OLDEST BIBLE ILLUSTRATIONS

FROM a buried city in the Middle East comes a remarkable and touching series of Scriptural paintings, the world's oldest series of Bible illustrations, now reproduced in color for the first time (see color pages).

The discovery goes back to 1921, when some British soldiers, digging in during a skirmish with Arab tribesmen, found, fragments of old buildings in the Syrian desert sand. Excited archaeologists dug deeper, came upon the Syrian city of Dura-Europos, which in about A.D. 250 had been a garrisoned outpost of the Roman Empire, athwart the main trade route between Antioch and Seleucia. Dura had a large Jewish community and a sizable synagogue. On the synagogue's walls the excavators found murals illustrating Old Testament stories, with certain Talmudic touches added.

Not only as a document of faith but as a legacy of art, the murals are extraordinary. The costumes pictured and some of the painting conventions (e.g., the painted frames surrounding each mural) resemble Persian art of the period. But the paintings as a whole show a transition between the easeful grace of Greek and Roman art and the frozen stiffness of later Byzantine figures. Meanings are conveyed strikingly, as when "the hand of the Lord" takes the shape of several free-floating, detached hands looming above Ezekiel. The coloring is subdued, never garish, subtly harmonious.

The first full report on the murals, prepared by Archaeologist Carl H. Kraeling, director of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, and a team of Yale experts, will be published this month (Yale University; $15). Ironically, the pictures were preserved by what probably seemed to Dura's Jews to be their desecration. The commander of the city's Roman garrison, faced with the threat of an enemy attack, did his best to prepare the city against Persian siege tactics. To keep the city walls from collapsing even if they were undermined, the commander ordered the street nearest the most vulnerable wall filled with earth, heaping it up over the house roofs to the top of the wall itself. To prevent the house walls from buckling, they were reinforced from the inside with earthen buttresses. This was the treatment applied to Dura's synagogue. As a result, when the city finally fell about A.D. 256, the synagogue's paintings "were protected," Professor Kraeling writes, "from the ravages of the city's capture and from centuries of rain and sunlight by earth heaped about and above them, and thus preserved intact to our day."

What makes the murals especially significant is that they seem to have been copied from, or at least inspired by, illustrations. The scenes pictured were not chosen at random from the whole Bible, but illustrate individual books, carefully following the text from beginning to end, thus strongly indicating an accompanying text. And this is particularly surprising, because the Jews had rigid prohibitions against pictorial representations of Scripture. Archaeologist Kraeling's explanation: during the period of close contact between Judaism and the Hellenic world, the Jews must have translated their sacred literature into Greek "to bring the contents of the Biblical books to the attention of the cultured Greek-reading public." To serve these "promotional and propagandistic purposes," they felt it necessary to deck them out with illustrations "as luxury editions to rival those of illustrated Greek classics." later adapted the same pictures as murals to make their "synagogues rival the painted pagan temples."

This hitherto unsuspected Jewish art may in turn have influenced the Christians of the catacombs. Except for representations of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, most of the earliest catacomb wall paintings illustrate scenes from the Old rather than the New Testament--scenes that may first have been rendered in the Dura synagogue's murals.

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