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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781426742972 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Abingdon Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2013 |
| Series: | Immersion Bible Studies |
| Pages: | 112 |
| Sales rank: | 790,793 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Immersion Bible Studies - Apocrypha
By David A. deSilva, Marvin W. Cropsey
Abingdon Press
Copyright © 2013 Abingdon PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-4297-2
CHAPTER 1
What Is the Apocrypha, and Why Should We Care?
Apocrypha
Claim Your Story
I was raised in the Episcopal Church, and my first encounters with the Apocrypha were positive ones. Serving as an acolyte at weddings and funerals, I heard readings from Tobit and the Wisdom of Solomon during these special services. Every now and again, a selection from Sirach or Baruch would be read on a Sunday morning as part of the lectionary cycle. It struck me as a little odd that these books were not in the pew Bibles, nor in any of our Bibles at home. On the other hand, they sure sounded scriptural. When I was a teenager, I found a copy of the Apocrypha in the church library, began to acquaint myself better with the whole collection, and came to appreciate and highly value each book's witness.
The experience of many of my friends and students, however, was quite different. Some of them assert that good Christians shouldn't even read the Apocrypha. "These books are theologically suspect," they say. "They were purposefully excluded from the Bible. They are what Catholics read." The Apocrypha can be a tough sell in many Protestant Christian circles. It was not self-evident that there should even be an IMMERSION BIBLE STUDIES volume on the Apocrypha, since these books are not part of the Bible for the majority of those who will use this series.
What experiences have you had with the Apocrypha up to this point? What are your own impressions of it as you begin this study? What do you hope to discover as a result of participating in this study?
Enter the Bible Story
The Apocrypha is a collection of Jewish texts written between about 250 B.C. and A.D. 100, offering what has been well called a "bridge between the Testaments" (though a few texts overlap with the writing of the New Testament). These books are essential reading if, for no other reason, than to fill in gaps in our knowledge of the Jewish matrix into which Jesus was born and within which the movement in his name took shape.
There are really two stories to enter in order to orient ourselves to this collection. The first is the story of the Jewish people from Alexander the Great's conquest of in 332 B.C. through Rome's suppression of the Jewish Revolt of A.D. 66–70. The books of the Apocrypha emerge as a response to the challenges Jews face as this story of foreign domination progresses. The second is the story of how these particular Jewish texts came to be differentiated from the vast amount of Jewish literature written during this period, and thus became a collection that can be defined as "the Apocrypha." This would be the story of the value placed on these particular books by Christians throughout the ages.
The World Behind the Apocrypha
The story told in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) takes readers up to the Persian period, with Cyrus of Persia conquering Babylon and authorizing the return of uprooted, conquered peoples to their homelands. Cyrus thus becomes a hero for the Jewish people, allowing the exiles of Judah to return to rebuild its Temple (completed by 515 B.C.) and Jerusalem with its city walls (completed after 445 B.C.). The next events found in the Protestant Bible concern the last years of King Herod of Judea, who died in 4 B.C.!
A lot happened in between, much of this the direct or indirect result of the exploits of Alexander the Great. Alexander seized all of the Persian Empire's western lands, including Judah, by 331 B.C. By the time of his death in 323, he had expanded his Greek empire east past Babylon itself. Alexander's generals divided his empire between them in the decades following his death. The descendants of General Ptolemy ruled Egypt as their empire; the descendants of General Seleucus ruled Syria, Babylonia, and part of Asia Minor as theirs. Palestine was the disputed buffer zone, held by the Ptolemies of Egypt until Antiochus III decisively secured it for the Seleucid Empire in 198 B.C.
During this period, many elite Jews sought to secure their future through assimilating to the dominant powers to some extent. Many learned Greek. Some took Greek names in order to be identified less with a conquered people. Some adapted more freely to Greek customs and expectations to the point that they no longer looked Jewish at all. In 175 B.C., the high priest himself took the decisive step of re-founding Jerusalem as a Greek city, enrolling like-minded Jews in its senate and setting up the institutions for full-fledged Greek education and acculturation. This led to disastrous consequences: a brutal repression of Judaism and the rededication of the Temple itself to foreign gods. It also gave rise to the Maccabean Revolt, the purification of the Temple (to be celebrated ever after in Hanukkah), and the establishing of an independent Jewish state under the Hasmonean dynasty (read First and Second Maccabees for the details).
Judah enjoyed political independence for about eighty years (141 to 63 B.C.), but the Hasmonean rulers lost both credibility and power, with the result that Rome took Judea under its "protection" and established Herod as its deputy king. Roman rule, first through Herod's family and then directly, was experienced as oppressive and unwelcome, leading to an ill-advised revolt against Rome in A.D. 66–70. The Roman armies crushed the opposition and laid waste to the Temple for a second traumatic time.
Wrestling With Faithfulness in an Age of Domination
The social, cultural, and political dynamics of this period presented many challenges for Jews living in Judea. These challenges were often magnified for Jews living in "Diaspora," that is, in Jewish communities in Egypt, Syria, or other Gentile territories. This was an environment that tended to intensify their experience of living as a minority group in a very un-Jewish world. Many of the books of the Apocrypha can be read as attempts to nurture and discern faithful responses to these challenges, helping Jews to remain connected to the God who spoke in the Scriptures and who continued to be present to guide, sustain, and deliver.
A major challenge had to do with the choice between assimilation and remaining "holy to the Lord," hence keeping cultural and social distance from non-Jews. Does keeping covenant make sense in a multicultural environment dominated by the Greeks? Why keep walking this path, especially when it makes networking, fitting in, and prospering more challenging? What is the best path to individual and national prosperity? Sirach, Tobit, Judith, and First through Fourth Maccabees all give prominence to addressing these questions. Greek Esther and Third Maccabees bear witness to close Torah-observance, and Gentile reactions to the Jews' practices, as a source of unwelcome, unhelpful ethnic tension.
Another important challenge comes from the Jews' increasing awareness of their minority status and opinion. They were asking, "do our claims about God's uniqueness make sense in a pluralistic world where the majority worship other gods with just as much fervency?" The Letter of Jeremiah, stories like Bel and the Snake, and the second half of Wisdom of Solomon were written to answer this question.
Living under near-constant foreign domination for centuries posed challenges to belief in the assurances made to David and his line and the visions of Zion's future articulated in the Hebrew Scriptures. Have the promises failed? Tobit and Baruch seek to reaffirm the promises in the context of Greek domination, while Second Esdras raises the problem most acutely in the wake of Rome's destruction of the second Temple. From a different angle, the opening chapters of Wisdom of Solomon and the martyr narratives of Second and Fourth Maccabees raise and answer the question in regard to the individual righteous person who, nevertheless, does not enjoy God's rewards in this life.
The Hellenistic context was not all bad, however. It also provided opportunities for the expansion of Jewish wisdom and cultural knowledge, as well as for the creative reinterpretation of the value of the Jewish way of life. Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, and Fourth Maccabees especially bear witness to the phenomenon of Hellenism's positive contribution to the repertoire of Jewish wisdom and self-understanding.
Christian Reading Practices and the Apocrypha
Jews wrote a vast amount of literature during this period. The fact that we have a collection called the Apocrypha at all is the result of conversations among Christians about the value and importance of these particular books from that much larger body. Early Christians read and valued many Jewish books that were not considered sacred in the synagogue. This should not surprise us, since they were turning more and more to writings like the letters of its apostolic missionaries and the Gospels as they were shaping their distinctive identity and practice. The early church was not living within the bounds of Judaism, including its boundaries on "canon."
Perhaps because they saw the points of similarity between the teachings of Tobit and Ben Sira and Jesus or between Wisdom of Solomon and Paul, or because they found texts like Second and Fourth Maccabees helpful in their own struggles to endure persecution, these books became very influential in the church alongside the books of the Hebrew Bible. Because the early church tended to use the Greek translations and versions of the books, even of the Hebrew Bible, they also inherited the longer versions of Esther and Daniel as well as the additions to Jeremiah's legacy (Baruch and Letter of Jeremiah). The early church thus had, functionally, a broader set of Jewish Scriptures than the synagogue.
Christians also noticed this difference, and frequently raised questions about whether or not the Christian Old Testament should fall more in line with the Jewish Scriptures. Jerome, a Christian scholar who studied for some time in Palestine, was a fourth-century champion of the latter view. He drew a line between the canonical books of the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible) and the additional books that, while valued by the church for centuries, should not be held to carry the same level of authority. Augustine avidly opposed this distinction due to the authority and impact these additional books had already enjoyed in the church for centuries. His view became the dominant one, ratified by the Third Council of Carthage in A.D. 397. This is reflected indirectly in the fact that our three oldest copies of the complete Christian Bible (three Greek volumes from the fourth and fifth centuries) contain most of the Apocrypha and intersperse these books throughout the Old Testament without distinction.
The Protestant Reformation, of course, brought this issue to the fore once again with its emphasis on "Scripture alone" as the rule for the church. It became vitally important in such an environment to decide exactly what counted as Scripture. Luther was well aware of the historical debates over the status of the additional books. It did not help their cause that certain beliefs and practices that Luther found objectionable, like offering prayers and masses for the dead or the idea of a "treasury of merit" that could be drawn upon by the less meritorious, were defended on the basis of passages in Tobit and Second Maccabees (Tobit 4:7-11; 2 Maccabees 12:43-45). Luther, followed by other reformers, concluded that these books should be gathered up out of the Old Testament and printed as a separate section, thus the Apocrypha came to be.
It is important to realize, however, that even Martin Luther highly valued these books. First of all, he took the trouble to translate them into German along with the canonical books and to print them in his German Bible. He also stated that, "though [the Apocryphal books] are not esteemed like the holy Scriptures, they are still both useful and good to read" (Luther's preface to the Apocrypha). He presented them thus as "recommended reading" alongside the Protestant canon. The Zurich Bible also included the Apocrypha as a separate section, with Ulrich Zwingli (Swiss Reformation leader, 1484–1531) commending them as containing "much that is true and useful, fostering piety of life and edification." They were included also in the original publication of the King James Bible. They were gradually omitted out of an interest in publishing less expensive Bibles for personal use, missionary distribution, and eventually church use.
The existence of the collection of Apocrypha, therefore, is the result of two equal dynamics—the exceptional value that the church placed on these texts and doubts about that value equaling that of the books of the Hebrew canon.
Live the Story
I find the authors of the Apocrypha to be very much kindred spirits to our own. We ask many of the same questions that they did: How do we find guidance from God in a post-scriptural age, that is, when we hold that the golden age of divine inspiration is behind us? How do we remain faithful to the revelation we have received (our Scriptures and their message) in a significantly changed world? How can we recognize the challenges to our faith and faithfulness? How can we positively engage this world in ways that do not corrode, and might even nourish, our faith and faithfulness?
We also share the conviction that, while we might not be living in a period in which inspired Scriptures are being written, God is not truly silent, either. Rather, God is still guiding God's people, inspiring faithful responses and the diligent seeking of God's will and favor. At the very least, we can approach these texts as the devotional and inspirational literature most widely, and for the longest time, embraced by the Christian church throughout the world.
CHAPTER 2Tobit
Tobit 1–14
Claim Your Story
Many of us will resonate with the plights of Tobit and of Sarah, if not in all the particulars of their stories, at least in the place to which their stories had brought them—the place of being ready to give up because there seems to be no way forward. We lose jobs and the means of sustaining our families and ourselves. We suffer personal injury or lose essential abilities. Our marriages fail to last and to produce the fruit for which we were hoping. Our commitment to doing what is right doesn't seem to pay off. Not all of us, but at least some of us have come to a point at some time in our lives where we've stopped praying "God, help me find a way forward" and found ourselves praying "God, just end my misery."
I've been at that point at least twice so far in my life. Perhaps twice in forty-five years is not all that bad. I resonate with Tobit's and Sarah's stories because, like them by the end of the book, I can look back on such prayers and praise God for making a way forward when there appeared to be none, not even the possibility. The Book of Tobit is a reminder that today's hopeless crisis can become tomorrow's testimony to God's generous kindness.
Enter the Bible Story
King David was remembered as "a man who shares [God's] desires" (Acts 13:22), or, in more traditional language, "a man after [God's] own heart" (1 Samuel 13:14, NRSV). God worked mighty acts through David and on David's behalf. The Psalms bear witness to David's many prayers and God's many answers. But David was king over God's people. Of course God took notice of him and invested in him. What about ordinary people, the people about whom the great historical books of the Old Testament say nothing (except, perhaps, that so many were killed in this or that battle, or so many participated in this building project, or so many returned to Judea from this or that tribe)?
The Book of Tobit fills an important gap in this regard. It is the story of an ordinary man, his wife, their son, and their extended family, who find themselves at the ends of their respective ropes, and who pray to God for help. They're not kings; they're not prophets. They're just "good church folk." And it is the story of how God hears their prayers and intervenes to bring about a good outcome beyond anyone's expectations. As such, the book assures us that the God who was close to, and interacted with the stories of, the great people of the Bible is also close to and ready to intervene in the lives of us ordinary folk as well.
Prayer
The Book of Tobit is a well-crafted, delightful story. Unlike many narratives from the ancient world, where the turning point comes rather late in the story just before the resolution, the turning point in Tobit comes quite early and in a rather nondramatic fashion. That turning point is a pair of prayers in Chapter 3.
Tobit, an Israelite exile living in Nineveh, has lost his sight and become entirely dependent on the wages his wife, Anna, is able to earn. When he refuses to believe her employers were so generous as to send a young goat home with her as a bonus, she replies with words that strike him to the heart, recalling his former ability to be generous himself. This pushes him over the edge, and he prays that God would at last allow him to die, since life has become so unbearable. At the same time, three hundred miles away in Ecbatana, a young woman named Sarah is similarly distraught. After seven marriages that end on the wedding night, she loses hope of ever having a family. Her female servants have started a rumor that she kills her husbands on their wedding night and spit her bad fortune in her face. On the verge of committing suicide, she decides not to bring even more grief on her family by her own hand and prays to God either to kill her or take notice of her pain at last.
The narrator takes us thence to God's throne and to God's decisive action on behalf of Tobit and Sarah to turn things around for them. The remainder of the story—the vast bulk of the story—is not a journey in search of resolution, but the story of how the resolution of the whole family's ills is being worked out along the way. This is itself quite a statement about life with God. Like the characters in the story, we may not comprehend as it is happening, but in hindsight we can at last see that a greater part of our story is the story of God working out the resolution better than we might have imagined.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Immersion Bible Studies - Apocrypha by David A. deSilva, Marvin W. Cropsey. Copyright © 2013 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Immersion Bible Studies,1. What Is the Apocrypha, and Why Should We Care?,
2. Tobit,
3. Second Maccabees,
4. Fourth Maccabees,
5. Prayers of Repentance in the Apocrypha,
6. Sirach,
7. Wisdom of Solomon,
8. Judith,
For Further Reading,
Leader Guide,