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Wednesday 16 June 2021

Nuts and Bolts: paralipomena.

 Yes, more Greek.

Paralipomena describes bits of a text that have been left out of the main body of a work and then put in later in a separate chunk. This may be because they're believed to be a bit dodgy (I don't mean dodgy in the sense that they're encouraging people to do deeply unwise or unpleasant things, but in the sense that they're believed to be later additions, so they don't have the authority they appear to have) or because they aren't so much a stand-alone work of art, but more of a commentary on another part of the work. 

The latter is the case with the biblical books of Chronicles, which are the most famous example of paralipomena

Mind you, being a kind of commentary on some of the rest, they were also, obviously, written later than the bits of the bible upon which they comment.

Nuts and Bolts: paralipomena. The Greek word paraleipomena comes from para- on one side, and leipein, to leave.



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