Overview

Reading in the Ruins: How the Bible's Broken Language Creates its Power offers a bold and intellectually rigorous rethinking of biblical authority, language, and interpretation. Challenging the assumption that Scripture derives its power from textual perfection or divine dictation, Emerson Dias argues that the Bible's authority emerges precisely from its linguistic fracture, diversity, and instability. Through close philological analysis and theological reflection, the book reinterprets Babel not as a curse to be undone, but as the foundational condition that makes writing, canon, translation, and interpretation possible. Scripture is presented not as a seamless object, but as a fractured archive-formed within history, preserved through mediation, and activated only in the relational event of reading. Engaging biblical studies, philosophy of language, and hermeneutics, this work explores writing as a technology born from communicative failure, canon as a discipline of loss, and inspiration as a response to fragmentation rather than its solution. From Sinai to Pentecost, the Bible is shown to regulate linguistic fracture rather than erase it. Written for serious readers of theology, biblical studies, and hermeneutics, Reading in the Ruins invites readers to abandon naive literalism and embrace the ethical responsibility of interpretation. It is a compelling work for scholars, students, and thoughtful readers seeking to understand how Scripture continues to speak with authority-not despite its broken language, but because of it.

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