?” “From going around the earth.” God points to Job, and the devil answers with the sharpest question in the book: does Job fear God for nothing? Take away what he has, and he will curse you to your face.

What follows is told in four almost identical blows. A messenger arrives: the oxen and asses are taken by raiders and the servants killed, “and I alone escaped to tell you”. While he is still speaking another comes: fire from heaven has burned the sheep and the shepherds. Then a third: the Chaldeans have driven off the camels. Then a fourth: a great wind from the desert has struck the house where Job’s children were feasting, and they are all dead.

Job tears his robe, cuts off his hair, throws dust on his head, falls to the ground and worships. Skaryna prints his answer like this:

The chapter ends with the line the whole book will test: in all of this Job did not sin with his lips, and said nothing foolish against God.

Whose words are these?

This is where Skaryna’s Job gets interesting for anyone who wants to know how he worked. Vladimirov compared chapter 1 with older Slavonic texts and printed them after it in his appendix. His conclusion was that for this chapter Skaryna did not make a new translation. He copied an existing Church Slavonic text with only small changes, just as he did for the first chapters of Genesis. The closest match Vladimirov found was the Job reading in the Flowery Triodion printed by Fiol in Kraków in 1491.

Skaryna himself gives a hint. His preface says that the book is divided into verses “from the third chapter to the end”. Vladimirov takes this seriously: the first two chapters were left undivided because they came into the book in a different way from the rest.

In the same appendix Vladimirov sets words from the Czech Bible of 1506 in brackets next to Skaryna’s, to show where the two run close. For example, the great wind comes нагле, “suddenly”, where the Czech has nahle (Vladimirov’s spelling). We removed those brackets from L0, because they are Vladimirov’s comparison and not what Skaryna printed.

Reading the L0 layer

• The source. The text is Vladimirov’s 1888 printing of chapter 1, which is in the public domain. We proofread it against his page images, and where the 1517 pages survive we checked it against them. The wording agrees, but Vladimirov’s spelling of a few letters (у/ꙋ, а/ѧ) does not always follow the 1517 print.
• The page photographs. They come from the Russian State Library copy. That copy has lost the leaf with the chapter summary and the first two verses, and so has the other open scan on Commons. The first block of L0 therefore has no photograph. The next page in this copy is a repaired leaf, with the text on a pasted strip.
• Help us check it. Nobody has yet checked this transcription letter by letter. If you read early Cyrillic and spot a mistake, tell us.

Next time we move on to the third book Skaryna printed.