Painting Fakes

After looking at the Wisdom writings in the Old Testament and the Apocrypha , it happens that at church we've started a sermon series on the Sermon on the Mount.  Last Sunday was the Beatitudes.  For once I'm not going to have a whinge, because it tied in very nicely with what I'd been thinking about the Wisdom books. As I mentioned, the Wisdom writers faced a problem.  Why do those who do wrong seem to prosper while those who do right suffer?  They had two answers.  The writer of Ecclesiastes advocated humble submission - we don't know what God is doing or thinking, all we can do is carry out the tasks he has given us and enjoy our life as we can.  The writer of the Wisdom of Solomon was more confident - the righteous may appear to die unrewarded, but God will reward them in the life to come. Jesus develops this theme further in the poem that begins the Sermon on the Mount, the eight lines we call the Beatitudes from the Latin...

Right then, back to something more esoteric after all this grumpy politics.  It's been a while since I wrote anything on the Apocrypha , so time I stopped procrastinating and wrote about the Wisdom books. I find Wisdom literature hard for a number of reasons.  The collections of sayings can be a bit mind-numbing, and often the content is repetitive.  Much of it also seems self-evident - why bang on about what is so obvious?  How to write about literature that doesn't hold my interest very well?  Yet here it is, in the Jewish sacred writings as well as in the writings of other traditions, so perhaps I've been missing something. Then it occurred to me that a good way of thinking about the Wisdom tradition is to see it in the context of the Law.  The five books of Moses are, in a sense, the primary source documents for Jewish faith.  They provide a set of laws by which the nation of Israel was supposed to be governed as the pe...

Finkelstein and Silberman suggest that the glories of the Israelite kingdom of David and Solomon are greatly exaggerated.  They say the archaeological evidence points to a small territory with a tiny population of limited literacy, and that the united kingdom of Israel and Judah is unlikely to be historical. They may or may not be right.  I'm hardly qualified to judge.  However, even if the biblical accounts are scrupulously accurate, they were of little help to the Jews who wrote the books of the Apocrypha .  For them these kingdoms were so long ago, and so far from the realities of their lives, that all they provided was a memory of past greatness and a dream of a possible future. The big problem they faced in their day was this: How do you survive a dominant and often hostile empire?  For most of Israel's ancient history, including the period of the later kings and prophets and the period of the Apocrypha, the Middle East was dominated ...

Esther is one of those books with one foot in the Old Testament and the other in the Apocrypha - others include Daniel and Ezra.  This is because the book exists in two different forms; the Hebrew version included in the Masoretic Text and a Greek version in the Septuagint that includes an extra 107 verses, plus some subtle but significant variations.  When Jerome translated it into Latin at the end of the 4th Century CE, he used the Hebrew version as his primary source, but included the extra Greek verses at the end as a kind of appendix.  When the Reformers separated out the apocryphal books from the Old Testament, the extra verses of Esther went with them.  I'm very grateful to the translators of the NRSV for putting the two parts of the Greek edition back together and providing a translation of the whole Greek text.  Chronologically, this book belongs with Tobit and Judith as a story about the period after the exile.  Its likely date of ...

So, to continue my journey thought the Apocrypha , here's a look at the Book of Judith. Just like Tobit , Judith is best seen as a work of historical fiction, except that in this case it is even less historical and more fiction.  It is described as taking place during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar as emperor of Assyria, although historians are unanimous that he was emperor of Babylonia.  Yet the Israelites have already returned from exile and are ruled by their High Priest, something that that did not happen until the rise of the Persian Empire a century later.  Furthermore, the main action happens around the walls of the Israeli city of Bethulia, the location of which is, shall we say, "uncertain".  And this is all before we even get to the actual story! The story itself is an exciting and amusing tale of deception, a late successor of the kind of holy trickery practiced by the patriarchs and Moses.  You can imagine its origin as a fireside tale, with vo...

Anyway, enough of this angry politics. I promised you a little while ago that I would write some posts about the Apocrypha , so here is the first. The book of Tobit is the first book in the Christian Apocrypha, and it tells you immediately why most Christian and Jewish authorites give these books less authority than the other parts of Scripture.  Probably written in the second century BCE, it is a kind of literary mash-up - a narrative spiced with extracts from wisdom literature and a couple of lovely pieces of poetry. It's framing story is, I think, best understood as a piece of historical fantasy.  Some scholars think it may combine two stories that were originally unconnected.  We have an angel disguised as a human, a besetting devil, the symbolic use of the number seven, a magic fish and a curious and unexplained dog. Tobit is a faithful Israelite of the tribe of Naphtali, taken captive to Nineveh when the Assyrians invaded the Northern Kingdom in the se...

Sometime ago I had an odd dream, which stuck in my head the way very few dreams do.  I can't remember anything about the context, but I was looking for something in my Bible and noticed a whole lot of books at the end of the Old Testament that I hadn't previously seen.  They had odd names that seemed vaguely ancient and Jewish, none of which I can now remember.  I was a little surprised but mostly just fascinated, eager to read this new stuff and find out what it was all about. Recently I've been repeating this experience in real life, and thereby hangs a tale. In the bibles we have as Protestants, the last book of the Old Testament is the prophetic book of Malachi, and the last historical period addressed is the immediate post-Exilic time covered in the books of Ezra, Nehemiah and Esther.  There is then a break of over 400 years until the New Testament begins with the birth of Jesus. What was God doing in the intervening 400 years?  Well, it seems he...