The Apocrypha and related subjects

[River]

[Note: upon request I split this off from the Parlour in Bag End. If anyone thinks that there are posts that either should or should not have been moved, or that a different title would be more appropriate, let me know - VtF]

Dang.

I don't remember that story from Sunday school...

[Primula Baggins]

There are a few like that.

[Jude]

It's from the Apocrypha - if you weren't a Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, there's no reason why you should have heard of it.

[River]

Ah. That explains it. Partially. We never covered David and Bathsheba either. Or Samson and Delilah. The former I found on my own. The latter I learned about in the HS orchestra. Famous piece. Racy story. Then there're Lot's daughters. We learned about how Lot picked up his family and ran when the angels destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. The bit where Lot offers his virgin daughters to a crowd who want to...um.. do things to the angels wasn't talked about. Nor what the daughters decided to do with Lot, later. In the full context, it's a pretty squicky story. And, by the time I read it, I'd read enough Greek and Roman mythology that I was pretty desensitized to squick. Or thought I was.

[Primula Baggins]

That would certainly explain why I couldn't find the story in the Bible when I went to look for it later.

But River is right that there's plenty of raciness and violence in the regular Bible as well.

[Frelga]

It's from the Apocrypha - if you weren't a Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, there's no reason why you should have heard of it.

Or Jewish.

It's a cool story if you like thrillers.

[Jude]

Does the Jewish canon contain all the books of the Apocrypha?

I just went and checked my Hebrew bible - it doesn't have Tobit or Judith in it

[Frelga]

It's not canon the way Torah or Haftarah (prophets) arw, but it's common to read Judith around Hanukkah in a parallel to reading Esther for Purim.

[Jude]

I thought Prophets were Nevi'im. My Hebrew is so rusty...

[Frelga]

No, you are correct. Haftarah literally means taking leave and applies to bits of Nevi'im read as part of the weekly service following the reading of the weekly Torah portion.

[River]

Does the story of Judith relate to the Hannukah story at all or is her story read just to celebrate some bad-@ssery?

[Frelga]

I... have to go check the Wiki.

OK, here's what I found:

The Hebrew versions name important figures directly such as the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes, thus placing the events in the Hellenistic period when the Maccabees battled the Seleucid monarchs.

The Maccabees are the heroes of the war of liberation that is central to the story of Hanukah, so I guess that would be the connection.

[Inanna]

Is lost....


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Please bear with my typos & grammar mistakes. Sent from my iPhone - Palantirs make mistakes too.

[River]

I would be borderline lost if I hadn't played Judas Maccabeus.

Also, we covered the basics of the Hannukah story in Sunday school when doing the rest of the OT. I'm not sure the Maccabees books are in there or if they just felt like we needed to know that, though.

[Frelga]

Inanna, sorry you got lost. Possibly a better place for this conversation would be in Tol Eressëa.

River, the Book of Maccbees is indeed a part of Christian canon but not the Jewish one.

[Primula Baggins]

It's not in the regular Christian bible, though. Though I see in my New Oxford Annotated Bible (an awesome bible, BTW, intensely scholarly in the notes and introductions and the front and rear matter) that 1 and 2 Maccabees are both in the Apocrypha. Along with other books that are in various combinations of the Roman Catholic, Greek, and Slavonic bibles, plus Appendices to the Latin Vulgate and the Greek bible. Including Tobit and Judith. I didn't have this bible as a kid; I don't think it existed yet, it's the New Revised Standard Version.

One of my favorite bits of my kids' confirmation classes was learning about the church-wide conferences where the lineup of the final Christian Bible was decided. Lot of politicking and infighting going on, and it led straight to at least one major schism. It didn't leave me any closer to being convinced of the bible being divinely inspired, not with the if-you-let-us-cut-this-we'll-let-you-include-that games going on.

[Lalaith]

Maccabees isn't part of the Jewish canon? Hunh. I guess I would've thought it would be.

I remember when I discovered that Catholics had additional books in their Bible. I was a little girl, and I would try to sneak in reading my grandma's big Catholic Bible. Surely I was sticking my toes into the fires of hell.

[Jude]

There's even more books that didn't make it into any of the bibles. For example, the Book of Enoch, which was quoted in the Book of Jude. So the book that quotes it is considered divinely inspired, but the book that it quotes is not. The only way that could make logical sense is if it were the other way around.

[Frelga]

This conversation probably should be split off into Tol Eressëa, since there seems to be an interest in continuing the conversation about the apocrypha.

Lali, Maccabees mostly were just too recent. It'd be like including the Declaration of Independence. Also, it is a record of a successful guerrilla war against Greek/Syrian oppressors. As such, it was downplayed during the Roman occupation, when most leaders realized that an armed uprising would result in a complete disaster. Spoiler alert - they were right. It was around that time that the ideas arose about the reward in the afterlife and the bodily resurrection as compensation for sticking with the oppressed religion in the current life. A version of that is reflected in the Christian Gospels.

Also, in that good news/bad news way that history tends to work, the uprising of the Maccabees led to the establishment of the Hasmonean dynasty which became... controversial to say the least.

Its inclusion into (some forms of) Christian canon may possibly be related to the desire to establish an uninterrupted line of canon leading up to Jesus. Although as Prim and Jude said the composition of the Christian canon was a complicated process, and the same is true of the various Jewish versions.

Disclaimer: I don't actually know all that much about it. I attended a few study sessions with a Rabbi and read a few books, but did not go to the extent of looking for supporting materials beyond Wikipedia.

P.S.: so cycling back to Judith, the above might also be the reason why the historical context shifted from the time of the Maccabees to the historically incongruous and generic references to Nebuchadnezzar.

[Cenedril_Gildinaur]

It's not in the regular Christian bible, though.

That's a bit of a prejudicial comment. There are five major divisions of Christianity: Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Assyrian. Some group Protestant and Catholic together as Western, making four major divisions. Within these five divisions, two of them branch out wildly into subdivisions: Protestant and Oriental Orthodox.

Basically all Protestants agree on one particular canon, but that doesn't make it the "regular Christian bible." All four other divisions have different counts, not only from Protestant but from each other. When you get to the Oriental Orthodox, things get really interesting. The Orthodox Tewahedo within Oriental Orthodox has a larger canon than any other group within Christianity (unless you include Mormon which I don't for theological reasons). It has 81 books, more than anyone else.