Here is another installment on my discussion of the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books.  The first of the three I discuss here is not well known, but the second and third are historically quite significant. ***************************************************** The Letter of Jeremiah This is one of the shortest books of Apocrypha—it is only one chapter long, and in the Latin tradition of the Roman Catholic Church it is included as the final chapter of the book of Baruch. The book is allegedly written by the prophet Jeremiah, sent to the Judeans bound for Babylonian exile. In exile they will be among people who worship other gods through idols. This book is nothing but an attack on pagan idolatry. The real historical context of the writing is a situation in which Jews around the world were surrounded by idol worship. It may have been produced in the aftermath of the Maccabean Revolt; it appears to have been composed in Hebrew or Aramaic. Much of the book consists of a mockery of ... To learn more about these books, you'll need to [...]

In this post I continue discussing the books of the Apocrypha, accepted as part of Scripture by Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches.  These are important books, historically and culturally – but hardly known among Protestant readers.   Here are three more!  Descriptions are taken from my introduction to the Bible.   The Wisdom of Solomon The Wisdom of Solomon is a book of positive wisdom (recall Proverbs), which claims to be written by the great king of the United Monarchy. In fact it was written many centuries later, by a Jew in the Diaspora, possibly in the first century b.c.e. or the first century c.e. The book celebrates Wisdom as the greatest gift to humans and insists that it involves proper fear and adoration of God, which will lead to eternal reward. Those who lead ungodly lives, on the other hand “will be punished as their reasoning deserves” (5:10). The exaltation of wisdom recalls Proverbs 8, where Wisdom appears as a female consort with God at the beginning of all things. Here too Wisdom is said [...]

Yesterday I answered briefly a question about the Old Testament Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books.  I’ve decided to go ahead and describe each of the ten.   This will take several posts.   These are very interesting books, well worth reading, and canonical Scripture for some parts of the Christian church. My summaries here are taken from my Introduction to the Bible.   **********************************************************   Tobit Tobit is a work of historical fiction—by which I mean it is a fictional tale set within a real historical context. Originally the book was written in Aramaic, either in the late third century b.c.e. or the early second. The narrative is set in the eighth century b.c.e. in the city of Nineveh, where the hero of the story, Tobit, has been exiled from his town in Galilee during the conquests of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser. In other words, the account is allegedly taking place after the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel. The story involves two subplots that eventually come to be woven together. The first is about Tobit himself, who is [...]

Here is a recent question I have received about the “Old Testament Apocrypha.”   QUESTION Bart, I hope you won’t mind me asking a totally unrelated question: At the beginning of the Christian Era – how many books of the Hebrew Old Testament did the Greek Septuagint translation contain?   RESPONSE: This is indeed an important topic, one usually overlooked completely by Protestant readers of the Bible.  Here is what I say about the apocrypha in my textbook on the Bible: *************************************************************           In addition to the canonical books we have examined so far, there was other literature written by Jewish authors that cannot be found in the Hebrew Bible but that is of great importance for anyone interested in it. Of these other Jewish books, none is of greater historical significance than a collection of writings that can be found in some Christian versions of the Old Testament. These are the deuterocanonical writings, as they are called in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions; Protestants typically designate them as the Apocrypha. The term [...]

I was fishing around for something different to post today, and came across this Q & A from exactly six years ago.  I get asked the question a lot, and I would answer it the same way even now, despised my advancing age...   ************************************************************************************* QUESTION: Do you have a suggestion for a book concerning the OT's construction? I believe in the History of God (by K. Armstrong) she mentioned that there were about five distinct writers for the OT. Is this the scholarly view and do you have a book suggestion to delve deeper into it?   RESPONSE: Right!  The Old Testament (for Christians; otherwise: the Jewish Scriptures, the Hebrew Bible; the Tanakh – these are all more or less synonyms.) It’s been on my mind a lot lately.  Right now, my current writing project is a college-level textbook on the entire Bible, Genesis to Revelation.   This seems to me to be way too much to cram into a semester, but as it turns out, something like half the colleges in the country teach [...]