Revisiting the Apocrypha, Transcript

(00:01) all right so tonight we're going to talk about the apocrypha um several of you in past uh lectures occasionally we come to a place where we talk about the apocrypha and then people ask about it and they say well then we'll say well someday we'll do a lecture on that and so here it is um what is the apocrypha so the word here actually comes to us in the in the west in english through medieval latin so the word apocryphus you know it is a um adjective so apocryphusa um so the ah is for feminine it means hidden and that is coming you know directly

(00:38) from the greek word apocryphos which means obscure and that is in turn related to a greek verb that means to hide so anyway the idea that as people have taken it is there's this idea that this is a hidden book or hidden books and that is always great for a title if you can have a title of your book be secrets of this or that or the nine secrets of successful people or nine nine secrets to eternal life that they kept out of the bible for some reason you know whatever it is the problem with the title is that the apocrypha really have never actually

(01:09) been hidden so there are a bunch of books of the bible that are let's say lost books of the bible and we've done a couple of those before and we'll do more again where we do let's say lost books of either the hebrew bible or the christian new testament these nevertheless um have always been pretty available including that even even though they're not in the protestant bible in the proper canon nevertheless for example in english the king james scholars actually did go through and translate them all into english so

(01:39) they've been quite available you know in the english speaking world as long as printing has so nobody's had to worry too much about where they were all right so what are the books i was going to try to make icons to do this there's too many of them to all fit as little icons on here and i've just kind of made a little chart to kind of explain how these go in some of the basic canons there's multiple canons as we've seen in the past in both in judeo-christianity but i'm just going to have here different columns here for the catholic

(02:10) canon the greek orthodox canon the old church slavonic canon which is like the russian orthodox church protestant canons and then jewish canon and so of these books tobit judith additions to esther wisdom of solomon the book called ecclesiasticus as opposed to ecclesiastes sometimes also called sirach baruch the letter of jeremiah additions to the book of daniel first second maccabees first estrus confusingly sometimes called third hazard stress sometimes also called fourth estrus the prayer of manassas psalm 151 so one more

(02:47) psalm in case you didn't like the first one i mean in case you really liked the one for first 150 of them and you need another one here's another one uh third maccabees more maccabees second estrus some more estrus and fourth maccabees and so we can kind of see here then within the canons um none of them are in the hebrew bible or in the jewish canon as put together by the rabbis so these are all not in the in the canon of the proper canon of hebrew scriptures for the catholics all the way up here through this first set of them

(03:19) and then i have these little stars here because they're in an appendix so they're kind of still in the bible but then there's kind of without it being canonical or something like that and that happens again for the greeks who having a little appendix the russians don't have that but they have more of the books than anybody so only poor fourth maccabees isn't making it in into anybody's actual canon although it is an appendix and then finally the protestants have the whole thing that they have which is to say the same ones that the catholics

(03:47) have at all in their appendix right so essentially nobody has really necessarily got rid of them all but they are not all canonized although for some of the denominations they are canonical um obviously we've talked before for example with the ethiopian orthodox church has almost all of this and then a bunch more books too so there are also cannons that are bigger than this but i'm just pointing these out as kind of the main ones so we know very well um you know from all of our different lectures that we've had on this and the studies that we have

(04:23) on this that the old testament that the hebrew bible as it's called is not simply something that somebody wrote from start to finish or compose from start to finish or um was delivered directly by the hand of god out of the out of um out of a cloud at one moment rather it was over the course of a very long period of time multiple authors in different languages composed different texts none of whom they largely ever imagined were going to be compiled together as one book of scripture at all but ultimately all did get published

(04:55) together and so it is always all read in a way that none of its authors intended for it to be read right and in addition to the ones that made it in there was a lot more of them that didn't make it in so it's a complicated um pattern of different books that might have made it into different canons and some of them did and some of them didn't so um we'll zoom in not spend a huge amount of time on this but this is kind of a timeline of the kind of bible biblical text making period so so we're counting down before the

(05:32) common era so that's you know bc as we often call it and then the common era or a.d as it's usually called um we say it that way because we're in judeo-christianity and so you know if we're it's not anyways if we say the christian year and before the christian era nobody likes it he wants to make it inclusive right so before this era um essentially there's the in the in the main states of uh the biblical lands uh there is this period of time then in the first temple period that we have missing but essentially than the

(06:07) destruction of the northern and southern kingdoms the destruction of jerusalem there's this period called the babylonian captivity which we're zooming in on in this particular timeline so this is the time period when the elite members of the people in jerusalem so the judeans are jews who are the leaders are either in exile in egypt or they've been taken into exile in babylon when the babylonian empire is conquered by the persian empire the persian emperor lets the people go back to jerusalem those elites go back if they want to not all

(06:43) of them go and it becomes then a persian province with capital as jerusalem the province of yehud and so there's this persian period then what ends up happening is alexander the great destroys the persian empire conquers it gets split up between his generals his generals include ptolemy who leads egypt and so immediately this land yehud is now in the or judea as it comes to be called it's now in greek and so yehuda in persian judea in greek it's now in the control of the egyptian empire the ptolemaic empire there's a question

(07:24) i heard on the radio many years a few years ago that alexander the great this is probably a rumor was poisoned by his right-hand man his best friend uh-huh whom i forget what the name was what did do you know who it is and if was that guy given uh any uh jurisdiction over any of these uh communities and so i have to you know it's been a long time since i've done it i think is the case with um alexander's is i think he's largely thought to have been to have died of an illness but on the other hand when anybody dies

(07:55) young they get they also there's accusations of poisoning and so um certainly all of his generals fight really quick his his his his family does get killed and isn't making it into being into a succession so it doesn't go to his son or something like that in the minority but i'm going to have to do a lecture on alexander and we'll we'll research it and make sure we know well i just wanted to know who is the right hand man is the one one he trusted the most yeah but whatever the name i just can't remember so had all his

(08:24) uh trust in this one guy okay yeah well so yeah so it's not yeah so yeah his best friend was named um if i stand is it have feisty on and so if ed feistyn had already died and then and then he had generals and so his generals include antigonus uh seleucus and um and ptolemy and so and so tal essentially what happens is as soon as he dies those guys all run in four different directions so that they can take over whatever they can ptolemy being the smartest one i think ran to egypt and became pharaoh and so then ptolemy you know had it

(08:59) created a dynasty that lasted to cleopatra so cleopatra is the last of the ptolemies anyway so at first that ptolemaic egypt greek egypt hellenistic egypt controls judea you know this province of jerusalem then they lose it to the zillow kids who are the people that are ruling syria and uh and then there is a revolt where there's this hasmonean kingdom which is sometimes called the maccabees we started as the book of maccabees uh and that's where there's a brief independent uh jewish kingdom and then the romans come

(09:34) in and take it over and it's roman until until the muslim conquest so anyway in this time period then the kind of the major bible early bible editing and composing of the earliest books of the bible are all being compiled down here when the babylonian captivity ends and when ezra is starting to rebuild the temple all the things are kind of coming together at that point but there continued to be texts written uh the last of the bible texts or the last of the biblical period ends and before for christians new testament

(10:11) period begins right and so in fact even um where is it on here the uh the book of daniel is actually written all the way here even though it's pretends to be written here and so it did make it in under the normal rules of the canon that should have also been excluded because essentially all the books that are in this inter period they're kind of keeping out but it doesn't mean that they're stopped being prophets it doesn't mean that they're stopped being writers of bible-like books in fact it accelerated a lot and there's way more

(10:43) and so what there did start to be is more door keepers to keep them all out and that's what ends up happening okay so uh one of the things when we're looking at uh kind of these texts is to we kind of remember that there's always a tension when you are in a place uh where judea is in palestine it's a zone that is essentially a smallish zone that's on the frontier between two larger imperial zones the imperial zones of iraq mesopotamia and of egypt which are always going to be the bigger powers on either side of

(11:16) you that try to fight over it and so as a result of that there is always kind of essentially a um they're also influencing you culturally and so when that destruction happened we had exile groups that went both places so we always think of the babylonian captivity but lots and lots of other judeans fled into egypt including the prophet jeremiah and evan in egypt they build a temple and so there is a temple of israelite worship in egypt then even though technically according to the law you're not supposed to build any temples other than in

(11:46) jerusalem then later when there we have that second temple period when the when the judeans go back and rebuild the jerusalem temple and they compile the bible they're doing all this bible editing and everything like that there is a bunch of egyptian and later hellenistic ideas that are coming into the second temple period but there's also persian and mesopotamian ideas happening right so in the first part of that period then yeah the persian empire so the first great world empire of which again it's usually people don't

(12:25) start to think about this but that entire period from ezra that second temple period jerusalem and yehuda are really just a little province around jerusalem that are province of the persian empire and so ezra is an official of the persian empire and so it's still you know in other words there's a lot of persian influence that's happening uh in this time period and indeed the book of ezra calls cyrus a messiah so because he has done this thing he is uh because he's a essentially acted as a um anointed king and brought the people back and helped

(12:58) rebuild the temple he's the messiah so there's a sense of that so during this time period if we're going to show these kind of different things the persians ideas are really winning out because of all of that influence of that empire and so there's a large diaspora community so in other words an exiled community so at from the time period from the destruction of jerusalem on there are as many generally as many probably jews judeans and jews who are observant outside of the land of judea as there are inside it and so there are a lot of them in egypt

(13:33) and although that continues to be the case the return of the babylonian exiles to jerusalem and the others at the orders of the persian emperor and the rebuilding of the new temple in the persian province of yehuda meant that babylonian and persian influences are more dominant at the beginning of this period the second temple period okay then we mentioned alexander right so alexander the great upends the whole situation and the resulting successor empire so we mentioned the cellucids here in syria but originally also in

(14:05) iraq and persia the ptolemies in egypt and then the other guys who have much less space but anyway back in greece and in the heartland of macedonia and things like that so in this case when that happened obviously it reversed itself again because now hellenistic influences are very dominant all over the region this alexander founds this great city of alexandria alexandria is a place of uh vast learning and scholarship and one of the things that ptolemy does in creating the library at alexandria is set in motion and idea that they want

(14:43) to have all learning everywhere and this includes then all of this writing that the judeans have had and so they want that to come to the library of alexandria but as such it has to be in the universal language that uh everybody civilized people use which is greek and so that's the idea of it right so um uh under the ptolemies then uh alexandria is the largest city in the hellenistic world it's the center of greek teaching the judean community in alexandria becomes the largest judean community in the world so there's a

(15:17) vast jewish community in this big city cosmopolitan city of alexandria and then these alexandrian jews create what's called the septuagint translation of the hebrew bible around the third century bce and so this is really important because before this all these little books are just little books you know so they are not all in a collection there's no such thing as a canon and there's a vast number of these books and you don't have anybody who is got a stamper that says this one yes this one no any individual person can do that but

(15:50) there's no central leader that is able to speak for everybody that has done that and so the very first time that everybody decides to what's going to get included or not is whether it was worth translating or not and so now uh the subtitle creates the first kind of canon collection even if it's not you know it's not necessarily official but people have essentially what they translated is what you get and so in this case um what we end up having is uh it's called the 70 but probably the magic number is probably 72.

(16:24) uh so it's by according to myth it's 72 scholars who translated it all and each one of them you know is in their own different little room and they all translated exactly the same so you know that it's a divine translation but anyway that's a later myth or understanding of how it happens it does it is kind of anyway it all happens and it's an important thing to have happened they take um you know the five books attributed to moses of the law they take the entire deuteronomic history and other history texts which

(16:53) they organize as history they take wisdom writings and finally they take prophetic writings and they organize them into these categories and so this includes this larger number of books that includes that i mentioned maccabees maccabees you know these kind of things which eventually all make it into the septuagint obviously not all of these are written at the time when the septuagint starts but as as a as one after they are written or added uh in the in the bce era that becomes the septuagint corpus so that's the subtool again but remember

(17:27) always there's way more of these books you know that are not making it in that they didn't translate so and and a lot of these books are considered scripture for example by the by the essenes that are over at qumran and that are having this uh monastery by the dead sea and so there's all the dead sea scrolls include lots of these books that they're doing commentaries on as if they were a scripture even though they're not making it into either the septuagint or the rabbinic books we need to get the microphone how are you doing

(18:14) uh i don't know which try again no no try again um yeah who was the editor who was the head of the translation who gave the money for all the translation so according to the according to that legend that i talked about it's in fact i think the very first ptolemy so ptolemy soter is the is supposedly you know as he's trying to assemble all of the books of all learning in all the world he determined that this is also worth doing and so that he put the money up um i think it's not clear that that's true you know so that's according to a later

(18:50) apocryphal book that made it into the septuagint but it's probably not a historic book and i think most scholars don't agree that that's what that's what happened and so probably it is the community there um the jewish community in alexandria that is desirous of having these texts included in the library and everything like that so they are probably self-funding it um but anyway according to the legend it is the king with the pharaoh yeah it was a gofundme site and very successful okay so i mentioned anyway i already just

(19:27) said many then first century hellenistic jews in the diaspora so again the people who aren't living in the land people to jewish communities that are in all the greek speaking cities of the eastern hellenistic empires and everything like that of the mediterranean they actually did not know hebrew and actually even in the land of judea they're almost all now speaking aramaic which is a related language but anyways the language that is being spoken as the lingua franca of the uh persian empire so it's the language

(19:59) of of syria and some of iraq so anyway they wouldn't have known hebrew and they're using them the situation as their scriptures so they will use their access to scriptures in greek uh and even in the aramaic speaking judea some jews considered some of these texts canon and so i mentioned that several of these like tobit sirach the epistle of jeremiah so these are books that are included in this apocryphal list but are not for example now in the jewish canon those are among the dead sea scrolls so the people at qumran are looking to

(20:33) these as this as if they're part of that same biblical corpus what is deuteronomy oh yeah so i have now failed to introduce that word so so i mentioned how there's a medieval name for this as apocrypha you know coming out of the medieval latin and i was saying that that means hidden books but not for everybody are they hidden at all because for some people as we saw uh most of the books in the are in the catholic canon and so this is a way of saying so the canon and deutero right and so in the same way that we maybe have

(21:08) if you remember in the out of the pentateuch one of the last book of the five books of moses is called deuteronomy which means deuteronomy which is to say law so it means second law so in the same way that the first four books are the law of moses and now the deuteronomy is the second law um and this this is the second canon so it's not they're more or less asserting that you could have all the rest of the books in the canon and that's the canon but these are also canonical and it's good to have these two you know you can do you maybe do without

(21:40) them but anyway they're also part of it so the deutera canonic deuterocanonical books so also just going back then to the second temple period the early christians who initially all come out of second temple judaism they're all initially observant jews they also quote whenever write this lxx that means 70 in latin right so that means the satou again so the 70.

(22:09) so they also quote the subtitle and they consider that to be scripture so um the christian bible the new testament is all written originally in greek so none of the gospels none of the letters none of the books that have made it the apocalypses that are in the new testament are written first in aramaic or in hebrew and then translated into greek they're all written in greek and that's important because even even though the earliest christians anyway the earliest people that are in the jesus movement jesus himself there

(22:40) their language would have been aramaic which is the common language of the people of time it's related to hebrew but it's a little bit different right or it's actually quite different it's a different language but it's you can kind of get it i guess if you speak hebrew anyway and so this is uh what they have then is when we are when we are in a new testament text and let's say jesus or paul or somebody um quotes a hebrew bible text they aren't going back to that original hebrew as if they had a hebrew school or they memorized it

(23:14) and now let's say the author of matthew mark luke or john translates that anew into greek they are just going straight to the centurion and so they'll just say a word for word others of two again and so the idea here is that we are not having then um some kind of word for word transcript of let's say jesus giving a sermon because that would have been in aramaic rather we're having multi-decades later compositions of greek literary writers who when they quote you know this canon they're using the greek so it's very important for christian

(23:46) andy yes question catherine so you're saying when in the new testament when jesus is quoting what we modernly referred to as the old testament yes it's not it's not that they have a quote and they say oh hey this matches they go and they copy the original quote that's right okay yeah exactly so um or or what i mean so that's definitely what matthew and luke do mark you know a lot of times ancient people do have um the texts memorized uh and so we we don't have this at all because everything is very available to us we

(24:27) can google everything and look at so we very very little is memorized of a thing but in antiquity people had um much fewer many fewer texts and um and people really memorized text a lot and so because you only had access to a few of them and so mark who doesn't know the text very well and so mark will often quote the old testament from the septuagint but get it wrong so so that also happens and so then what will happen is if mark is misquoting having jesus misquote the old testament then when luke and matthew who take

(25:01) mark's text and fix it they'll just silently fix it nothing no problem you know so and so anyway that does happen yes elizabeth maybe out of the scope of this lecture but at some point jews started to go back to the hebrew of course yeah yeah we'll talk about it yeah you will like yeah i'm sorry so we're just making the point here that for the the christian community or the jewish community that becomes christian they are really over on the greek side of that tension that we talked about so in other words we talked

(25:31) about how there's a kind of a aramaic or babylonian tension on the one side in a greek and egyptian side the christians really are over in egypt land you know in terms of this side of the scale and so then the 70 then is the basis then of the christian canon so when uh when christianity then emerges as in his own religion it starts putting its own canon together they take the tattoo again again that's what this means here that original jewish version of the of the text if you end up being the greek orthodox church

(26:04) you just get to keep it you don't have to translate anything so now that's becomes the canon and in fact to this day uh the greek orthodox church just considers this to be preferable to any new translation from the hebrew because this is what this is what the candidate is uh meanwhile uh not everybody stayed and keep kept being speaking greek the whole easter i'm sorry western half of the empire the roman empire of course spoke latin and so it was essential for the western half to get it into latin and so the kind of latin that it

(26:34) got translated into is called vulgar latin vulgar is just one of the many words for means common right so you can tell that the people who used to write you know the elites didn't like the masses because they called them peons and all the other things anyway so the vulgar the way that vulgar people speak or common tongue latin and so then that becomes the vulgate and so that's why that's called the fall game anyway so saint jerome a great scholar uh translated it all yeah it's a question here work on it thank you

(27:07) um the fact that jerome said that some books were not originally hebrew yes so there are quite a many quite a few or very limited if they were just limited what which ones would they have been you were anticipating where we're going [Laughter] exactly so yeah so jerome points out in doing that like you say you're you're you're getting to where we're going we'll tell you which ones they are so jerome points out that just a few of these books don't have hebrew originals and so that's a he puts that as an important

(27:37) note as he's translating to latin because he said he says or at least he claims that he went back to the hebrew to make the translation into the vulgate not everybody believes him because a lot of people don't think jerome's of hebrew is that good but and he does seem to follow septuagint a lot but at least he's able to tell where there is no hebrew original to go back to and so ultimately then because of that some of them he puts them into these appendices and some of them don't make it in to the latin ones we saw there's a

(28:05) little bit of difference between the catholic canada essentially and the orthodox canon and this is why that happens so we'll get to exactly which ones those are but in the meantime we're going to do elizabeth's question first which is so what happened in terms of rabbinic judaism so rabbinic judaism ultimately decides that this whole greek thing has ended in a disaster because look what happened christians this is not what anybody wanted right you know so everybody who um continued to be non-messianic jews and others who

(28:34) continued to not or not christian yeah not jesus messiah jews um they all have kind of decided that this boy these guys really took this the wrong way they've injected all this greek stuff into the religion and so there was a real desire to purge all this kind of greek stuff away and so actually to stop studying um say even greek speaking jewish authors so these authors from alexandria like philo and josephus that are preserved only in the christian tradition even though they're entirely jewish philosophers and writers

(29:08) they are not preserved in the jewish tradition because again they are seemed as a a jumping-off point for this terrible disastrous heresy that happens with christianity from the jewish perspective so when they reassemble their canon the rabbis eliminate most of the texts written in the later temple period and i mentioned an exception is daniel because they don't realize that it was written as late as it was so we end up with the hebrew canon then being a much smaller collection of texts than what we had in the um in the

(29:41) septuagint and these are called by an acronym the tanakh and so that's coming from torah nevi'im ketuvim which is to say the law the prophets and the writings and this is why then the hebrew bible in the jewish canon is in a different order than all the christian canons because the christian canons are in that earlier septuagint order but now they're grouped in a new way by the rabbis here so we have torah the five books attributed to moses you know and then um uh the prophets lumped together but including things

(30:17) like all the minor prophets are one book so that's including everybody like jonah and everybody that's all in one book right and uh and kings in other words the earlier ones king samuel justice and judges are counted as prophets and then the additional writings includes those wisdom writings that made it in as well as things like psalms the biggest one of the writings so just to kind of bring it to um then you know where we're getting it you know getting it to in the west uh the protestants then decided to reject the deuterocanonical books

(30:53) so at the time of the reformation protestants are emphasizing translating the bible into their own vernacular languages now so latin has ceased to be the universal tongue as far as everybody's concerned in the west now people are speaking shakespearean english or that equivalent of that in french you know and german and all that sort of thing and so in dutch and so the protestants then want to translate the bible into those languages so that every person can have access to it directly and not have to have it mediated through the priests who

(31:26) are the ones that know latin when they do that then they also get the bright idea that they want to go back and go to the original hebrew rather than translating from hebrew to greek to latin to english to think well that's going to make for a bad kind of telephone game of getting the actual content right so instead they want to go back to the hebrew and when they do that then they also notice that a bunch of these books aren't written originally in hebrew unfortunately for the king james scholars one of the things that they end up doing

(31:56) is especially in the greek so especially the new testament they go back to an original greek instead of translating from the latin to english but they get a bad greek copy and so and so the problem and so therefore that's one of the reasons why the king james bible um is wow beautiful less accurate in terms of a translation it's because it's not because they aren't good translators it's because the text that they had that they're translating from is not as good so now we have the we've subsequently created the discipline of literary

(32:29) criticism we subsequently gathered all um all manuscripts of the bible from everywhere and so now we know what the most original version of the original text is you could have a very bad copy of a multiple with all kinds of insertions and errors you know that's in hebrew to translate from and that's not going to give you a good translation you want to get the earliest and most correct hebrew before you translate it into english right so that's what's happened in the newer translations okay so what we end up with then is

(33:02) there's just kind of you know a big picture on all this we were talking here about that in ancient israel even in the first temple a period there are factions within the court that are being drawn and who want to make alliances either the one direction with the big power of egypt or the other direction the big power of babylon and then when we're getting to the how the bible is influenced and things like that that ends up with these again these two splits the sort of greek and egyptian west split the aramaic and babylonian east split

(33:33) and this ends up being the catholic and orthodox canon and this is the protestants in jewish canon so again this is just another way to show that same thing so they have kind of a weird divide in terms of if you have the apocrypha or you don't and uh or you do or don't and so again protestants are with the jews on this one and orthodox and catholics are together on this and so just a reminder so to your point which are the ones that don't make it in you know and don't have the originals it's a special well we'll go through

(34:05) individual ones but it's essentially these are the ones that have notes about them so 151 that nobody i know psalm 151 united the catholics saw the protestants took that what was the problem with that well so again it's late and it's not attested in any of the earliest versions of the psalms so it's definitely an additional poem that someone has written later they've written it as though david wrote it uh it's not really written by david and so then but it got attached onto the end of the psalms and so for people that most of the

(34:44) psalms that are attributed to david are not written by david or possibly any of them they would be in the style hopefully of the ones that are attributed david in the in the text um but in any events for a lot of people they had good reasons why they thought well these these last ones they aren't in the earliest manuscripts it we can't we can't justify putting it in so that's why thank you okay so now we're going to look at some of these i don't have i'm not going to we can't because of the timing and because of what you know how much of

(35:15) apocrypha turns out there is i can only you know i'm going to highlight a few of these and unfortunately one of them is not going to be the song but i'm going to am going to bring out i think about five of these and give you a sense of what these books are because i think that they're actually a lot of very interesting books and we don't hear about them as much anymore as they did over the past maybe so tobit is one of them so this is an adventure story about a guy named tobit and especially his son tobias or tobiah in in hebrew tobias and greek

(35:47) it's set in the 8th century bce so way back in the first temple period but it's composed in the second or third century bce so in the heart of that second temple period it's composed either in aramaic or in hebrew a lot of people think aramaic but then there is a heap some hebrew fragments of it in the among the dead sea scrolls so the dead sea scroll community had uh copies or fragments of tobit and they have hebrew and aramaic versions and so it's possible though a lot of times what ends up happening is that people translate

(36:25) things into hebrew and so even sometimes where there's a greek original they'll sometimes translate it into hebrew and so it is a little bit of a puzzle for linguists they have to kind of say um that this really betrays a you know like a hebrew origin and it has all these hebrewisms in the greek but the problem with that is is that also what can happen is because the whole septuagint is translated from hebrew largely and so therefore has hebrew isms in it if you're trying to imitate that style you also do that so it comes a big

(36:56) trick for linguists to figure it out but so they try to puzzle it out and that's why we don't always know the answer so the author is unknown but it's clearly a jewish author that is somewhere in the diaspora so somebody who is really concerned about and is aware of people who are living in the exiled communities all around whether it's in mesopotamia whether it's in egypt it's not clear but anyways the author is in one of these places not living in the land because he's really concerned about the diaspora um uh the diaspora people

(37:29) so um they actually inspired lots of artwork in the renaissance so um this is actually the only canonical source for the characters of raphael the archangel and so people like the painter rafael who are named for that archangel that character appears only in uh tobit in terms of that canon that we have and also asmodeus the demon or asmodeus if you ever have heard of asmodius i don't know you might not have okay well so that's where he this is where he comes from from tobit so let's look at the plot of this story

(38:03) so tobit is a righteous israelite i think he's from the tribe of naftali so one of the northern tribes and he is living in the diaspora in nineveh so if you may remember the last 10 tribes the northern tribes are carted off to assyria the same way that the tribes of judah and benjamin are carted off to babylon and so essentially this is set again this is not actually about this time but it's set in that time of the northern people and and while he's there he just suffers loss after loss after loss so he loses all his property

(38:35) um he's very righteous he does everything righteous he doesn't deserve all these things that happen to him and finally as he's having one last struggle he's making his way back to his home in nineveh he has to sleep out on the he's sleeping out without a tent or anything like that birds droppings in land in his eyes and that blinds him and so he really gets to the point where he has been this long-suffering guy like job but unlike job who everybody tells to curse god and die you know and he just perseveres um tobit's like praise forgot to god

(39:10) that he can just be allowed to die you know so he's done and so one of the things that happens in the whole course of this is it gives us all kinds of insights into the customs and how jews in the diaspora are trying to be observing their religion when they don't when they aren't around the temple in jerusalem and they don't have access to that and so it's very interesting for that as there's all kinds of little details that pop up in this book so meanwhile so after we leave tobit behind you know you flash to a

(39:40) completely interlaced scene you know way off in media which is to say the precursor of persia the part of the persian empire but before the persian empire in media there's a young woman named sarah she's of course gorgeous as they always are and also super righteous and she is also an israelite in the diaspora she's lamenting because she keeps getting married so she keeps finding of course she's beautiful everybody wants to marry her but after she marries a young man it goes back to the bed chamber and they're going to

(40:12) have their uh honeymoon night or wedding night uh and then the demon asmodius comes and just kills the guy dead and this has now happened seven times so so at the very same moment the tobit is praying to die uh to god to let him die uh sarah here is having the very same prayer she wants to just die already because she you know what's the use of being the most beautiful righteous israelite girl in the universe if every time you try to marry one of these cute guys or rich guys or whatever the asmodius just kills them you know so

(40:47) anyway and then the other thing that's happened is that everyone's accusing her of being a black widow right so she's the one who's obviously killing all these boys uh and so that's anyway her fate okay so meanwhile tobit remembers wait a second you know um i'm broke and blind and have all this thing happen to me but i remember that i had this friend that i like lent all this money to or you know not let's but anyway had put all this money and trust with and so i want to off in media and so i'm going to send my son to go get all the

(41:19) money and we'll be able to recover some of our losses and put our life together and so he sends tobias off to collect the debt tobias on the way encounters the angel raphael so this is where raphael comes into the picture raphael has been sent by god but he's in disguise the two become traveling companions and they bring along the tobias's dog and and this is the only appearance that a positive dog makes in the in the bible in the hebrew bible normally um and so this is also showing that maybe they have a different sense about this

(41:48) in the diaspora at this time in the second temple period but essentially dogs aren't portrayed as clean animals or moses doesn't have a faithful dog right so but anyway tobias and tobit have a dog so anyway they go to uh the river tigris and while they're by the banks a magic fish jumps out and raphael has tobias catch the um the fish real quick then with the fish in hand they arrive in media tobias meets uh sarah who turns out is his kinswoman and by the way you know one of the problems that they point out about

(42:24) people in diaspora judaism is how do you marry somebody who is within the bloodlines in other words how do we not marry foreign uh you know women or whatever which is what the bible demands and so this is a thing that tobits has told his son as he's going off on this journey he's afraid that he's going to meet attractive foreign women you know on this kind of thing but fortunately he marries a kinswoman who he can marry although there is a problem with marrying her as we might remember so he's number eight so but fortunately he's got the magic fish

(42:56) right and so we'd already been told when he got the magic fish the fish has um internal organs that have three properties the heart liver i'm sorry the heart yeah liver and gall the heart and liver can be used to dispel demons and the gall is useful for guess what curing blood curing blindness so anyway so it's a very important magic fish so he uses the heart and the liver he makes it he burns them and and and causes an odor and so asmodeus instantly flees to the further portions of egypt and that's the end of him

(43:28) meanwhile then uh tobias and sarah get the debt and they all make their way back to nineveh to beat tobit there's a dog in the picture there yeah yeah there it is there's a lot of the dog makes it into a lot of these paintings i think it's the only biblical dog so okay uh returning home with the money and the fiance tobias meets the blind father and um as the angel had instructed him he uses then the gall from the magic fish rubs it on his father's eyes takes off the cataracts essentially and cures his blindness and so then they

(44:02) marry tobit blesses his god blesses god he lives happily ever after and he and his wife die and are able to be buried with honor and everything you know that's as much as he could have ever wanted so it is essentially the job story but with a big happy ending you know for topic so um describes then um these concerns and beliefs of observant jews in the diaspora in this kind of second temple period but we can also notice as we're kind of reading this adventure it's a little novella really because it's actually kind of a fun exciting story it focuses

(44:34) on things like angels so i mentioned that there really aren't that many named angels so far in the old testament uh michael i think is all we got up until this point um gabriel is gabriel's only in the new testament right i mean i think so so anything is michael and now we're getting raphael yes um so if a lot of the um angels and other semi-divine characters are coming from the old sort of um polytheistic origins you'd expect to see more of them in the early scriptures now so there's angels but they don't get

(45:10) names and so possibly the reason why their names are getting deleted is because they're not really angels in the um in the oldest part of the story right so they're they're the sons of l which is to say the other gods in the heavenly court but as they're being demoted to angels i think they're not getting these kind of names that we come from more familiar with and so now these are really angel figures so when they're being written this way it's meant as an angel and so that's a new kind of a thing that's emerging

(45:38) uh same thing demons exorcism healing you can kind of see exorcisms and healing and angels and demons that this is really getting into the second temple world view that jesus is emerging out of right because it's much more at the core of the concerns of what the new testament authors are writing about than anything that's in what ends up being the um because the jewish canon pulls back and gets rid of this it actually gets rid of most of these developments right because the only book that kind of makes it in is daniel

(46:07) nothing to do with anything but tobias tove means good oh tobias means good yeah as in mazel tov which means good luck yeah oh that's a question here okay so how did he escape the death curse with the fish it saved him oh yeah so so the fish had magic properties and so uh in the one obviously was the gall if you pull the gall in the eyes it'll make it cures blindness but the other where the liver and the heart if you i think you burn them in a incense thing and the and the smoke um you know in the same way that a

(46:50) sacrifice would be what god is pleased by you know when you uh when you do a sacrifice and give a burnt offering and then the you know god smells the it is a sweet savory or something like that and in this case the demons don't like this so this is probably caused a very bad fish smell you know but especially as far as demons are concerned and so the guy flees to the demon flees all the way to the hither most regions of egypt it says so like at the very other side of the world as far as the author of tobit is concerned okay

(47:21) all right it's next that's tobit we're gonna do a couple more of these so okay next additions to daniel so um this is not another whole book but it is little pieces of a book so what we have is the earlier version this is going to be starting to be a theme that we have when we're looking at ancient texts a lot of times ancient texts and the way we have them presently are not something that one person sat down and wrote but rather somebody wrote then somebody had that text you know in the same way you'd ever make a copy of it

(47:55) while you're making a copy people might take something else that's another text that's like it and put it with that text and sometimes when they do it they might smooth it out in between or sometimes it's deliberately done by an editor or what's called a redactor who is trying to do that and make two books into one book and making it coherent because they like both the books and they wish they were together as one book you know in a new collection or the original book is it is inspiring the person to want to write a much longer version of

(48:24) the book and so they take the little book and they've made it longer or the original book offends them so much that they want to fix it and they want to get rid of parts of it and make changes and that sort of thing so that is continuously happening with these kind of texts and so with daniel here what we end up having is we get to see it in action because we have the text that has existed as of 165 bce and that is the text essentially that's in the hebrew bible although already it's written in hebrew and aramaic so it may

(48:56) well be since it's even in two different languages it may well be a bunch of different texts that have been stuck together because they're not even all in the same language as if you get to 165 bce and then we see these extra four parts and they are added by 100 bce and that goes to become the certificate it says there that may be centuries older you mean newer than daniel oh oh the new parts may be older than the original so this is yeah i'm sorry the book of the slide is really weird way after the actual event so yeah so the book of daniel is

(49:29) written 400 years after it supposedly took place or rather it's composed into the present forms that we have it so it's composed into 165 into the this is the hebrew and aramaic version then the 100 bce in the in the in the greek version but the pieces some of the pieces were written right then so some of the pieces we know were written then but some of the pieces might have been older but none of them are as old as this but the parts that get stuck in in the greek version are very likely older than the last parts

(50:04) of the uh here so it's a big mess right but essentially what they're doing here in this case is the author who's putting the subtooligant versions together with these extra pieces essentially they are finding free-floating stories that they like and they are inserting them into daniel because it may well be a free-floating story about daniel and they're like why isn't this in the book of daniel and so then they put it in there they could also have made it up but in this case it's probably older and so in this case they found a

(50:36) free-floating story and there are those too and so we'll mention one of these free-floating stories that's fairly oh so this is an example anyway how it worked essentially we had daniel as of 165 bc there were these free-floating scrolls so two prayers that are kind of like psalms a little story about called susanna another story called the idol bell and the dragon there's actually two little stories that are kind of the same put together there and so at certain point those are stuck together in daniel and that's then translated into greek

(51:06) and that gives us our certificate version elephant i i don't think i had realized that the story of susanna was part of the book of daniel does daniel turn up as a judge or is the um the advocate who yes yeah yeah we'll tell them uh interrogates the two witnesses and asks what kind of a tree this young man was in and they see different kinds of trees and he says you're both lying that's right yep you know the story yeah so even though so you know a story that isn't in the you know it's therefore i don't think it's in the the

(51:45) the hebrew tanakh but it might be in the rat it might be the story known by the rabbis i don't know so it could be someplace else okay i'm just going to give another example that we've had before so this is of the um a couple centuries about a century after this is the how the the theoretical way of the gospel of john as we have it in the new testament might have come together so there might have been an original little little gospel called the science gospel that shows seven signs why jesus is the messiah so seven different

(52:15) miracles he turned water into wine he raised lazarus and so this is the seventh sign or whatever the jesus is the messiah then there is a writer who is scalded by scholars john 1 who maybe wrote the bulk of the gospel of john who expanded that little story and split it up and made a big whole gospel narrative text then there's another guy who scholars call john two who was a redactor who didn't like john one's theology and who edited and changed it and then who wrote a big ending on the end that's his own and so

(52:48) we can tell very clearly between john 1 and went john 2 that there are two authors because the story ends and the new guy picks up and that the scene is very poor it's a very obvious scene because john two is way less sophisticated to writer than john one we don't know about this this is totally theoretical that's not for sure this is but it could be meanwhile though there is a story that's quite famous uh about jesus it's called the woman taking an adultery it's this woman who all of the people are wanting to uh

(53:19) stone and jesus is doing this thing where he's writing on the ground and ultimately he says uh those of you without sin cast the he was of that sin cast the first stone and all of the accusers uh leave because they all know that they're sinful uh and then and so then he asked women woman where is your accusers you know and so and so in other words she's then um anyway this is a story that i think almost all christians really like as encapsulating uh jesus's teachings and ministry it is completely not in any of the early

(53:51) manuscripts of of john so it is not part of the gospel originally it's free-floating sometimes in some of the manuscripts it's found in luke so it is one of these free-floating stories it doesn't mean that it didn't happen or whatever or what we don't know how early it is but essentially it is not meant to be where it is in the gospel and it got stuck in there and so that kind of thing has happened here with with daniel right let's let's soldier on you is it a quick comment or yes um i heard before on the radio that um

(54:26) they're commenting about the four gospels they said that john's gospel was completely different from the other three that's right the other threes were very similar but john's was completely different so maybe it's due to this situation with the john 1 john 2. um yeah and we've had it we'll have to have another whole lecture to explain it it's not why um but yes you're completely correct the gospel of john is totally different from the other three the short answer is that mark is the earliest gospel and both luke and matthew have mark

(54:58) and they both write their gospels by editing mark and so they are each doing the same thing where they're expanding it out they're using mark and then they're using one other source that they both share which is called q anyway so they have both mark and q and that's why mark matthew and luke seem the same because they're based on the same original text mark okay so the story of susannah to what elizabeth was talking about so we'll just read a little of this text so we get a sense of it there was a man living in babylon whose name was joachim

(55:27) he married uh the daughter of hilkiah named susanna a very beautiful woman of course you know always they're always very beautiful woman been one who feared the lord so she's also very righteous susannah would go into her husband's garden to walk every day the two elders two jewish elders used to go in and see her going in and walking about and they began to lust for her one day they said to each other let's go home before it's time to go lunch so they both left and they went different ways but from each other

(55:54) then turning back they'd met again like ooh oh i thought you were going home what am i doing here well i don't you know anyway so they both when they pressed each other as why they had both shown up and why they were kept on loitering they admitted that they were you know each lusting in their hearts after susanna and so then they made a pact or a conspiracy they were going to arrange for a time when they could have a nefarious pact so once while they were watching and waiting for an opportune day she susanna went in

(56:25) as before with only two maids and wished to bathe in the garden for it was a hot day no one was there except the two elders who had hidden themselves and were watching her when the maids had gone out the two elders got up and ran to her they said look the garden doors are shut and no one can see us we are burning with desire for you these guys are they really know how to um cal here right we're burning for desire for you so give your consent and lie with us but if you refuse we will testify against you that a young man was with you

(56:56) and that this is why you sent your maids away so she's going to get a false uh false accusation by two elders if if of adultery if uh if she refuses susanna groaned and said i am completely trapped for if i do this it will mean death for me if i do not i cannot escape your hands i can i choose not to do it i will fall into your hands rather than sin in the sight of the lord then susanna cried out with a loud voice so good for her and then the two elders also then shouted out against her so they're going to follow through with their threat the

(57:33) elders then go on to testify against susanna the people all run and they all decide that they're going to stone her on the word of these elders until daniel as elizabeth points out comes in as the judge and cries foul he gets them each separated and so this is the first kind of detective story in in the bible anyway but in maybe in history so that each one of them is put in their own room and he questions each one of them about what tree was it and all this other kind of things they teach they tell different stories because they

(58:00) didn't make up it they didn't make the story up in this kind of detail and so as a result of it their testimonies don't match caught in their lies then they're stoned for giving false testimony okay that's a fun story good story happy ending story so the same thing daniel and the idol bell it's another one of these fun stories so uh daniel uh was a companion of the king cyrus of persia he was one of the most honored of all his friends now the babylonians had an idol called bell and every day they provided for 12

(58:32) bushels of choice flower and 40 sheep and 66 measures of wine the king revered it he revered the idol and he went every day to worship it but daniel daniel worshipped his own god so the king said to him why do you not worship bell daniel answered because i do not revere idols made with hands but the living god who created heaven and earth and has dominion over all living creatures so this is a polemical morality tale against uh paganism you know whatever you want to call it but anyway essentially against polytheism and use of images

(59:06) in in worship the king said to him do you not think that bell is a living god do you not see how much food he eats and drinks every day daniel after says do not be deceived o king for this thing is only clay inside and bronze outside and it never ate or drank anything so the king was angry and he called the priests of bell and said to them if you do not tell me who is eating the provisions you shall die but if you prove that bell is eating them daniel shall die because he has spoken blasphemy against belle so daniel said to the king let it be

(59:38) done as you've said so setting him up for don't want to be in the priest's shoes here so but the food is sealed then inside the temple so they close at the door so that nobody can get it out and they put the seals on the doors but the 70 priests have a secret entrance and so they come in and the secret entrance which they use they have a big party they drink all the wine and eat all the food but dan so anyway they come out daniel the food is all gone and daniel is set to be killed but previously he had set his servants

(1:00:08) there and they put ash and dust all over the ground and so when they go in then daniel points out all these footprints of all the 70 priests and he says now what what what the hell what's going on there you know and stuff like that and so then cyrus realizes the priests trick him and so cyrus puts the priests and their whole families to death just for good measure no they should have they should have thought of that and it's probably dark in there so anyway then daniel then is given control of the idol on the temple which he then

(1:00:40) promptly destroys so you can kind of see the kind of free-floating stories that were obviously very um energetic and precious to people so they wanted to put those into the rest of the canon you can kind of see how these make their way into into a compilation like daniel okay so now we'll go to maccabees we'll look at a different kind of story this one is one that is meant as more of a history um its setting is in the second century bce and is composed a little bit after that so it's actually not pseudonym pseudonymous or pretending to

(1:01:16) be what it's not the way some of the previous ones have been and rather it's giving us pretty much insight into this particular time period and so even though it's not scripture for for example judaism it's very important for jewish historians who are reconstructing what happened at this time so the author is unknown but probably in judea itself there are a bunch of other maccabees books as we saw they are unrelated to this book and in fact they um so even though they're called first second third fourth maccabees

(1:01:45) it's mostly just we have lots of maccabee books and they've just numbered them based on which one they got first or whatever in terms of the canon but they um they in fact even in some cases contradict the first one and so the authors have different viewpoints so this is a history then of the hasmonean revolt and so we talked about how at the end of the hellenistic period after after ptolemy after egypt is controlling judea then we saw that the syrians were controlling the greek syrians are controlling uh judea and then um the there's a revolt

(1:02:21) and there's an independent kingdom under the hasmoneans so here's the plot of first maccabees the hellenistic king antiochus iv of syria uh conquers jerusalem and seizes it away from the ptolemies in egypt he then sets up what's called an abomination of desolation in the temple which is to say um an idol uh or a symbol of idols you know um so anyway an idol in the temple and the idea of it the important the importance of this word here abomination of desolation is that this is also the word that is used in daniel's apocalypse of a prediction of

(1:03:04) something that's going to happen and later apocalyptic readers read daniel and they assume this to mean something in the far future often and this is also how it's reinterpreted through the book of revelations and things like that but it's very clear what daniel means is the same exact incident so he's referring to antiochus iv and it's also written we can that's one of the reasons why we can tell it's that the book of daniel is written shortly after this event happens because it's very concerned with this event

(1:03:32) so he attempts then to force the judeans to adopt all of these hellenistic practices so all around you know for the last couple hundred years here people who are lydian speaking people who are carrying speaking cappadocian speaking all of the different peoples have started to learn greek aramaic speaking phoenicians everybody has started to learn greek they've started to adopt greek customs they're listening to greek philosophy and they are having um they are for example having greek uh schools and cities and so for example the gymnasium where

(1:04:07) um which is the nude school for uh young aristocratic boys and things like that and so they're refounding all these cities as greek cities and so now um antiochus here is more or less saying we're not making any exceptions for judeans anymore you have to stop being you know you have to stop all of this kind of non-conformity and get with the program that everybody has with you know the greek future here um and so there is a reaction against that a guy named metataius and a bunch of his sons including a guy named judah maccabee

(1:04:40) have a revolt against the syrians and also it's a civil war because there's a giant faction you can always remember that also are already hellenizing so they that they're actually a whole bunch of uh jewish people who are on board with this in other words we do want to get with the program we want to modernize you know so so there is also kind of a civil war between the those kind of two factions so um in 165 bce the temple is freed uh and reconsecrated so that sacrifices may begin again and this is uh emerging out of this is

(1:05:14) the hanukkah story and so the hell festival of hanukkah is instituted by uh judas maccabeas and his brothers the hasmoneans who become the priests and later the princes are the kings of an independent hasmonean judean kingdom it's a controversial rule that they have because they are not from either the the priestly line so you might remember that people have to be descended from aaron in order to be the high priest via zaduk so you have to be a zadokite or a sacha see and so the hasmoneans initially aren't pardon that bloodline although

(1:05:47) they merge into this overall nobility and likewise then to be king you're supposed to be davidic so you're supposed to be from the house of david and they're neither of those things and so their rule in some senses is also then controversial and once they are in charge they also a lot of them there's a they can't help but want to hellenize a little bit either and so what ends up happening is that they'll sometimes have then greek names they want to bring in some of the customs that are in all of their neighboring kingdoms because there's no

(1:06:19) other model of how to be king of anywhere than all of the neighboring hellenistic kingdoms and so they start bringing all those kind of things in and then also they end up in order to maintain their independence from much larger kingdoms around them they end up cutting deals with the emerging roman republic which is emerging as the mediterranean's great power and even though the romans always always always claim that they only ever fought defensive wars and they never you know were intervening to take anything over anytime you make a deal

(1:06:50) with the robins you know you're only able to be independent for a very short period of time and so essentially very quickly it becomes a client kingdom and then a client the hasmoneans get replaced ultimately by herod who is a relative in terms of by marriage but anyway ends up being the king that by the way is a menorah it is not a hanukiah it's not a hanukkah menorah okay it's got seven right candles not nine oh good point yeah well this is the menorah from the yeah from the temple so this is the one that um because this is from the arch of titus

(1:07:25) so this is the ramen actually the roman celebration of spoiling and destroying the temple thank you okay so essentially maccabees so the idea of this is um it reveals for us a lot of the context of the second temple period and also this internal conflict that is happening that this tension that we've had all the way back to the first temple period of being drawn either towards egypt or drawn towards babylonia likewise now being drawn towards again well syria now on the one side and later now it's going to be a revived persia

(1:08:02) oh and then on the other side egypt has now fallen to the greeks so essentially the greek speaking world and the romans okay ecclesiasticus um this is i i think that once you already have a book called ecclesiastes having one called ecclesiasticus you know it starts to become very confusing for anybody so often this one's called sirac although it's not written by a guy named cyrek but it's written by a guy whose grandfather was named cerak so it's set um sometime and this before the anyway late 2nd century or early 2nd

(1:08:39) century bce uh and it's composed right around the same time because again it's meant to be this is also one of these ones that's not pseudonymous right so it is not a later writer who's writing the name of ezra or enoch or any other person but rather writing in his own name it's originally in hebrew translated into greek the hebrews lost mostly lost there's fragments it's written by a guy named jesus the son of eliezer the son of sirach which in aramaic would be i'm sorry hebrew would be yeshua ben al-azhar ben sira and so he is a jew

(1:09:11) living in jerusalem at this time his then grandson uh translates it in updates it translates writes a little introduction translates it into greek and it makes it into the subtwo again that way and so we have in the past i think when we were talking about the book of job we looked a little bit about the wisdom tradition we don't talk as much about it anymore but anyway that's an important component of the hebrew bible the old testament and so we've looked at it before how there's essentially two different kinds of

(1:09:45) wisdom literature and the two are in fairly stark disagreement with each other and so they're um this is normal for philosophers right so the wisdom literature is more like philosophy and the philosophers tend to have like one position and then the other ones have a different position right and so we have that in greek philosophy as well so it starts in the earliest one in this kind of philosophy that's called prudential wisdom and these are things like the proverbs which is essentially um things that people say that are like

(1:10:14) common sense truths uh and so that's essentially what prudential wisdom is if you um if you do everything right you know a penny saved is a penny earned if you put up money in the bank you'll you know you if you you know it'll be you'll be happy for it tomorrow and not all this kind of thing so all this kind of good behavior or wise behavior leads to good results kind of thing but then there is a after after several centuries of that there is a new wisdom that emerges that's called reflective wisdom which is wisdom that we've read about for example

(1:10:47) in job it's quite famously um job was really wise job was very righteous he did all these righteous things and he was totally innocent according to the book and yet he gets punished and has all the most horrible things that happen to you that could possibly happen to you and so the reflective wisdom asks why is that be that's kind of what not what you said in proverbs you know that's kind of the opposite of what you said would happen in proverbs and yet we find this kind of thing happening all the time where we see

(1:11:16) wow there's a really wicked guy who he maybe is a billionaire and he maybe then wins stuff like elections i don't know and you wonder why would that keep happening that doesn't make any sense if proverbs tells us anything you know you know that person is thrown into the pit uh supposedly anyway so the reflective wisdom of job and then ecclesiastes then um are arguing then uh that this is not what we see happening but this gets pretty harsh so ecclesiastes at a certain point is kind of even wondering and makes the argument several

(1:11:49) times that the only thing that they're a person can have then is to take pleasure in their life their work uh to eat and to drink and to and to be prosperous around them because at some point or rather we're all gonna die and everything else that you do is totally vanity and vain and that and we can't even tell if a human spirit goes to heaven and a dog goes into into shoal or if no one goes anywhere because there's no spirits and there's no afterlife so ecclesiastes gets pretty bleak and the reflective wisdom tradition is

(1:12:20) sort of um anyway people want to push back on that too you know and so they would rather have they would rather have no do good and good things will result and so there ends up being that in the apocrypha books like sirac ecclesiasticus and wisdom of solomon that are written later that you're essentially pulling back to the prudential kind of wisdom updating it for the hellenistic time periods here and uh countering than the reflective wisdom and so for example um proverbs if we go back to this first one in terms of this kind of

(1:12:54) prudential wisdom these are kind of promises that we get in proverbs so concerning wisdom the fear of the lord is the beginning of knowledge fools despise wisdom and this is wisdom speaking my child do not forget my teaching but let your heart keep my commandments for long life and abundant welfare they will give you so if you were following the precepts of wisdom if you were doing following the proverbs you'll have uh abundant welfare and long life blessed are those who find wisdom long life is in her right hand

(1:13:27) and in her left hand are riches and honor so wisdom holds those two things for you if you follow all the kind of proverb teachings so that's what the kind of the results of proverbs but as we've seen then from the reflective wisdom of ecclesiastes and job we have things ecclesiastes says i've seen it all from the righteous perishing in their righteousness to the wicked growing old in their wickedness so if that keeps happening proverbs and wisdom prudential wisdom is wrong as far as ecclesiastics wisdom is concerned

(1:13:56) likewise in job job says it is all one therefore i say god destroys both the blameless and the wicked when disaster brings sudden death he mocks mocks the calamity of the innocent so it's a very harsh statement um coming from the hebrew bible you know about god and so actually a lot of people therefore wanted to soften that and to push back against that in fact they rewrote job about 20 times to try to try to soften that so one of the ways then is sirac here he writes that wisdom was first of all created things

(1:14:32) she built an everlasting home among the mortals with their descendants she will keep faith so again holy wisdom here personified if you are following all these wise precepts wisdom is going to keep faith with you there is a very neat theory that i read in an article by randall mcgraw-helms is one of my favorite new testament scholars who argues that jesus of cues so the sayings gospel the gospel that luke and matthew both use to construct their gospels was familiar with the prudential wisdom of sirach here the guy sirac is named

(1:15:10) jesus ben whatever ben shirak and he teaches in direct opposition so the two jesuses are against each other in terms of this that jesus of nazareth that he argues is clearly aware of this be aware of this text because there's a dozen dozen places where he takes the same text and turns it upside down and some of it is pretty cool word for word i'm not going to pull all those out but there's some of these that are are some of the where we can at least see the teachings are opposites so siroc says the most high hates sinners never

(1:15:38) help a sinner never trust your enemy don't have him at your side or he will trip you up so that's pretty prudential prophet you know proverbs kind of thing if you if you if you trust your enemies you know that's going to be that's going to end bad for you jesus though says love your enemies do the good for those who hate you pray for those who treat you spitefully right so it's the opposite kind of wisdom likewise jesus the son i'm sorry jesus son of sirak lists a grandson of siraculus a number of people and activities that are blessed so

(1:16:10) blessed are the this blessed are that and woe to you this jesus nazarus takes those same things and and flips them the opposite so sirach who's writing earlier says you who fear the lord expect prosperity lasting happiness and favor so if you are following all these precepts and fearing god and following proverbs you're going to expect prosperity lasting happiness and favors blessed is the rich that is found without blemish wealth is good so yes valerie yes that sounds like such a psychologically and maybe sociologically

(1:16:52) like such a right versus left politically argument that i'm wondering if you know at that time was it the sadducees were more kind of representative of the prosperous or was there some kind of political division that that might have so he's represented above yeah yeah that's an interesting question right so what is the what these guys do are arguing right with each other um so siroc here is coming out of the he's called himself the scribe so he's coming him out of the scribal class and so that would mean that he would be more likely aligned with

(1:17:25) where a pharisee is at than a sadducee sadducees tend to okay yeah the sadducees who are the real super elite priests they tend to not care about all of this babbly writing stuff and they more or less say we care only about the torah and everything else that's not in it you know you guys can argue about all you want because what the torah says is that you have to that the only people that can do that that can do sacrifice is the most important thing the temple's the most important thing the only people that can

(1:17:51) do sacrifices the sadducees and all this other stuff is just nonsense that may not we're not that we don't believe in resurrections we don't believe in all this kind of thing what's important is you know the temple and that's and who's supposed to conduct it so the sadducees are kind of fixed on that i think so anyway yes so probably coming out of you know the you know this pharisee tradition though not all the pharisees would agree with sirach it doesn't he is quoted by the rabbis i think he's not making it as i mentioned into the jewish canon uh

(1:18:20) and so um jesus and also sets himself up in the gospels anyway as an opponent of the pharisees on a bunch of different things so he's against scribes in general and he clearly has a one of these different alternatives anyway of the wisdom tradition he talks about wisdom in the gospels too but what i would kind of argue is that there's already a back and forth in this wisdom tradition and that jesus is probably fitting just in this green side as opposed to the purple side of these two things within the broader tradition so he might

(1:18:52) just be considered his own describer pharisee himself part of this wisdom tradition but on the other side so um we already had those wealth is good so jesus's side of that you know besides blessed are the rich blessed are you who are poor for yours is the kingdom of god woe to you who are rich for you have received your consolation so those are from the jesus side of that and again jesus the son of shirak here says that quote a devout man lends to his neighbors but if the guy he borrowed from if he cannot repay he has defrauded the other of his

(1:19:27) money and gratuitously made an enemy of him he will pay him back in curses and insults and so jesus writes or says if you land only where you expect to be repaid what credit is that to you even sinners lend to each other to be repaid in full so essentially um for jesus of nazareth siroc's devout man is only a sinner right and so this is probably a deliberate reversals all of these things so anyway i think this is an interesting that this text while it doesn't make it into um and most of the canons may well have

(1:20:01) been you know and known and influential to early christians and and maybe something that they're reacting against even always things don't necessarily come out of the ether almost every time you have a a text you think oh that's really original it may well be that they're writing the opposite of something that they're reacting against you know okay so we're just gonna do one more of these because we're really getting it's running along here so the second book of edge dress which is actually also sometimes called

(1:20:30) fourth estrus and so the problem here is that esdras is the greek for ezra and um and there's already a book of ezra in the in the protestant old testament and in fact the book of ezra and nehemiah are first and second ezra in the septuagint and so then this becomes the fourth one because there's another one first esdras so anyway it's very confusing because actually different people name them all different things so it's actually alternatively known as second estrus third estrus or fourth s just depending on what what book you're in

(1:21:08) so it's set in ezra's life i'm sorry yes it should be earlier than that um i i didn't change it from the last one so anyway should go back to the setting the slide here is wrong it should say essentially right after the um after the rebuilding of the temple in ezra's life it's composed though of three separate texts that are composed in the first through third centuries of the common era so now we're actually on the other side of the meridian here and so these are much more recent and i just kind of i'm pointing these out to show that this

(1:21:38) kind of activity does not actually end so like i say there become more and more door keepers that are keeping these texts from being in anybody's canon but people have not stopped writing scripture it continues in you know even the christian tradition to the present and so anyway these are written in initially the earliest earliest one is written in the earliest text is written originally in hebrew was translated into greek the later two may have actually one of them might even been convoluted in latin of all things and then translated into

(1:22:08) greek but in any event it's uh now only had in greek the author are unknown the original the early one is a jewish author and then the other two are christian author editors so essentially it's three books that are totally different from each other that have been stuck together and there's three different authors they're very distinct from each other the oldest one is the one in the middle so this kind of thing just happens okay so writing as ezra the earliest of these authors which is more confusingly called ezra

(1:22:42) four as if all of these other edges anyway so there's just a lot of different anyway because the next one the other ones are other five and those are six anyway so ezra four is a jew lamenting the destruction of the second temple by the romans by writing as though he were lamenting the destruction of the first temple by the babylonians and so it's essentially taking this new thing that's happened the destruction of the the second temple and then putting it into that context of something that had happened before

(1:23:09) as therefore then goes on to tell an apocalyptic vision of the world's present wrongs and that how those are going to be overturned and so this is one of the things that has emerged uh in this whole second temple period is more and more of the prophets are apocalyptic writers and it's essentially visions like in daniel where you're essentially assuming there's going to be an end of the world a cataclysm where the old world would be destroyed and the new world will emerge where the just are finally rewarded so we'll just read a little bit of it

(1:23:40) so you may remember that in the earliest part of the hebrew bible there's a sense that uh you know when why do the righteous suffer there's collective punishment when the people are unrighteous when they break god's laws when they become pagans god then um brings uh destroyers in to just you know mess the people up and then they eventually remember oh yeah we're supposed to be only worshiping the lord and so then they repent and then the lord brings a judge and the judge kicks out all of the foreigners the midianites or

(1:24:10) anything like that and so that's the cycle as taught about why that kind of thing happens in the first temple period in the oldest part of the bible throughout the entire second temple period nobody is being a pagan everybody is you know they're becoming increasingly you know following the laws much more and more and more strictly they're pretty pretty solid on that and so that is really not the problem that has happened and so now when the you know the romans for example have destroyed the temple again the answer is hard to fathom and they

(1:24:39) have to come up with something new so here's what as ris here has to say ezra 4 has to say then i said in my heart are the deeds of those who inhabit babylon and we can say in this case rome let's see you know who we're writing on behalf of right are the deeds of those who inhabit rome are they any better is that why it has gained dominion over zion over jerusalem and my heart failed me because i have seen how you god endure those who sin and have spared those who act wickedly have destroyed your people and protected

(1:25:13) your enemies and have not shown to anyone how your way may be comprehended are the deeds of babylon better than those of zion or has another nation known you besides israel of what tribes have so believed the covenants as these tribes of jacob we are really doing it we're doing everything we can what are these romans doing yet israel's reward has not appeared and their labor has borne no fruit for i have traveled widely among the nations it's among all the gentiles and i have seen that they abound in wealth they're doing really good you know

(1:25:47) though they are though they are unmindful of your commandments they're not doing anything they're supposed to and they're getting rewarded now therefore weigh in balance and a balance are iniquities and those of the inhabitants of the world and it will be found which way the scales will incline when have the inhabitants of the earth not sin in your sight or what nation has kept your commandments so well so you know if we were to believe you know this thing that the wicked are going to get punished and the righteous

(1:26:13) are going to get rewarded you know that clearly hasn't happened as of 70 in 70 a.d and so from from this um present calamity this then um this this particular ezra um has a literary vision with the archangel uriel and so this adds our fourth archangel so michael gabriel raphael and uriel and the archangel uriel um essentially shows an apocalyptic vision of how you know in the end times you know the wicked will ultimately be punished and scourged and all kinds of things and the righteous will be rewarded and so it's a a new idea now

(1:26:54) um that reward is not going to happen in this life because we're seeing that it's not happening so just to sum up it's a big long a lot of detail and things like that and hope it's been enjoyable there is this entire period that isn't represented especially in the protestants and jewish canons but it didn't mean that prophecy or writing stopped and when we actually then look at these texts that have uh come down to us it's interesting because they do give us a stronger picture of how christianity emerged the kinds of immediate context the kinds

(1:27:34) of things that early christians were thinking about and also how rabbinic judaism emerged the things that the rabbis are immediately dealing with like the destruction of the temple so thank you yeah question thank you i was most interesting thank you very much my question is with regard to martin luther king were there any of the uh books that were left out that he believed in or didn't believe in or what was his uh thoughts on these books some that were in martin luther or martin luther king jr no no martin luther martin luther okay

(1:28:19) because i don't know as much about martin luther king jr what he was maybe thought about each individual book but i can tell you about martin luther so martin luther um was definitely uh on the board with getting rid of the apocrypha and yeah so he didn't like the apocrypha he felt that this was um people uh he had all kinds of different ways where he decided that um essentially the roman church had introduced errors into the true early christianity that they wanted to he wanted to purge away so anything that was like christian

(1:28:50) tradition that was seen as being paganizing tendencies and things like that and so these texts he thought we can just go ahead and get rid of and he actually had a bunch of different more texts that he wanted to get rid of too but it was uh people didn't agree so anyway he wanted to lose some more sorry on on the board there it says the protestants had a certain number of these but just in the appendix so they all got ripped out of the main books and put into the appendix and so and so they're on there as an appendix because

(1:29:20) because they're translated because anglicans never so that you know when we're talking about the english-speaking world as opposed to the german world anglicans um always tried to steer this kind of mushy middle path right where they didn't want to get rid of bishops they didn't want to get rid of all the liturgy and the robes and all the fun stuff like that but then they did get rid of some of the statues and this kind of thing and you know but they so they put they put all those books and they put them in the appendix

(1:29:43) so we didn't throw them away but um we still printed them you know and so that good thing thank you very much you're welcome thank you yeah you just answered one question which is um that uh the apocrypha may not have been in they were apocryphal but they were there and so they were accessible to german christians because there's a bit from the wisdom i think and there's a bit from ecclesiasticus uh as part of the brahms requiem oh yeah uh yeah it's very influential continuing to be influential in in renaissance reformation art

(1:30:30) so there is all of these i didn't have any problem finding pictures from from these books in terms of paintings and also we wouldn't have trouble finding it in music there's an opera on susanna american yeah there's an opera by verdi called stephalio about a christian minister who is called upon to forgive his unfaithful wife i can't remember how it ends uh and the other thing that comes to mind is when we say something is apocryphal um it means it usually means oh there's this story about somebody right yeah it may or may not be true but

(1:31:09) it's a good story and it speaks to the essence of the person it's about good point yeah that's a great way a great way to kind of sum up how we have treated this but like you say it has continued to be um it was continued then to be used and influential in the art and in fact um it turns out that renaissance painters really liked painting the susanna story as you might imagine and i only was able to find the one that wasn't really an indecent picture that i put in so i had to look around for the right painting to put in the slide but anyway

(1:31:43) so yeah yeah of course but i mean it's also these very lecherous elders right so so anyway in the first place they didn't get anywhere they didn't they obviously deserved what they got they're young guys they weren't yet oh when they were young oh yeah okay gotcha valerie yeah just before you ended the lecture what was the second esdra or you had you had something up uh just before uh no for right right before the the next the last law slide i believe or just before that yeah um why did the righteous suffer the um and

(1:32:26) you said that um at the time that there was a shift towards seeing the reward in the afterlife because how else could it be that you know you try and try and you do everything right and yet the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer and israel isn't doing very well yeah and i'm wondering if that kind of general sentiment let's say it was kind of a re maybe call it a reformist sentiment uh you know to see you know to recast the you know the fruits of one's you know one's righteous living into an afterlife might

(1:32:59) it have also affected jesus and his sayings oh yeah absolutely yeah so no so this is definitely part of what's going on in early christianity so what i and what i'm kind of even saying here uh is that this is kind of a very mainstream context of second temple judaism um it ultimately is something that the christians then go with and so and so because um all of these second temple texts end up staying with christianity until the protestants you know purged the mouth sammy per sorry because i was thinking that first

(1:33:33) and foremost jesus was a jew and he would have thought as a jew did at the time you know of the roman occupation and how dispiriting it was and so i can see again psychologically the shift to seeing the reward in the afterlife and then then of course becomes so important in christianity you're exactly right and so and so that's what's so interesting is that again this isn't something that is had or even understood so this question here that um that ezra not realizer but anyway ezra iv you know writing after the destruction

(1:34:03) of the second temple he's looking back at the earliest part the part of the canon that continues to be in the hebrew bible the jewish canon and it doesn't describe this results you know and so the results should be that israel should have prospered and prospered and prospered and all the wicked should have been punished or something like that but that didn't happen and so they he's trying to come to terms with some new way to do it and so this has been emerging through the entire second temple period we've talked before when we talked about

(1:34:35) resurrection you know that one of the places resurrection may be the influence may be coming from zoroastrianism which has resurrection that has been the religion of the persian empire that has been therefore influencing by this time that this is being written has been influencing uh judaism for 600 years um coming out of this kind of that that kind of sense because resurrection is less a greek idea so the greeks are more into more believing so whereas zoroastrians do not have um my mind body dualism where they're believing in it they have a eat

(1:35:11) good evil dualism but matter is both good and evil spirit is both good and evil whereas for um uh for greeks um mind and body are very separate things and flesh and flesh tends to be the thing that gets to be made equal evil and and spirit tends to be the thing that's good and so greeks don't come up with resurrection as an idea they think of having a spiritualized existence that is immaterial so that's generally i mean that's not all greeks but anyways that's generally where where people are coming from and so anyway an afterlife that idea

(1:35:42) it's something that the christians really go with then in in the when the rabbis decide then to pre really purge out almost all of these second temple texts as a result this stuff doesn't really continue on as much in rabbinic judaism so even though rabbinic judaism is coming out of this context this kind of focus apocalyptic focus all this kind of thing is way more muted than in the jewish tradition which goes back and focuses on the earlier texts by getting rid of these out of the cannon all makes sense huh so okay very good we

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