Lection and Liturgy

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 ...

The short story, Ruth , sadly gets no use in the normal Sunday lectionary. It is tempting, following on from the absence of Deborah and Jael ( see yesterday’s post ), to wonder if the men who compiled the lectionary were giving in to a little bit of unconscious bias against women’s stories! Jean-François Millet, The Gleaners. Ruth meets her future husband while gleaning To be fair, however, it is hard to pull out a single excerpt from a very tightly written short story. The book tells the story of an Israelite family who go to live in the neighbouring country of Moab. The husband dies, leaving his widow Naomi and two sons. The sons marry Moabite women, and then the sons die. Naomi, accompanied by her loyal daughter-in-law Ruth, goes back to Israel. There Ruth attracts the attention of a wealthy and kind man, and ends up marrying him. Their child is named as the grandfather of King David. The story is placed between the books of Judges and Samuel, because of when it i...