What inspired you to write The Oldest Bedtime Story Ever? What sparked your interest?
When I was writing my doctoral dissertation on “The Bible and Its Modern Methods,” my sister-in-law in South Africa adopted a Xhosa girl and asked us to be godparents. I had always made my own Christmas cards and decided this child deserved more than a trip to Baby Gap.
As the only alternative emerged—to handcraft an Old Testament for her—I realized I needed to find a way to represent characters that could be seen as either white or black. This gift became a mock-up for the final published project, something that could be shared by people of all ages, colors, and creeds.
What’s the most important take-home message for readers?
The Torah/Old Testament is still relevant—not just because its characters continue to populate Western art and culture, but because it holds a mirror up to our all-too-human behavior. The collages I created are meant to invite metaphorical over literal interpretations.
The decision to illustrate in collage resulted from observations I made during my adventures in biblical studies. When I first learned about the different editorial layers that have been identified throughout the books of the Bible, it struck me that the texts had been pasted together like collages, with the seams left showing—and that whoever left them this way wanted us to accept them for their totality.
Certain editorial strains reminded me of the German Expressionists, while prophetic images whispered Ana Mendieta’s siluetas and psalms of lament shouted Jackson Pollock. But the whole collection we call the Old Testament/Torah was to me one big collage that needed to be conveyed in these terms.
There are a number of winks to the art historian in the book: Adam and Eve as Tahitians once painted by Gauguin, the Matisse dove, the Hebrew woman bent over in front of the pyramid like one of Millet’s Gleaners, and my Malevich Moses. The paper credits read like fashion captions and modestly point out objects that required extra skill: the bouclé Moses wears when he smashes the tablets was woven from four different, finely-cut papers! My choice to represent the invisible God by the first initial of His Hebrew name—and to handle the figures as faceless silhouettes—was an exercise in not creating idols.
Is there anything you had to leave out?
You mean like sodomy, rape, and the banishment of Hagar and Ishmael?
What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic?
I shudder at the stereotype of the God of the Old Testament as wrathful and unloving. The Torah/OT is an incredibly old and diverse collection of texts that is open to interpretation. It gets blamed for world conflicts, but it is people who have used it to abuse each other. Its contradictions and discrepancies appear to show that the ancients had a more sophisticated sense of what was textually acceptable than many moderns do.
Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing?
People who grew up with faith and people who didn’t, including but not limited to: urban Jews, rural Protestants, lapsed Catholics, liberal evangelicals, aesthetically inclined agnostics, the atheists who took Communion at my wedding, and the Bantu Baptists of Mtwaku in South Africa’s Eastern Cape whose faces lit up as we translated an early draft to them.
Are you hoping to just inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off?
I hope many will find it a useful reference tool—a narrative Who’s Who of ancient Israel. I hope parents and children will engage with it together. And I hope the artwork will inscribe images of the biblical characters on readers’ minds that will last a lifetime.
What alternative title would you give the book?
The Most Beautiful Bible Since Gutenberg.
How do you feel about the cover?
It’s a pity there had to be a jacket. I fear people might miss the foil-embossed cloth cover beneath it.
Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why?
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, because it is so frighteningly possible.
What’s your next book?
The News about Jesus and How He Saved the World.
