Lection and Liturgy

There are a number of places in the bible where we encounter stories that are difficult, not only because we find them hard to understand, but because we find them morally repugnant. Quite often, the biblical story-teller narrates them without giving the listener any real clue what to think about them. The feminist scholar Phyllis Trible refers to them as Texts of Terror 1 and many of those she focusses on are about women as the victims of male violence. Some of these stories occur already in the first book of the Bible, so this seems like a good place to comment on them. One of the most famous of this kind of story – but by no means the worst – is at once bafflingly brutal and strangely powerful. It is effectively what we today would call a story of physical child abuse. It crops up in the lectionary on several occasions. This is the story of Abraham taking Isaac, his only son, to sacrifice him at God’s command. At the last moment, God prevents the human sac...

If the previous post looked mainly at grasping the overall meaning of a reading, today’s looks at the question of detail. It is not just the devil who is in the details. Paying attention to details helps meaning and truth emerge. Exploring the details can help the reading be heard as the word of the Lord. Perhaps the most obvious of those details is the pronunciation of names, people and places. The first, and most important piece of advice to remember, is that when it comes to the really difficult names, no-one else is likely to know exactly how they are pronounced either. However, in most cases, there is a relatively traditional English pronunciation of most names. Very often the translated English name is quite different from the Hebrew or Greek way of saying the names in the original language. The traditional English is itself simply a time-honoured way of mangling the original, but if you know it, or can find it out, it’s certainly worth doing so. If you ca...