Lection and Liturgy

Daniel, as I have mentioned in a previous post , is not classified among the prophets in the Hebrew Bible, but as one of the rather more miscellaneous “Writings”. The main reason for that is almost certainly because it was written quite late – around the time of the Maccabean revolt 1 , as an encouragement for those who were being called to give their lives, if necessary, as a faithful witness to their God.  The writing on the wall at Belshazzar ‘s Feast. See the story in Daniel 5. The first half of the book deals with previous examples of faith shown by the legendary characters of Daniel and his companions, Hananiah, Azariah and Mishael. The story calls them both by these Jewish names, and their Babylonian names: Daniel is Belteshazzar, and his companions Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. It seems likely that these stories are already old by the time the author of the book of Daniel selects these characters for as the basis for his purpose of encouraging faithfulness in...

Some historical events leave a deep footprint. Alexander the Great’s conquest of much of the world, as known to the people of the Mediterranean at the time, was one such event. While the political empire he established fragmented quickly among his squabbling heirs, the linguistic and cultural empire – an accidental by-product of his victories – lasted centuries longer. Greek became the common language of the ancient Mediterranean world, and Greece’s culture, education and philosophy became the ones to admire. For some time this was also the case in Jerusalem, many of whose leaders aspired to the Hellenistic city state model. The writer of First Maccabees attributes this primarily to the beginning of the second century BC. He sees it as yet another example of religious and cultural compromise. The leaders seeking cultural assimilation are backed up by the forces and laws of the king, Antiochus Epiphanes, who seems also to have had some delusions of grandeur. The Greek E...

As I mentioned early in this series, I am including the deuterocanonical books / apocrypha in their traditional Greek and Latin Bible order. ( The main post discussing this distinction is here. ) Today’s post considers a cluster of short stories grouped towards the end of the historical books. No readings occur in the Sunday Lectionary from the two deuterocanonical books of Tobit and Judith, and only one from the undisputedly canonical book of Esther. It is worth mentioning them together, as they illustrate the kind of short story, told with a historical framework, which show popular stories in their literary versions getting into the Bible. A basic familiarity with them can help us understand the culture in which Jesus and his first followers grew up. Tobit is a humorous family story, used only in weekday readings, telling of the young man Tobias and his adventures. Tobit, his blind father, sends him to get some money he had left while in exile, in the land of ...

This blog series now moves on to the longest section, as much intended for repeated reference as reading immediately. Nonetheless, I hope each post will be interesting enough to read in its own right as it is blogged. Since I am going (with one or two extras here and there) to blog my way through the books of the Bible in their canonical order, you might expect that to begin at the beginning would mean starting with Genesis. However, I want to take a couple of steps back, and begin with another word starting with the same three letters: genre. At this point, though, I need to enter a caveat. I blog these posts on books of the bible not as an expert, but as a fellow reader. I venture to claim a degree of knowledge, and a reasonable depth of study for much of (but not all) the New Testament books. But when it comes to the Old Testament I have no particular expertise. I’m simply another reader sharing something of what I read. My reading always begins by asking what sort of book I’m rea...

 If you were surprised it took a few centuries (as the previous post described) to reach agreement about the contents list of the New Testament, you may be even more surprised by the length of time it has taken for the Old Testament. Christians have never produced a fully-agreed contents list for the Old Testament. Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Anglicans and Protestants disagree about which Old Testament books they should read in public. The seeds of this disagreement lie in the distant past. The early Christians essentially used the books which were in circulation among the synagogues of the diaspora: 1 the Greek-speaking world of the ancient Mediterranean. Greek in the ancient world functioned much like English in today’s world: it was the “global” language of the Graeco-Roman world. The earliest books of the bible to be translated into Greek were the books of Torah: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The other books followed, wi...