Wax poetic
“O that my words were now written! O that they were printed in a book!” Job 19:23 would seem to have presented an puzzle for translators of the Authorized Version. What could the Old Testament scribe mean by “printing”?
In the Latin of Saint Jerome the relevant verbs are scribantur and exarentur (quis mihi tribuat ut scribantur sermones mei quis mihi det ut exarentur in libro). Exarentur conjugates exarare; a verb frequently used in antiquity to mean “to note” or “to write,” and frequently translated as “to print” by later writers, its literal meaning is “to plow.” It’s no metaphor, however, but a simple descriptive term—for the ancients wrote most frequently not on paper or vellum or papyrus, but by gouging their words into tablets of wax.
Such tablets consisted of shallow panels of wood or ivory filled with beeswax and bound together into little booklets called tabellae or pugillares or sometimes cerae (pluralized “wax,” here used as synecdoche). The literate used them as notebooks, or address books, or PDAs, perhaps—inscribing their thoughts and lists into them with a sturdy made of bone or wood tipped with iron. Exarare, “to plough,” describes perfectly the act of making marks in wax by gouging or scratching.
Wax tablets were the most common medium for writing from ancient times well into the middle ages, from the near East and North Africa to Western Europe. Ancient images such as the fresco from Pompeii above frequently depict the literate with wax tablet and stylus. By the seventeenth century, however, they were out of use, largely thanks to cheap paper. And as they were radically ephemeral, they disappeared almost entirely; very few examples of tabellae bearing writing exist today.
Although the scribe who first wrote the words of Job knew no Latin, Jerome’s meaning would have been perfectly comprehensibleto him—for like the much-later Doctor of the Church, he would have been ploughing words into wax. Throughout the Bible and much ancient literature, writers deploy a rich vocabulary of metaphorical evocations of wax-tablet writing, bedeviling later translators to whom such flourishes were often incomprehensible.
Consider how the meanings of writing as task and labor are expanded or transformed when wax tablets are in use. Your hands and palms are oily, your words smudgy and angular. The beeswax is fragrant and smooth when freshly poured; once inscribed and reinscribed, rubbed out and darkened by candle soot, your text becomes a ploughed-over field.
