Showing posts with label Ezra. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ezra. Show all posts

Sunday, May 10, 2020

Semi-Random Musings (20)

I have always wondered about the purpose of the book of Esther.

Of all the books in the Bible, Esther seems to have the least to do with 21st century Christianity. It is basically a book of Jewish-centric history which tells how the nation of Israel (for the umpteenth time) survived extermination at the hands of its enemies. God is not even mentioned in its pages. The national feast inspired by the events in Esther (Purim) is nothing like the God-ordained celebrations of Leviticus 23. Purim commemorates the “days on which the Jews got relief from their enemies”, and is (or at least originally was) more like today’s secularized Christmas celebrations than any of the seven feasts of Jehovah, all of which were rife with rich spiritual symbolism, speaking to generations about the meaning of the death of Christ and its consequences for mankind.

So why is Esther in our Bibles?

Tuesday, May 05, 2020

Beyond the River

The book of Ezra is written in Hebrew, but one of its most frequently-used expressions is not Hebrew but Aramaic.

The words `abar nÄ•har are translated “beyond the river” or “this side of the river” in most of our Bibles. They occur in the sections of Ezra that contain letters written by the enemies of the returning Jewish exiles in Jerusalem to kings of the Medo-Persian empire, and by the functionaries of these kings in response, since Aramaic was the language in which royal edicts were issued. The expression also occurs, probably for the sake of consistency, in the Hebrew narrative portions of Ezra which have to do with the contents of the letters.

Basically, “beyond the river” means the biblical land of Israel and any of the surrounding nations over which Israel, at the height of its powers, had influence.

Monday, September 24, 2018

Apocrypha-lypso (10)

In this series, we have been examining ancient books which Protestants almost universally exclude from our Old Testament canon.

So far, our Apocryphal entries have self-disqualified for five or six different reasons, including but not limited to historical inaccuracy and theological inconsistency (God is not a son of man, that he should change his mind). After all, if the Bible is God’s word, it seems obvious that documents for which inspiration is claimed must show some fundamental consistency with the accepted canon of scripture.

But today’s entry is neither historically dodgy nor theologically at odds with the rest of the Bible. It is one of our more credible contestants to date.