The Bible According to an Oversized Book of Cartoons

This article appears in the February 2018 issue of Sojourners magazine. To subscribe, click here.

IT HAS BEEN A TIME of shadows and warnings, bursts of violence and the creeping stain of betrayal. Falsehoods, at first a dripping faucet over a tin bucket—the hint of failing seals and valves, the promise of future corrosion—have become a downpour. Disintegration seems the rule.

Where to find a true story, one that endures?

Scripture might seem the logical turn for a Christian. But I know my weaknesses. Left to my own devices, I cherry-pick favorite verses, I swerve away from difficult passages. I rarely read anything in the Old Testament except the prophets—and those while too often presuming I stand with them, already on their side, and God’s: Nothing for me to hear, except the echo of the woe and correction I’d like to dole out to others. A situational loss of hearing that is a sure path to perdition.

But then I was introduced to an unusual portal to the holy word, one that easily charmed its way past my conscious and unconscious scriptural biases: a 500-plus-page coffee-table book whose bronze cover is adorned with line drawings of people who are at turns winsome and ominous. With title and highlights in fluorescent orange, the design is reminiscent of some DayGlo-kissed whimsy from the 1960s. In the Beginning: Illustrated Stories from the Old Testament (Chronicle Books) retells, through images and spare prose that is both fresh and respectful of the scriptural sources, core stories of the Judeo-Christian tradition, from creation and the Garden of Eden to Daniel in the lions’ den. Created by French writer and biblical interpreter Frédéric Boyer and French illustrator Serge Bloch, and translated into English by American poet Cole Swensen, it is a profound work leavened by gentle playfulness.

In the Beginning (published in France in 2016 as Bible—les récits fondateurs) began not as a book but as 35 short animations Boyer and Bloch created for the independent French Catholic publishing company Bayard. This is evident in the simple, energetic illustrations and concise narratives of the book. (The site bible-recits.com has links to 15 of the animated chapters on YouTube—they are engaging even if you cannot understand the French narration—and video interviews in French with Boyer, Bloch, theologians, and biblical scholars. Boyer also supervised a team of biblical scholars and contemporary writers for a French translation of the Bible published by Bayard in 2001.)

Serge Bloch is a prolific illustrator for newspapers, magazines, children’s books, and animated series. His illustrations here are dominated by loosely drawn characters, with soft spot washes of color and texture. More detailed drawings, often of anachronistic objects—a brick wall, a throne, factory equipment, the Eiffel Tower (topping the tower of Babel)—are at times layered in. Bloch often employs Ralph Steadman-style ink blotches and distortion to emphasize the danger and chaos of apocalyptic visions or tales of earthly horror. Sex and violence are frequent themes, but the illustration style is not exploitative or explicit. Although this seems a book most fully meaningful to adults and teenagers, it is not inappropriate for mature children.

The 35 chapters pull substantially from the books of Genesis and Exodus, but also from other books with a clear narrative structure, including Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Esther, Jonah, and Job. But Boyer and Bloch also illuminate the Song of Songs, the Psalms, the poetry of the prophets Isaiah, and the strange visions of Ezekiel. The chapters each open with a title page and a blurb announcing what is to follow, often subtly wry. Chapter 27, for example, is “Isaiah’s Visions or A Mysterious Liberator ... In which we learn of the events that followed the catastrophe of exile. And a prophet who sees what no one else wants to see makes some alarming suggestions that no one wants to hear.” The synopsis for Ezekiel begins: “In which a small man is exiled, his suitcase at his side.” And the subtitle of Jonah is a special favorite: “The Sadness of a Minor Prophet.”

At the end of the book, Boyer has written short essays that give some historical and interpretive context for each story.

I found myself disarmed by the ease and energy with which this book drew me in to reading the old, old stories and seeing them anew. But what about that gave me hope?

The briefest of introductions establishes the overarching narrative frame to the collection of stories. For the Israelites exiled in Babylon in 586 BCE, remembering who they had been as a people and the lessons not-quite-learned was a lifeline: “In exile, they remembered the one true God, a promise, and the wonders of earlier times. Words from the sky. A path through the sea. With these ancient stories, they would write their hope.”

So, the devastation the exiles were experiencing was not to define them: Their core identity was rooted in the full sweep of history and a difficult but enduring relationship with an often confounding God. The implication being that in memory there is hope, in part because it reminds us that the choice to not accept the corruption of any given era is definitive for who we are and how we live. God places us in history, but also invites us to co-create the future.

Scriptural stories carry both past and promise, and crackle with the residual energy of a God who spoke us into being. Chapter 1 tells of creation, establishing the primacy and the creative/restorative potential of words as wielded and bequeathed to us by God: “How it all began we’ll never know / But we have speech / And it is speech that started it all ... Everything is included in the word of God / God wanted there to be something rather than nothing.”

But these ancient stories are, like the daily news, often filled with the worst of humanity—rape, murder, massacres, betrayals. God sometimes forgives and restores, but also punishes or seems capricious. How does this engender hope?

I turn to the other key element Boyer points to, in the midst of these texts of terror and the terrible: forgiveness. That is, God’s repeated desire, despite God’s own latent anger-management issues and homicidal tendencies, to grant pardon to humanity (who needs it again and again). And from that, the forgiveness that is possible between people. Tender thematic sprouts appear here and there, often after some narrative conflagration, as when God asks a sad and angry Jonah, “Why allow endless darkness to defeat forgiveness?” The title page of the final chapter, which is drawn from the book of Daniel, hints that forgiveness is bound up with our ultimate destination, noting that it is a tale “in which the end of time is announced along with the end of idols and errors, a time given over to pardon.”

Memory is on our side—the stories of the past help us know who we are. But In the Beginning also testifies that people of faith are heirs to the dynamic, ongoing story of creation, the inherent hope in being a living, forgivable, and—if we choose—forgiving part of “something rather than nothing.”

Lies and ideologies-made-idols are the misappropriation and misrepresentation of reality. They make us want to cry out in frustration: “Is nothing sacred?” But the quiet thrum beneath the all that is all is that everything was meant to be sacred.

We were made for better than this. As we open to that possibility, to God’s holy syntax (The “sound of silence,” Boyer writes in reference to Elijah. “A sound as soft as dust.”), we might know and live more of what is true.