The Bible

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0. Introduction

0.1 Quiz

The following set of multichoice questions are provided as a means of testing your general knowledge in regard to the Bible and its content. You are allowed two attempts at this quiz the first is to be completed before beginning this course while your second attempt is to be made once you have completed the course.

From what country did Moses help the Israelites escape from their lives of slavery?
- Egypt. Edom. Moab. Midian.
What was Nicodemus?
- A Zealot. A Saduccee. A Scribe. A Pharisee.
Which of the following books is not in the New Testament?
- James. Jude. Amos. Titus.
In what town did Mary and Martha live?
- Bethsaida. Bethel. Bethlehem. Bethany.
Israel split into two kingdoms. The northern called Israel. What was the southern one called?
- Philistia. Judah. Edom. Syria.
Which disciple cared for Mary after the death of Jesus?
- Peter. Simon. James. John.
How many books make up the New Testament?
- 39. 25. 43. 27.
Which two Old Testament characters appeared with Jesus at His transfiguration?
- Abraham and Elisha. Elijah & Elisha. Abraham & Moses. Elijah & Moses.
Which powers took the people of the northern and southern kingdoms into captivity?
- Rome. Persia. Babylon. Assyria.
In what language was the Old Testament written?
- Greek. Latin. Arabic. Hebrew.
What miracle did Jesus perform at a marriage in Cana?
- Healed Peter’s mother-in-law. Withering of a fig tree. Water into wine. Walked on water.
Which of the following books is not a book of prophecy?
- Nehemiah. Joshua. Ezra. Nahum.
Which country did Mary and Joseph go to after Herod decided to kill infants in Bethlehem?
- Egypt. Moab. Edom. Ammon.
Which of the following books is not in the Old Testament?
- Lamentations. Ecclesiastes. Ruth. Hebrews.
Which tribe of Israel looked after the religious aspects of life?
- Benjamin. Asher. Levi. Dan.
What was the affliction of Bartimaeus?
- Deafness. Dumbness. Lameness. Blindness.
Which of the following books is part of the Pentateuch?
- Exodus. Judges. Daniel. Joshua.
What does the word gospel mean?
- Good news. Holy story. God speaks. Wise sayings.
For how many days did Jesus appear to His disciples after His resurrection?
- 12. 40. 7. 33.
On what Island was John when he was given the vision of Revelation?
- Rhodes. Samos. Cyprus. Patmos.
Which of the following is not one of the 7 churches mentioned in the book of Revelation?
- Miletus. Philadelphia. Thyatira. Ephesus.
Which of the following was not one of the judges of Israel?
- Deborah. Jephthat. Samson. Laban.
In which book of the Bible do we read of the valley of dry bones?
- Daniel. Jeremiah. Isaiah. Ezekiel.
Who wrote the book of Acts?
- Paul. John. Luke. James.
How many books are there in the Old Testament?
- 39. 27. 29. 37.

1. Books Divinely Inspired.

1.1 Introduction

When you hold the Bible in your hand you are actually holding a library of approximately 66 books. It is said “approximately” because not all Bibles are the same. Different traditions within the broader Christian tradition hold different views as to which books carry divine authority and so can be said to be Holy Scripture.

In this Session you will look at the Bibles of 4 major traditions to get a sense of these differences. You will then be asked to work with the Scriptures themselves, in particular with what the Lord Himself had to say on this matter in the Gospels, before considering what the Heavenly Doctrines say as to which books of the Bible are divine and as such constitute the Lord’s Word.

1.2 Reading

Lets explore questions concerning the nature and origin of the Bible. We see mentioned in the introduction for this Session that the Bible is a compilation of a number of books and that not all Bibles are made up of the same books. This immediately begs the question as to how it was that a particular set of ancient texts were settled upon as sacred, what was the standard used to establish whether a book or scroll was divinely inspired or not and who was given the authority to apply the standard to the various texts to establish their validity.

Most people who subscribe to a body of sacred texts as the basis for their faith are content to take it on faith that what is has come to them by means of tradition and as such has been sanctioned by the successive authorities of their churches. But when it is seen that not all Bibles are the same questions of the legitimacy of the content of one version as opposed to another can’t be avoided, unless one is content to dismiss the others by holding to a position that one’s own faith tradition is the final authority on what is to be accepted or rejected.

But this kind of blind faith in tradition and ecclesiastical authority as to what constitutes the Sacred Scriptures can hardly be said to satisfy any genuine inquiry into the nature of those books that are claimed to hold special divine status. Invariably differences in what is accepted and rejected on the basis of ecclesiastical authority and religious tradition between any two groups, in so far as what is held to be Sacred Scripture, can go no further than the word of one group against another. All appeals to human derived standards can only result in an impasse.

Is there an objective standard that can be used that doesn’t rely on human authority and/or tradition to which a person can appeal to establish whether a text holds divine status or not?

The answer to this question may appear to be obvious for those of us who subscribe to the teachings found in the Heavenly Doctrines and who regard them as divine revelation. There we find explicit statements as to which books of the Bible make up the Word [1] and why they are the Word as far as the Old and New Testament Scriptures are concerned. But an appeal to the Heavenly Doctrines, while perfectly reasonable to those who are sympathetic towards them, wouldn’t constitute a strong starting point for those who are willing to enter into a discussion dealing with the questions of divine inspiration in regard to religious texts but are not familiar with, or perhaps are, but are unconvinced as to the claims the Heavenly Doctrines make concerning themselves.

Appealing to the Heavenly Doctrines as the final authority in these circumstances is not likely to be helpful as it would be regarded as nothing more than an appeal to one man’s view, that man being Swedenborg, and so an appeal to human authority as the standard by which the status of religious texts are judged. It could then be agued that the use of this standard is in essence no different to the standards of tradition and ecclesiastical authority that other groups use to support their view as to those texts that should be included in the Bible as Sacred Scripture.

One way to approach this debate would be to agree on a common standard that is deemed reasonable by the parties involved. This is important because other Christian groups, particularly those found in the Protestant tradition view the New Church ’s position on what constitutes the books of the Word as somewhat arbitrary. If it can be shown from the literal sense of the Word and specifically from the Lord’s own mouth in the gospels a rationale for the singling out of particular books as having a special status above others in the Bible [2] then we at least have the possibility of a common agreed standard. With this in mind we now turn to exploring the different texts that a number of different traditions hold as having special sacred status.

1.2 The Old Testament

WILL THE REAL CANON PLEASE STAND UP!!

The Greek word kanon means “a measuring rod.” The canon of Scripture thus represents the yard stick by which the church’s belief and practice is to be measured against: its norms, the list of writings accepted as authoritative and binding. Any concept of Scripture (i.e., a recognition of divine revelation in a written form) ultimately implies the concept of a canon that identifies and enumerates those writings.

Just to give you some idea of the range of acceptable writings we shall look at 4 canons before giving consideration to those books of the Old and New Testaments that are included in the canon of the New Church. We begin with the Old Testament and as we can see from the following list the number of books across traditions varies quite markedly ranging from 22 books in the Jewish tradition to 52 books in the Greek Orthodox tradition.

The Jewish or Hebrew Canon (22 or 24 books) The Protestant Old Testament Canon (39 books) The Greek Orthodox Old Testament Canon (52 Books) The Catholic Old Testament Canon (46 books) The New Church Old Testament Canon (29 books)

1.3 The Jewish and Protestant Canons

These are treated together due to the fact that those books of the Old Testament held to be divinely inspired within the Protestant tradition are the same books deemed as divinely inspired within the Jewish religious tradition.

The 24 books of the Jewish canon contains the 39 books of the Protestant Old Testament canon. The way in which Jewish tradition splits and organises these books differs from the Protestant tradition. The Jewish canon or Tanakh contains 3 divisions of books called the Law, the Prophets and the Writings. The books in each of these divisions are as follows…

1.4 The Tanakh

Name given by the Jews to what the Protestant’s call the Old Testament which is an anagram (TaNaKh) for Torah (Law), Naviim (Prophets) & Ketuvim (Writings).

The Law (5 books) Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
The Prophets (8 books) Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and The Twelve.
The Writings (11 books) Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Solomon, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles.

The Protestant canon (The Old Testament) has 5 divisions and is organised as follows:-

The Pentateuch (5 books) Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy
The Former Prophets (12 books) Joshua, Judges, Ruth, I & II Samuel, I & II Kings, I & II Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther.
The Poetical/Wisdom books (5 books) Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon
The Major Prophets (5 books) Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel
The Minor Prophets (12 books) Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi.

You will have noticed that in the Protestant canon some books found in the Jewish canon are divided into two books so that where in the Jewish cannon we have the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, the Protestant canon we have first and second Samuel, first and second Kings and first and second Chronicles. This split was a pragmatic decision to assist with printing the Bible as a series of volumes to avoid any single book being too large. The other major distinction is that the 12 Minor Prophets of the Protestant canon form a single book in the Jewish canon simply called The Twelve. When this is taken into consideration we see that both these canons contain the same overall content.

It’s worth noting that of the 22/24 books of the Jewish canon a few inclusions were not without controversy. The books in question were…

Proverbs: Main area of controversy stemmed around its contradiction of itself (see Proverbs 26:4-5)

Ecclesiastes: Its central theme being that life is vanity was considered by some as not in keeping with the spirit of Holy Scripture

Song of Solomon: Its sensual nature presented a challenge as it was difficult for some to reconcile the erotic language of this book with it being divinely inspired.

Esther: Esther doesn’t mention the name of God once and this was considered enough to call its authority into question.

It was resolved at the Jewish Council of Jamnia in AD 90 that these books were to be included in the canon.

1.5 Orthodox And Catholic Canons

Both these traditions have additional books included in their canons. These extra books are found in the Greek Translation of the Jewish Scriptures called the Septuagint or LXX. [8] The LXX was wide spread throughout the Hellenistic world and it was due to the authority it held amongst Greek speaking Jews as the Scriptures was a contributing factor to the calling of the Council of Jamnia which determined once and for all on what books would make up the Jewish canon. Two determining factors were;

The book had to have been originally written in Hebrew and
It had to be over 400 years old, in other words it had to have been written before the inter-testament period [9] had begun in keeping with the idea that all divine revelation as far as the Jewish religion is concerned had effectively ceased from that time.

Jerome (347-420) was the first to produce a full Latin translation of the Bible from the Hebrew and Greek texts in the early 5th Century. This was called the Vulgate (vulgar or common Latin version). In his earlier translation work under the direction of Pope Damascus I he argued to have excluded from the translation the books of the Apocrypha (extra books now found in the Roman and Greek Orthodox versions of the Bible) but was overruled.

All of these books were written in the inter-testament period and for this reason among others were not accepted into the Jewish canon as according to Josephus and the Talmud after the time of Malachi (430 BC) divine revelation ceased.

The extra books included in the Catholic canon are called the Deuterocanocal or “second canon” but are called the Apocrypha within the Protestant tradition. Within the Protestant tradition these books are considered useful books with spiritual wisdom within them but they are not considered divinely inspired. That they were regarded as useful books for the Church is seen in that they were included in a separate section of the full Authorised Edition (King James Bible).

Evidence from the writings of the early Apostolic Fathers and various councils suggest that the early church had largely settled on the 39 books currently in the Protestant Old Testament canon as being Holy Scripture as seen in the following outline.

Jewish council of Jamnia (AD 90) settled on the 24 books of the Jewish canon

Bishop Melito of Sardis (A. D. 170) wrote a list of the books to be included in the canon – all of those in the Jewish canon were listed with the exception of Esther.

Origen (3rd Century AD) confirmed acceptance of the view of Josephus in regards to the canon

Eight prominent Church Fathers (4th Century AD) Athanasius of Alexandria, Cyril of Jerusalem, Epiphanius of Cyprus, Amphilocius of Asia Minor, and Gregory Nazianzus of Cappadocia , Hilary of France, Rufinus of Italy, and Jerome all compiled lists that confirmed the acceptance of the 39 books that currently make up the Protestant Old Testament.

The Testimony Of Tradition And Ecclesiastical Authority

The central question that now arises hinges around the opinions of these illustrious figures of church history. Are these opinions enough to base our convictions on as to the authenticity of those 39 books of the Bible’s Old Testament as having a divine status and authority? Many people accept this as enough; in fact many are prepared to accept what they are told without question, being persuaded that the Bible as it is found in their own tradition is the divinely inspired Word of God. The acceptance of the Bible as the Word of God on the authority of someone’s say so is to rely on external evidence and while this needs to be taken into consideration it is but one aspect of a more complex picture.

Please now attempt the assignment for this section of Session 2: The Old Testament Canon.

1.6 Assignment 1

Provide an overview of your own sense of the Bible and give a brief account of your relationship to it in terms of your personal history of engaging with it.
Find examples of the following styles of writing in the Bible and provide a reference for them.

Mythical
Historical
Poetic
Prophetical
Apocalyptic

Do a little research to answer the following questions…

What were the original languages that the Bible was written in?
What is the Septuagint and how did it get its name?
How many years were there between the end of the Old Testament period and the beginning of the New Testament period?

Make a list of questions you carry personally in regard to the Bible and its contents.

2. Divine Revelation

2.1 Introduction

The New Church doctrine about Divine Revelation, which is with us, the Word of the Lord, is given most succinctly in two places in the works Swedenborg published for the New Church. The first is in the last part of the Arcana Coelestia,1 and the second in the work Concerning the New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine,2 published two years later in 1758. The essential message is that the Lord’s Word is accommodated both to angels and men, and that it is given as a means of maintaining, and when necessary restoring, a connection or covenant between the Lord and heaven and earth. It is also clearly shown that the Lord Himself is this Divine Truth.

Both of these statements conclude with a paragraph in almost identical terms specifying which books, first in the Old Testament and then in the New Testament, contain an internal sense capable of effecting this connection. What is said in the former work is repeated almost verbatim in the latter, but in this case there is also the addition of a copious summary of the doctrine of “the Word,” extracted from the Arcana Coelestia with reference numbers given. Here the concluding paragraph3 is as follows:

Which are the Books of the Word. The books of the Word are all those that have an internal sense; but those books which have no internal sense are not the Word. The books in the Old Testament are: the five books of Moses, the book of Joshua, the book of Judges, the two books of Samuel, the two books of the Kings, the Psalms of David, the Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi: and in the New Testament, the four Evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the Apocalypse.

The rest have no internal sense, This list of books selected from the generally accepted scriptures may seem somewhat arbitrary unless something is first known of how the books contained in the various Bibles came to be

AC 10318-10325
HD 249-266
HD 266

written and collected together. The purpose of this essay, which is concerned with the Old Testament only, is to try to supply a brief outline of such knowledge without going into too much detail about the views and conclusions of scholars about the writers or compilers of each book and the dates of writing. It is hoped that it may be of use, both to those who may be drawn to Swedenborg and the New Church from other backgrounds and to those who already in some measure are receivers of the “heavenly doctrine.” In conclusion it will be shown how the references to the Old Testament by the Lord Jesus Christ as recorded in the Gospels agree with the list of books as given to the New Church.

Before going on to examine the Hebrew Bible, which must be our main concern, a start can be made with a few observations about the more familiar English Bible. In this the Old Testament is found to consist of thirty-nine books which have been arranged in an order that can be classified thus:

I. LAW. Genesis to Deuteronomy 5 books II. HISTORY. Joshua to Esther 12 books III. POETRY. Job to Song of Solomon 5 books IV. PROPHECY. Isaiah to Malachi 17 books

All these books were written in Hebrew except for some portions in a few of the later books that were written in Aramaic. This was a dialect still being spoken in Palestine in the time of the Lord Jesus Christ and His disciples.

This arrangement of the books, though logical in some respects, is not the same as that of the Hebrew Bible known to the Jews and carefully preserved by their scribes. Yet the Hebrew Bible was “the scriptures” as used in the temple and the synagogues and referred to by the Lord on earth.

At that time the scriptures were preserved in the form of parchment scrolls, most carefully copied as necessary from time to time. Similar scrolls are still used in the ceremonial worship of synagogues. With each book, so that errors in copying might be checked and eliminated, the number of words and letters was counted, and notes were made of the middle word and the middle letter, and also of any peculiarities such as an abnormal spelling or a letter written extra large or upside down.

These notes and some other details still found in the printed Hebrew Bible were passed on by one generation of scribes to the next as a firm tradition. The Hebrew word for tradition is “Masorah,” from which the scribes called Masorites or Masoretes were named. Swedenborg saw clearly that their work was providential and he referred to it several times.4

It is well known that the books of the Old Testament were written by different persons at different times. Just what a long period of time elapsed while they were being written, copied, and gradually collected is perhaps not so generally known. Disregarding the portions and quotations which came from earlier times, this may be as much as 1300 years or more from the time of the Exodus (c. 1400 BC) up to the writing of the book of Daniel after 170 BC or even later. As we know from the general history of the Israelites, great changes and developments took place during this period. The quite primitive people of Hebrew stock descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and delivered

SS 13, LJ41, DP260

from slavery in Egypt, became a people tutored by the Word of the Lord and tested as well as influenced by the nations around them. Inevitably their language and customs were modified over the years up to the time of the Lord’s Advent; but we know that the very obstinacy and stiff-necked quality of which they were accused by Moses and the prophets and the Lord Himself, ensured that the principal precepts especially entrusted to them in the Law of Moses were tenaciously maintained and preserved. As already noted, this happened of the Divine Providence, although there were intervals when nearly all the people fell away from any faith or obedience.

The Hebrew Bible with its three great divisions of the Law, the Prophets and the Writings, as printed today in conformity with Jewish tradition, consists of the same 39 books. They were, however, counted by the Jews as 24 and referred to as the “four-and-twenty,” and arranged thus:

I. THE LAW (Torah),

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy 5

II. THE PROPHETS (Neviim) in two sections

Former Prophets: (a) Joshua, (b) Judges, (c) Samuel, (d) Kings 4
Latter Prophets: (a) Isaiah, (b) Jeremiah, (c) Ezekiel, (d) “the twelve” (minor prophets) 4

III. THE WRITINGS (Kethuvim) in three sections.

Three books: (a) Psalms, (b) Proverbs, (c) Job 3
Five rolls: (a) Song of Songs, (b) Ruth, (c) Lamentations, (d) Ecclesiastes, (e) Esther 5
(a) Daniel, (b) Ezra and Nehemiah, (c) the Chronicles 3

The titles found in English Bibles are derived for the most part from a Greek version of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint. Compiled in Alexandria, this was in use among the Jews of the Roman Empire. The Septuagint had a considerable influence on an early Latin version of the Scriptures produced in Africa in the second century AD.

At that time Greek was still the language commonly in use among Christians even in Rome. This Latin version, known as the Old Vulgate, included some additional books written originally in Greek. It was only after Jerome had made, during the period AD 391 to 404, a new Latin translation of the Old Testament from the original Hebrew that Christians in the western churches began to know which books were in the Hebrew Bible of the Jews.

They were then able to distinguish these from the books written originally in Greek, and from various additions and interpolations made to Hebrew books by Greek writers. We now call these the Apocrypha. The widely used Vulgate, the common version of the Latin Churches, was largely based on Jerome’s work.

During the Middle Ages and up to and even after the Reformation, there have been considerable variations in the Canon of the Scriptures accepted by the different branches and sects of the Christian Church. These, however, need not concern us as we turn to a further consideration of the Hebrew Bible.

THE LAW

The Law (often called the Pentateuch from a word of Greek origin meaning the five-fold book) was ascribed by tradition to Moses and referred to as “the law of Moses.” Clearly he did not write the account of his death at the end of Deuteronomy, but Moses seems to have been mainly responsible for the rest.5

The first part to be written down was “the book of the covenant”6 including the Decalogue. This was followed by the rest of Exodus and the other books. Genesis contains both true history (chaps. 12 to 50) and also (chaps. 1 to 11) made-up history, taken from part of an older Word written for the Ancient Church. We do not know precisely how Moses received this, but he is said to have copied the early chapters from it.7

Possibly he had access to a copy obtained from Egypt. With the Israelites the several books had no official titles. They were simply known by their opening words, or at least by the first distinctive phrase. Thus Genesis was known as “Bareshith” or “In the beginning.” Exodus was known as “These are the names,” and Numbers as “In the wilderness.” In much later times Hebrew titles were given to some of them, such as “Book of Creation,” “Book of Damages,” etc., to denote their contents.

The five books of “the Law” were in effect the first Bible of the Israelites. They have always been regarded by the Jews as holier than any other books, In the eighteenth year of King Josiah there was found in the temple a law book which was at once recognized by king, priests and people as authoritative and ancient. There is no good reason to doubt that this book, found by Hilkiah the high priest, was substantially the Pentateuch that we have. Moreover, the Samaritans, who had no dealings with the Jews when the latter were collecting their books called “the Prophets,” had a Bible consisting only of the books of Moses. Copies of this Samaritan Pentateuch are still in existence.

They were written in an earlier and more rounded form of script than that of the square letters adopted by the Jews sometime after their captivity. This book was preserved and used by the Samaritans in their worship on mount Gerizim. It furnishes a strong argument against the theories of some Biblical critics who suppose that even the earliest books were pieced together from different texts and sources by later editors. In this way attempts have been made on purely natural grounds to account for such seemingly unnecessary repetitions as two creation stories and two versions of the Decalogue, etc. There is general agreement, however, that the first great division of the Hebrew Bible was accepted by all Jews as the most holy part of their scriptures at or before the beginning of the 4th century BC.

THE PROPHETS

Although the four books of the “former prophets” consist of history, the Jews classed them as prophetical. They believed them to have been written by men of God who were prophets in the true sense of the term, i.e., specially inspired teachers. These books describe the whole course of the history of the Children of Israel from their entry into Canaan up to the Babylonian captivity.

This is covered in four periods with which the four books in their series broadly correspond: (a) the invasion of Canaan under Joshua, (b) the struggle for control under the Judges, (c) the rise of the monarchy under Samuel, and (d) in the Kings the history of the two kingdoms up to their respective ends, when Israel surrendered to Assyria, and Judah, the lone survivor, was taken away captive to Babylon.

Ex. 20-23; Cf. Ex. 24:3-8
TCR 279; AC 1403
See II Kings 22, 23
A process called redaction.

The fall of Samaria in the ninth year of Hoshea10 occurred about 722 BC, and the fall of Jerusalem 134 years later in 588 BC. Thus the four books record the history of roughly 920 years subsequent to the death of Moses. The “latter prophets” (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the twelve minor prophets) have been the subject of much discussion and speculation among scholars in regard to their dates and writers.

They prophesied at different times and places, but there is general agreement that Amos was one of the earliest, and that Haggai and Zechariah belong to the period of the return from the captivity when the temple was rebuilt, whereas Malachi was active later when the temple service was in operation.

The book of Jonah differs from the rest of the twelve in that it consists entirely of narrative. It records the story of Jonah-ben-Ammittai of Gath-hepher in Galilee, who lived in the reign of Jeroboam II about 780 BC,11 thus earlier than Amos.

It does not, however, record in the customary manner the actual words that he spoke in the name of the Lord. Because it speaks of Nineveh in a way that implies that it had ceased to be a great city,12 it would seem that it must have been written after 606 BC when that city fell. Its language and style, with many Aramaic words and phrases, point to a date about 400 BC or later. The book of Joel was written late, possibly in the first half of the 4th century BC, after the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah.

The three great books, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel stand in the chronological order of the men whose names they bear, and their prophecies relate to periods within the wider span covered by “the Twelve.” Because of their outstanding quality and greatness their eventual inclusion with “the Prophets” was never in doubt. The whole collection probably took place gradually after the return of the Jews from exile.

Most scholars are agreed that these books, however variously arranged in order, were accepted as the second great division of the Hebrew Bible by 200 BC, and perhaps as early as 250 BC, and that it was then considered as a closed collection. It is suggested by Jewish writers that “the Twelve” were put together and regarded as one book because each of them was comparatively small.

As separate rolls they could have been lost. Jonah, so different from the rest, may have been included to make the round number 12 and because he is described as a prophet in II Kings 14:25. The largest roll, Zechariah, probably originally consisted only of chapters 1 to 9. At later dates the rest of the chapters may have been joined on to leave the number of “the Twelve” undisturbed.

There is evidence in chapters 10 to 14 pointing to something of the sort.

THE WRITINGS

No precise date can be determined for the completion of the third division of the Hebrew Bible. In view of the wide variety of its contents, some of very early date and some quite late, we can only suppose that all the books of this collection were known by the time of the Lord’s Advent. It is possible that one or two of them may not have been accepted as canonical by the Jews until a little later. The Hebrew title is simply “Writings,” although a Greek title Haggiographa or “sacred writings” is now frequently used.

II Kings 17:6
II Kings 14:25
Jonah 3:3

The three books which come first in this division (Psalms, Proverbs, Job), besides being the largest (except for Chronicles), have probably been classed together by reason of their poetical form. The 150 Psalms, collected over quite a long period, were given the Hebrew title Tehillim meaning “Praises.” The word for a single psalm is mizmor, for which there is no plural. It means “to play the lyre,” as does the Greek word psalmos.

From the time of David onwards these sacred songs have been used by the Jews for singing or chanting to a musical accompaniment in their worship. This distinguishes them from all the other books of their “scriptures,” and is probably the only reason for their relegation to this division of the Hebrew Bible. David is by universal tradition regarded as the founder of this sacred psalmody, but many of the compositions are of much later date. It would seem that the collection may have been arranged and re-arranged several times before reaching its present form.

The book of Proverbs, consisting of a loose collection of wise sayings, belongs to what has been called the “wisdom literature” of the Hebrews. It is set out in poetic parallelisms not unlike the Psalms. Various statements therein indicate that it came from different sources, some ancient and others less so, and two sections are ascribed to Solomon. The book of Job also belongs to “wisdom literature,” but scholars have held widely differing views as to its date.

It has been assigned to almost every period from the time of Moses or even earlier up to the return from exile. As a complete poem its theme and general balance set it apart in a class by itself as something like an epic. Swedenborg states that it is a book of the Ancient Church, but without an internal sense treating solely of the Lord, thus “not of the books called the Law and the Prophets.”13

The “Five Rolls” which form the second section of this collection have been grouped together simply for convenience because they were read after the Law in the public service of the synagogue on five specified festivals or solemn days. The Song of Songs was read on the eighth day of the Feast of the Passover. This was on account of an allegorical interpretation of the book with a reference to the history of the Exodus.

Ruth was read on the second day of the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost, the feast of harvest. Lamentations was read on the ninth day of the month Ab, the traditional date of the destruction of both temples.

Ecclesiastes, because it recommends the thankful enjoyment of life’s pleasures, was read on the third day of the feast of Tabernacles, the most joyful of Jewish feasts. The book of Esther was read at the festival of Purim (i.e. “lots”). It describes the origin of this, and it was associated with the dedication of the second temple.

The contents of these books have nothing in common. The Song of Songs, the original Hebrew title, is a superlative like “heaven of heavens” given to a love poem with male and female speakers distinguished in the Hebrew by the gender of the words. The book has always been interpreted allegorically, although widely different views have been held as to the date of its composition and the nature of the allegory. Peculiarities in the language are usually regarded as post-Exilian.

Ruth traces the genealogy of David to the Moabitess whose name it bears. It tells of events about a hundred years before David. Most scholars consider it to be of early date with probably some additions made after the exile. It does not seem to have been considered as fit for inclusion with “the former prophets.” Lamentations in the Hebrew has as its title the first word, “How.” It consistsof five lamentations or elegies each occupying one chapter.

Prefixed to these in the Septuagint version is the statement, “And it came to pass after Israel was led into captivity, and Jerusalem laid waste, that Jeremiah sat weeping, and lamented with this lamentation over Jerusalem, and said… .” It seems to have had an unquestioned acceptance as a special part of the prophecy of Jeremiah. Its separation from Jeremiah can only have been for convenience of use in reading as one of the “Five Rolls.”

Ecclesiastes is so named from a Greek rendering of its Hebrew title “Koheleth.” This has been taken as an ascription to Wisdom, calling together and speaking to an assembly or congregation. Its language dates it as quite late in the 4th century BC. Although it is ascribed to Solomon as son of David and King of Jerusalem, renowned for his wisdom, it has nothing to say of the follies of his life. The book of Esther belongs to about the same period of the Persian ascendency, perhaps a little earlier.

Written to account for the feast of Purim, it makes no mention of God and in this is unique in Hebrew literature. Its right to a place in the canon of scripture has been disputed by both Jews and Christians, although it became highly regarded in later Judaism when for patriotic reasons it was considered as the chief of the “Five Rolls.”

We now come to the three books which the Jews placed last in their Bible. Of these the book of Daniel contains the personal history of the prophet Daniel covering the period from about 606 to 535 BC. Parts of it were written in Hebrew and parts in Aramaic, long after the events recorded. In this respect it resembles the book of Jonah, but its highly symbolic style and apocalyptic prophecies resemble parts of Zechariah.

It was written very late, probably after 170 BC, about the time of Antiochus Epiphanes at the beginning of the Maccabean period, according to most scholars. This would account for its exclusion from “the Prophets,” which was then a completed collection. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah were originally one book relating events associated with the activity of those two men who played a very prominent part in the consolidation of Judaism after the exile.

They take up the recording of events just where the books of the Chronicles leaves off. Chronicles, or “journals” or “annals” as they were named by the Jews, were first referred to as “a chronicle of the whole of sacred history” by Jerome. The Septuagint title was Paraleipomena or “things passed over,” but this is quite inappropriate because they have a clear literary plan which in its own way covers the whole history from the creation to the Babylonian captivity.

Because it traces David’s descendants to the sixth generation after Zerubbabel,14 the composition of this work must be at leastmas late as the close of the Persian and the beginning of the Greek period.

Turning now as promised to the Gospels for a record of the Lord’s own references to “the scriptures,” we find the most explicit statements in the 24th chapter of Luke. After His resurrection the Lord spoke with two disciples on the road to Emmaus, and they told Him of their bewilderment at the recent events in Jerusalem.

When He had heard them, “Then He said unto them, O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken: ought not Christ (i.e. the Messiah) to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory! And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning Himself.15 Later when these two disciples had returned to Jerusalem and joined the eleven apostles, Jesus again appeared to them, and after He had given evidence of His reality, that He was not just a ghost, He said: “These are the words which I spake unto you while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and the prophets, and the Psalms, concerning Me.”16. Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.

Here we find the Lord referring in the first statement to the two great divisions of the Hebrew Bible, the Law and the Prophets, as being, when expounded or opened, concerned with Himself. In the second statement He is even more specific and refers in similar terms to the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms. The addition of the Psalms to the Law and the Prophets is usually taken by Christian commentators as a reference (by the title of its first book) to the whole of the Haggiographa or third division of the Hebrew Bible. There is not a shred of evidence that the Jews ever used the term “Psalms” in this way. To them “the Psalms” have always been the Psalms and nothing more.

If, then, we take this statement of the Lord as a starting point and compare it with the New Church list of books of “the Word,” we find that the only difference is the addition of Lamentations and Daniel. The list published by Swedenborg includes these two books, the Psalms, and the whole of the Later and the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible. As we have already noted Lamentations originally belonged with Jeremiah.

It may reasonably be inferred that the Lord was aware of its inner content and prophetic quality as having regard to Himself. In His consciousness in the world He would have thought of it as one of the Divinely inspired scrolls wherein He might instruct His Human and have communion with His Divine Soul which He called Father. The Lord’s view of Daniel in both Matthew17 and Mark,18 when He warned of “the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet,” shows that He included Daniel as one of the Divinely inspired prophets through whom He gave His Word. As the Psalm says, “The Lord gave the Word, great is the army of those that published it.”.

2.2 The New Testament Canon

While most Christian traditions agree on the 27 books that make up the canon of the New Testament it needs to be noted that some traditions do include more books than the 27 listed below.

The Gospels (4) Matthew, Mark, Luke & John History (1) Acts

Paul’s Letters (13) Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 & 2 Thessalonians, 1 & 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon
General Letters (8) Hebrews, James, 1 & 2 Peter, 1, 2 & 3 John, Jude
Prophecy, Apocalyptic (1) Revelation

The books of the NT were completed most probably in and around 90 AD with John’s writing of Revelation. The debate in the Christian Church regarding which books were to be included in the New Teastament canon was to continue for some 1500 years. The earliest existing list to contain the 27 books as found in today’s Bible was a list compiled by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, in a letter of 367. The debate continued down through the centuries until 1546 where the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent endorsed the current 27 books once and for all. Interestingly 10 years before in 1536 Luther had created a list which left a question over the status of 4 of the 27 books. These were Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation. In his translation of the Bible these books were inserted at the end and were considered Apocryphal in nature.

Note 1. There were a large number of works from which the 27 were selected (click here to see list) – various other gospels existed (Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary, Infant Gospel of Thomas) along with letters such as the Epistle of Barnabas, I & II Clement, and histories such as The Acts of Paul, as well as apocalyptic material e.g. The Apocalypse of Peter, with some works being regarded as scripture at one point only to be retracted at a later date.

Note 2. It is clear that the writings selected to make up the New Testament was done so largely relying on tradition and the endorsement of prominent personalities within the Church through their quoting of texts in their own writings. There has existed a lot of debate and varying views of what should be in and what should be out and it needs to be acknowledged that this debate was not without strong political and doctrinal undercurrents.

Nevertheless God by means of His providence works through history and the affairs of men to ensure the preservation of what is needed for the salvation of the human race and while we have no definitive statement in the New Testament itself of the books in it that should be regarded as divine in nature we do have a large body of Scripture in the Old Testament from which doctrine can be drawn and the material of the New Testament assessed.

Old Testament Ref.

Micah 5:2
Isaiah 60:3
Jeremiah 31:15
Hosea 11:1
Psalm 69:9
Isaiah 61:1-3
Zechariah 9:9; Psalm 8:2
Isaiah 53:3
Isaiah 53:7
Isaiah 53:8
Psalm 41:9
Zechariah 11:12,13; Jeremiah 19
Zechariah 13:7
Psalm 27:12
Isaiah 50:6
Psalm 22:16 17.Isaiah 53:12
Psalm 22:6-8
Psalm 22:18 20.Psalm 69:21
Psalm 22:1
Exodus 12:46; Psalm 34:20; Zechariah 12:10
Isaiah 53:9
Psalm 16:10,11

Having completed the exercise above comment on your own sense of the relationship between the Old Testament and what we find in the gospels.

Look up the following references from the gospels and make a general comment on what they tell you about the Lord’s own testimony concerning Himself and in particular what they teach us about His relationship to the Scriptures.

John 8:56; 5:46; Matthew 22:45 Luke 4:17-21 Matthew 5:17-19 Luke 18:31; 22:37; Matthew 26:31, 53, 54; Mark 14:48-49; Luke 24:25-27; Luke 24:44-46.

A Concluding Comment Hopefully you now have a deeper sense of the interconnectedness of the Old Testament Scriptures and the Gospel accounts of the Lord’s life. Seen together we find an incredibly detailed tapestry that has woven together the Scriptural elements of the Old Testament with the gospels into a single fabric neither of which is understandable without the other.The gospel accounts offer us the complete picture or fulfilment of the Lord’s life as foretold in the Old Testament.This interconnectedness serves as a powerful testimony to the divine nature of the gospels accounts.

2.3 The Books Holding Divine Status

Those books of the Old and New Testaments that we can have confidence are divinely inspired are…

Old Testament

The Pentateuch (5) Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy
The Former Prophets/Historical Books (6) Joshua, Judges, I & II Samuel, I & II Kings.
The Poetical/Wisdom books (1) Psalms
The Major Prophets (5) Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel
The Minor Prophets (12) Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggi, Zechariah, Malachi.

New Testament

The Gospels (4) Matthew, Mark, Luke, John
Prophecy (1) Revelation

All other books are of value to the church but don’t have the same status as those listed above. The books above take their divine status through having either been endorsed directly by the Lord or through the internal evidence of their content as containing an inner spiritual meaning that has direct relevance to the Lord’s life and work. These books because of the Lord’s presence in them are what is specifically meant by the term The Word.

References/Resources

http://www.ntcanon.org/Vulgate.shtml

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/

http://www.bible-researcher.com/index.html

http://www.biblebb.com/files/howbible.htm

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/NTcanon.html

http://www.bible-history.com/resource/r_books.htm

2.4 Assignment 2

A. The Testimony Of Jesus Concerning The Scriptures

Perhaps the most compelling statement as to what books of the Old Testament should be held as divine are from the Lord’s own mouth where in the gospels He said to his disciples.

These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me. And He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures.He said to them, Thus was it necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.And you are my witnesses of these things.

Luke 24:44-48.

Using this above passage from Luke’s gospel and your knowledge of those books that formed the Jewish canon

make a list of the books of the Old Testament that the Lord was referring to under the categories of;
The Law of Moses,
The Prophets and the Psalms.

Make a separate list of those Old Testament books that are not included in your list.

Look up The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine #266.

Compare the list of books from the Old Testament mentioned there with the two lists you have made.
Comment on what you have found in comparing the lists.

Now look up the following Bible references:

Dan 7:13; Mtt. 24:30; 26:64; Mk 13:26; 14:62 & Lk 21:27
comment on whether there is a case for the inclusion of the book of Daniel as a book of the Word.

Lamentations makes frequent reference to the Lord and His dealing with His people and was written by a recognised prophet in Jeremiah.Ruth’s authorship is unknown, yet, in its favour we see that this book does provide contextual background for the Lord’s genealogy, for Ruth is the great grandmother of King David (see Matt. 1:5 & Lk 3:31-32 compare Ruth 4:13-17.)

Assignment B: The Gospels Foretold in the Old Testament

Create a table by looking up the Old Testament Scriptural reference given in the first column. In the second column state what this relates to the events in the Lord’s life as found in the gospels. Then in the third column give a gospel reference.

Example: Micah 5:2: Lord’s Birthplace: Matthew 2:6
Isaiah 60:3
Jeremiah 31:15
Hosea 11:1
Psalm 69:9
Isaiah 61:1-3
Zechariah 9:9; Psalm 8:2
Isaiah 53:3
Isaiah 53:7
Isaiah 53:8
Psalm 41:9
Zechariah 11:12,13; Jeremiah 19
Zechariah 13:7
Psalm 27:12
Isaiah 50:6
Psalm 22:16
Isaiah 53:12
Psalm 22:6-8
Psalm 22:18
Psalm 69:21
Psalm 22:1
Exodus 12:46; Psalm 34:20; Zechariah 12:10
Isaiah 53:9
Psalm 16:10,11

Having completed the exercise above comment on your own sense of the relationship between the Old Testament and what we find in the gospels.

John 8:56; 5:46; Matthew 22:45
Luke 4:17-21
Matthew 5:17-19
Luke 18:31; 22:37; Matthew 26:31, 53, 54; Mark 14:48-49; Luke 24:25-27; Luke 24:44-46.

Hopefully you now have a deeper sense of the interconnectedness of the Old Testament Scriptures and the Gospel accounts of the Lord’s life. Seen together we find an incredibly detailed tapestry that has woven together the Scriptural elements of the Old Testament with the gospels into a single fabric.

Neither of which is understandable without the other.The gospel accounts offer us the complete picture or fulfilment of the Lord’s life as foretold in the Old Testament.This interconnectedness serves as a powerful testimony to the divine nature of the gospels accounts

C: The Book Of Revelation

The most controversial book of all the books of the New Testament canon Revelation has proved to be something of an enigma for many throughout the history of the Christian Church.Its acceptance into the canon has been questioned on and off right down to the time of Luther who was at a loss as to what should be done with this book.The book of Revelation has a very different style to that of the book of Acts and the Epistles being a book of prophecy in an apocalyptic style more in keeping with similar books found in the Old Testament.

The works Apocalypse Revealed and Apocalypse Explained show that this book does in fact have an internal sense that treats of the Lord’s life in the world with this difference, where those books we have identified so far as being the Word are largely focussed on the Lord’s first Advent1 the book of Revelation as to the exposition of its internal sense is more focussed on the Lord’s second Advent1, or the effects of the divine life as it makes its coming in the Word itself.

But aside from those works of the Heavenly Doctrines that show the divine nature of this book we can see in its literal sense a number of statements that need to be carefully considered.Some of these are listed below and you are asked to comment on them.

Read Rev. 1:1-3. What claim is made here concerning the nature of this book?
What does this statement say the book is? How does this differ from the book of Acts or of the Epistles?
Get a red letter edition of the Bible (words of the Lord are recorded in red)

look through the Gospels, the book of Acts, the Epistles and Revelation noting the occurance of red type.
Record your observations or general impressions.

Using references what would you say the main theme of this book is:-

Rev. 1:4, 7, 8; 2:5, 7, 25; 3:3, 11, 20; 4:8; 6:17; 11:17; 14:7; 16:15; 22:7, 12, 20.

Comment on the Lord’s teaching in the following verses and offer reflections on their possible connection to the book of Revelation:-

John 14:27-28; Matt 24:3, 30, 37; Mark 13:4; Luke 17:26; 21:7.

This book can be thought of as a collection of all those prophecies of the Old and New Testaments that relate to the end of the age collected into a single vision which John then writes down.The book of Revelation provides a vital key to understanding those prophecies of the Old Testament pertaining to the end of the age in its bring of them together into a more coherent form.

Do you feel that the collective evidence points to the book of Revelation as being from the Lord and as such a book of the Word?

Note that the dividing up of prophecy as belonging to the 1st or 2nd Advents and the assumption that the Lord partially fulfilled aspects of prophecy from the Word in time is done from how things appear. All descriptions of the end of “the age” carry general principles that are applicable to the demise of any church in any age and the subsequent arising of a new church.

Thus many prophecies expounded in the Heavenly Doctrines as applicable to the first advent also have application to the events surrounding the second and vice versa. They also have application to the (st)ages an individual person passes through in their regeneration.

3. The Nature Of Divine Inspiration

3.1 Introduction

We are looking at the question of which of the books of the Bible can be said to be divinely inspired? From the perspective of the New Church for a book of the Bible to be divinely inspired it must contain in an unbroken series an account of the Lord’s life and work. This account, the Heavenly Doctrines teach us, is found in the spiritual or inner meaning of the Scriptures that lies within their literal sense. The Lord’s declaration that He is the fulfilment of the Scriptures is understood to mean that He became the very embodiment of everything they are and contain. Everything in the Scriptures i.e. the Law, the Prophets and David speak of Him because they are from Him who is the Word and as such is God (see John 1). This is true not just of the open prophetic statements you worked with in the previous exercise but of every other detail found in the historical books as well. It’s a staggering thought when we consider that because the Scriptures are from the Lord they carry His attributes which means that the levels of meaning found within them are infinite and eternal. The Lord lived His life from the Scriptures when He was in the world and because of this became the Divine Truth itself. We can see something of the depth of meaning in those books that the Heavenly Doctrines declare to be books of the Word in the Bible (see New Jerusalem and its Heavely Doctrine #266) in the expositions of Genesis and Exodus found in the work the Arcana Coelestia, the exposition of the book of Revelation found in the works, The Apocalypse Revealed and The Apocalypse Explained. And while the Heavenly Doctrines don’t contain a similar exposition of any of the gospels as such there are copious references to them that are explained according to their deeper spiritual meaning demonstating that these books of the New Testament have an inner meaning that expands our sense of the unseen work of the Lord’s glorification and its effects in the spiritual world.

THE ACTS

The book of Acts is the only history of the early church to be included in the New Testament and as such it serves as a very important book. But is it divinely inspired in the same way as the gospels or those books of the Old Testament that the Lord declared Himself to be the fulfilment of? Using the criteria the Heavenly Doctrines give for a book to be a book of the Word and so the product of divine inspiration we can ask the following question of the book of Acts.

Does the book of Acts contain within it an account of the Lord’s life in all of its recorded details that the Lord fulfilled while He lived in the world?

Clearly it’s difficult to see how this is possible when we consider that the book of Acts was written well after the Lord’s life, death and resurrection. So in a strict historical sense the book of Acts, while inspiring, doesn’t fall into the category of being Divine Truth in a textual form like that of the Law, the Prophets or the Psalms in which were recorded prior to the Lord’s first Advent all the details of the Lord’s inner and outer life while in the world. We also have the testimony from the Lord’s own mouth when in the world that these works were to be regarded as being of a special divine quality. It’s true that the gospels were also written well after the Lord’s life in the world, however careful study of them in the light of the Heavenly Doctrines show that these too are divine in that they are shown to have a continuous internal sense that concerns itself with the Lord’s inner life. As far as the book of Acts is concerned there is no evidence through the application of the criteria given in the Heavenly Doctrines for determining a book of the Word that it carries within it this inner level of meaning. If this level of meaning is not evident we can safely say that it is nothing more than a historical account of the activities surrounding the spead of the early Christian Church.

The Epistles

Using the same criteria we can say that this is also true of the Epistles. These letters provide us with insights into the problems, issues and lives of the early Christian’s but they are not Scripture in the sense that the Lord fulfilled their contents in living out His life in the world. These writings are inspiring commentaries on first century church life but they do not contain an inner sense that constitutes the very life of the Lord Himself. Interestingly none of the writers of the Epistles claim the status of Scripture for their writings and in all their own uses of the term ‘Scripture’ they refer exclusively to the Old Testament and to the Lord as its fulfilment. Paul even goes so far as to point out that some of the advice he gives is nothing more than his own opinion in contrast to other statements which he is confident are from the Lord (see 1Corinthians 7:10-14).

Finally in regard to those books in the Bible that are not in the list of those that the Heavenly Doctrines declare to be the Word Swedenborg in response to his friend Bayer’s letter in which he ask for clarification on the status of these books were we have the following statement…

“…In respect to the writings of the apostles and Paul, I have not quoted them in the Arcana Coelestia, because they are doctrinal writings, and consequently are not written in the style of the Word, like those of the prophets, of David, of the Evangelists, and the Book of Revelation. The style of the Word consists altogether of correspondences, wherefore it is effective of immediate communication with heaven; but in doctrinal writings there is a different style, which has indeed communication with heaven, but mediately. They were written thus by the apostles, that the new Christian Church might be commenced through them; wherefore matters of doctrine could not be written in the style of the Word, but they had to be expressed in such a manner, as to be understood more clearly and intimately. The writings of the apostles are, nevertheless, good books of the church, insisting upon the doctrine of charity and its faith as strongly as the Lord Himself has done in the Gospels and the Book of Revelation; as may be seen and found evident by every one who in reading them directs his attention to these points. That Paul’s expression in Romans ii, 25, concerning Justification by Faith, has been quite misunderstood, is proved in the Apocalypsis Revelata, no. 417, to which you may refer; wherefore the doctrine of Justification by Faith alone, which constitutes the theology of the Reformed churches at the present day, is built on an entirely false foundation. With my kindest remembrances to your and my friends, I remain with esteem,

Your obedient servant, EM. SWEDENBORG. Amsterdam, April 15, 1766.”

SEE TAFEL’S DOCUMENTS CONCERNING SWEDENBORG Volume 2 p. 241-242

The Book of Revevelation

Read Rev. 1:1-3. What claim is made here concerning the nature of this book? What does this statement say the book is? How does this differ from the book of Acts or of the Epistles?
Get hold of a red letter edition of the Bible (words of the Lord are recorded in red) and have a quick flick through the Gospels, the book of Acts, the Epistles and Revelation noting the occurance of red type. Record your observations or general impressions.
From the following references what would you say the main theme of this book is…Rev. 1:4, 7, 8; 2:5, 7, 25; 3:3, 11, 20; 4:8; 6:17; 11:17; 14:7; 16:15; 22:7, 12, 20.
Comment on the Lord’s teaching in the following verses and offer reflections on their possible connection to the book of Revelation…John 14:27-28; Matt 24:3, 30, 37; Mark 13:4; Luke 17:26; 21:7.

There are also numerous prophecies in the Old Testament that were not fulfilled in the Lord’s first advent and so had yet to be fulfilled1.The content of the book of Revelation is a further description of the fulfilment of these prophecies as foretold by the Lord.This book can be thought of as a collection of all those prophecies of the Old and New Testaments that relate to the end of the age collected into a single vision which John then writes down.The book of Revelation provides a vital key to understanding those prophecies of the Old Testament pertaining to the end of the age in its bring of them together into a more coherent form.

Do you feel that the collective evidence points to the book of Revelation as being from the Lord and as such a book of the Word?

Note that the dividing up of prophecy as belonging to the 1st or 2nd Advents and the assumption that the Lord partially fulfilled aspects of prophecy from the Word in time is done from how things appear. All descriptions of the end of “the age” carry general principles that are applicable to the demise of any church in any age and the subsequent arising of a new church. Thus many prophecies expounded in the Heavenly Doctrines as applicable to the first advent also have application to the events surrounding the second and vice versa. They also have application to the (st)ages an individual person passes through in their regeneration.

THE BOOKS HOLDING DIVINE STATUS

Those books of the Old and New Testaments that we can have confidence are divinely inspired are…

Old Testament

The Pentateuch (5) Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy
The Former Prophets/Historical Books (6) Joshua, Judges, I & II Samuel, I & II Kings.
The Poetical/Wisdom books (1) Psalms
The Major Prophets (5) Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel
The Minor Prophets (12) Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggi, Zechariah, Malachi.

New Testament

The Gospels (4) Matthew, Mark, Luke, John
Prophecy (1) Revelation

References/Resources

http://www.ntcanon.org/Vulgate.shtml

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/

http://www.bible-researcher.com/index.html

http://www.biblebb.com/files/howbible.htm

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/NTcanon.html

http://www.bible-history.com/resource/r_books.htm

The Testimony Of Jesus Concerning The Scriptures

Perhaps the most compelling statement as to what books of the Old Testament should be held as divine are from the Lord’s own mouth where in the gospels He said to his disciples…

“These are the words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that all things must be fulfilled which were written in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms concerning Me.”And He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures.He said to them, “Thus was it necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.And you are my witnesses of these things.”” Lk 24:44-48.

Using this above passage from Luke’s gospel and your knowledge of those books that formed the Jewish canon make a list of the books of the Old Testament that the Lord was referring to under the categories of; The Law of Moses, The Prophets and the Psalms.

Make a separate list of those Old Testament books that are not included in your list.

Look up The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine #266.Compare the list of books from the Old Testament mentioned there with the two lists you have made.Comment on what you have found in comparing the lists.

Now look up the following Bible references:Dan 7:13; Mtt. 24:30; 26:64; Mk 13:26; 14:62 & Lk 21:27 and comment on whether there is a case for the inclusion of the book of Daniel as a book of the Word.

If we use the 22 book Jewish canon in reference to the quote from Luke’s gospel we end with having to include the books of Lamentations and Ruth.There is a strong case for the inclusion of the former but not such a strong case for the latter.Lamentations makes frequent reference to the Lord and His dealing with His people and was written by a recognised prophet in Jeremiah.Ruth’s authorship is unknown, yet, in its favour we see that this book does provide contextual background for the Lord’s genealogy, for Ruth is the great grandmother of King David (see Mtt. 1:5 & Lk 3:31-32 compare Ruth 4:13-17.)

This Session is divided into two parts. In 3a you will give consideration to what the Heavenly Doctrines have to say on the nature of the Sacred Scripture. To some degree this will be a revisiting of some of the material you have already been introduced to in the section on the Word in the Overview of the Heavenly Doctrines course. It’s important to have the principles outlined in this Session clearly fixed in your mind, particularly in regard to the style of the of the Word as to its natural or literal sense, as you move into Session 4 where you will consider how modern biblical critisim and natural reasoning has dealt with the biblical text.

In 3b you will begin to look at the approach to the biblical text taken in George Dole’s book, A Book About Us: The Bible and the Stages of Our Lives. Note: A pdf version of the book can be downloaded under the Resources for the Course section above.

The follow is a selection of readings drawn from the work, The Four Doctrines, from the section The Doctrine of the New Jerusalem concerning The Sacred Scripture by Emanuel Swedenborg. Be sure to read through the material before attempting the assignment questions for this Session.

3.2 Reading

The Sacred Scripture, Or The Word, Is The Divine Truth Itself

It is generally agreed that the Word is from God, is divinely inspired, and therefore holy; but hitherto it has remained unknown wherein its divinity resides; for the Word in the Letter appears like common writing in a strange style, lacking the sublimity and brilliance which are apparently features of the literature of the world.

For this reason the man who worships nature instead of God, or in preference to God, and who consequently thinks from* himself and his proprium** and not from* heaven from* the Lord, may easily fall into error respecting the Word and into contempt for it, and say within himself as he reads it, What does this mean? What does that mean? Is this Divine? Can God, to whom belongs infinite wisdom, speak in this way? Where is its sanctity, or whence derived but from man’s religious credulity?

The prepositions ex and a, both translated “from”, are here used in contrast, a indicating the responsible agent or originating source, and ex an instrumental agent, or intermediary, contributing to the performance of an action, but not itself the source.
The Latin word proprium means “what is one’s own”. Swedenborg uses it in a special sense involving “what is of the self”.

He, however, who thinks in this way does not consider that Jehovah Himself, who is the God of heaven and earth, spoke the Word by means of Moses and the Prophets, and consequently that it must be Divine Truth itself; for what Jehovah Himself speaks is Divine Truth. Nor does he consider that the Lord, who is the same as Jehovah, spoke the Word written by the Evangelists, much of it from His own mouth, and the rest from the spirit of His mouth, which is the Holy Spirit. For this reason He Himself declares that in His words there is life, that He is the light which enlightens, and that He is the truth.

[2] That Jehovah Himself spoke the Word by the Prophets has been shown in THE DOCTRINE OF THE NEW JERUSALEM CONCERNING THE LORD, Nos. 52, 53. That the words which the Lord Himself spoke in the Evangelists are life, is declared in John:

The words that I speak unto you are spirit, and they are life. John vi 63.

In the same Evangelist:

Jesus said to the woman at Jacob’s well, If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldst have asked of Him, and He would have given thee living water.

Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him, shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of

water springing up into everlasting life. John iv 6, 10, 14.

By Jacob’s well is signified the Word,

as also in Deut. xxxiii 28;

and for this reason also the Lord sat there, and spoke with the woman; and by water is signified the truth of the Word.

From These Considerations, However, The Natural Man Still Cannot Be Persuaded That The Word Is Divine Truth Itself, In Which Is Divine Wisdom As Well As Divine Life; For He Regards It From Its Style, In Which He Does Not See These Things.

Yet The Style Of The Word Is The Divine Style Itself, With Which No Other Style, However Sublime And Excellent It May Seem, Can Be Compared, For Any Other Style Is As Thick Darkness Compared With Light. The Style Of The Word Is Such That There Is Holiness In Every Sentence, And In Every Word; Indeed, In Some Places, In The Very Letters; And Consequently The Word Conjoins Man With The Lord, And Opens Heaven.

here Are Two Things Which Proceed From The Lord, Divine Love And Divine Wisdom, Or What Is The Same, Divine Good And Divine Truth; For Divine Good Is Of His Divine Love, And Divine Truth Is Of His Divine Wisdom. The Word In Its Essence Is Both Of These; And Since It Conjoins Man With The Lord And Opens Heaven, As Has Just Been Said, Therefore The Word Fills The Man Who Reads It From The Lord, And Not From Himself Alone, With The Good Of Love And The Truths Of Wisdom-His Will With The Good Of Love And His Understanding With The Truths Of Wisdom; Thus Man Has Life Through The Word.

Lest, Therefore, Men Should Be In Doubt That The Word Is Of This Nature, The Lord Has Revealed To Me Its Internal Sense. This In Its Essence Is Spiritual, And Resides In The External Sense Which Is Natural, As The Soul In The Body. This Internal Sense Is The Spirit Which Gives Life To The Letter; And It Can Therefore Bear Witness To The Divinity And Holiness Of The Word, And It Can Convince Even The Natural Man, If He Is Willing To Be Convinced.

THE SPIRITUAL SENSE

WHAT THE SPIRITUAL SENSE IS. The spiritual sense is not that which shines forth from the sense of the Letter of the Word when one searches the Word and explains it to confirm some dogma of the Church: this sense is the literal sense of the Word. The spiritual sense, however, does not appear in the sense of the Letter: it is within it, as the soul is in the body, as the thought is in the eyes, and as affection is in the countenance; and these act together as cause and effect. It is this sense especially that makes the Word spiritual, not only for men but also for angels; and therefore the Word by means of this sense communicates with the heavens.

From the Lord proceed the Celestial, the Spiritual and the natural, one after another. What proceeds from His Divine Love is called the Celestial, and is Divine Good; what proceeds from His Divine Wisdom is called the Spiritual, and is Divine Truth. The Natural is from both and is their complex in the ultimate [or lowest] degree. The angels of the Lord’s celestial kingdom, who constitute the third or highest heaven, are in that Divine proceeding from the Lord which is called the celestial, for they are in the good of love from the Lord.

The angels of the Lord’s spiritual kingdom, who constitute the second or middle heaven, are in that Divine proceeding from the Lord which is called the spiritual, for they are in the truths of wisdom from the Lord.* Men of the Church is the world, however, are in the Divine natural, which also proceeds from the Lord. From this it follows that the Divine proceeding from the Lord to its ultimates, descends through three degrees, and is termed Celestial, Spiritual and Natural. The Divine which descends from the Lord to men comes down through these three degrees; and when it has descended, it contains these three degrees in itself.

Such is the nature of every thing Divine; therefore when it is in its ultimate degree, it is in its fulness. This is the nature of the Word. In its ultimate sense it is natural, in its interior sense it is spiritual, and in its inmost sense it is celestial; and in each it is Divine. That the Word is of this nature is not apparent in the sense of its Letter, as this is natural; because man when in the world has hitherto not known anything concerning the heavens; and consequently has not known what the spiritual is, and what the celestial; thus he has not known the difference between these and the natural.

Author’s Note. The heavens consist of two Kingdoms, one of which is called the celestial kingdom, and the other the spiritual kingdom. This may be seen in the work on HEAVEN AND HELL Nos. 20-28.

The difference between these degrees cannot be known unless by a knowledge of correspondence. For these three degrees are quite distinct from each other, like end, cause and effect, or like what is prior, posterior and postreme [or last], yet they make one by correspondences, for the natural corresponds to the spiritual, and also to the celestial. What correspondence is may be seen in the work on HEAVEN AND HELL where it treats of, The Correspondence of all things in heaven with all things in man, Nos. 87-102; and, The Correspondence [of all things] in heaven with all things on earth, Nos. 103-115.

Since the Word interiorly is spiritual and celestial, it is therefore written by means of pure correspondences; and what is thus written is in its ultimate sense written in such a style as is seen in the Prophets and Evangelists which, although it appears ordinary, yet has stored up within it Divine Wisdom and all angelic wisdom.

Acquiring Doctrine From The Word

OCTRINE MUST BE TAKEN FROM THE SENSE OF THE LETTER OF THE WORD, AND BE CONFIRMED [BY IT]. This is because the Lord is present in that sense with man, and nowhere else, enlightening and teaching him the truths of the Church; for the Lord never acts except in fulness, and the Word in the sense of the Letter is in its fulness…therefore doctrine must be taken from the sense of the Letter.

The Word by means of doctrine is not only understood, but it also as it were gives light; because without doctrine it is not understood, and it is like a lampstand without a light, as was shown above. The Word, therefore, by means of doctrine is understood, and is like a lampstand with its lamp lit. Man then sees more things than he had seen before, and he also understands those things which he had not understood before. Things obscure and out of agreement he either does not notice and passes over, or he sees and explains them as in agreement with doctrine.

The experience of the Christian world testifies that the Word is understood from doctrine, and also that it is explained according to doctrine. For all the Reformers see the Word from their own doctrine and they explain the Word according to it; so too the Roman Catholics see it from their doctrine and they explain it accordingly; and even the Jews do likewise; thus falsities are seen from false doctrine, and truths from true doctrine. Hence it is evident that true doctrine is like a lamp in darkness and a sign-post on the way.

Doctrine, however, must not only be taken from the sense of the Letter of the Word, but it must also be confirmed by that sense. For if not confirmed by it, the truth of doctrine appears as if it were only man’s intelligence in it and not the Lord’s Divine Wisdom; and thus doctrine would be like a house in the air, and not on the ground, and consequently without a foundation.

The doctrine of genuine truth may also be fully drawn from the literal sense of the Word; for the Word in that sense is like a person clothed, but whose face and hands are uncovered. Everything in the Word pertaining to man’s life, and thus to his salvation, is there unveiled. The rest is veiled; and in many places where it is veiled it shines through as the face appears through a thin veil of silk. Moreover, as the truths of the Word increase from the love of them, and are co-ordinated by love, they shine more and more clearly through their coverings and become more obvious. But this also is brought about by means of doctrine.
It may be supposed that the doctrine of genuine truth can be acquired by means of the spiritual sense of the Word which is obtained through a knowledge of correspondences. Doctrine, however, is not acquired by such means, but only illustrated and corroborated. For as was stated above in No. 26 no one comes into the spiritual sense of the Word by means of correspondences unless he is first in genuine truths from doctrine.

If a man is not first in genuine truths, he may falsify the Word by means of some correspondences he may know, by connecting them together and explaining them to confirm what is firmly held in his mind from some principle which he has adopted. Moreover, the spiritual sense is not communicated to anyone except by the Lord alone; and He guards it as He guards heaven, for heaven is within it. It is important then that a man should study the Word in the sense of the Letter: from that sense only is doctrine derived.

1. GENUINE TRUTH, WHICH IS TO BE THE SOURCE OF DOCTRINE, IS MANIFEST IN THE SENSE OF THE LETTER OF THE WORD ONLY TO THOSE WHO ARE ENLIGHTENED BY THE LORD. Enlightenment comes from the Lord alone and is granted to those who love truths because they are truths, and who apply them to the uses of life; with others, there is no enlightenment in the Word. Enlightenment comes from the Lord alone, because the Lord is in all things of the Word. Enlightenment is granted to those who love truths because they are truths, and who apply them to the uses of life because they are in the Lord, and the Lord in them.

For the Lord is His own Divine Truth; and when this is loved because it is Divine Truth-and this is loved when it is applied to use-then the Lord is present in it with man. These things the Lord also teaches in John:

At that day ye shall know … that ye are in me, and I in you.
He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he is it that loveth me … and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him …
And I will come to him and make my abode with him. John xiv 20, 21, 23;

And in Matthew:

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Matt. v 8.
These are they who are enlightened when they read the Word, and with whom the Word is lucid and transparent.

The Marriage Of Good And Truth In The Word

It is said that in every detail of the Word there is the marriage of the Lord and the Church, and consequently the marriage of good and truth; because where there is the marriage of the Lord and the Church, there is also the marriage of good and truth, the latter resulting from the former. For when the Church, or a man of the Church, is principled in truths, the Lord then enters into those truths with good, and makes them live; or what is the same, when the Church, or a man of the Church, is in intelligence by means of truths, the Lord then enters his intelligence through the good of love and charity, and thus infuses life into it.

There are two faculties of life in every man, the understanding and the will, the understanding being the receptacle of truth, and thence of wisdom, the will being the receptacle of good, and thence of love. These two faculties ought to make one, that a man may be a member of the Church; and they are united when a man forms his understanding from genuine truths, apparently of himself, and when his will is filled with the good of love, which is done by the Lord. In this way a man has the life of truth and the life of good, the life of truth in his understanding from the will, and the life of good in his will through the understanding. This is the marriage of truth and good with man, and also the marriage of the Lord and the Church in him.

Those who read the Word attentively cannot help noticing the use of double expressions which seem like repetitions of the same thing; as for instance, brother [and companion, poor] and needy, wilderness and desert, void and emptiness, foe and enemy, sin and iniquity, anger and wrath, nation and people, joy and gladness, mourning and weeping, justice* (or righteousness) and judgment, and so on.

These appear to be synonymous expressions, when in fact they are not. For the words brother, poor, wilderness, [void], foe, sin, anger, nation, joy, mourning and justice are used with reference to good, and in the opposite sense, to evil; while the words companion, needy, desert, emptiness, enemy, iniquity, wrath, people, gladness, weeping and judgment are used with reference to truth, and in the opposite sense, to falsity. Yet it seems to the reader who is ignorant of the truth involved that poor and needy, wilderness and desert, void and emptiness, foe and enemy, are one and the same thing; likewise sin and iniquity, anger and wrath, nation and people, joy and gladness, mourning and weeping, justice and judgment; whereas they are not one, but become one by conjunction.

In the Word also many other things are closely associated, as fire and flame, gold and silver, brass and iron, wood and stone, bread and water, bread and wine, purple and fine linen, and so on. This is because fire, gold, brass, wood, bread and purple signify good, while flame, silver, iron, stone, water, wine and fine linen signify truth. In like manner it is said that men should love God with all the heart and with all the soul;

and also that God will create in man a new heart and a new spirit, for heart is used with reference to the good of love, and soul, of truth from that good. There are moreover some expressions which, because they partake of both good and truth, are used by themselves without the addition of others; but these and many other things are evident only to the angels, and to those who, while they perceive the natural sense, understand also the spiritual sense.

Justice, righteousness: Both these words are used, as in the A.V., to render the Latin word Justitia.

Heresies

Heresies may be formulated from the sense of the Letter of the Word, but it is harmful to confirm them

It was shown above that the Word cannot be understood without doctrine, and that doctrine is like a lamp to make genuine truths visible. This is because the Word is written by pure correspondences; and consequently many things in it are appearances of truth, and not unveiled truths. Many of these are adapted to the comprehension of the natural, and indeed of the sensual man, yet in such a way that the simple can understand it in simplicity, the intelligent intelligently, and the wise in wisdom. Now since the Word is of this nature, appearances of truth, which are truths veiled, may be taken for unveiled truths; and when these are confirmed, they become falsities.

This is done, however, by those who consider themselves to be wise above others, when yet they are not wise; for being wise consists in seeing whether a thing is true before it is confirmed, but not in confirming whatever one pleases. The latter is the practice with those who are by nature strongly inclined to confirming, and who take pride in their own intelligence; but the former obtains with those who love truths and are affected by them because they are truths, and who apply them to the uses of life; for they are enlightened by the Lord and see truths from the light of truth, whereas the others are enlightened by themselves and see falsities from the light of falsities.

Appearances of truth, that is, veiled truths, may be taken from the Word for unveiled truths, and when confirmed, they become falsities. This may be evident from the many heresies which have been and still are prevalent in Christendom. Heresies themselves do not condemn men, but an evil life; and men are also condemned by confirming from the Word falsities which are inherent in heresy and by reasoning from the natural man.

For everyone is born into the religion of his parents, and is initiated into it from infancy. He later adheres to it, nor can he of himself get rid of its falsities because of his business connections in the world. What does condemn is living an evil life, together with the confirmation of falsities to the utter destruction of genuine truth.

That man is not sworn to falsity who adheres to his own form of religion and believes in God; and, if a Christian, who believes on the Lord, regards the Word as holy and from religious principles lives according to the Commandments of the Decalogue. Therefore when he hears the truth and perceives it according to his capacity, he can accept it, and thus be rid of his falsity. It is otherwise with the man who has confirmed the falsities of his religion, as a falsity confirmed remains, and cannot be eradicated. For after confirmation, a falsity is as though a man has sworn to it, especially if it agrees with his self-love, and consequently with the pride of his own wisdom.

This may be illustrated by an example. In many passages in the Word anger, wrath and revenge are attributed to the Lord: and it is said that He punishes, casts into hell, tempts and does many other things of a similar nature. He who believes this in simplicity, and therefore fears God, and takes care not to sin against Him, is not condemned for this simple faith.

He, however, is condemned whose confirmed belief is that anger, wrath, revenge, thus such things as originate in evil, exist in the Lord; and that He punishes men and casts them into hell from anger, wrath and revenge. Such a man is condemned because he has destroyed the genuine truth, which is, that the Lord is Love itself, Mercy itself and Goodness itself; and being these, that He cannot be angry, wrathful and revengeful. These things are attributed to the Lord according to the appearance; and so in many other cases.

Many other things in the sense of the Letter are apparent truths, within which genuine truths lie concealed. It is not hurtful to think and to speak according to such apparent truths; but it is hurtful to confirm them so as to destroy the genuine truth concealed within them. This may be illustrated by an example from nature, adduced because what is natural instructs and convinces more clearly than what is spiritual.

It is hurtful to confirm the apparent truth of the Word so as to destroy the genuine truth concealed within; because all things in the sense of the Letter of the Word, both in general and in particular, communicate with heaven and open it, according to what was said above Nos. 62-69. When therefore a man applies that sense to confirm the loves of the world which are contrary to heavenly loves, then the internal of the Word is rendered false. Therefore, when its external, or sense of the Letter whose internal is rendered false, communicates with heaven, then heaven is closed; for the angels, who are in the internal of the Word, reject it. From this it is evident that a false internal, or truth falsified, destroys communication with heaven and closes it. This is why it is hurtful to confirm any heretical falsity.

Moreover, it should be known that the sense of the Letter of the Word is a guard for the genuine truths lying within it. It is a guard in this respect that it may be turned this way and that, and interpreted to one’s own apprehension, without its interior content being injured or violated. It does no harm that the sense of the Letter of the Word is understood differently by different persons: but harm results when Divine truths, lying concealed within, are perverted, for in this way violence is inflicted on the Word. To prevent this, the sense of the Letter is a guard; and it acts as a guard with those who are in falsities from their religion, but who do not confirm these falsities, for such men do no violence [to the Word].

This guard is signified by the cherubim, and is also described by them in the Word. This is signified by the cherubim which, after the expulsion of Adam and his wife from the Garden of Eden, were placed at the entrance. Of these we read:

When Jehovah God drove out the man, He placed at (ab) the east of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. Gen. iii 23, 24.

By the cherubim is signified a guard; by the way of the tree of life is signified access to the Lord, which men obtain through the Word; and by the flaming sword turning every way is signified Divine Truth in ultimates which, like the Word in the sense of the Letter, can be so turned.

The Word Alone Provides Knowledge Of God And Spiritual Matters

Without the Word no one would have any knowledge of God, of heaven and hell, of a life after death, and still less of the Lord

This follows as a general conclusion from all that has thus far been said and shown; as that

The Word is Divine Truth itself, Nos. 1- 4;

The Word is the medium of conjunction with the angels of heaven. Nos. 62-69;

Everywhere in the Word there is the marriage of the Lord and the Church, and consequently the marriage of good and truth, Nos. 80-89;

The nature of the Church is according to its understanding of the Word. Nos. 76-79;

The Word is also in the heavens, and from it the angels derive their wisdom, Nos. 70-75;

Through the Word also the nations and peoples outside the Church derive their spiritual light, Nos. 104-113;

besides much more that might be mentioned.

From these considerations it may be concluded that without the Word no one has spiritual intelligence, which consists in the knowledge of God, of heaven and hell and a life after death; nor has he any knowledge at all of the Lord, of faith and love to Him, and consequently of redemption, although this is the means of salvation. The Lord also says to His disciples:

Without me ye can do nothing. John xv 5;

and John said:

A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven. John iii 27.

There are some men who maintain from firm conviction that without the Word a man can know of the existence of God, of heaven and hell, and also something of the other matters taught in the Word. They thereby weaken the authority and the holiness of the Word, if not with the mouth yet in the heart. Therefore, one may not argue with them from the Word, but from the light (lumen) of natural reason; for they do not believe in the Word but in themselves. Inquire then, by the light of reason, and you will find that there are two faculties of life in man, called the understanding and the will; and that the understanding is subject to the will, and not the will to the understanding; for the understanding merely teaches and points out the way.

Having learned these things, you will perceive that a man of himself does not desire to understand anything but what comes from the proprium of his will; and that there is no possibility of doing this unless there were some other source of knowledge. Man from the proprium of his own will does not desire to understand anything but what relates to himself and the world; anything beyond this is in thick darkness to him. For instance, if, when looking at the sun, moon and stars, he should reflect on their origin, he could not but think that they are self-originated. He could not think any more profoundly that many of the learned men in the world who, although they know from the Word that God created all things, yet acknowledge nature [as creator]. Still more would they do so had they known nothing from the Word. Is it credible that Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca and other ancient sages who have written about God and the immortality of the soul first derived their knowledge from their proprium? No; they obtained it by tradition from others who first learned it from the [Ancient] Word. Nor do writers on natural religion derive their knowledge from themselves; they only confirm by rational deduction what they learn from the Church which has the Word; and it is possible that some of those who confirm truths do not believe them.

Religion has existed from the most ancient times, and the inhabitants of the world everywhere have had a knowledge of God, and some knowledge of a life after death. This has not originated from themselves or their own intelligence, but from the Ancient Word mentioned above Nos. 101-103; and in later times from the Israelitish Word. From these two Words forms of religion spread to the Indies and their Islands, through Egypt and Ethiopia to the kingdoms of Africa, from the maritime parts of Asia to Greece, and thence to Italy.

However, as the Word could only be written by representatives, that is, by such things in the world as correspond to and signify heavenly things, therefore religion with many nations was turned into idolatry, and in Greece into mythology. Divine attributes and properties were turned into so many gods, and over these men set one supreme deity whom they called Jove from Jehovah; while it is well known that they had some conception of Paradise, some knowledge of the Flood, the sacred fire, and the four ages from the first or golden age to the last or iron age, by which in the Word are signified the four states of the Church as described in Daniel ii 31-35. It is also known that the Mohammedan religion, which succeeded and destroyed the former religious systems of many nations, was taken from the Word of both Testaments.

3.3 Assignment 3

Part A: The Sacred Scripture, Or The Word, Is The Divine Truth Itself

Summarise the points given in the reading that support the Word being Divine Truth?
Why is this unconvincing for the natural man?
What can you glean from the reading regarding how the the style of the Word is perceived by

the natural man
the spiritual man

What is the Word in essence and what are the implications of this for the human race
How does the text portray the relationship between the internal and external senses of the Word?

Part B: The Spiritual Sense

In your own words say what you understand the text to be saying as to…

what the spiritual sense of the Word is NOT
what the spiritual sense of the Word IS

What do you understand by the statement, “The spiritual sense…does not appear in the sense of the Letter: it is within it…”?
List the different degrees that the heavens consist of and give a short summary of each ones chief characteristic.
What reason is given for the Word having the same degrees within it?
Read #7 and #8 and give an explanation for why the style of the Word is such that it is?

Part C: Acquiring Doctrine From The Word

Why must doctrine be taken from the sense of the letter (# 53) and be confirmed by it (#54)?
What is the doctrine of genuine truth and how are correspondences to be used in relation to it?
Why is it important to be “first in genuine truths” before looking to the Word to confirm things?
Summarise in your own words the concept of enlightenment provided
In what ways is this similar or not similar to your own definition that you were asked to give at the start of this Session?

Part D: The Marriage Of Good And Truth In The Word

How is the marriage of good and truth in the Word related to the faculties of life that make up the human mind?
What evidence is there in the style of the literal sense of the Word that shows that the marriage of good and truth is in every part of it?
Use a concordance or electronic bible and find 3 examples from the Old Testament and

3 examples from the New Testament that illustrate this characteristic of style.
Provide the scriptural references and comment on how the references you have chosen reflect this style?

Part E: Heresies

Why is the Word written in correspondences, and why is doctrine needed in order to understand it?
What are heresies and what is the process outlined in the text that gives rise to them?
What factors make a heresy spiritually dangerous and how do these factors impact on a person’s relationship to the Word and so to heaven?
In what way does the very style of the literal sense of the Word safeguard a person’s spiritual well being?

Part F: The Word Alone Provides Knowledge Of God And Spiritual Matters

How does the text account for the fact that spiritual knowledge seems to exist with those who don’t have the Word?
Summarise in your own words the argument given in the text for appealing to the light of natural reason?
What is it a person can discover from this and
how does this confirm the truth that the Word is necessary and that it alone is the source of all genuine spiritual knowledge?

4. Modern Theories To The Biblical Text

4.1 Introduction

While the main focus of this course is to provide the student with an appreciation of the Bible as a whole using a more reflective or devotional framework as its basis there is still the need for understanding how modern scholarship handles the Biblical text so that students can critically assess the methodology and assumptions that underlie “source criticism”. In this Session student will gain a basic understanding of what “source criticism” is, the underlying assumptions that sit beneath its methodology, and contrast this with what the Heavenly Doctrines have to say as to the structure of the Biblical text.

The following set of documents form the reading for Part A of Session 4. The first offers an overview of the Documentary Hypothesis and the view this takes in regard to the biblical text. The second is an interview with Robert Alter who is a leading contemporary biblical translator. Where those who are schooled in the tradition of higher criticism and the Documentary Hypothesis look to dissect and pull the biblical text apart, Robert Alter takes a very different approach arguing that biblical texts need to be viewed as intentionally produced literature. From this perspective the argument is that the value of the texts can only be found when they are viewed as a whole having been compiled purposefully. The third reading is taken from New Church Life (1959) and offers a comprehensive response to “the rise of Higher Criticism” through drawing from what the Heavenly Doctrines teach concerning the origin and nature of Scripture.

A. Definitions

Modern literary conventions forbid plagiarism, and require authors to identify and acknowledge any material they have borrowed from another writer. But in ancient times it was common to “write” a book by transcribing existing material, adapting and adding to it from other documents as required, and not indicating which parts were original and which borrowed. The OT contains few books, which are the work of a single author throughout; for the most part its books are composite, and in some cases the source materials are drawn from original documents that may be spread over several centuries. Source criticism seeks to separate out these originally independent documents, and to assign them to relative (and, if possible, absolute) dates.

Source criticism is to be distinguished from other critical methods. Where original documents prove not to have been free compositions, but to rest on older, oral tradition, FORM CRITICISM may then be used to penetrate behind the written text. The study of the editing process, whereby the sources have been linked together and incorporated into the present, finished text belongs to the province of REDACTION CRITICISM. Source criticism should also be distinguished from textual (sometimes called lower) criticism, which is concerned to establish the exact wording of the earliest manuscript of the present text, not to reconstruct hypothetical earlier stages in the text’s growth. Nevertheless, there is some overlap between source and textual criticism, since the telltale signs that a text is composite may include the kinds of minor inconsistency that scribes were apt to correct when copying manuscripts, and the textual critic needs to be aware of this when making conjectures about textual transmission. Conversely, source critics must be careful not to appeal to such inconsistencies without first making sure that they cannot be accounted for as slips in copying.

C. Evidence for Composite Character

Inconsistencies. Suspicion that a book is not the work of a single author, composing freely, is most readily aroused when inconsistencies are noticed. These may be of various kinds. In narrative texts it may be impossible to extract a coherent sequence of events. For example, in Gen 12:1, Abram is told to leave Haran after the death of his father, Terah.

According to 11:26, Abram was born when Terah was 70; according to 11:32 Terah died at the age of 205; hence Abram must have been 135 when he was called to leave Ur. But 12:4 says that he was only 75 when he left Haran. The difficulty is explained if the story in Genesis 12 is drawn from a different source from the genealogical information in Genesis 11.

Thematic inconsistency arises when a text seems to give expression to two incompatible points of view. Thus in the stories about the rise of the Israelite monarchy in 1 Sam 8-12, some accounts seem to regard Saul’s election and anointing as reflecting a decision by God (e.g., 9:15-16; 10:1), while others present the people’s insistence on selecting a king to be a sinful rejection of God (e.g., 8:1-22; 10:17-19). The simplest explanation is that the compiler of the books of Samuel used more than one already existing account of the origins of the monarchy, and that these accounts did not agree among themselves. On a smaller scale, there are often puzzling inconsistencies of detail, such as the variation in the names used for God in Genesis and Exodus (“Yahweh,” “Elohim,” “El Shaddai,” “El Elyon,” etc.).

Repetitions and Doublets. In almost every narrative book in the OT a careful reading reveals difficulties in following the sequence of events because the same incident seems to be related more than once. The earliest example is in Genesis 1-2, where in 1:27, “God created man in his own image,” but then in 2:7, “the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground,” just as if the man’s creation had not been mentioned before. Where this kind of repetition is found, the 2 simplest explanation is often that two versions of the same story have both been allowed to remain in the finished form of the book, unreconciled with each other. In some cases material from two or more sources seems to be interwoven: the classic example is the Flood Narrative of Genesis 6-9, where one version speaks of a 40-day flood and the other of a 150-day flood, with incidents from the two versions set down in alternating blocks.

Similarly repetitious accounts, often extremely complex and hard to analyze, may be found in Exodus 24, where Moses seems to go up the holy mountain three times, and Joshua 3-4, in which the account of the crossing of the Jordan under Joshua’s leadership is impossibly convoluted. Where two accounts or versions are closely similar in extent, they are often called a doublet: compare, for example, 2 Kgs 24:10-14 with 24:15-16, or Gen 37:21-22 with 37:26-27.

Stylistic Differences. Some OT books show extraordinary variations of style, ranging from a preference for particular words or phrases to peculiarities of grammar and syntax. In the Pentateuch, variation is particularly marked in Genesis and Exodus, where some sections are written in a lively narrative style akin to that of the books of Samuel, while others are marked by a stylized and repetitive manner, full of recurring formulas, lists, and technical terms. Compare, for example, the vivid narrative of Exodus 2—the childhood and early career of Moses—with the ponderous accounts of the building and equipping of the tent sanctuary in Exodus 36-40. Such variations in style can also be found in poetic books.

Among the oracles in Jeremiah, for example, there are some (e.g., chapters 30 and 31) whose similarity to the style of Isaiah 40-55 (the so-called “Second Isaiah”) is so close, and whose dissimilarity from the rest of Jeremiah is so great, that they seem likely to derive from a different hand than the rest of the book. Other chapters in Jeremiah, especially those in prose, seem close to the style of the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua-2 Kings). While an appreciation of stylistic difference is often to some extent subjective, the variations within books such as these are wide enough to make it unlikely that a single author is responsible for all the material. English translations of the Bible tend to flatten out such differences by using a uniform “biblical English,” but in the Hebrew they are easily detected.

D. Stages of Source-Critical Analysis

Breaking Up the Text. Source-critical analysis begins not with a quest for continuous sources, but with an analysis, into fragments, of each section of the biblical book under consideration. The source critic must note each point where there is a break, inconsistency, or discontinuity in the text, and so establish for each chapter how many different pieces of underlying material are present.
Reconstructing the Sources. Though some books of the OT may have been assembled from a host of tiny fragments and so are little more than anthologies, this process of growth seems unlikely for most of the narrative books of the Bible. For example, when the fragments into which the Pentateuch has been analyzed are examined, they group themselves naturally into a few piles, each marked by a very strong family resemblance.

Thus the creation story of Gen 2:4b-25, the account of the building of the tent in Exodus 36-40, and the laws of Leviticus have so many points of style, expression, and theology in common that they probably derive from the same document. … Painstaking work along these lines resulted in the classic “four-source” hypothesis for the Pentateuch outlined above, according to which the whole work was assembled from only four underlying sources, three of them continuous, parallel accounts of the history of the world from creation to the death of Moses (J, E, P) and the fourth basically the book of Deuteronomy and some related narrative materials (D).

Each of the four sources is marked by a uniform style, certain preferences of vocabulary and theme, and its own chronological framework. It is the unresolved clashes between the four, mutually incompatible presentations that make the Pentateuch so bewildering to the casual reader. See also YAHWIST (J) SOURCE; ELOHIST (E) SOURCE; PRIESTLY (P) SOURCE; DEUTERONOMY. Other books yield to the same kind of analysis. Thus scholars distinguish three or four basic kinds of material in Jeremiah, each of which may have had an independent existence as a self-contained work before being edited to produce the present book.

Dating the Sources. Relative dating of source-materials is sometimes possible, where it seems likely that one sourcedocument was written by someone already familiar with another. Thus, in the case of the Pentateuch, it is sometimes argued that the P narrative of the events at Sinai presupposes an acquaintance with the J version and therefore must be later. Where there is no such presumption, however, the relative dating of sources depends, like their absolute dating, on external points of reference. One of the oldest critical observations in biblical studies was that certain verses in the Pentateuch could not be by Moses, because they presupposed a far later period. Thus the statement, “The Canaanite was then in the land” (Gen 12:6), can only have been written by someone living after the Canaanites had ceased to be in the land, that is, long after Joshua. But it has only been since the triumph of critical biblical scholarship in the 19th century that such arguments have been applied rigorously to the whole OT, with the result that many sources can now be given, if not firm dates, at least a terminus post quem and a terminus ante quem—earliest and latest possible dates.

E. Terminology

After the Enlightenment, scholars began to think of the Bible as a source in a different sense: as important historical evidence from which the history of Israel or of the early church could be reconstructed. This is the sense in which 19thcentury secular historians spoke of studying historical sources, meaning by this valuable primary documents; and when Wellhausen suggested that the Pentateuch consisted of four sources, he meant four sources for reconstructing the history of Israel and its institutions. If a history of Israel was to be written, it was essential to establish which were the primary sources of evidence—and the four-document hypothesis maintained that there were four such sources, rather than (as a superficial reading of the Pentateuch would suggest) only one.

Modern usage has moved from saying that the Pentateuch contains four historical sources (of information) to saying simply that the Pentateuch consists of four sources, thereby losing contact with the original reason for using this particular term, and treating it simply as a synonym for “underlying literary document.”

Details of Documentary Hypothesis

Literary analysis shows that one person did not write the Pentateuch. Multiple strands of tradition were woven together to produce the Torah.

The view that is persuasive to most of the critical scholars of the Pentateuch is called the Documentary Hypothesis, or the Graf-Wellhausen Hypothesis, after the names of the 19th-century scholars who put it in its classic form. “Briefly stated, the Documentary Hypothesis sees the Torah as having been composed by a series of editors out of four major strands of literary traditions. These traditions are known as J, E, D, and P.”

J (the Jahwist or Jerusalem source) uses the Tetragrammaton as God’s name. This source’s interests indicate it was active in the southern Kingdom of Judah in the time of the divided Kingdom. J is responsible for most of Genesis.

E (the Elohist or Ephraimitic source) uses Elohim (“God”) for the divine name until Exodus 3-6, where the Tetragrammaton is revealed to Moses and to Israel. This source seems to have lived in the northern Kingdom of Israel during the divided Kingdom. E wrote the Aqedah (Binding of Isaac) story and other parts of Genesis, and much of Exodus and Numbers.

J and E were joined fairly early, apparently after the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BCE. It is often difficult to separate J and E stories that have merged.

D (the Deuteronomist) wrote almost all of Deuteronomy (and probably also Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings). Scholars often associate Deuteronomy with the book found by King Josiah in 622 BCE (see 2 Kings 22).

P (the Priestly source) provided the first chapter of Genesis; the book of Leviticus; and other sections with genealogical information, the priesthood, and worship. According to Wellhausen, P was the latest source and the priestly editors put the Torah in its final form sometime after 539 BCE. Recent scholars (for example, James Milgrom) are more likely to see P as containing pre-exilic material.

Contemporary critical scholars disagree with Wellhausen and with one another on details and on whether D or P was added last. But they agree that the general approach of the Documentary Hypothesis best explains the doublets, contradictions, differences in terminology and theology, and the geographical and historical interests that we find in various parts of the Torah.

Jewish tradition on the origin of the Torah

The traditional Jewish view, still held by Orthodox Judaism today, holds that God revealed his will to Moses at Mount Sinai in a verbal fashion. This view is also held by many Christians, within most branches of Christianity.

According to Jewish tradition, this dictation is said to have been exactly transcribed by Moses. The Torah was then exactly copied by scribes, from one generation to the next. Based on the Talmud (Tractate Gittin 60a) some believe that the Torah may have been given piece-by-piece, over the 40 years that the Israelites wandered in the desert. In either case, the Torah is considered a direct quote from God. However, there are a number of exceptions to this belief within Orthodox Judaism.

Over the millennia scribal errors have crept into the text of the Torah. The Masoretes (7th to 10th centuries CE) compared all extant variations and attempted to create a definitive text. Also, there are a number of places in the Torah where it appears that there are gaps and it has been postulated that part of the text has been edited out.
Some phrases in the Torah present information that should only have been known after the time of Moses; Based on Abraham ibn Ezra’s and Joseph Bonfils’s observation of this, some classical rabbis postulated that these sections of the Torah were written by Joshua or perhaps some later prophet. Other rabbis would not accept this view.
The Talmud, in tractate Shabbat 115b, states that a peculiar section in the book of Numbers 10:35-36, surrounded by inverted Hebrew letter nuns, in fact is a separate book. On this verse a Midrash on the book of Mishle states that “These two verses stem from an independent book which existed, but was suppressed!” Another, possibly earlier midrash, Ta’ame Haserot Viyterot, states that this section actually comes from the book of prophecy of Eldad and Medad.
Deuteronomy is quite different in many ways from the previous four books. Commenting on this, the Talmud says that the other four books of the Torah were dictated by God, but Deuteronomy was written by Moses in his own words (Talmud Bavli, Megillah 31b). Some rabbis have noted that some other parts of the Torah may also have been composed this way as well.
For more information on these issues from an Orthodox Jewish perspective, see Modern Scholarship in the Study of Torah: Contributions and Limitations, edited by Shalom Carmy (Jason Aronson, Inc.) and Handbook of Jewish Thought, Volume I, by Aryeh Kaplan (Moznaim Pub.)

Classical rabbinical views that suggest multiple origins

The modern, critical view of the origin of the Torah is not without precedent. Within Jewish tradition, individual rabbis and scholars have on occasion pointed out that the entire Torah showed signs of not being totally written by Moses.

Rabbi Judah ben Ilai held that the final verses of the Torah must have been written by Joshua. (This is discussed in the Talmud, Bava Batra 15a and Menachot 30a, and in Midrash Sifrei 357.], however Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai disagrees.
Parts of the Midrash retains evidence of the redactional period during which Ezra redacted and canonized the text of the Torah as we know it today. A rabbinic tradition states that at this time (440 B.C.E.) the text of the Torah was edited by Ezra, and there were ten places in the Torah where he was uncertain as to how to fix the text; these passages were marked with special punctuation marks called the eser nekudot.
In the middle ages, Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra and others noted that there were several places in the Torah which apparently could not have been written in Moses’s lifetime. For example, see Ibn Ezra’s comments on Genesis 12:6, 22;14, Deuteronomy 1:2, 3:11 and 34:1,6. Ibn Ezra’s comments were elucidated by Rabbi Joseph Bonfils in his commentary on Ibn Ezra’s work.
In the twelfth century, the commentator R. Joseph ben Isaac, known as the Bekhor Shor, noted that a number of wilderness narratives in Exodus and Numbers are very similar, in particular, the incidents of water from the rock, and the stories about manna and the quail. He theorized that both of these incidents actually happened once, but that parallel traditions about these events eventually developed, both of which made their way into the Torah.
In the thirteenth century, R. Hezekiah ben Manoah (known as the Hizkuni) noticed the same textual anomalies that Ibn Ezra noted; thus R. Hezekiah’s commentary on Genesis 12:6 notes that this section “is written from the perspective of the future.”.
In the fifteenth century, Rabbi Yosef Bonfils while discussing the comments of Ibn Ezra, noted: “Thus it would seem that Moses did not write this word here, but Joshua or some other prophet wrote it. Since we believe in the prophetic tradition, what possible difference can it make whether Moses wrote this or some other prophet did, since the words of all of them are true and prophetic

Internal textual evidence

Doublets and triplets are stories that are repeated with different points of view. Famous doublets include Genesis’s creation accounts; the stories of the covenant between God and Abraham; the naming of Isaac; the two stories in which Abraham claims to a King that his wife is really his sister; the two stories of the revelation to Jacob at Bet-El. A famed triplet is the three different versions of how the town of Be’ersheba got its name.

There are many portions of the Torah, which seem to imply more than one author. Some examples include:

Genesis 11:31 describes Abraham as living in the Ur of the Chaldeans. But the Chaldeans did not exist at the time of Abraham.
Numbers 25 describes the rebellion at Peor, and refers to Moabite women; the next sentence says the women were Midianites.
Deuteronomy 34 describes the death of Moses.
The list of Edomite kings included Kings who were not born until after Moses’death.
Some locations are identified by names, which did not exist until long after the time of Moses.
The Torah often says that something has lasted “to this day,” which seems to imply that the words were written at a later date. Classical commentaries usually interpret such verses to mean until the day they are read, in other words forever.
Deuteronomy 34:10 states “There never again arose a prophet in Israel like Moses…” which seems to imply that the verse was written long after. However, this can be understood as “There would never again arise..”

The Documentary Hypothesis

In 1886 the German historian Julius Wellhausen published Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (Prolegomena to the History of Israel). Wellhausen argued that the Bible is an important source for historians, but cannot be taken literally.

He argued that the “hexateuch,” (including the Torah or Pentateuch, and the book of Joshua) was written by a number of people over a long period of time. Specifically, he identified four distinct narratives, which he identified as Jahwist, Elohist, Deuteronomist and Priestly accounts. He also identified a Redactor, who edited the four accounts into one text. (Some argue the redactor was Ezra the scribe). He argued that each of these sources has its own vocabulary, its own approach and concerns, and that the passages originally belonging to each account can be distinguished by differences in style (especially the name used for God, the grammar and word usage, the political assumptions implicit in the text, and the interests of the author.

The “J” source: In this source God’s name is always presented as YHVH, which German scholars transliterated as Jahweh (the equivalent of the English transliteration Jehovah).
The “E” source: In this source God’s name is always presented as Elohim (Hebrew for God, or Power) until the revelation of Gods name to Moses after which God is referred to as YHVH.
The “D” or “Dtr” source: The source that wrote the book of Deuteronomy, and the books of Joshua, Judges, I and II Samuel and I and II Kings.
The “P” source: The priestly material. Uses Elohim and El Shaddai as names of God.

Wellhausen argued that from the style and point of view of each source, one could draw inferences about the times in which the source was written (in other words, the historical value of the Bible is not that it reveals things about the events it describes, but rather that it reveals things about the people who wrote it). Moreover, Wellhausen argued that the progression evident in these four sources, from a relatively informal and decentralized relationship between people and God in the J account, to the relatively formal and centralized practices of the P account, one could see the development of institutionalized Israelite religion.

The documentary understanding of the origin of the five books of Moses was immediately seized upon by other scholars, and within a few years became the predominant theory. While many of Wellhausen’s specific claims have since been dismissed, we must note that the documentary hypothesis is not one specific theory. Rather, this name is given to any understanding of the origin of the Torah that recognizes that there are basically four sources that were somehow redacted together into a final version. One could claim that one redactor wove together four specific texts, or one could hold that entire nation of Israel slowly created a consensus work based on various strands of the Israelite tradition, or anything in between. Gerald A. Larue writes “Back of each of the four sources lie traditions that may have been both oral and written. Some may have been preserved in the songs, ballads, and folktales of different tribal groups, some in written form in sanctuaries. The so-called ‘documents’should not be considered as mutually exclusive writings, completely independent of one another, but rather as a continual stream of literature representing a pattern of progressive interpretation of traditions and history.” (“Old Testament Life and Literature” 1968)

Acceptance of the Theory

Some Jews and Christians reject the theory entirely, and follow the traditional view that the whole Torah is the work of Moses. Others, such as the translators of the New International Version take a middle ground, believing that Moses was the author of much of the text, and editor and compiler of the majority of the rest. Most critical bible scholars, however, accept the principle of multiple authorship, and Wellhausen’s identification of four basic accounts. Many, however, have questioned his interpretation of Israelite religion, including his reconstruction of the order of the accounts JEDP. Some scholars have questioned Wellhausen’s assumption that history follows a linear progression. They have suggested that he organized the narrative to culminate with P because he believed that the New Testament followed logically in this progression. In the 1950s the Israeli historian, Yehezkel Kaufmann, published The Religion of Israel, from Its Beginnings to the Babylonian Exile, in which he argued that the order of the sources would be J, E, P, and D.

In recent years attempts have been made to separate the J, E, D, and P portions. Harold Bloom wrote “The Book of J”, in which he claims to have reconstructed the book that J wrote (though, certainly, much of J’s original contribution must have been lost in the consolidation, if one believes the four-author theory). Bloom also indicates that he believes that Jwas a woman, but this is not accepted by other scholars.

4.2 Interview with Robert Alter

A professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, Robert Alter has focused much of his work on the literary art of the Bible, publishing such volumes as The Art of Biblical Narrative, The Art of Biblical Poetry and The World of Biblical Literature.

We spoke with him recently about his new translation of the Book of Genesis (published by Norton) and about related issues of biblical interpretation.

What was it like to work with the Book of Genesis so intimately and for such a long period of time?

It was wonderful. There are few things I’ve done in my career that turned out to be such fun. First, in order to translate the Bible, in contrast to, say, translating Camus, you have to do philological spade work. That is sort of like detective work. When I suddenly realized, for example, that a particular biblical expression had a meaning that no one before had realized, I had that “Eurekal!” feeling. That part of it is fun. Further, Genesis is such a beautifully articulated and compact text. When you work with it with the kind of fanatic attention that a translation demands, there are often little details that suddenly begin to emerge.

For example?

A special verb is used in the story of Cain and Abel that is used only for the opening of the mouth, but it is also related phonetically to the verb that means “to wound.” This latter word basically means “to split open.” So in my translation I wrote that God said to Cain, “Cursed shall you be by the soil that gaped with its mouth to take your brothers blood from your hand.” I don’t think anyone else has tried to capture that gaping, woundlike image.

This illustration brings me to another great joy of translating the Bible. After I was well into my work, I realized that I was simultaneously carrying out two great love affairs: my love affair with the Hebrew language and my love affair with the English language. When I would read a verse, I’d feel so struck by the rhythm, the weight and nuance of the words that I knew I wouldn’t be able to reproduce it in English. But then I would arrive at some approximation in which a particular rhythm, for example, would just click and seem to fit the Hebrew perfectly. It was a wonderful sense of achievement.

Is it fair to say that your new translation of Genesis is deliberately archaic-sounding?

Yes, if you’ll grant that the archaic is not necessarily alienating. One of the great things about culture is that it inscribes upon us an historical memory; we don’t simply jettison earlier phases of culture. As a result, Picasso can allude to Velazquez or Giotto and so forth, and an innovative 20th century poet like Ezra Pound can make archaic echoes part of his innovative poetry. So I thought that it was possible - and it turned out to be more possible than I suspected - to create an English style that would be readable as literary English late in the 20th century, but at the same time would have something of the dignity and poise of the ancient Hebrew.

You’re especially averse to translators’ yielding to what you have caned the “heresy of explanation.” What are the origins and characteristics of this heresy?

In the 20th century, especially after World War II, translators of the Bible have been self-conscious about trying to make everything crystal clear. Out of some fear that people can no longer construe metaphors - which I don’t think is the case - texts that are metaphorical in the original are turned into abstractions and paraphrases. Also, cultivated ambiguities in the original, such as using the same term to mean two different things and playing the two different meanings against each other, are entirely eliminated.

Again, can you give us an example?

The binding of Isaac. In Genesis 22 when Abraham is about to go up to the mountain with his son, he turns to speak to his servants, who are actually his slaves. In my translation the passage reads, “And Abraham said to his lads, Sit you here with the donkey, and let me and the lad walk ahead and … worship.,” The same Hebrew term “lad” can be either an affectionate term for a young man or a term referring to anybody in a subaltern position, including a servant or slave. Since the general translation strategy according to the heresy of explanation is not to confuse readers, the first occurrence of that term at the beginning of the sentence is conventionally translated as “servant,” “slave” or “retainer,” or something like that. Then when the word comes up again with reference to Isaac the son, it’s translated as “lad.”

That strategy seems to me seriously mistaken because the poignancy and complexity of the moment is related to the dual use of the word “lad.” The narrator has referred to the two young men who are Abraham’s slaves as “lads.” Then Abraham refers to his own son - the son he thinks he is going to kill - as “the lad.” The son is better off than, worse off than, and the same as the slaves - all at the same time. In an attempt to make the language sharper than it is in the text, the heresy of explanation destroys some marvellous shades of literary meaning.

You said that what is archaic need not alienate readers, but don’t you also mean for your translation to strike readers as at least a bit strange or foreign?

There are two things to consider in answering your question. First, my notion of accuracy is not just premised on word-forword equivalencies. It also takes into account the level of style manifested in the literary language of the Hebrew Bible in its time. This is a topic to which I devote a lot of attention, and I don’t think too many people have. It seems to me that the language of Genesis, in the context of its own time, is very much a literary language with a distinctive style.

So my translation is faithful not just to the words of Genesis but to the books spirit. That’s the first point. Genesis is a work of literature that, strictly in the context of its own time, was not composed in the language of everyday intercourse.

For this reason, the person whose reading experience is pretty much limited to (I’m constructing a straw man or woman here) the weekly newsmagazines, the daily newspaper, business reading and maybe detective novels may find the language of my translation a bit foreign. The language in my translation doesn’t move like journalistic language, so it may introduce an element of distance.

On the other hand, I don’t think the reader who has some breadth of contemporary reading experience will find that this is a problem. For example, anyone who reads the novels of Cormac McCarthy will have become accustomed to the repetition of words. Strings of sentences are connected by and, and, and just as in biblical Hebrew.

Yet to people who like to read good novels McCarthy offers an evocative representation of the Texas-Mexico border area and the whole wild and cruel world that goes with it. I had a similar use of language in mind as I translated Genesis.

For some scholars who champion the cause of biblical narrative the distinction between the text and the realities that lie beyond the text seems blurred. You seem to be interested in both text and reality and the interchange between them.

I’m rather concerned with reality, and the next obvious question is, what kind of reality am I talking about? In relation to the Bible, I suppose I’m talking about some theological reality, the nature of God, the nature of creation and how the human being fits into this picture and the idea of a covenant between God and a particular people. Then there are other realities a little more accessible to us and easier to talk about, like the reality of history and the reality of the human family and individual psychology.

On all those fronts, I think the Bible has illuminating and sometimes troubling things to say to us, and I say “us” intentionally. These are not antiquated books. The medium through which the Bible speaks to us is for the most part narrative.

You participated in Bill Moyers’s PBS series on Genesis and at one point you said that you weren’t entirely comfortable with speaking about God as a character. God is a character in the Bible, you said, but God is also not a character. Since you didn’t get a chance to clarify the issue during the

program, could you explain what you meant?

Looking at the question simply on narrative grounds - I’m not at this point making an extratextual theological argument - God isn’t quite a character as the other characters are in the Genesis stories. Certain recent attempts have been made-the boldest being perhaps Jack Miles’s book The History of God - to read God very much as a character. Here’s the problem with that approach. God does indeed show certain limited character-like traits.. dialogue is assigned to him, very occasionally interior monologues as well; occasionally we’re told how God feels - God was pained in his heart, and so forth. But beyond that, unlike the other characters, he’s a kind of iceberg. You see the little tips, but he has no history that’s reported to us.

If his voice suddenly booms out addressing Abraham, we nevertheless don’t see the same kind of dialogic interchange that you get between Abraham and Sarah or between Joseph and his brothers. The Bibles silence on these divine “characteristics” are part of biblical monotheism’s antimy thological tendencies. God doesn’t have any genealogy, he doesn’t have a family, he doesn’t have a personal history or a physical description, so he remains, as I think the theological readers of the Bible have always properly said, a mystery. And a mystery is not quite a character.

Your insistence on paying careful attention to the literary character of the Bible has led to the charge that you are a kind of neofundamentalist. How do you respond to this charge? More important, how does your narrative approach relate to text-critical and historical approaches to the Bible? Can we forget everything we had to learn about J, E and P?

I have been accused a couple of times of being a neofundamentalist, which I think is nonsense. Just because I want to take seriously the unity of the text hardly qualifies me as any kind of fundamentalist. I don’t close my mind to, history. The documentary hypothesis is pretty well in place with regard to the first four books of the Pentateuch, and attempts that have been made over the years to overturn it are not very convincing.

But, having said that, what do you do with these strands of tradition? The documentary hypothesis is useful if you are trying to reconstruct the evolving ideological strata of ancient Israel and when you are entertaining hypotheses about the evolution of the text that we have before us. Of course, there is no single documentary hypothesis that everyone agrees on.

There is no total agreement about when and where each of these sources comes from, and scholars disagree sharply about the exact borderlines between J, E, P and so forth. Those disagreements aside, the next question is what one does with the documentary hypothesis if one wants to take the biblical text as what I call the finished product - as an integrated literary artefact that speaks to us.

In answer to this question I stress heavily the importance of redaction. The redaction of the biblical text seems to me not in the least mechanical or haphazard. There are uneven joints here and there, but the redactor’s work is very purposeful and gives us in the end a book that we can read as a continuum.

Let me illustrate how I think the source critics get a little trigger-happy. After Jacob has stolen the blessing from Esau in Genesis 27, the chapter ends with Esau seething with resentment and planning to kill his brother as soon as Isaac is out of the way. When Rebecca hears of it, she says to Jacob, “Look, you have to get out of here; I’m sending you off to brother Laban in Mesopotamia, and when your brother cools off you can come back.”

Then in the subsequent verse she turns to Isaac and tells him that she is utterly distraught because Esau has brought home these Hittite brides. She says she’ll go crazy if anything similar happens to Jacob. She plants the idea with Isaac: “Lets send Jacob back to the old homestead, to find a nice girl from the clan.”

The source critics say these are two conflicting stories that offer two different explanations for why Jacob was sent off to Mesopotamia. These critics may be right, but I’m not convinced. There are no strong stylistic grounds for discriminating between the two stories. But, more important, the story’s unity seems self-evident.

Esau wants to kill Jacob, and Rebecca wants to save the life of her favourite son. But she is not going to go to her husband and say, “Hey, your favourite son wants to kill my favourite son.” She has already demonstrated how shrewd and calculating she is in the previous part of the story. Instead of just blurting out the real situation, she finesses Isaac. She says, “I can’t stand these foreign brides that Esau has brought; home; let’s send Jacob off. Wouldn’t that be better than having him take up with a Hittite?” Even if we assume for a moment that the source critics are right, that there was an X tradition and a Y tradition - two different explanations for why Jacob was shipped off to Mesopotamia - I think you can still see that the finished product is a carefully redacted narrative unity.

What would you do with the first two creation stories?

That’s a bit different. The sources there are P and J, and they are very different stylistically. The alleged sources at the end of Genesis V, E and J, are really almost impossible to discriminate on merely stylistic grounds. The people or person who composed P presumably was close to or even identical with the circle of the redactors, I think. So the question in the case of the creation stories is, why didn’t P simply displace J with his own story?

You could say, as many scholars have, that J is an old authoritative text. But how could the author of P do something so stupid as to put together the J story with his own when the two so clearly contradict each other in certain significant elements? I think there is a kind of perspectivist maneuver here. The stories are placed side by side, and, in the matter of the creation of woman, for example, there is a blatant contradiction. In P human creation is simultaneously male and female, in J woman is made out of the humans spare parts. What’s at stake is two different cultural perceptions of woman’s role. Woman is perceived in terms of a patriarchal culture in which she’s subordinate, but nevertheless she is very powerful.

Some recent interpreters of Genesis have been fairly critical of the God portrayed there. God as depicted in the flood stories, for example, has been accused of genocide. To move from translation to interpretation, what do you see going on in this story?

I’m aware of the views you’re talking about. I myself prefer a view closer to the story itself and its context. I would work back from the human situation to God, rather than start from the top and go to the bottom. The persons who composed this story - clearly both P and J, as well as R who redacted it, are present - had two things before them. One was the human reality in which, as a matter of common experience, totally unexpected catastrophes such as floods overwhelm large numbers of people. Nothing has changed on this score, we still suffer hurricanes, storms and floods.

The second thing they had was a literary antecedent that I suppose every literate person in that cultural setting was familiar with: the Mesopotamian flood story. That story is itself a narrative designed to explain a recurring fact of collective existence. According to this earlier narrative, there was some arbitrary or perhaps even whimsical act on the part of the gods who decided to cause a flood. In one version the humans were making too much noise - a kind of overpopulation problem.

The Israelite writers made use of this tradition; they didn’t want to jettison it, because it spoke to something in their sense of reality. But the Israelite writers were unhappy with this depiction of amoral gods, the sort of gods Shakespeare speaks of in King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.” They can’t have a God like that, so the entire story has to be morally motivated. In retelling the stories, the Israelite writers start out by saying that all the earth was filled with outrage. You have to accept that premise in order to enter the story as the Israelites told it.

But I suspect that there was still another issue, at least for the redactor. Here I’m doing some cautious speculation. By the late first-temple period, the notion is already prevalent that Israel’s national existence is contingent on its moral performance. This view is articulated certainly in the prophets and the various strands of Deuteronomic writings.

Then an unprecedented event occurs: Israel’s national existence is wiped out. The bulk of the population, along with the elite, is forcibly exiled in 586. Nevertheless, the national consciousness and the national faith sustain themselves - and they sustain themselves precisely through the idea that the catastrophe is collective punishment from God for moral-cultic perversity, and that there is a promise of renewal. There is a second covenant, like the covenant of the rainbow. If you take all those issues into consideration, it begins to look like reading out of context to say that God in the flood narrative is a genocidal God.

So what kind of book is the Bible? It shouldn’t be mistaken for history, although it’s rooted in history. It takes its place among the worlds literary classics, yet presumably it’s more than fiction. My thoughts on this matter have been greatly influenced by the work of Gabriel Josipovici, who wrote The Book of God: An Essay on the Bible. Josipovici is a British literary critic and novelist who originally worked entirely in modem literature.

Then he became interested in the Bible, learned biblical Hebrew and Greek and wrote this very adventurous book that tries to describe what kind of book the Bible is. He begins by talking about the prose rhythms at the beginning of Genesis and how those rhythms introduce you to a world which you are compelled to accept. They wrench you from your world and take you into its world, which now becomes the authoritative world.

Unless you believe in divine inspiration, it’s not easy to distinguish between sacred and nonsacred texts. If you believe in divine inspiration, you say, “I know that my faith tells me that this body of texts is inspired, and these are sacred texts and none of the others are inspired.” If you’re not sure of that, then it’s hard to find formal features that will tell you what is sacred and what is not sacred.

Josipovici says that there are certain texts-those of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, among others - that are not content merely to represent the world, or to entertain you, or to display the originality and ingenuity of the author. They want to break into your world and say, “No, the world isn’t that way, the world is this way.” They want you to question the very grounds of reality.

Somewhere Kafka said he wants to be able to create a kind of literature that is like an axe that breaks through the frozen ice of the reader’s heart to his inwardness. Literature as an axe breaking through - that’s a shocking image. Rather than adopting the conventional distinction of canonical and extracanonical, inspired and uninspired, I’m more comfortable with looking at literature empirically and recognizing that there are certain kinds of texts that make inexorable demands on you - and the Bible is one of them.

The Bible is probably the central such text in our entire cultural tradition. This brings us to an issue that is receiving increasing attention from theologians. The relationship between human imagination and religious revelation. It’s an immense issue, of course, but have you given thought to these matters?

Maybe I should say, immediately, that I’m a person who has difficulty conceiving transcendence. I don’t deny transcendence, but it is not easily accessible to my mind. To be frank, I don’t readily imagine a personal God who literally speaks and to whom human beings listen. I’m open to the idea that there is, in less personal terms than tradition imagines, an underlying Ground of Being.

I have to start, then, not from the standpoint of revelation, but from the standpoint of imagination. As you say, this is a very large topic. The imagination is capable of fantasizing and projecting things onto the world-in short, of making things up. But the imagination, like the intellect, is also a very powerful tool for apprehending the nature of reality. It’s clear, that the intellect armed with mathematics is a wonderful human invention and has been able to discover extraordinary things. I think we should remind ourselves that a similar respect for the imagination is in order.

Although Robin Lane Fox is a good historian, his book The Unauthorized Version is a symptom of a problem. The book’s subtitle is Truth and Fiction in the Bible. It strikes me that Lane Fox holds a quite naive notion of truth and fiction. For him, truth is equated with factuality. That is not where truth is in the Bible. Take, for example, Jacob’s wrestling through the night with the unnamed stranger who turns out to be a divine being. Historical positivists like Lane Fox would immediately declare the story “untrue”

it is unlikely that Jacob was a historical figure so that his encounters with supernatural beings cannot be part of a properly historical record; and, in view of form-critical studies, the struggle with an opposing spirit form (or troll) at a ford has a distinctly folkloric look.

Such conclusions may be shrewd about history yet naive about truth. The powerful symbolic truth of this enigmatic tale has in fact been evident to millions of readers through the ages. This is the dark night of the soul for Jacob, the wrestler with man and God, before the morning when, after 20 years, separation, he will have to confront the brother he bamboozled. He grapples with this mysterious Other, will not let go of him, wrests from him a new name - which, as a medieval rabbinic scholar observed, displaces the root of “crookedness” in his name with a designation in which “lordship” is etymologically inscribed - and he comes away maimed.

In his very victory, Jacob becomes a wounded person, and he will speak from the consciousness of his wounds till his dying day. It strikes me that anyone who goes through life with the least introspection can see a darkly eloquent image of his or her own experience in this story. Alongside the abiding and resonant truth of the tale, the factual question of whether there was a historical Jacob who once fought with a stranger at the Jabbok seems rather trivial.

4.3 In Defense of Scripture

The Christian World and the Bible by Hugo L. Odhner.

We meet together as receivers of a new revelation of Divine truths concerning our Lord God, concerning the Word, concerning the immortal life that awaits us after death and the life which can prepare us for heavenly uses. These truths are now revealed because the world of human minds has entered a new phase of development in which doubts have shaken the foundations of Christendom, and the Holy Scriptures no longer command respect but are regarded, among the learned, only as a collection of literary gems, remarkable in view of their antiquity, but without real meaning for our times. The large universities expend their funds on the enterprises of those who deny all miracles and prophetic predictions and class the Lord Jesus Christ with other fallible men.

The defense of the integrity and sanctity of Scripture has mostly fallen to the lot of men of smaller scholastic stature; and many of these feel themselves committed to uphold a merely literal interpretation of the Word and to champion those traditional falsities which the Writings show to have been destructive of the first Christian Church: the belief in a Godhead of three persons, in a vicarious atonement, in justification by faith alone in the predestination of many to hell-doctrines which are repulsive to rational minds.

The absurdity of such doctrines is partly responsible for so many modern Protestants veering away from any definite doctrines and preaching instead a moral redemption through social service. As one writer puts it: “In a world sick unto death the Church has turned to the panacea of ecumenicalism to present to the world a united front-united in disbelief.

After the Last Judgment had set men’s minds free to deny as well as to perceive, the greater strides in human knowledge were turned into intensified attacks on the Bible. Geology showed the world to have been far older than the six or seven thousand years which Genesis seemed to allow for it.

Astronomy opened the skies to display an infinity of worlds among which our puny planet was scarcely worthy of any special grace of God. Biology laid claims to tracing mans ancestry to brute creation rather than to the hands of God. And whether right or wrong, science seized the license to interfere in nature most hallowed spheres. Man grew large, and God as it were shrank in man’s esteem. Heaven became for the typical “modern” man no more a Divine promise but a myth, at best a dream.

The Bible-printed by the millions now-was no longer the Word of God, but simply the record of mankind’s yearnings for a paradise on earth-a hope continually crushed and therefore turned into desperate inventions about a renewed existence after death. Since the Bible was regarded as a human production, literary and historical critics began to shatter the traditional forms of religious thinking among many. Not only was the authorship of the biblical books challenged, but their antiquity and historicity were denied. And since the world, even the learned world, has hitherto supposed the histories of the Word to he nothing but histories and to involve nothing deeper,” the questioning of this history has meant that more and more people have lost all real faith in the Scriptures, and thus in the Lord.

This persistent assault on the Word, often disguised, is also an attack on the New Church. Let no one think that the New Church scholar need fear any natural truth that is properly verified. Yet it is increasingly clear from a survey of the myriad books and articles by those accredited as specialists in biblical research that the New Church stands almost alone in offering a rational defense of the integrity and holiness of the Word in its literal sense.

Only in the light of the Writings can the new findings in biblical and historical research be sifted and evaluated. A New Church translation of the Old and New Testaments is one of the needs that we cannot for long avoid meeting: for the English versions which we now use contain many errors, some of which stem from the falsities current in Christian thought. The recent Revised Standard Version not only takes liberties with the text to modernize it, but makes changes which disturb the series of the Gospel. It omits the doxology from the Lords Prayer in Matthew 6, and reduces the account of the woman caught in adultery (John 8) to a mere footnote.

The Letter and the Spirit

The Writings present a doctrine concerning the Sacred Scriptures which can he rationally seen and confirmed. In itself, as Divine doctrine, the Word is “infinitely above the human rational” and thus is not subject to man’s reason. But “the rational is the very thing that receives the doctrine;” and if believed as accommodated in the Word, and if its spiritual truth is not tainted by man’s rational, the doctrine becomes living in his mind and can then be confirmed by all the knowledges he possesses, of whatsoever name or nature.

The Writings thus explain how the Word was constructed. They distinguish between the spiritual sense of Scripture and its natural sense, between the different styles of its text, between the true history and the made-up history. They also show how the symbols and the correspondential language of the ancients were often taken for the actual truth.

The Old and New Testaments in their literal sense are not of merely historic importance, in tracing the Lords ways with man in past ages. For the Word, when received by human minds, is the foundation of the heavens from this earth, and the means hr which a conjunction can be established between mankind and heaven, and the Lord. In fact, we read that “the Word is not the Word before and until it is in the ultimate, thus until it is in the sense of the letter.” “The Divine truth is called holy, but only when it is in its ultimate, and its ultimate is the Word in the sense of the letter.” It is even said that “the Sacred Scripture is the fulness of God.”

When the Writings refer to the Word in its sense of the letter, this means the thirty-four inspired books of the Bible which they enumerate by name as containing a continuous internal sense.8 Swedenborg had these books before him in the Hebrew and Greek when their internal sense was “dictated” into the interiors of his thought, out of heaven. He assures us that “through the Divine Providence … the Word, as to every jot and tittle, and especially the Word of the Old Testament, has been preserved from the time it was written.” It is also stated that “the Word as to the sense of the letter has from its first revelation not been mutilated,10 not even as to an expression and letter in the original text, for every expression is a support, and in some measure the letters.”

Scholars agree that the Hebrew Scripture and the New Testament text have been preserved during the centuries far more accurately and completely than any other ancient writings. Our present printed texts of the Hebrew Word are based on manuscripts dating back to the ninth century of our own era, and contain vowel points inserted by the so-called Masoretes to fix the sense.

Swedenborg in his Diary suggests that these Jewish scribes of the Dark Ages perhaps were aided by Divine inspiration.13 But the world was vastly astounded a few years ago when, in a cave near the Dead Sea, a leather scroll of Isaiah was found with virtually the same Masoretic text, except for the use of a different vowel system. This scroll is now dated about two B.C.

The Writings do not claim that all the copies of the Bible which men have transcribed or printed are infallibly accurate. Nor is mere age a guarantee of a more reliable text. In some early Greek manuscripts there are omissions or slight changes in the wording. Neither are Swedenborg’s own translations sufficient, for his quotations are often paraphrases. In some instances he departs from the Masoretic text, and in one of these we note that his rendering is confirmed by the Dead Sea Isaiah scroll.

The Lord declared that one jot or one tittle should in no wise pass from the law till all had been fulfilled (Matthew 5: 18). The reason for this lies in the fact that in the spiritual sense all things cohere in a continuous connection, to the arrangement of which every word in the sense of the letter … conduces: “wherefore, if a little word were taken away, the connection would be broken and the coherence perish.”

The new truth which the Writings reveal is that the Divinity of the Word is not due to its antiquity, or the accuracy of its historical details or its scientific allusions, but solely to the presence within its language of a spiritual sense which in unbroken series treats of heavenly things. This does not imply that the Old and New Testament books do not contain true history. For they testify of the most essential fact of history, the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ. To evangelize that event was the sole purpose of the Gospels; and the manner of His coming could not be understood except on the background of Israel’s history.

Nevertheless, Swedenborg was the first Christian writer to show that the Bible, though inspired, was not always to be taken as actual history. Anticipating modern historical critics, he was led to see that the early chapters of Genesis did not describe physical events. They were legends, but sacred legends, containing Divine instruction about the spiritual states of mankind’s infancy. In his preparatory period, Swedenborg had sought to defend the Mosaic account of creation and the Flood with all his scientific knowledge and religious zeal.

But when the spiritual world was opened to him, he was given to see that these narratives were “framed so as to contain heavenly and Divine things, and this according to the method accepted in the Ancient Church.” To confirm the Divine instruction he appealed to reason: “They who do not think beyond the sense of the letter cannot believe otherwise” than that the universe was created in six days. “But who, if he takes into consideration the particulars, cannot see that the creation of the universe is not there meant; for such things are there described as may be known from common sense not to be so”; as that there was light before the sun, and that woman was built from the rib of man.

Shortly after their publication, the Writings must have had a special appeal to reasonable men. For scientific findings increasingly accorded with the teachings now revealed that Adam and Eve were not the first human beings; that the Flood was not universal: that all races did not stem from Noah; that the ages of the patriarchs were given in symbolic numbers; and that history, as far as the Bible related it, did not commence until the time of Abram.

Rise of the “Higher Criticism”

The Arcana Coelestia had pointed out that Genesis had two creation stories, in one of which the name of God was given as Elohim, which in the spiritual sense means the Divine truth, while in the other the name Jehovah was used, to indicate that Divine good is treated of in it. In 1753, four years after the first volume of the Arcana had been published, a French physician, Jean Astruc, wrote some “Conjectures” that the book of Genesis was compiled by Moses from several different records, one of which used Elohim for the name of God, another, Jehovah; and that this is why the Mosaic account contains an apparent repetition of the same events.

Creation was related twice. The story of the Flood was also told in two accounts, which were interwoven. Some time elapsed before scholars took up with this idea, but it was gradually accepted by every biblical student of any note. The critical movement became known as “Higher Criticism.” “Lower” or “Textual Criticism” simply seeks to determine the accuracy of documents and to fix the best possible text, and is, of course, as old as the Hebrew scribes. But “higher” or “historical and literary criticism” operated from a skeptical base, and devoted itself to dissecting all the biblical books into their elements and assigning the possible authorship, date of writing, and so on, in the light of existing knowledge of contemporary secular events. Its scholars belong to different “schools.” and differ widely.

But on the presumption of their own literary judgment they have divided the Hebrew text into four general documents (J, E, D, P) and into innumerable additions. And of course they differ in judgment. The Bible was put into a melting pot and emerged beyond recognition. The history of Israel was reconstructed, beginning as tribes spread over Canaan. The existence of Moses was even denied. If there was a wilderness journey, it was one without a Sinai, without the ten precepts, without an ark or a levitical order, and without miracles. The Pentateuch, the scholars said, came from legends pieced together during the Divided Kingdom, and revised after the return from Babylon.

The Writings place the early part of Genesis back in hoary antiquity. They frankly state that Moses here took something from the Ancient Word, which itself was composed from different inspired documents. Indeed, Moses was seen by Swedenborg in the spiritual world, and then had with him his five books as well as the Ancient Word, from which he had quoted so exactly that “not a syllable is missing.”17 What Moses recorded in his books was not all original with him. The commandments and laws given in the desert resemble those of other nations of the Middle East.

Less than a hundred years ago, Sumerian and Babylonian tablets were deciphered containing legends of creation and the Deluge, which, apart from their polytheistic trappings, showed certain marked resemblances to the Genesis accounts. Eagerly, critics jumped to the conclusion that the Jews had copied their account from Babylon’s; although there is no reason to doubt that both had a common source in a primeval revelation. Strange to say, the Babylonian epics, originating many centuries before Moses, contain the same double tradition as the Hebrew’; indicating that the biblical story must have been intact long before Moses, and was not compounded, as the critics claim, in the seventh century B.C.18

True History in the Scriptures

The antiquity of man and the age of the world are not treated of in the Writings. Swedenborg uses the terms of his contemporaries when he tries to convince them of the absurdity of men lying in the grave awaiting the judgment for six thousand years! And when he notes that the Most Ancient Church flourished “thousands of years ago.”19 But the doctrine is definite that in the twelfth chapter of Genesis, and in those that follow, the historicals are not “made-up” but true history.

Thus the events relating to Abram, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, as well as Moses, “occurred historically as they are written.”21 The historicals are true, but at the same time representative of spiritual things: and “all the words are significative.” Yet “no other historicals are recorded in the Word, and in no other order, and no words are used to express them, than such as in the internal sense may express these arcana.”22 Thus the details of Abram’s life are “true historicals”; the events “really took place.”23 And the same is the case with the historicals in the rest of the books of Moses, in Joshua, in Judges, in Samuel, in the Kings, in Daniel, and in Jonah.”

There was indeed a peculiar providence of the Lord over Israel, so that the things of the church might be represented.25 And in the writing of the Sacred Scripture words were chosen which have the same significance throughout; “and this uniformly in both the historical and the prophetical books, although written by various individuals and at different times-a uniformity that would not be possible unless the Word had come down from heaven.”

As to the time when the various books were written, the Writings do not challenge the traditional view as far as it rests on literal statements. After Moses had written his books, Joshua and Judges were composed. Then David wrote his psalms. Samuel and Kings were composed later.27 The book of Jonah is said to contain particulars which are “historical and yet prophetical”;28 and the early Diary notes that Jonah being swallowed by a whale “actually occurred in the world, even as something similar “happened in fantasy to a spirit in the other life.”

It should be noted that most of the books of the Bible are anonymous, except for the titles supplied by the Jews. The second book of Samuel treats only of events taking place after he had died; being called by Samuel’s name probably because written on the same scroll as First Samuel. The book of Psalms is called “David” and the Lord so cited the Psalms. David, writing about himself, was not aware that he was the prophetic prototype and representative of the Lord’s Human.30 A great many of the psalms refer to incidents in David’s colorful life, into which all kinds of human emotions seem to enter, even as they entered into the Lord’s maternal heredity. But other psalms are ascribed to other authors or refer to later events, like the elegy of the Captivity, when the Jews sat by the rivers of Babylon (Psalm 137). Still, the Psalms can be called David’s when the authorship is not being discussed.

That there was a Divine inspiration not only in the words but also in the arrangement in the Psalms and Prophets is clear from Swedenborg’s statement that the summaries of the internal sense of those books had been compared with the Word in heaven and been found to conform with it.32 “While I read the Word through from the first chapter of Isaiah to the last chapter of Malachi, and the Psalms of David, it was given me to perceive that every verse communicated with some society of heaven, and thus the whole Word with the universal heaven.”33 Each of the chapters in the prophetical Word corresponds to one of the societies of heaven… . There is a correspondence of the whole heaven with the Word in its series.”

The “Second Isaiah”

Even the Prophets contain historical accounts and allusions. And two problems have troubled thoughtful students since olden times. One of these concerns Isaiah, who was active a century and a half before the Exile. The first thirty-nine chapters of his book seem to have been written before the Captivity; while the last twenty-seven chapters picture the temple as destroyed, and name Cyrus as the Lord’s anointed through whom Israel would be redeemed from captivity.

Swedenborg, in a note in his Adversaria, voices a doubt that words or names not known to a prophet could be inspired into him “orally.”35 There is no disturbance of the sequence of the spiritual sense even if it is assumed that in the lifetime of Cyrus there was a “second Isaiah” writing during the Captivity, as most scholars now believe.

Daniel. Is There Literal Prediction?

A more delicate problem concerns the book of Daniel, which scholars now insist must have been written, not by Daniel in Babylon, but by someone in Judea about 165 B.C., during the Maccabee rebellion. They therefore say that it was not prophecy, but history in the guise of prediction. There are no insuperable difficulties in confirming the general accuracy of the events recorded in Daniel, and which are written in the third person. After much denial by the critics. Belshazzar, for instance, has again emerged as a historic figure in newly discovered cuneiform texts. But the stumblingblock for the critics is the exactness with which they see Daniel’s prophetic visions to be fulfilled in history.

It is stated that Daniel wrote down his visions of the night (Daniel 7: 1). Modern students object that these visions were too true to be prophecy. For they seem to describe in some detail the coming of Alexander the Great and the oppressive rule of Antiochus Epiphanes. But consider: if the record of Israel’s history is true there were many instances of the literal fulfillment of prophecy. The test of a true prophet in Israel was that his predictions came to pass (Deuteronomy 13: 1, 3, 18: 22).

The Lord Himself made predictions of things which shortly came to pass. Joseph’s dreams, and those of the butler, the baker, and Pharaoh, were fulfilled according to their interpretations. The freedom of man would be endangered if he foreknew coming events or relied on miracles. But miracles did occur, and predictions were usually not understood until after the fulfillment. Further, the Lord “foresaw from eternity what each man’s quality and chosen destiny would be”;36 and He can reveal this when necessary.

But in the case of Daniel, we are told in the Writings that the prophecy of the three empires to follow that of Babylon did not refer to temporal kingdoms. “Such kingdoms, one after another, have not existed on this earth.”37 And Bible students still differ as to whether the “fourth kingdom” refers to Syria or to Rome, for the allegorical language is ambiguous and can be applied in various ways. To the New Church person it is not essential when the book of Daniel was composed, or whether it is history in the garb of prophecy. The essential thing is that it is seen as an organic part of Scripture in which the spiritual teachings concerning the successive states of the spiritual church are embodied. And of this the Writings make certain.

####The Nature of Biblical Historicity When the Writings speak of the story of Israel as true history, it is well to reflect that history is always written from the point of view of the nation and the times, and often from personal bias. Whatever contradictions may appear in the biblical narrative, they are such as can be expected from a people whose turbulent passions the Lord could curb and bend only through miracles, promises and punishments. The Word would have been written differently if written in another nation.38 But Israel was chosen because of its spiritual ignorance, and because its people could be saved through external obedience. Their very faults equipped them to picture the wilfulness of every human heart.

The inspired scribes tell Israel’s story with shocking candor, without hiding the most atrocious evils of their revered heroes. To Israel it was a truth that Jehovah was a jealous God who ordered the ruthless massacre of enemy tribes and sanctified the crude laws of retaliatory justice, and who said to Isaiah, “I make peace, and create evil” (45: 7). It was no contradiction for Israelites to record that Joshua conquered the whole of Canaan, even though many cities were left in Canaanite hands. When Samson boasts that he slew a thousand with the jawbone of an ass (Judges 15: 16), that is an instance of the hyperbole which primitive peoples constantly employ. When Joshua bids the sun be still upon Gibeon, it was a piece of poetry borrowed from the Ancient Word; which does not take away from the historical fact that time seemed to stand still while Israel overcame her enemies! The miraculous light of the spiritual sun can indeed take away all sense of time and cause two days’ work to be done in one without disturbing the order of nature.39

It seems likely also that the names of cities and peoples were changed in the record to their later forms, as Dan for Laish. Pithom and Raamses may not have been so called at the time of Moses. The coastal sheiks of Gerar who befriended Abram are called Philistines in Genesis, although the people actually so named entered Canaan centuries later. And it should not shock us to discover that camels were not used as yet in Abram’s day, and that the word might originally have been “donkeys” or “asses”-which have the same general correspondence as camels. In his Adversaria, Swedenborg notes that although Moses wrote the Pentateuch, Ezra or some other inspired scribe may have added some explanatory notes to the manuscript.40 Such editorial changes might well have served, in the Divine Providence, to preserve a natural sense where the meaning might otherwise be confused.

The Unity of Scripture

The miracle of Israel was that in her story that inner Divine purpose and those Divine laws which are secretly present in all history41 are openly disclosed in part, and for the rest are couched in forms that can be unfolded into a spiritual sense. Even her history is essentially prophecy; and “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Revelation 19: 10). The Arcana Coelestia states that “in the internal sense of the Word the Lord’s whole life is described, such as it was to be in the world, even as to the perceptions and the thoughts, for these were foreseen and provided, because from the Divine.”

This inner thread of testimony concerning the incarnation and glorification of the Lord’s Human marks the purpose of the Old Testament Scripture. It is an unbroken thread, or rather, a perfect web of doctrine which, like the inner garment of the Lord, could not be divided. The critics of the world have again crucified the Lord, scoffing at His Divinity, and are tearing into pieces the letter of the Word, which is His outer garments. But the spiritual sense is a “vesture without seam, woven from the top throughout.”

It is the woven tunic for which the soldiers had to cast lots. For the spiritual structure of the Heavenly Doctrine must be accepted or rejected as a whole. That the life of the Lord was in some ways foreshadowed in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the form of prediction of events, is clear from the New Testament. In scores of places the Evangelists show how the Lord’s actions were in almost literal fulfillment of some prophecy, from His birth in Bethlehem to His final passion. After His resurrection “He expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning Himself”-“beginning at Moses and all the prophets” (Luke 24: 27). And Paul and other Christians therefore spoke of the Jewish ritual as an allegory of the Lord’s work of redemption.

The Lord’s advent and earthly life were historic facts and are suitably represented in the true historicals of the Old Testament, which begin with Abram. Even in the natural sense there are parallels. The Lord, like Abram, was a sojourner in Egypt; as Israel crossed the Jordan so Jesus was baptized there; as Israel suffered captivity and persecution and the destruction of the temple, so the Lord underwent humiliation, and the temple of His body was destroyed-to he raised up anew on the third day. In the Prophets and in the Psalms the progressive states of the Lord’s glorification are variously prefigured. Even the function of John the Baptist is foreshadowed.

The passion of the cross is alluded to by Isaiah in remarkable detail (chap. 53). It is as if the spiritual and the natural senses were woven together, with spiritual truths shining out from the “dark savings” of the prophets. In the New Testament, the Gospels weave, as in a tapestry from four strands, the graphic profile of the Lord’s earthly life and then, in the Apocalypse, the clouds unroll to show the vision of the glorified Human in heaven.

To disturb this picture is to desecrate it. Therefore the angel warned: “I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the city and the things which are written in this book.”

To “add” or “take away” is, spiritually, to alter the doctrine of the spiritual sense from which the sense of the letter was “dictated by the Lord.”44 But the sense of the letter is the guard for the genuine truths hidden within, and holds them together as the body holds the viscera.45 Indeed it is when the Divine truth is in its ultimate that it is holy, and becomes the Word.46 Not even a little word can be omitted without an interruption of the series of the spiritual sense.

The Challenge to the Church

“The Word in its whole complex is as one man as to all and single things, within and without; and because that man is as the Human of the Lord was in the world, therefore the Lord is called the Word, in John 1: 1.”48 And it is that Man which is crucified in the minds of simple believers when the critics seek to produce a new history of Israel and a new Gospel story; indeed a new “humanistic” religion, which, as they put it, is “demythologized by the quiet amputation of every thing miraculous, predictive, or supernatural.

The New Church person needs to be cautious in reading the books and viewing the films produced to popularize the Bible or to revamp the Christian faith to suit a sceptical generation. Many of the elaborate assumptions of the critics of fifty years ago have proved to be houses built on sand. We need have no fear of the historical and archaeological evidence which further research will unearth.

The spade has usually reaffirmed what the pens of the literary critics have denied. Sixty years ago it was widely accepted that Moses and his people were illiterate. Today his age is shown as one of considerable culture and commerce, and the region of Canaan as using three written languages. Similarly with Abram. To quote Professor Albright: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob no longer seem isolated figures, much less reflections of later Israelite history they now appear as true children of the age, bearing the same names, moving over the same territory, visiting the same towns (especially Harran and Nahor), practising the same customs as their contemporaries. In other words, the patriarchal narratives have a historical nucleus throughout.”

Similarly, recent finds of papyri containing fragments of a life of the Lord based on all four Gospels have strengthened the evidence that the Gospels were composed in the life-time of the apostles. The providential discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls helps to confirm that the Jews were stirred by Messianic hopes in the days of John the Baptist. Despite all this, the modern trend is antagonistic to any acknowledgment of the Lord’s Divinity, even as the Writings predicted when they note that “Anus should rule secretly even to the end.”

The New Church must ever remember that the unpardonable sin which robs the man of the church of the means of his salvation is the sin against the Holy Spirit-the denial of the Divine Human and of the holiness of the Word. The Lord protects men from such profanations in various ways. Some today do not know the Word except as a literary heritage, full of provocative sayings, which, as a Hebraic-Christian tradition, has formed the substratum of many of our customs and manners, but which need not be believed. Thus is the Bible mutilated in the minds of men, stripped of Divinity and denied historic reliability; fit only for dramatizing and for emotional appeal.

But the New Church possesses another Bible, the holy Word itself which the Writings state is preserved without mutilation since its first revelation or its final writing; and which, once published, is to be “preserved to all posterity.”

Let us not forget that the literal sense of Scripture is the vulnerable “heel” of the Son of Man, upon which the attacks of the hells are centered.53 Although the Seed of the woman shall crush the head of the serpent of the tree of sensuous knowledge, yet the serpent will bruise His heel. And “if the foundations are overturned, what shall the righteous do?”

The challenge must not be ignored. The New Church must indeed center its study upon the treasures of the internal sense, which are given to her for doctrine and for life. But with our many uses and scanty resources, we must also meet the critics on their own ground. In this the New Church is unique that it holds the key to unlock the Word, and knows that it is the presence of a continuous spiritual sense that is the criterion of its Divine authorship

4.4 Reading

A Book About Us, Chapter 1, pages 1-6

4.4 Assignment 4

How would you describe your experience of working through the material on “higher criticism”, how did it affect you?
Comment on your sense of “higher criticism” in the light of the principles expounded in The Doctrine of Sacred Scripture.
In Session 3 you were asked to identify what Dole pointed out to be the two options open to us in how we approach the biblical text. Which of these options best describe the approach of “higher criticism” and say why you have pick the option you have.
Create a list of elements found in the style of the Word that the “documentary hypothesis” appeals to in support of its particular view of the biblical text.Along side these in a second column summarise in what way they are said to support it, and in a 3rd column summarise what the Heavenly Doctrines have to say on the matter.
Do you see anything in the Alter interview suggestive of a positive change as far as the direction of contemporary biblical scholarship is concerned?Be sure to give a justification for your response.

The Lord’s Garments

What connections are you able to draw between the passages from the Apocalypse Explainedbelow and what higher criticism “achieves” in its analysis of the biblical text?

Apocalypse Explained (Tansley) n. 64

“The soldiers took his garments and made four parts, to each soldier a part, and also his coat; now the coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout. They said therefore among themselves, Let us not divide it, but cast lots for it, whose it shall be; that the Scripture might be fulfilled, which saith, They parted my garments among them, and for my vesture they did cast lots. These things therefore the soldiers did ” (xix. 23, 24).

He who does not know that in every particular of the Word there is an internal sense, which is spiritual, cannot see any arcanum in these things; he only knows that the soldiers divided the garments and not the coat, and he perceives nothing more than this, when, nevertheless, there is not only a Divine arcanum contained in this circumstance, but also in every particular of the things recorded concerning the Lord’s passion.

The arcanum which is contained in this circumstance is, that the Lord’s garments signified Divine truth, thus the Word, because the Word is Divine truth; the garments which they divided, the Word in the letter, and the coat, the Word in the internal sense. To divide them, signifies to disperse and falsify; and soldiers signify those who belong to the church, who fight for Divine truth; wherefore it is said, “These things therefore the soldiers did.” It is therefore clear, that by these words in the spiritual sense, is meant, that the Jewish Church dispersed the Divine truth which is in the sense of the letter; but that they could not disperse the Divine truth which is in the internal sense. (That the Lord’s garments signified Divine truth, thus the Word, was shown above; that His coat signified Divine truth, or the Word, in the internal sense, may be seen, Arcana Coelestia, n. 9826, 9942; that to divide is to disperse and separate from good and truth, thus to falsify, may be seen, n. 4424, 6360, 6361, 9094.

That soldiers signify those who belong to the church, in this place to the Jewish church, who fought for Divine truth, is evident from the spiritual sense of warfare and of war; that war signifies spiritual combats, which are those of truth against falsity, may be seen, n. 1659, 1664, 8295, 10,455; it is therefore said concerning the Levites, whose function was to deal with the things of the church, that they should go out to the warfare, and should serve in the warfare, by exercising the ministry in the tent of the assembly (Numb. iv. 23, 35, 39, 43, 47; viii. 23, 24).

Apocalypse Explained (Tansley) n. 375

That no injury should be done to the internal or spiritual sense of the Word, is also signified by the Lord’s garments being divided by the soldiers, and not the vesture, which was without seam, woven from the top throughout (John xix. 23, 24). For by the Lord’s garments is signified the Word; by the garments which were divided, the Word in the letter; by the vesture, the Word in the internal sense; and by the soldiers, those who fought for the goods and truths of the church. That such persons are signified by soldiers, may be seen above (n. 64, at the end): and that garments in the Word signify truths clothing good, and the Lord’s garments signify Divine truth, thus the Word (also above, n. 64, 195).

Dole rightly points out that the Bible is far from being a systematic treatment of theological matters but can be thought of as narrative of the dynamics of the relationship between divinity and humanity. Is this major theme something you are conscious of when reading the Bible?
What is the fundamental paradox Dole points out to be evident in this relationship and in what ways does he say it comes out in the text?
What shifts in the balance of your relationship to the Divine can you identify over the course of your life?

5. A Brief Survey on the Word

5.1 Reading

The following is a brief survey of the books of the Word found within the Bible. The purpose is to provide the student with a general sense of the flow and movement of the text of the Word in terms of its literal content. Students should in their reading of the following aim to get familiar with the various themes found in each of the books as this general context will be necessary as a basis for gaining an appreciation of the broad spiritual applications present in the Word when viewed as a whole.

THE OLD TESTAMENT

THE BOOKS OF MOSES (THE PENTATEUCH)

GENESIS

In its most external form the Old Testament can be viewed as a record of the history of a covenantal relationship between God and the human race. In Genesis we are introduced to the one God who is the creator and sustainer of all that is and over the course of the first eleven chapters we have a story that captures the creation, fall, destruction, and preservation of the human race. At chapter twelve of Genesis the story takes a much more localised form and we find ourselves immersed in tribal culture of the ancient Middle East with the history of Divine and human interactions centred on the patriarchal figures of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob the latter of which had his name changed to Israel. This narrowing of focus from a universal perspective to that of God’s dealings with specific individuals brings a very personal feel to the covenant relationship between God and those who heed His call into a relationship with Himself. The character of Joseph, one of the 12 sons of Jacob, takes centre stage in the closing chapters of the book of Genesis setting the background for the continuation of the story in the book of Exodus.

EXODUS

So the book of Genesis or Beginnings in the sense of origins on the literal level of its meaning presents us with a history of the origins of all things in creation including the human race before moving to those specific individuals who where the fathers’ of the Jewish people that eventually became the nation of Israel. In the book of Exodus the literal story presents the history of the sons of Israel as slaves in Egypt and their deliverance by the hand of God under Moses’ leadership. We now see an expanding out of the record of God’s dealings with the human race in the sense that the Divine now enters into a covenant relationship with a whole people (previously it had been with the individual patriarchs). The 12 sons of Jacob/Israel that had become twelve tribes now through their collective suffering in Egypt as slaves and their common experience of the power of Jehovah to deliver them we see their journey into a collective sense of being that would eventually culminate in a fully fledged sense of national identity.

Leviticus, Numbers & Deuteronomy

The remaining 3 books of the Pentateuch, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy offer a fuller perspective into the relationship of the Divine and His “chosen” people with Leviticus providing detailed laws related to religious, ceremonial, and practical life of the Israelites. The book of Numbers largely deals with the life of the Israelites as they journeyed for 40 years in the wilderness towards the land of Canaan while the book of Deuteronomy is basically a series of discourses from Moses with a view to preparing the people for their long awaited entry into the promised land.

The Former Prophets (The Historical Books)

JOSHUA (see pdf map: Tribal Areas)

The next set of books are what are called the Former Prophets. These open with the book of Joshua who, having succeeded Moses as leader, is now charged with taking the people into the land to prosecute a military campaign to rid it of its inhabitants, the Canaanites, Amorites and Perrizites. The land was to be divided amongst the various Israelite tribes for their inheritance with one exception, the tribe of Levi. Rather than a province of land the tribe of Levi were given cities by the other tribes along with the common surrounding land. Thus the Levites who served as priests and performed the duties associated with religious worship were not concentrated in one area but were present throughout the land. For those of the tribe of Levi their “inheritance” was to be the Lord himself (see Jos. 13v33).

JUDGES

The next book of the Word found in the Former Prophets is that of the Judges. The earlier campaign under Joshua to rid the land of its inhabitants and to have the boundaries of Canaan secured was never fully completed and as a result various Canaanite tribes remained in the land. The book of Judges describes how the Israelites periodically came under the influence of these pagan tribes and adopted their practises and religions as their own in direct disobedience to what the Lord commanded. What we find in the book of Judges are a series of characters raised up by God to deal with the corrupting influences of the Canaanites in order to restore the relationship between the Lord and the people of Israel.

FIRST SAMUEL

At the beginning of the period of the Judges Israel was structured as a set of self governing tribal states. This was soon to change however for in the book of Samuel we find a transition from the final Judge of Israel, Samuel, to that of a king, Saul. Samuel is a prophet and warns the people of the potential dangers of being under a king but their desire is to be like the nations around them. The Lord grants them what they desire and Samuel anoints Saul. Saul is a formidable military commander and wins many battles but ends up disobeying what the Lord commands. His disobedience leads to his rejection by God and Samuel anoints David in his place. Saul remains king and David the shepherd boy is catapulted into national consciousness when on looking to deliver food to his bothers on a battle front with the Philistines takes on the Philistine champion Goliath and single headedly defeats him with a sling shot before removing his head with his own sword. Praises are offered to David’s and Saul becomes insanely jealous of David, who despite winning victories and forging a close friendship with Jonathan, Saul’s son, attempts to kill him. The final straw for David was Saul’s order to his household to have David killed, where upon, with the aid of his wife (Saul’s daughter) and Jonathan David makes his escape to live as a fugitive with other outcastes. During this time Samuel, on whom Saul relied, had died and in a final act of disobedience to the Lord Saul seeks out a medium to raise Samuel. Samuel gives his final prophetic message to Saul from beyond the grave saying that he and his sons would die in their upcoming battle with the Philistines. Samuel’s prophecy came to pass with Saul taking his own life by falling on his sword and so opening the way for David to take the throne.

SECOND SAMUEL

The second book of Samuel opens with David being anointed king with a surviving son of Saul also being anointed in the North. A war results and through a series of events David wins the respect of those who failed to support him initially and the united tribes declare him king. David then leads his army against Jerusalem which was a Canaanite strong hold and takes it. He erects his palace there and calls it The City of David or Zion. He then subdues the Philistines and recaptures the ark of the covenant and brings this to Jerusalem. David then sees Bathsheba bathing on a roof and falls for her committing adultery. Bathsheba is found to be pregnant so David has her husband Uriah placed in the heat of the battle where he is killed. David’s sin is made known through Nathan the prophet. David repents but must suffer the consequences for his actions. The child dies when it is born and David’s life is marked with much sorrow from this point on with enmity between his sons and even an open rebellion lead by his son Absalom who, as a result, is killed

FIRST AND SECOND BOOKS OF KINGS

see pdf map: The Divided Kingdom; see also pdf chart: Time-Line of Kings and Prophets

The two books of kings open with David in old age and bed ridden. In his weakened state his son Adonijah with the backing of David’s commander Joab and the priest Abiathar makes a play for the throne and so David asks Nathan to anoint Solomon as king. The people back Solomon who moves to quell any opposition by dispatching with the dissenters including Adonijah and Joab. Solomon is upright before the Lord and the Lord in a dream says that he could ask for anything he wished. Solomon asks for wisdom to know the difference between right and wrong and is granted much more besides so much did his request please the Lord. Under Solomon the kingdom of Israel expands and experiences a great time of prosperity and peace. Solomon is able to build an elaborate temple to God. His success continues but is eroded as he comes under the influence of his many wives he begins to erect places of worship for foreign gods. God declares that his disobedience will result in the kingdom being torn apart with only Judah remaining in honour of David his father.

Upon the death of Solomon the kingdom is torn in two with the northern kingdom of Israel under the rule of Solomon’s son Jeroboam and the southern kingdom under the rule of another of Solomon’s sons named Rehoboam. Jeroboam in an attempt to establish a distinction between the northern and southern kingdoms had altars and shines built to golden calves and had the people worship these and ordered the Levites to serve at these as priests. Rehoboam isn’t much better also encouraging idolatry and male and female prostitution as worship. The worship of foreign gods continues after the death of both of Solomon’s sons. There are a few feeble attempts at reviving the worship of Jehovah in the southern kingdom of Judah but most of the succeeding northern kings commit greater evils in their expansion of their father’s practises.

Ahab and his queen Jezebel institutes and openly supports the spread of the worship of Baal in the northern kingdom of Israel. It is at this time that God raises up Elijah to confront Ahab with his evils. This eventually leads to the deaths of both Ahab and Jezebel. The story continues recounting the deeds of the kings that follow. With each of the northern kings being more evil than their predecessor. As the decline continues so territory is lost to the Assyrians until a full invasion sees the northern peoples carried away in captivity.

A few of Judah’s kings attempt to reform southern kingdom with an attempt to restore the temple which sat neglected in disrepair. Hezekiah in taking the throne destroyed all the idols in Judah and then with the assistance of Isaiah Judah manages to keep Assyrian expansion at bay. Under Josiah’s rule an organised programme of spiritual renewal is instituted with the law being read to the people and with the people reaffirmed in their allegiance to the Lord we find the reinstitution of Passover which had not been celebrated for centuries. Things however regressed upon Josiah’s passing and culminated in the king of Babylon invading the southern kingdom, destroying the temple and carrying off the people into captivity.

THE PSALMS (DAVID)

As the purpose of this survey is to provide an overview of the books of the Word (New Church canon) with a view to building a sense of it being in the human form we leave aside for now the books of Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job and move directly to the Psalms or David. The book of Psalms is in fact made up of 5 separate books and as far as their literal sense is concerned they largely draw from episodes in Israel’s history. The five books of 150 psalms found in the book of Psalms are poetic in their style and were designed to be set to music and as such they were designed to be sung in a congregational setting. The majority of the psalms are devoted to expressing praise or thanksgiving to God with others being laments or supplications expressive of suffering and the desire for deliverance from enemies or adversity. Another type of common psalm are those that express remorse over wrong doing and the subsequent hope of forgiveness and redemption. It is noticeable The Psalms carry a strong messianic theme very close to their surface. A consistent theme throughout The Psalms is the mental struggle to overcome appearances and the emotional impact these have on the psalmist’s states of life highlighting the need to get reconnected to the Lord by means of truths found in the Word.

THE LATTER PROPHETS (THE MAJOR PROPHETS)

Note: You should read the summaries of the Latter Prophets in conjunction with the charts called… Time-Line of Kings and Prophets

The Prophetic Books

ISAIAH

We now move to the next book of the Word which also is the first of those books that are described as the Latter Prophets, the book of Isaiah. Another division of the prophetical books divides them into two groups, one group being The Major Prophets and the other The Minor Prophets. These terms don’t refer to the relative importance of the books but to their relative length. The Major Prophets include Isaiah, Jeremiah and Lamentations, Ezekiel and Daniel, with the Minor prophets being what in the Jewish canon is referred to as The Twelve beginning with Hosea and ending with Malachi.

Isaiah’s ministry stretched from the end of Uzziah’s reign through that of Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah and into the reign of Manasseh who overthrew the worship of Jehovah. Isaiah’s prophecies were directed at the southern kingdom of Judah and while the immediate threat of conquest appeared to be that of Assyria who took possession of the northern kingdom of Israel and Samaria Isaiah identified the real threat for Judah as that of Babylon.

With the exception of the book of Psalms no other book contains more direct prophetic statements related to the coming of the Messiah than that of Isaiah where we find the actual word “salvation” appears some 26 times in stark contrast to its occurrence in all the other prophets combined where we find it used 7 times. Indeed the very name Isaiah means “Jehovah is salvation”. The book is composed of a series of prophecies directed toward Judah and the nations. It is composed of 3 main sections; the first (Chpts. 1-35) are prophecies of impending consequences for evils committed, the second (Chapts. 36-39) offer a historical interlude before prophecies of comfort and consolation (Chapts. 40-66) framed within the promise and hope of the coming of the messiah. Perhaps the most well known parts of Isaiah are those that present the Lord in what are the Servant Songs (42:1-4; 49:1-6; 50: 4-9 and 52:13-53:12).

JEREMIAH

Jeremiah message of Judah’s impending destruction if the people didn’t heed the Lord’s call to repentance meant that he was despised and persecuted by his countrymen. Jeremiah’s message deals with the inevitable consequences for a life of rebellion and disobedience to the will of the Lord. The book can be divided into 4 main sections: Jeremiah’s call (Chpt. 1) prophecies directed towards Judah (2:1-45:5), prophecies directed towards the Gentiles/nations (46:1-51:64) and the fall of Jerusalem (Chpt. 52). For 40 years Jeremiah confronted his people with the word of the Lord only to see them grow more arrogant as conditions became more and more dire for them. They believed they could act as they liked and be safe as God would not allow the temple in Jerusalem to be violated. Jeremiah found himself constantly reminding the people that their security could only be found in returning to the Lord on the grounds of the covenant He had set for them, a covenant that clearly stated the consequences for disobedience and rebellion. Jeremiah recognises that a true covenant to come is one written on the hearts of God’s people (31:31-34).

LAMENTATIONS

This book is a lament over the state of affairs Jeremiah is confronted with. A book of 5 chapters containing 5 poems whose themes are 1. the destruction of Jerusalem, 2. the apparent anger of Jehovah, 3. the prayer for mercy, 4. the siege of Jerusalem and 5. the prayer for restoration. The first four poems have an acrostic structure that follows the pattern of the Hebrew alphabet in which the first group of verses begin with the first letter, the second with the second letter etc. Although the book communicates the profound depth of sorrow felt in the face of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of her people at the hands of Babylon there is in contrast to this an equally deep sense of hope and trust that the Lord will restore things, leading His people back to Him along a path of sorrow, repentance, hope and faith.

EZEKIEL

Ezekiel delivered his prophecy while in Babylonian exile. This books prophetical message is delivered in rich imagery through its use of parables, signs, and symbols. It can be broken into 4 sections: Ezekiel’s call (Chpts. 1-3), the judgement on Judah (Chpts. 4-24), judgement on the Gentiles (Chpts. 25-32) and the restoration of Israel (Chpts. 33-48). A constant theme through the book is that of the judgement of Jerusalem as not yet having been completed and this was reflected in the imagery of the departure of the Glory of the Lord from the temple (8:1 – 11:25). Ezekiel shows that the cycle of judgement that will fall upon the nations will come to pass and only then will things begin to be restored. This restoration is vividly captured in the image of the valley of dry bones (37:1-4) and the vision given to him of the restoration of the city land and temple (40-48) with its specifications and the return of the Glory of the Lord to the temple from the east. A salient feature of the book is the constant use of the title “son of man” (some 90 times) which of course calls to mind messianic connections with the Lord who, in the Gospels is called by this same title.

DANIEL

Daniel was a Jew who was deported as a captive to Babylon. The book that carries his name falls into that class of biblical literature designated as apocalyptic. It can be divided into two parts the first (Chpts. 1-6) is largely historical and the second part made up of its remaining chapters is mainly prophetical. Daniel contains some of the most well known stories found in the Biblical text, Daniel in the lions den, the story of his friends being cast into a furnace and being seen there with a mysterious fourth figure and surviving, and Daniel’s rise in the royal service due to his ability as an interpreter of dreams. The second part of the book is filled with apocalyptic visions similar to those found in the New Testament book of Revelation and finishes with a prophetical statement.

THE MINOR PROPHETS

We shall deal with the Minor Prophets together giving just a brief summary of the themes found in each of them.

Hosea

Prophet to the Northern kingdom whose ministry spanned the last 6 kings of Israel. His life mirrored that of Israel’s fickle relationship to God. He married Gomer who ran after other men as Israel chased other gods, in particular the god Baal the worship of whom involved ritualise prostitution. As a overarching theme Hosea is a story of the one-sided love and faithfulness that characterised the Lord’s relationship to Israel with particular emphasis on the Lord’s mercy.

Joel

From the graphic devastation resulting from a plague of locusts Joel message to the Kingdom of Judah is a call to repentance in the face of impending judgement and the salvation of the Lord. The theme of impending judgment is capture in imagery of locusts, famine, raging fires, invading armies but always in a wider context the hope of a following restoration. This book pronounces the coming Day of the Lord, terrible for those who refuse to repent but a time of blessing for those who do.

Amos

The Northern Kingdom of Israel experienced a time of external prosperity under the reign of Jeroboam II. Joel’s message is one of peeling back the fine looking veneer to reveal the depravity that lay beneath. The dark side of an excessive pursuit of luxury and wealth was the merciless oppression of the poor and an increase in materialism, immorality and injustice. Amos’ message is basically a message of judgement directed towards the nations and oracles and visions of judgements against Israel. The book falls into four sections, the first is one of eight prophecies (Chapts. 1-2), the second of three sermons (Capts. 3-6), the third is five visions (Chpts. 7:1-9:10) with the final section consisting of five promises (Chpt. 9:11-15). Amos’ preaching is characterised by strong themes of the righteousness and justice of God and how these are to be mirror in human relationships. The rich are condemned for their oppression of the poor and religious hypocrisy and he emphasises that true religion demands righteous living and that the way one treats ones neighbours is telling of their true relationship to the Lord. Amos ends with the message that after exile and judgement comes consolation in that God will restore His people to the land and bless them.

Obadiah

Obadiah is the shortest book of the Old Testament being only 21 verses long and deals with the relationship between Edom (Esau) and Israel (Jacob) and is concerned with Edom’s continued opposition to Israel and the judgement it will incur due to its opposition to God’s chosen people. Edom’s state was such that there is no possibility of redemption. Obadiah’s pronouncements of judgement have a chilling finality about them. These can be found in the first part of the book (verses 1-18) the second part deals with the restoration of Israel (verses 19-21).

Jonah

The story of Jonah and his transportation in the belly of a great fish is another well known story from the Bible. In the literal account it presents the Lord as the God of all peoples (even those of a nation who have a reputation for cruelty) to whom He extends His love and mercy. He calls Jonah (a Hebrew) to go to Nineveh, a city of Assyria, to proclaim a message of repentance. Jonah is reluctant and the Lord is persistent and in the end the message is proclaimed and Nineveh repents.

Micah

The themes of the book of Micah can be summarised in the statement; “He has shown you, O man, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” (6:8). If the book is divided into thirds we find that the first third deals with exposing the sins of his countrymen (the main focus is Judah but there are also prophecies directed to Samaria and Israel) the second third proclaims the judgement to come and the final third holds out the hope of restoration in response to what will befall them. The burden that comes through is for the mistreatment of the poor, there are strong denunciations of idolatry and immorality and the corruption of Judah’s leaders is also highlighted. The hope of restoration is offered but will only occur once the prophecies of judgement are fulfilled due to the failure of the people to accept their covenant responsibilities before the Lord. Micah contains one of the clearest pronouncements of the Lord’s birth into the world found in the Old Testament prophetic works (5:2) and offers vivid descriptions of the Messiah’s reign (see 2:12-13; 4:1-8; 5:4-5).

Nahum

Nahum proclaims the fall of Nineveh at the hands of Babylon due to the cruelty of its army and the vices of the city.

Habakkuk

Judah’s continual refusal to heed the call to repentance sees Habakkuk calling on the Lord to ask how long the situation would continue. The Lord responds revealing that Babylon will be the chastening rod brought against them. Habakkuk is deeply perplexed and in his distress is brought by the Lord to see that the consequences of sin and evil due to a refusal to heed calls to repentance cannot be avoided. The Lord also gives Habakkuk a vision of His glory. The book of Habakkuk conveys a strong sense of the Lord continually at work to accomplish His purposes in spite of how things may appear, hence a strong theme is the Lord’s faithfulness in times of doubt.

Zephaniah

This book deals with the coming day of the Lord and the impact this will have on the whole earth. Specific focus is given to the nation of Judah and the nations surrounding her as well as the city of Jerusalem. As always the day of the Lord involves judgement on the one hand and restoration and salvation on the other, both themes are found in this book.

Haggai

The book of Haggai is composed of four brief sermons. The people had returned from Babylonian captivity to build the temple but work on the temple had ceased due to the people becoming more concerned with the building and adorning of their own houses. The frank messages of the sermons point out that until what is of the Lord is put first in their life His blessings cannot but be withheld. Haggai spoke to the people’s apathy and lack of motivation in an attempt to rekindle a desire for divine things and so reprioritise them in their life.

Zechariah

A contemporary of Haggai Zechariah was also raised up by the Lord to encourage the people to finish the rebuilding of the temple. Zechariah looks to motivate the people in this task through giving them an inspiring vision of the returning Messiah whose glory will inhabit His temple. The Lord’s future plans are offered in the form of a series of eight visions, four messages and two burdens. In this book are found prophetic statements regarding the advent, rejection and final triumph of the Messiah.

Malachi

Malachi was the last of the Old Testament prophets and the book that carries his name is the last recorded statement of God through a prophet for 400 years. Such a method of communication with His people would not be heard until John the Baptist is raised up as the “voice of one crying in the wilderness”. Malachi’s message of judgement was to a people plagued with corrupt religious authorities, evil practises and a false sense of security despite the clearly corrupt state of affairs that prevailed. The temple had been rebuilt and religious worship was active with sacrifices being offered in it. But the priests were corrupt and self serving, there was a neglect of tithes and offerings and intermarriage with pagan wives which was forbidden was rife. Malachi looked to challenge these issues and their underlying attitudes of indifference towards the Law calling the people to a new commitment and obedience to it. Malachi ends with dramatic prophecies of the coming of the Lord and of His forerunner John the Baptist.

Now familiarise yourself with the chart: Developmental Chart of the Formation and Decline of a Nation.

THE NEW TESTAMENT

THE GOSPELS

The first 3 of the 4 gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke share a lot of material and due to this fact are called the synoptic gospels. Synoptic meaning “seen together” from syn (together) and optic (to see). All the gospels deal with the life and teaching of the Lord when on earth and together provide a strong sense of the desire for God to connect with humanity in a relationship that promotes what is genuinely good and true. All that has gone before from Genesis to Malachi finds its fulfilment in Jesus Christ, or as is so clearly stated in the fourth gospel by John, through the “Word made flesh”. Despite the debates of scholars regarding the primacy and order of the gospels the unfolding of the Lord’s life across the four gospels, when held in the sequence we have them, carries within it a wonderful unity when all the gospels are seen together as the means by which those who seek the Lord are brought to see that He is the Word.

A brief synopsis of the gospels is as follows…

Matthew

Presents Jesus as the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy through its use of extensive quotes from the Old Testament. The genealogy given of the Lord begins with Abraham tracing His lineage through Joseph from the royal line of David showing Him to be the Messiah.

Mark

Presents Jesus in action. It opens with the Lord’s baptism moving immediately into His public ministry. The style of this gospel is fast paced and it draws the reader in through it use of this sense of immediacy. 1/3 of the gospel deals with the last week of Jesus’ life.

Luke

Presents Jesus as the Son of Man come to seek and save the lost (19:10). Luke’s genealogy is a reversal of that found in Matthew in that it begins with the Lord moving back to Adam. Other variations and differences can also be found between the two accounts. Luke is the largest of the gospels in terms of its length.

John

Presents the Lord as the Word incarnate (the Word made flesh), it states that what is recorded of the Lord’s acts was done “that you might believe that He is The Son of God.”

Omission and Inclusions Unique to John’s Gospel

It’s worth noting the following omissions and inclusions unique to the gospel of John.

John’s Gospel omits a large amount of material found in the synoptic Gospels, including some surprisingly important episodes: the Lord’s temptation, His transfiguration, and the institution of the Lord’s supper are not mentioned by John. John mentions no examples of the Lord casting out demons, nor do we find in it reference to the sermon on the mount or the Lord’s prayer. It is also interesting to note that there are no narrative parables in John’s Gospel (most scholars do not regard John 15:1-8 [the Vine and the Branches] as a parable in the strict sense).

The gospel of John also includes a considerable amount of material not found in the synoptics. All the material in John 2—4, Jesus’ early Galilean ministry, is not found in the synoptics. Prior visits of Jesus to Jerusalem before the passion week are mentioned in John but not found in the synoptics. We also don’t find mention of the resurrection of Lazarus (John 11) in the synoptics nor do we find The extended Farewell Discourse (John 13—17) in the synoptic Gospels.

REVELATION

The book of Revelation or the Apocalypse is the final book of the Word found the Bible. It reminds us in its style and content of Daniel and Zechariah and clearly links us back to prophecy dealing with the great and terrible day of the Lord. Like the Old Testament prophetical books we enter the realm of the spirit with its graphic imagery of judgement and redemption. If the gospels depict the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy then Revelation is the fulfilment of the gospels in the sense that the saving work of the Lord demonstrated throughout the gospels reaches it climax and final outworking in human affairs in the book of Revelation. While the gospels build on the prophetic imagery of Isaiah’s suffering servant here in the book of Revelation the Lord is presented in power and great glory. In its incredibly rich symbolic imagery it depicts the power of the Word to bring down the old order and to “make all things new”.

5.2 The 9 Commandments

By David Noel Freedman, professor of History at UCSD who holds the Endowed Chair in Hebrew Biblical Studies. Noel’s contributions to the study of the Bible and Ancient Near East are innumerable. His special areas of research and expertise are Hebrew orthography, biblical poetry, and the editing, organization, and structure of the biblical corpus. At 79 years of age, Professor Freedman is still going strong, serving as editor of the critically- acclaimed Anchor Bible series and the new Eerdman’s Critical Commentary series. He is editor-in-chief of the Anchor Bible Dictionary and the Eerdman’s Dictionary of the Bible. His latest book, The Nine Commandments, was released last year.

The Primary History in the Hebrew Bible reveals a pattern of defiance of the Covenant with God that inexorably leads to the downfall of the nation of Israel, the destruction of the Temple, and the banishment of survivors from the Promised Land. Book by book, from Exodus to Kings, the violation of the first nine commandments are charted one by one. Because covetousness lies behind all the acts committed, each act implicitly breaks the Tenth Commandment as well. This hidden trail of sin betrays the hand of a master editor, who skillfully has woven into Israel’s history a message to a community in their Babylonian exile that their fate is not the result of God’s abandoning them, but a consequence of their abandonment of God.

The Primary History in the Hebrew Bible consists of nine books:

A. Torah (Pentateuch)

Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy

B. Former Prophets

Joshua
Judges
Samuel
Kings

In our Bibles today, Samuel and Kings are divided into two parts. In the official Hebrew canon, however, Samuel and Kings each originally consisted of a single long book, which was subsequently divided into two parts, presumably for ease in handling and for reference purposes. The same is true, incidentally, of Chronicles, which, however, is a later composition, not part of the Primary History and indeed appears at the very end of the Hebrew Bible.

In English and Greek Bibles, the Book of Ruth is attached to Judges, but that insertion reflects secondary and derivative arrangements; in the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Ruth appears near the end. So these nine books from Genesis through Kings form the Primary History of Israel as recounted in the Hebrew Bible. They constitute a single narrative sequence, tracing the story of Israel from its origins—and the origins of everything—to the end of the nation, the downfall of the southern kingdom of Judah in 587/586 B.C.E. and the captivity of the survivors in Babylon.

This major, central block of material, almost half of the entire Hebrew Bible, was compiled, and promulgated, in my opinion, sometime in the latter part of the Exile, not long after the story ends, say about 550 B.C.E. The last dated entry in the story is 561 B.C.E. when the king of Babylon released Judah’s King Jehoiachin from prison (2 Kings 25:27). The exiles began to return under the Persian monarch Cyrus in 539 B.C.E.

Clearly the Primary History is comprised of compositions of diverse authorship, and includes materials derived from a wide spectrum of sources, some cited, some alluded to, and others implied. Nevertheless this Primary History exhibits certain, I would say unmistakable, marks of unity. Over the years, I have devoted considerable research to this unity and what I have to say here is part of the results of this research.

Briefly my argument is that a single person (or a small editorial committee, but inevitably dominated by one person) was responsible for assembling the constituent elements of this great narrative and putting the account in the orderly arrangement in which we now have it. Furthermore, while scrupulously preserving the materials available and entrusted to his care, and observing the rules of the editorial task, he nevertheless was able to contribute to the final assemblage and to produce a unified work.

The work of the editor, or redactor, has always interested me, as I am an editor myself, and while my experience is doubtless quite different from an ancient editor’s, there must also be elements in common. The first obligation of an editor is to recognize his (or her) constraints or limitations. But without encroaching on the province of the author, the editor, especially if assembling or compiling a composite work including the contributions of several authors, has not only the right but the obligation to organize and arrange the material to bring out its continuity and coherence, to shape a unity that is inherent but not fully realized in the component parts. That is, in essence, what I suppose to have occurred with the Primary History when it was created by the compiler, presumably a Jerusalem priest in the Babylonian Exile.

The evidence for such unifying editorial activity is to be seen in the links between the parts of the Primary History that derive from different authors. The further apart the links are in the story, the more likely they are to reflect the work of the editor. Thus editorial touches that connect Genesis with Kings are especially indicative of the work of the redactor or compiler. Consider, for example, the apparent, if superficial, link between the first stories in Genesis (Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel), both of which deal with punishment for sin or crime, and the fate of the nation at the end of Kings.

In both the Adam and Eve story and the Cain and Abel story (Genesis 1-4), the outcome of disobedience is banishment or exile, precisely the fate of the presumed readers of those stories, who are themselves the subjects of the final chapters of Kings, the exiles in Babylon. Moreover, Babylon itself is the subject of the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11), the first narrative after the renewal of life on earth following the Flood.

The Tower of Babel story supplies the transition to the account of Abraham’s family and the beginning of the patriarchal narrative. So what began in Babylon more than a millennium before ends in the same place for his remote descendants: from Babylon to Babylon provides a neat summary or envelope for the whole of the Primary History. Only a compiler-editor would have achieved explicitly what was only implicit in the separately authored blocks of material.

Let us turn now to a more elaborate structural feature that pervades the whole Primary History, cuts across source and authorship lines and, if sustainable as the work of the compiler, may give us an entirely new perspective on how he managed this vast enterprise. It is generally agreed that the principal theme of the Primary History is to explain how it happened that Israel, the chosen people of God, who were rescued by him from bondage in Egypt and established in a new homeland, the land of Canaan, to be his nation, lost their independence and their land, and ended up in Exile far away. While the details of this tragedy, the decline and fall of the two nations, Israel and Judah, are given in political/military terms, if not socioeconomic ones, the overriding theme is that just as Israel was created by God, so it could be (and was) destroyed by him.

The reason for the latter act was that, from the beginning, the relationship between God and his people was understood to be morally conditioned and was explicated in terms of a binding agreement or covenant between them. Thus, while the deliverance of Israel and its establishment as a nation were the deeds of a gracious God, who acted on the basis of a prior commitment to the patriarchs, beginning with Abraham, nevertheless the continued existence of the nation, not to speak of its success, security and prosperity, would depend upon its behavior, specifically its adherence to a code of conduct agreeable and pleasing to God, and spelled out in the hundreds of rules and regulations, moral and cultic, civic and religious, social, political and economic, which permeates the pages of the Torah. These in turn are summed up in the Decalogue or Ten Commandments, with which every Israelite must have been familiar. Here, in a word (or Ten Words, as they are called in the Hebrew Bible), is the epitome of the covenant, a summary of the rules by which all Israel is to live under the sovereign rule of God.

There is both promise and threat in the terms of the covenant, as both Moses (in the speeches of Deuteronomy) and Joshua (in his speeches in Joshua 23-24) make clear: If Israel obeys the laws of the covenant, then all will be well and Israel will prosper under the aegis of its God; if, however, the people disobey the commandments and rebel against the authority of their God, then everything will be lost: prosperity, security, nationhood and land.

The story then is the story of how Israel failed to keep its side of the bargain, failed to observe the requirements of the compact with God, and was ultimately punished for this dereliction of duty. Most readers—scholars and lay people—will probably agree about all this. Clearly there are other themes and important features to the Primary History, but certainly the interpretation of Israel’s history and destiny in this major narrative properly emphasizes Israel’s covenant obligation and its persistent and repeated failure to live up to God’s central demands.

Now I want to try to put myself in the shoes of the redactor-compiler, or to sit at his desk, and ask how I can sharpen the focus, highlight the drama of this decline and fall of the nation(s), to bring home to the survivors the necessary, if onerous, lesson of the past, so as to strengthen their resolve in their present affliction and prepare them for something better in the future, a future that will hold out a very similar combination of threat and promise.

The first thing I would do would be to make a special point of the Decalogue as the core and center of the covenant. The simplest way to do this would be by repetition. The Decalogue is found in both Exodus 20:1-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-12. Instead of combining the two or conflating them, the compiler keeps them separate. So the Decalogue appears twice in the story, near the beginning of Israel’s forty-year march from Egypt to Canaan and just before the end of the journey, as Israel is about to enter Canaan.

Moreover, the repetition of the Decalogue is found at a strategic point in the literary structure. The Book of Deuteronomy is at the center, the fifth book of the nine books in the sequence, and thus serves as the pivot or apex of the entire work. That this is not just a numerical accident or coincidence is shown by the contents of Deuteronomy: Moses, the central figure of the Primary History, dominates the whole book of Deuteronomy, which consists of a series of addresses by Israel’s greatest leader toward the end of his life: his valedictory, which has special authority and power.

In these sermons, Moses not only reviews the history of his people (thereby providing legitimate reason to repeat the Ten Commandments) but also, as a true prophet, forecasts what is going to happen to them in the future, depending upon their behavior. So the Decalogue is not only the beginning of the national history but it is also at the center of the narrative. Further, the Decalogue symbolizes and summarizes the covenant, the obligations of which fall on every Israelite, first as an individual personally responsible for obedience to the commandments, but also as a member of the community that is answerable to God as a whole for the behavior of its individual members.

We can outline the sequence of events as follows: Israel was delivered from bondage to Egypt and was brought to the sacred mountain, Sinai. There the Decalogue was given as a précis of the terms of the terms of the covenant. The people agree to its terms, and the covenant is solemnly ratified by sacrifices and a common meal at the mountain (Exodus 24). The rest of the story is told in the succeeding books and is an account of repeated violations of the covenant, interrupted by occasional reversals and reforms, but culminating in the renunciation of Israel by its maker and founder, and the destruction of the nation: first the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C.E. and then the southern kingdom of Judah in 587/586 B.C.E. The end is captivity in Babylon.

How can the final editor of this mighty history make the case more precise, more dramatic and more suspenseful, and at the same time provide a way through the complex details of a 600-year history from beginning to end? I believe what he did was this: Using the Decalogue as his point of departure, he portrays Israel as violating each one of the commandments directly and explicitly. Further, these commandments are violated in order, one by one. Given the fact that he has a group of books (i.e., scrolls) to deal with, he assigns, in general, one commandment and one violation to each book.

Wherever possible, the seriousness of the episode is stressed in such a way as to show how the violation (usually by an individual) nevertheless involves or implicates the whole nation, so that the survival of the nation itself is put in jeopardy. Only the extraordinary intervention of a leader or a precipitate change of direction on the part of the people provides reason to spare them. In each instance, God finally relents and the relationship is patched up. But the threat and warning remain and are strengthened, so that each succeeding violation brings Israel (and Judah) ever closer to destruction. At the end of the string, all of the commandments will have been violated and God’s patience will have run out. Let us now see if—and how—this happens.

The Ten Commandments, in abbreviated form, are listed below:

Apostasy
Idolatry
Blasphemy
Sabbath observance
Parental respect
Murder
Adultery
Stealing
False Testimony
Coveting

Because the editor is working with existing literary works and not just a collection of bits and pieces, he is naturally limited in the degree and extent to which he can arrange or rearrange, organize and reorganize, or manipulate his material. Hence we can expect certain deviations and adjustments as we go along. For example, the fact that the story of covenant-making and covenant-breaking properly begins with the Book of Exodus presents him with something of a problem. Since the Ten Commandments are not yet set forth in Genesis, he cannot make Israel reprehensible for violating them in that book. He therefore must double up the commandments violated in the Book of Exodus.

Apostasy and Idolatry

Immediately after the Ten Commandments are given on Mount Sinai and the Israelites agree to them, Moses goes up to the mountain to receive instructions for building the Tabernacle. During his absence, the well-known incident of the golden calf occurs (Exodus 32). The episode is described in such a way as to make it clear that the Israelites have violated the first as well as the second commandment: “You shall have no other gods beside me” (Exodus 20:3) and “You shall not make for yourself a graven image” (Exodus 20:4).

The Israelites not only make the golden calf (a graven image), they speak of it as symbolizing one or more gods (apostasy): “And they said, ‘These are thy gods, O Israel, who brought thee up from the land of Egypt’”(Exodus 32:4). Thus, we have not only accounted for the first two commandments, but also for the first two books of the Primary History.

When we probe a bit deeper into this episode we find another aspect of it that will be repeated book after book, commandment after commandment: While some Israelites are guilty of violating the covenant in connection with the golden calf, others (the Levites) are not, but the existence of the community is threatened. God tells Moses that he will wipe out Israel and create a new people from Moses’ progeny (Exodus 32:10). It is only after Moses intercedes and there is a partial slaughter of the guilty apostates that God relents and the community is allowed to live and carry on its activity (Exodus 32:11-14, cf. vv. 31-35).

This episode becomes the paradigm for the whole subsequent history of Israel. A violation of any of the commandments is a violation of all of them, indeed of the whole covenant, but the primary category is always expressed in terms of apostasy and idolatry, which in this sense are a digest or summary of the Decalogue just as the Decalogue itself is a digest of the full range of rules and regulations of the covenant.

Blasphemy

The third book is Leviticus and the third commandment prohibits the misuse of the name of God, that is, blasphemy: “You shall not invoke the name of Yahweh your God for falsehood” (Exodus 20:7). There is just such a story in Leviticus. An unnamed man—the son of an Israelite woman and an Egyptian man—“went out among the people of Israel…and quarreled” (Leviticus 24:10). Then he “cursed the name and committed blasphemy” (Leviticus 24:11). He is brought before Moses and placed in custody until Yahweh’s decision is made known. Yahweh then instructs Moses to bring the blasphemer outside the camp where all those who heard the blasphemy are to lay their hands upon his head, and the whole assembly is to stone him (Leviticus 24:12-14).

Yahweh tells Moses to tell the people, “Any man, if he curses the name of Yahweh shall surely be put to death, and the whole congregation will stone him—the alien resident as well as the native born—when he curses the name he shall be put to death” (Leviticus 24:15-16). Among the hundreds of laws and regulations imposed on Israel by the covenant, the Ten Commandments stand out in not having specific penalty attached to them. These are not casuistic laws, stated in terms of cause and effect, crime and punishment, but apodictic laws, flat regulations, obedience to which is simply and unqualifiedly demanded.

In the case of the blasphemy we have just recounted in Leviticus, the guilty party is detained until the matter of punishment has been resolved. The Israelites recognize that there has been a serious breach of the covenant, but neither they nor Moses know how to deal with the matter. When word is received from Yahweh, it is necessary for the whole community, including those who witnessed the crime, to participate in the act of judgment. In that way, the community is cleared of complicity with the guilty person, and escapes the consequences of this fatal breach of the covenant.

While the particular occurrence may seem trivial in comparison with the making of the golden calf, the special treatment accorded this passing event shows that the writer (or editor) had in mind the highest level of covenant obligation—the Decalogue.

Sabbath Observance

The fourth book in the Primary History is Numbers and the fourth commandment is Sabbath observance: “Rememberthe Sabbath Day to keep it holy. For six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of Yahweh your God. You shall do no work at all, neither you nor your son nor your daughter, your male or female servant, nor your cattle, nor the alien who is within your gates” (Exodus 20:8-10).

In Numbers we find a story about a man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath, thus violating the prohibition against doing any work on that day: “While the Israelites were in the wilderness, they found him gathering wood on the Sabbath Day. So those who found him gathering wood brought him to Moses and to Aaron and to the whole assembly. They detained him in the guard house, because it had not been explained what should be done to him.

Then Yahweh said to Moses: ‘The man shall surely be put to death. The whole assembly shall stone him with stones, outside the camp.’ So the whole assembly brought him outside the camp and they stoned him with stones and he died, as Yahweh had commanded Moses” (Numbers 15:32-36).

In Deuteronomy 5:12, the word is “observe.” This story is very much like the one in Leviticus concerning blasphemy. In both cases, a violation of one of the Ten Commandments is recorded and the man responsible is arrested pending sentence and the imposition of appropriate punishment. In both cases the determination of the penalty (death by stoning by the whole assembly) is made by Yahweh through direct communication with Moses. The action by God is taken to supplement the Decalogue itself, which only lists the injunctions but does not specify the punishment. And the severity of the penalty serves to emphasize the centrality and essentiality of these terms of the covenant. Anything less than the removal of the offender would implicate the whole community in the offense and ultimately lead to abrogation of the compact and the dissolution of the nation.

Parental Respect

The fifth book is Deuteronomy and the fifth commandment reads as follows: “Honor your father and mother, so that your days may be prolonged on the land that Yahweh your God is going to give you” (Exodus 20:12). Once again, there is an account of a violation of a particular commandment. This time, however, it is couched in the hypothetical terminology of case law: prescribing the punishment for a specified crime. In other words, the formulation in Deuteronomy is a stage beyond Leviticus and Numbers.

In the earlier books, we are given the incident or episode that provided the basis or precedent on which the punishment was fixed. Here we have a more general formulation, presumably derived from a particular incident, now lost, or no longer included in the biblical tradition. However, like the earlier episodes, the story supplements the Decalogue in that it specifies the penalty for violation of the commandment. Here is the statement of it:

“If a man has a son, who is contumacious and rebellious [i.e., stubbornly rebellious] and will not obey the orders of his father or his mother; and if they chastise [discipline] him and he persists in his disobedience, then his father and his mother shall lay hold of him and bring him forth to the elders of his city and to the gate of his place. And they [the parents] shall say to the elders of his city: ‘This son of ours is contumacious and rebellious, and he will not obey our orders; he is [also] an idler and a sot.’ Then all the men of his city shall stone him with stones until he is dead. So shall you destroy the evil from your midst. And as for all Israel, let them pay heed and show reverence” (Deuteronomy 21:18-21).

Stealing

The order of commandments six, seven, and eight varies among the sources. In an abbreviated version of the Decalogue in Jeremiah’s well-known Sermon in the Temple Courtyard (Jeremiah 7:9), these three commandments follow the same order in which they are dealt with in the next three books of the Bible (stealing, murder, adultery) rather than the order in which they appear in Exodus and Deuteronomy (murder, adultery, stealing).

In the Book of Joshua, the major crime, or transgression of covenant, is a case of theft, a violation of the eighth commandment in the conventional ordering of the Hebrew Bible but corresponding to the order of the list given in Jeremiah. The story in Joshua is told in great detail: The Israelites have destroyed Jericho but have themselves been defeated at the next site on their march, Ai. Yahweh then announces the reason for the defeat: Someone has “stolen” some of the booty from Jericho that had been dedicated to Yahweh.

The man is identified by lot: Achan ben-Carmi of the tribe of Judah. At the very outset of the story, the focus is on this essential crime: “The Israelites committed a grave offense regarding the dedicated booty. Achan, the son of Carmi, the son of Zabdi, the son of Zerach of the tribe of Judah took some of the sacred booty, and the wrath of Yahweh was kindled against the Israelites” (Joshua 7:1). As a result, the Israelites are defeated at Ai, and this setback jeopardizes their foothold in the land of promise and threatens their whole settlement. The punishment is even more severe and extensive than in the previous cases. Achan and his family are executed by stoning, with the whole community participating.

The story shows how the crime of theft was construed as a capital offense on a par with the other commandments, and punishable in the same manner (by community stoning). In most cases, theft would not be considered a capital offense and the wrongdoer would be punished by a fine, the imposition of damages (requiring payment of double the amount or a larger multiple) or to make restitution in some other suitable fashion.

Such cases would hardly serve the stipulated purpose here, but the extraordinary case of Achan does so admirably and thus fits the scheme we have outlined. As in the other cases, here, too, God takes a direct hand in exposing the crime and the criminal, and in imposing the punishment. The editor/compiler has adapted the commandment and structured the story in order to fit the overall pattern and so emphasizes the importance of the commandments and the threat to the life of the community, as well as the divine provision for dealing with violations, and the nation=s narrow escape from the consequences of divine wrath.

Murder

The seventh book, Judges, involves murder, following the order in Jeremiah 7:9. Judges includes many instances in which someone is killed, but most do not qualify for our purposes. Not only are they not considered violations of the commandment against murder, they are regarded as righteous deeds for the sake of the community. The story we have in mind comes at the very end of the book (Judges 19-21).

It is the story of an unnamed woman, identified only as a Levite’s concubine. The men of Gibeah in Benjamin take her by force in the night and mass rape her (Judges 19). She crawls back to the house where her master is staying and falls dead. The woman is described in the story as “the murdered woman” (Judges 20:4). The Hebrew root is the same as the root of the word for murder in the Decalogue.

The crime is described by the author/editor as the worst in the history of the commonwealth: “Not has there happened, nor has there been seen anything like this since the day that the Israelites went up from the land of Egypt until this day” (Judges 19:30).

Adultery

We have now reached the eighth book, the Book of Samuel, which will deal with adultery. While adultery is often mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, only one example of this rime is spelled out in detail with names of persons and places and specific occasions. This is the well-known case of King David, who took Bathsheba the wife of Uriah the Hittite and subsequently arranged for Uriah to be killed in battle to conceal the original crime. The climax of the story occurs when the prophet Nathan confronts the guilty king who ultimately repents (2 Samuel 11-12).

For the author/editor of Samuel, David’s adultery with Bathsheba was a turning point not only in David’s reign, but in the history of the kingdom. All the subsequent trials and ills of the later years, the rebellions and machinations, are described as stemming from that violation by the king, who compounded adultery with murder, forfeited the respect and loyalty of his troops and thus distanced himself from Yahweh, the covenant and the privileged status he had enjoyed as the anointed of Yahweh. The peril for the country is amply documented, as well as the act of divine remission and compassion. Once again, the kingdom escapes its fate, and the dynasty is preserved for the sake of the nation.

False Testimony

The last book in the Primary History is Kings and it invokes the ninth commandment. Once again, royalty is involved, and the action produces widespread and very serious consequences for the kingdom. The commandment in this case deals with false testimony in a legal proceeding, what we would call perjury. (In our courts, witnesses testify under oath or solemn affirmation, which is required for perjury, whereas in ancient Israel oaths were invoked only under special conditions and only on the defendant.) The story in Kings involves Ahab, king of Israel, his Phoenician wife Jezebel, and a man named Naboth. When Naboth refuses Ahab’s offer to purchase the former’s vineyard, Jezebel arranges to have false charges brought against Naboth, accusing him of cursing both God and king. As punishment, Naboth is stoned to death and Ahab takes possession of Naboth’s vineyard (1 Kings 21).

Here is a clear violation of the ninth commandment (“You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor [fellow-citizen]” [Exodus 20:16]). Once again, an angry prophet, in this case Elijah, denounces the guilty party and decrees dire punishment (“Have you killed and also taken possession?…In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick your own blood” [1 Kings 21:19]). Once again a king is faced with the undeniable facts, is remorseful and repentant. And again God is merciful and postpones the evil day of judgment (1 Kings 21:27-29).

The final historical settling of accounts, however, is not long in coming. Before the Book of Kings is concluded, both Israel and Judah will have met violent ends as nations, their armies defeated, their countries conquered, their capital cities destroyed, and their leading citizens taken into captivity in faraway lands. We have come to the end of our string as well: nine books, nine commandments. But what of the tenth: “You shall not covet”? belonged to another.

Thus, with a modicum of ingenuity and adjustment we can correlate the Decalogue and the Primary History and make a dramatically effective correspondence between commandments and books, leading to a climax or culmination in the final collapse of the two kingdoms, the end of national history, and the Babylonian Captivity. How could such a correlation have come about in view of the heterogeneous character of the Primary History and its clearly multiple authorship? Perhaps it is sheer coincidence (buttressed by the ingenuity of a modern analyst looking for such correlations).

Or did a creative redactor consciously set out to construct a history of his people on the framework or scaffolding of the Decalogue, deliberately preserving an overall unity of the heterogeneous elements by the strategic highlighting of particular themes and devices to bring out the central story, which tells of the covenant between God and Israel, the ultimate consequences of the relationship, and the judgment upon and verdict against the nation-states?

The fact that this particular device or pattern has never been observed before—at least to my knowledge—should caution against supposing that it was the major or central objective of the redactor. It was simply another, if dramatic, way of showing and stressing the central theme of the history of Israel, and illustrating or reflecting the unity of the account comprising the nine books of the Primary History.

5.3 Assignment 5

PENTATEUCH

Genesis - Create a list of the stories that make up the first 11 Chapters of Genesis and reference where they are found.
Chapter 12 is where actual historical events form the basis of content for the Word. List the leading characters (patriarchs) around whose lives the rest of the book of Genesis (Chpts. 12-50) revolves?
Create a family tree tracing the lineage of Joseph’s sons Ephaim and Manasseh from Abraham.
Exodus - the first part of this book deals with the deliverance of the sons of Israel from Egypt - what other topic is a major portion of the book devoted to?

HISTORICAL BOOKS OR FORMER PROPHETS

Under “Historical Books” and against “Judges” is the word “wavering” (see chart: Developmental Chart of the Formation and Decline of a Nation). Find and identify 5 such instances of ‘wavering’ in the Book of Judges.
Turn to and read,

I Kings 16: verses 29 to 34
1 Kings 18
1 Kings 19
1 Kings 21

And summarize the prophet Elijah’s relationship with the then king of Israel (Samaria), Ahab, and his queen, Jezebel.

Read and reflect on 1 Kings 18, verses 21, and say in what way this impacts on/relates to your own life, attitudes and consciousness.

THE LATTER PROPHETS

THE MAJOR PROPHETS

Ezekiel contains a series of parables listed below. Read through these and choose the one you are most drawn to and spend some time meditating upon it before answering the questions below…

The Wood and the Vine (Ez 15:1-8)
The Foundling (Ez 16)
The Eagles and the Cedar (Ez 17)
The Fiery Furnace (Ez 22:17-22)
The Two Harlots (Ez 23)
The Cooking Pot (Ez 24:1-14)
The Shipwreck (Ez 27)
The Irresponsible Shepherds (Ez 34)
The Valley of Dry Bones (Ez 37)
How does the theme of the parable relate to the historical situation Ezekiel is addressing?
Write out what you see as the main theme of the parable as a general principle/statement so that it can be applied to anybody in any time and place.
What points of New Church doctrine can you relate to the theme of the parable you have chosen?
Drawing on what you studied in the course Introduction to Correspondences list the main symbols and what their correspondences might be.
Now in a paragraph summarise your findings showing how the lessons in the parable apply to living a spiritual life.

MINOR PROPHETS

Under “Minor Prophets” and against “Haggai” is the word “procrastination” (see chart: Developmental Chart of the Formation and Decline of a Nation). Read the prophecy all the way through and say in a couple of paragraphs what that procrastination was all about. What parallels from your own life connect with what this prophecy deals with?

THE GOSPELS

Why have the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke called the synoptic gospels?
For this exercise you will need to open and print the pdf attachment Synoptic Gospel Exercise. Do an analysis of the text of Matthew 9: verses 9 to 13; Mark 2: verses 13 to 17; and Luke 5: verses 27 – 32. While the stories are very similar there are also subtle differences. For now just identify and list the differences below and state in general what the reason for differences between this and other similar stories in the gospel accounts might be.
John’s Gospel stands apart from the first 3. It is deeper and more profound. It has a different focus. It is not so much into giving details of the Lord’s activities as it is into what those activities highlight. For instance, in John’s Gospel is the story of the feeding of the 5000, which is also found in each of the synoptic gospels; yet in John the story as such is used as the lead in to quite profound teaching by the Lord about himself as being the Bread of Life which is not found in the synoptic accounts.
Read each of the accounts from your own Bible; Note below your own sense of what John offers in contrast to the synoptic accounts. See Matt 14:13-21; Mk 6:32-44; Lk 9:10b-17 & Jn 6 (whole chapter).
Now read:-

John Chapter 1: verses 1
John Chapter 4: verses 1 to 26
John Chapter 9: verses 1 to 39

Look for statements in each about Jesus’ identity and divinity and say what these are.

REVELATION

In this exercise you are asked to read a few passages of Scripture in your own Bible from the books of Revelation, Daniel and Zechariah.

Dan 7 & Rev 13
Zec 4 & Rev 11

Just note the connections and similarities found in these references in terms of imagery and style.

Please ensure you read the relevant Biblical references and are familiar with them prior to reading Chapter 2 from A Book About Us

Read Dole Chapter 2Framing the Story pp 9-18

Questions for Reflection

Dole suggests a basic tripartite symmetry to the structure of the Biblical Text – what is this and what are its main features?
What is the basic sequence does Dole draw from the Gospel of Matthew as reflective of the broad narrative of the Biblical text?
Comment on the connections and illustrations you can draw between this sequence and your own experience of life?

Touching On The Spiritual Sense

ARCANA COELESTIA

From Genesis 1 down to this point (Gen Chapt 12), or rather, down to Eber, the narratives have not consisted of true history but of made-up history, which in the internal sense meant things that are celestial and spiritual. In this and subsequent chapters however they are not made-up but true historical narratives, which in the internal sense in like manner mean things that are celestial and spiritual. This may become clear to anyone simply from the consideration that it is the Word of the Lord.
In these chapters which contain true historical narratives every single word and statement means in the internal sense something altogether different from what is meant in the sense of the letter. Nevertheless the historical details themselves are representative. ‘Abram’, who is dealt with first, in general represents the Lord, and specifically the celestial man. ‘Isaac’, who is dealt with after that, likewise in general represents the Lord, and specifically the spiritual man; and Jacob’ too in general represents the Lord, and specifically the natural man. Thus they represent things which are the Lord’s, things which belong to His kingdom, and those which belong to the Church.
…the internal sense is such that every single thing has to be understood apart from the letter, abstractedly - as though the letter did not exist; for within the internal sense reside the soul and life of the Word, which are not open to view unless the sense of the letter so to speak vanishes. This is how angels are led by the Lord to perceive the Word when it is being read by man.
What is your response to the idea that the first 11 Chapters of Genesis are “made up” to appear as a history?
If they are not historically true, where is their truth to be found?
What is the main symbol or motif that links the two books of Genesis and Revelation?
What other imagery does Dole draw upon to draw connections between the prologue and the epilogue of the Biblical narrative?
What do you understand by the terms “the innocence of ignorance” and “the innocence of wisdom” and in what way does Dole say that understanding the relationship of these two concepts offer support for connecting our experience of life with the Biblical text?
Comment on the journey the text takes from a garden to a city and how this reflects the journey involved in our own spiritual development.

6 The Word in Human Form

6.1 Assignment 6

Take some time to study the chart, The Books of the Word Taken as a Whole.As you will have seen this chart is similar to that found in the previous session dealing with the development and decline of Judah and Israel with the additional inclusion of those books of the Word found in the New Testament.

As you look at this chart in what way does it suggest that the structure of the Word is in the human form?
What other thoughts are stimulated in you as you contemplate this chart?
Is this way of bringing a sense of structure to the Word something you find helpful – give reasons for your answer?

THE TRIBES, THEIR LANDS AND THE LIFE OF THE LORD

Open the Maps, Tribal Areas (Session 5a) and Divided Kingdom.You may also find it useful to use the Online Bible Atlas (Link Provided) or an Atlas of your own.

Under each tribal name record its meaning (use the Online Bible Dictionary)
Summarise its correspondence (use the link to the Dictionary of Correspondences)
Draw onto the Tribal Areas Map the boundaries of the Divided Kingdom
Draw onto the Tribal Areas Map the boundaries that existed in New Testament times
Record on the Tribal Areas Map the following New Testament places:- Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Cana, Capernaum, Gergesa, Nazereth, Sychar.

Research their names to find their meaning, find out about their correspondence, and say what significant event(s) are associated with them from the life and ministry of the Lord.
Find and read through one event in the Lord’s life associated with the places listed above in the gospels. List the spiritual connections/thoughts/insights/applications that open up for you as you read through this event?
Looking at your map give attention to what Old Testament tribal area and/or region is associated with the gospel event. What other connections open up for as you take into account the meanings of the names, areas and the correspondences you worked with earlier that are specifically associated with the area in which the gospel event takes place?
Create a diagram of Dole’s model based on the sequential variations of the covenant(s) given by the Lord from Genesis through to the gospels. This should include:-

The biblical reference.
The location where the covenant was given.
Who’s involved.
A summary of the key feature(s) of the covenant.
The stages of human life that relate to the period concerned.
The spiritual stage of life to which the covenant applies.
The books of the Word that each covenant extends through.

Read through the reflective questions at the end of Chapter 3.Select one and respond to it by writing a 500 word essay.

7. Mining The Word

7.1 Introduction

The Word of the Lord is in the human form, having an internal and external part to it making up its soul and body. The external part being found in the letter serves as a body that offers support to its internal part or spirit which is its spiritual sense. In the Arcana Coelestia #1408 this is beautifully stated where it says:

Its bodily parts are the things that constitute the sense of the letter, and when the mind is fixed on these the internal things are not seen at all. But once the bodily parts so to speak have died, the internal for the first time are brought to view. All the same, the things constituting the sense of the letter are like the things present with man in his body, namely the facts belonging to the memory which come in through the senses and which are general vessels containing interior or internal things. From this one may recognize that the vessels are one thing and the essential elements within the vessels another. The vessels are natural, and the essential elements within the vessels are spiritual and celestial. In the same way the historical narratives of the Word, as with each individual expression in the Word, are general, natural, indeed material vessels that have spiritual and celestial things within them. These things never come into sight except through the internal sense.

7.2 Reading

Early Church Father’s Testimony Concerning the Inner Sense of Scripture

A Book About Us: Chapter 4, pages 35-42

The Word of the Lord is multi-layered in its meaning. In other words it has levels of meaning within. This is not new as is clear from the Heavenly Doctrines where we find a number of references to the understanding of correspondences that existed within the Ancient Church. What may surprise you is that knowledge of the Word having an internal sense was known in the early Christian Church as can be seen from the following set of quotations from the early church fathers… Origen (185-250)

I, who believe the words of my Lord Jesus Christ, hold that there is not one jot, nor one tittle of the law and the prophets, which has not its mysteries, and that not one of these can pass away until all be fulfilled. In Exod. cap. i

They who find fault with the allegorical interpretation exposition of the Scripture, and maintain that it has no other sense than that which the text shows, take away the key of knowledge. In Matt. cap. xxiii

Of the Mosaic Law he states:-

…unless they be all of them taken in another sense than the literal, when they are recited in the church, as we have frequently declared, they are a greater stumbling block, and tend more to subversion of the Christian religion, than to its advancement and edification… In Lev. cap. vii

…the laws of the sacrifices, which are given in this book of the Law (Leviticus) are to be fulfilled according to their spiritual meaning; for no man, having a right or sound reason, can admit that rams, and goats, and calves are fit offerings for an immortal and incorporeal God. In Lev. cap. iii

…they truly make the Law an Old Testament, who desire to understand it after a carnal manner; but to us, who understand and expound it spiritually, and its evangelical sense, it is always New. In Num. cap. xvi

Of the Prophets

…the Prophets veiled their secret and sublime truths from vulgar comprehension under obscure figures, enigmas, allegories, proverbs, and parables; Against Celsus bk. viii

…true Christianity consists in the interpretation and unfolding of prophetical enigmas, and of the parables given in the prophets, and of the other figures which are contain in the Scriptures, and of the facts therein recorded. Against Celsus bk. viii

…the names of the kings (of Judah and Israel) are not given historically in the Divine Scripture, but for spiritual causes and things. The do not so much relate to kings, as to vices which bear rule in man. In Num cap. xxxi

Of the Gospels…

…there is an interior sense to the events which are recorded in the Evangelists; In Matt. cap xiv …whatsoever Jesus did in the flesh was, as to every particular, a similitude and type of what he will do hereafter; In Esaiam cap vi 7 …the true miracles of Christ, and the healing of the sick, are of a spiritual kind. In Matt. cap xxv

The works which Jesus then did were the symbols of those things which He by His power is always doing. In Matt. cap xv Augustine (354-430) …the five books of Moses preach nothing else but Christ, as He Himself says, “If ye believe in Moses, believe also in Me, for He wrote of Me.” “In quæst. 64” Diversæ Quæst

…they who take the writings of Moses according to the literal sense, do not desire to be learned in the kingdom of heaven, neither do they pass over to Christ, that He might remove the veil (which in on their hearts.) In Contra Faust., lib xii,cap vi

Ignatius (105-115)

…the law of God is spiritual, and they have not the true Law, who do not take it spiritually. In Matt cap xiv

Jerome (340 – 420)

…. they who follow the obscurity of the letter are wise only in earthly things. I

Christ is the true Stone which is found in the letter of the law, but which is rejected by those who rest in the letter. In Iocum Evang. Johannis

…whatsoever is promised to the Israelites carnally, we show will, at one time or another, be fulfilled in us spiritually. In Præf., lib. iv., “In Jeremiam.” …whatever denunciations are in the history uttered against Jerusalem, relate to the church.

Of Mount Zion he says…it is a foolish thing to call an irrational and insensible mountain holy, or to believe it to be so. In Jerem., cap xxxi

Eucherius (d c. 449)

“I will open My mouth in parables,” …admonishes us that the Holy Scripture of the Old as well as the New Testament is to be interpreted in an allegorical sense

7.3 References

#$### References in the Bible Indicating a Spiritual Sense Within the Letter

See also… Lk 24:44-45; Jn 3:14; Jn 5:46; Jn 6:32;

I have also spoken by the prophets, and I have multiplied visions; and by the hand of the prophets use parables. (Hos 12:10).

Open my eyes and I will see wonderful things from Your Law. (Psa 119:18).

I will open my mouth in a parable; I will pour forth dark sayings of old, (Psa 78:2).

Jesus spoke all these things in parables to the crowds, and He did not speak to them without a parable, so that was fulfilled that spoken through the prophet, saying: “I will open My mouth in parables; I will speak out things hidden from the foundation of the world.” Psa. 78:2 (Mat 13:34-35)

And we have such confidence through Christ toward God; not that we are sufficient of ourselves to reason out anything as being out of ourselves, but our sufficiency is of God, who also made us able ministers of a new covenant, not of letter, but of Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit makes alive. But if the ministry of death having been engraved in letters in stone was with glory, so as that the sons of Israel could not gaze into “the face of Moses” because of the glory of his face, which was to cease, Ex. 34:34 how much rather the ministry of the Spirit will be in glory! For if the ministry of condemnation was glory, much rather the ministry of righteousness abounds in glory. For even that which has been made glorious has not been made glorious in this respect, because of the surpassing glory. For if the thing done away was through glory, much rather the thing remaining is in glory.

Then having such hope, we use much boldness. And not as “Moses, who put a veil over his face,” for the sons of Israel not to gaze at the end of the thing being done away. Ex. 34:35 But their thoughts were hardened, for until the present time the same veil remains on the reading of the Old Covenant, not being unveiled, that it is being done away in Christ. But until today, when Moses is being read, a veil lies on their heart. But whenever it turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Ex. 34:34 And the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. But we all with our face having been unveiled, having beheld the glory of the Lord in a mirror, are being changed into the same image from glory to glory, as from the Spirit of the Lord. (2Co 3:4-18)

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and everything that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ…(2 Co 10:4-5)

For he is not a Jew that is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that outwardly in flesh; but he is a Jew that is one inwardly, and circumcision is of heart, in spirit, not in letter; of whom the praise is not from men, but from God. (Rom 2:28-29)

For we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones. (Eph 5:30)

“For this, a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh.” Gen. 2:24 The mystery is great, but I speak as to Christ and as to the church. (Eph 5:31-32)

Because even Christ once suffered concerning sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God; indeed being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit; in which also, going in to the spirits in prison, He then proclaimed to disobeying ones, when once the long-suffering of God waited in the days of Noah, an ark having been prepared, into which a few, that is, eight souls, were saved through water. Which antitype now also saves us, baptism (not a putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God through the resurrection of Jesus Christ; (1Pe 3:18-21)

For it has been written, Abraham had two sons, one out of the slave woman and one out of the free woman. But, indeed, he of the slave woman has been born according to flesh, and he out of the free woman through the promise, which things are being allegorized, for these are two covenants, one, indeed, from Mount Sinai bringing forth to slavery (which is Hagar, for Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, and she slaves with her children), but the Jerusalem from above is free, who is the mother of us all; for it has been written,

“Be glad, barren one not bearing; break forth and shout, the one not travailing; for more are the children of the desolate rather than she having the husband.” Isa. 54:1 But, brothers, we are children of promise according to Isaac. But then, even as he born according to flesh persecuted the one according to Spirit, so it is also now. But what says the Scripture? “Cast out the slave woman and her son, for in no way shall the son of the slave woman inherit with the son of the free woman.” Gen. 21:10 Then, brothers, we are not children of a slave woman but of the free woman. (Gal 4:22-31)

And I do not want you to be ignorant, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the Sea. And all were baptized to Moses in the cloud, and in the Sea, and all ate the same spiritual food. And all drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank of the spiritual rock following, and that Rock was Christ. Yet God was not pleased with most of them, “for they were scattered in the deserted place.” Num. 14:16 But these things became examples for us, so that we may not be lusters after evil, even as those indeed lusted. (1Co 10:1-6)

For indeed because of the time you are due to be teachers, yet you need to have someone to teach you again the rudiments of the beginning of the Words of God, and you came to be having need of milk, and not of solid food; for everyone partaking of milk is without experience in the Word of Righteousness, for he is an infant. But solid food is for those full grown, having exercised the faculties through habit, for distinction of both good and bad. (Heb 5:12-14)

For the Word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account. (Heb 4:12-13)

For the Law had a shadow of the coming good things, not the image itself of those things. Appearing year by year with the same sacrifices, which they offer continually, they never are able to perfect the ones drawing near. (Heb 10:1)

7.4 Assignment 7

Parables are earthly stories having another meaning, somewhat hidden, but often not very far beneath the surface. For the most concentrated series of parables in all of the Gospels turn to the 13th Chapter of Matthew’s Gospel and read it through.

a. How many parables are there in this Chapter?

b. How many of these did Jesus go further and show they have another, deeper, meaning?

Another series of memorable parables is in the 15th Chapter of Luke’s Gospel. Read the Chapter through.

a. Now say what you have taken, personally, from the theme focused on in each of these parables.

Read and reflect on Psalm 121. a. What is your sense of the meaning of the hills (verse 1)?

b. How do you understand the 2nd part of verse 5, “The Lord is your shade at your right hand.”?

c. And then, in verse 6, what might the “sun” here and “the moon” mean, in a non- physical, spiritual (in relation to us as spiritual, regenerating people) way?

Now turn to Psalm 23

a. What – spiritually – might “the green pastures be” (verse 2)

b. and the “still waters” (same verse)

c. And, in a spiritual, inner, sense, not in a physical, natural, sense, have you ever felt yourself to be in “the valley of the shadow of death?” (Think: what is ‘death’, spiritually?) Identify and describe such an occasion.

Read “Bible References Pointing to an Internal Sense?”

a. Can you think of any other things said in Scripture indicating a spiritual sense? What about in Matthew Chapter 13, which you have just read?

b. Are there passages in Scripture which, for you, cry out to be explained in a non-literal way? What about Matthew 5:29-30? Are there others? If so what are they?

Read the document called “Early Church Fathers” and respond to the following…

a) What was your reaction as you read through this material?

b) Did the fact that these leading characters in the early Christian church so strongly encouraged a non-literal understanding of Scripture so early on surprise you or not - why?

c) Say which of the quotes you where most taken by and why?

8. Digging Deeper

TODO: Link to booklet Minor Prophets

8.1 Guide

A slow unhurried reading of Obadiah is essential. Read each chapter before you look at the related section of the Study guide. Read the chapter again while you are using the study guide, and read it a third time when you are finished. This process will give you a powerful sense of the series of events and meanings in each chapter. It is important to feel comfortable with all the names, places, and announcements in Obadiah’s prophecy. When possible, some historical information will be included in the study guide to increase reading comprehension and enhance application.
Our reading of the one chapter of Obadiah will begin with quotes from a work of the Writings called Summary Exposition of the Prophets and Psalms (hereafter referred to as P&P). This work has a verse-by-verse overview of Obadiah that summarizes the internal sense. Our research will help move us from this general summary to the particulars of the internal sense.
Another important reference tool is Searle’s General Index to Swedenborg’s Scripture Quotations. This reference shows where in the Writings a verse(s) of the Word is either explained specifically or used to illustrate a doctrinal point that we can use in our study. There is also another use of this work. As we study, each researcher will be led by the Lord’s Providence in myriad of ways and according to specific needs or states. Knowing how to use this book will help us look up related passages that will add to our knowledge of the three-fold Word.
You will soon discover that not every verse, word, name, etc. is directly quoted and explained in the Writings, but there are often other references to the same name, place, or thing in the explanation of a different verse of the Word. The hope is that reflection on these other references and their associated doctrine will help us see possible applications to our full study of Obadiah. We will need to use “derived doctrine” often. Please don’t run away from this maligned term. If we use it properly, admitting openly that it is derived, we bring no harm to the internal sense.
Keep a notebook handy during your study times. Write out insights, questions, and any summaries you find helpful in organizing your thoughts about each chapter. The goal of this study guide is not to give a detailed summary of the internal sense but to start each researcher’s quest for deeper insight.
At the end of each chapter in the study guide, you will find a study review. The review includes a summary of each section to help you reinforce and build on your understanding of several of the key points.
Begin each study unit with a devotional prayer asking the Lord to guide and direct your thoughts. Studying in this sphere has the power to inspire and open our minds with a higher spiritual priority that will keep us in the company of the Lord’s angels. As the Writings teach, we must seek to love truth for truth’s sake. Such an approach will free each reader from preconceived ideas that might limit his or her ability to “see” the intent and message of the Lord’s Word.

Introduction

Welcome to the study of the shortest book in the Word. Obadiah has one chapter and twenty-one verses. As brief as this book is, scholars raise many questions about it. They debate its author and date of composition, and they point to the striking similarity between passages in Obadiah and Jeremiah to question whether Obadiah actually witnessed the things he wrote about or saw them in a dream or vision from the Lord. As always, we need to briefly consider the interesting issues the scholars raise. Some of their observations wonderfully highlight things the Lord intended us to find in the Word that serve as a base or “containant” for the deeper spiritual things of the internal sense. On the other hand, we can set aside some of their debates because they are resolved when the spiritual sense is opened to reveal and explain the internal sense of the Word.

Let’s consider a specific issue to illustrate this point. Biblical researchers note several similarities or parallelisms in Obadiah and Jeremiah. For example, the words “grape gatherers came to you” appear in both Obadiah 1:5 and Jeremiah 49:9. Who, ask the scholars, wrote that prophetic sentence first? Jeremiah wrote it first, they have determined. Here is how they came to that conclusion: Obadiah 1:10-14 seems to refer to the capture of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. by Nebuchadnezzar. They believe Jeremiah 49 was composed following the battle of Carchemish in 605 B.C. Ergo, Jeremiah said it first.

In its introduction to the book of Obadiah, the Oxford Annotated Bible suggests another explanation for the similarities: that both prophets borrowed these passages “from a collection of sayings transmitted orally by prophetic circles.”

At this point, it seems prudent to ask if these theories have any spiritual importance for us. Do we really need to determine who wrote these prophetic words first? Does a collection of “oral prophetic sayings” have anything to do with the internal sense? Isn’t the repetition itself of greater spiritual significance than those who said it?

The Writings answer, as noted below, that repetition is good and intrinsically necessary for the message of the spiritual sense. Repetition is the work of the Lord and not individual prophets!

Repetition in the Word is not there because one prophet borrowed from another. So that we can better answer future criticisms that the Word is repetitious, let’s consider these teachings:

Arcana Coelestia (AC) 435, 707, 734, and 1015 teach us that the Lord uses repetition to signify certain states people pass through.

AC 734 states emphatically that there is no such thing as repetition in the Word.

AC 1259 helps us to understand that if repetitions accidentally occurred in the Word, if phrases were creatively lifted from other sources, and if prophets plagiarized lines, it would cause the Word to lose its holiness. “It is common in the Word, especially the prophetic, for one thing to be expressed in two ways; and he who does not know the mystery in this, cannot [but] think it a mere repetition for the sake of emphasis.” (AC 4691)

AC 5888 states that repetition occurs to indicate the state of the will and understanding. See this concept explained also in AC 6343[3], AC 7945, and in The Doctrine of Sacred Scriptures 81, 84, and 86.

AC 9565 states that if something is repeated three times, each single thing has a plenary conjunction in the internal sense.

Divine Providence (DP) 193 gives reasons why repetitions occur in the Word. The Author

We have no direct information about Obadiah’s life and the dates of his birth and death. We know that his name means “a servant of the Lord.” Among the Jewish people, Obadiah was a popular choice for a name, so it is not surprising to find numerous Obadiah’s mentioned in important Old Testament events. There are some scholars willing to go out on a limb to identify one of the Obadiah’s mentioned in the Word as the author of this prophetic book. For those who would venture into such a pursuit, there are at least nine Obadiah’s in the Old Testament to consider.

In I Kings18, there is a steward in King Ahab’s household named Obadiah. This Obadiah was a friend to many prophets. He saved more than a hundred of them, hiding them from Jezebel, feeding and giving them water. For his devotion to the Lord’s prophets and his kindness to them, he was made a prophet. (I Kings 18 tells of a time when Obadiah met and talked with the prophet Elijah.) In I Chronicles 7:3, an Obadiah who is a son of Izrahiah (four other sons are named) is called a chief man: “All five of them were chief men.” In I Chronicles 8:38, Azel had six sons, one of whom was named Obadiah. The lineage of this family can be traced to Saul, the first king of Israel.

I Chronicles 9:16 mentions an Obadiah whose lineage is traced to Elkanah, who lived in the villages of the Netophathites. Is this the Elkanah who was the father of Samuel? In I Chronicles 12:9, there is an Obadiah from the Gadites who joined forces with David in Ziklag. In I Chronicles 27:19, there is a prince of Zebulun named Obadiah.

II Chronicles 17:7 mentions a prince named Obadiah being sent by Jehoshaphat to instruct the people in the laws of the Lord. In II Chronicles 34:12, a Levite named Obadiah was appointed by King Josiah to be an overseer to repair the temple. In Ezra 8:9, a man named Obadiah accompanied Ezra on the return of the exiles from Babylon. Whenever the Word withholds background information on one of the Lord’s “chosen,” I can’t help but think it is the Lord’s way of keeping us focused on the message of the Word and not the individual. Therefore, tying Obadiah’s lineage to one of the nine Old Testament references seems superfluous. What’s your point of view on this quest to find a historical connection?

An Overview of the Literal Sense of Obadiah

Obadiah’s prophecy expresses the Lord’s displeasure with the Edomites. What sin or evil had they committed that would cause their downfall? Their heritage goes back to Esau, so Jacob was their uncle. In other words, they were blood relatives to the children of Israel.

The Edomites stood by when Jerusalem was invaded. The Edomites rejoiced over the captivity of the sons of Judah. They actively participated in the looting of Jerusalem. The Edomites set up roadblocks to prevent the people of Jerusalem from escaping the attack of the Philistines. They were callously indifferent, “un-brotherly,” and lacking in charity to the neighbor. Note how the Word uses correspondences to identify Edom’s transgressions:

They had a cruelty of feet (verse 11): “you stood on the other side.” They had a cruelty of heart (verse 12): “…rejoiced over…the day of their destruction.” They had a cruelty of tongue (verse 12): “…nor should you have spoken proudly.” They had a cruelty of eyes (verse 13): “…should not have gazed on their affliction.” They had a cruelty of hands (verse 13): “…nor laid hands on (Judah’s) substance.” Let’s take one last look at the outline of the literal sense of Obadiah. We can identify four major sections of Obadiah:

In Obadiah 1:1-9, Edom is about to be driven out of its land by a confederacy of nations selected by the Lord.

Obadiah 1:10-14 describes the kind of punishment Edom will receive for its participation in the capture of Jerusalem.

Obadiah 1:15-16 announces a day of judgment upon all nations. “As you have done, it shall be done to you.”

Obadiah 1:17-21 tells that in that day Judah and Israel shall escape and shall regain the lands that the Edomites and other enemies took from them. With this introduction and overview, let’s enter this wonderful and helpful study of Obadiah as it announces and celebrates the birth of the New Church.

8.2 Obadiah 1:1-3

“The vision of Obadiah.

Thus says the Lord God concerning Edom (we have heard a report from the Lord, and a messenger has been sent among the nations, saying, ‘Arise, and let us rise up against her for battle’): ‘Behold, I will make you small among the nations; you shall be greatly despised. The pride of your heart has deceived you. You who dwell in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high; you who say in your heart, ‘Who will bring me down to the ground?’“.

PASSAGES FROM THE WRITINGS

Prophets and Psalms

“Concerning those who are in self-intelligence, and who pervert the literal sense of the Word, who are Edom; that they are to be combated, because they imagine themselves more intelligent than the rest, vers. 1-3…”

Arcana Coelestia 3322 [8] “In Obadiah (i: 1-10, 18, 19)…‘Esau’ and ‘Edom’ denote the evil of the natural man originating in the love of self, which despises and rejects all truth, whence comes its devastation.”

Apocalypse Revealed (AR) 338 “…they who have pretended before the world that they were in the good of love, and yet were in evil, hide themselves after death in caves; and they who have pretended that they were in truths of faith, and yet were in the falsities of evil, hide themselves in the rocks of the mountains.” Obadiah 1:3 is cited along with other passages.

Posthumous Theological Works, Vol. 1, Invitation to the New Church 35. “[The ‘rock’ is spoken of in the Word ….] The ‘fissures of the rock’ mean falsified truths…” Obadiah 1:3 is cited along with many passages.

Arcarna Coelestia 10582 “To dwell in the holes of a rock is [to be] in falsities of faith. The subject here is those who exalt themselves above others, believing that they are more learned than the rest of mankind, when yet they are in falsities and cannot even see truths. Such in the other life dwell in the holes of rocks, and sometimes thrust themselves forth upon the rocks…. his is meant by holding the height of the hill, and mounting on high as an eagle…and yet being brought down.” Obadiah 1:3-4 are cited.

Apocalypse Explained (AE) 410 [5] “In Obadiah (i. 3-4)…Edom, who signifies here the pride of learning which is from self-intelligence, and falsity therefrom destroying the church.… ‘the clefts of the rock’ signify the falsities of faith and of doctrine, because those dwell there who are in such falsities…”

DERIVED DOCTRINE

“The vision of Obadiah.”

Divine Providence #134 explains that there are two kinds of visions: Divine and diabolical. Divine visions are “such as the prophets had; who, when they were in vision, were not in the body, but in the spirit…”

Obadiah’s name means “servant of the Lord,” so this helps us identify which kind of vision we are studying. It is a Divine vision received in a spirit of willingness to serve the Lord. It is a spiritual mission that is not limited to time and space but to eternal ends.

“We have heard a report from the Lord.”

Who or what are we to make of the “we have heard”? Does the “we” represent the will and understanding? The rest of the derived doctrine seems to validate such an assumption. Arcana Coelestia #4674 helps us answer this question when it explains that a “report” or “news” signifies that which is from the divine truth. A report’s purpose is to help us discern the quality of evil and falsity. The words “A report from the Lord” clearly makes this “report” more than a rumor or gossip. It is a report from infinite Love and Wisdom. “…a messenger has been sent among the nations, saying…” Apocalypse Revealed #667 teaches that nations in the positive sense signify those who are in the good of love and charity from the Lord. Whereas in the negative sense, nations signify those who trust in their own selfhood. (AE 249) Which sense of nations is being used here? To find a possible answer, let’s check the correspondential meaning of “sending a messenger.” A messenger, or to send a messenger, signifies to communicate. (AC 4239) Near the end of AC 4239, it mentions that Jacob sending messengers to Esau represents bringing conjunction between the “truth Divine of the natural (which is Jacob) and the good Divine therein (which is Esau).” The point being illustrated is that the Lord was forming a coalition of those who had a common spiritual interest. Uniting the “brothers” would bring an end to the haughty estrangement that the falsity of self-intelligence felt was invincible. Let’s not overlook that very last word, “saying.” In the internal sense, “saying” can represent the following things: to reveal; a new light is to come; to perceive; to think (and to do); and to predict. “Arise, and let us rise up against her for battle.” AC 2326 gives us this meaning of “arise.” It signifies having an elevation of the mind, or to enter a state of affection from charity. “Rise” in AC 2028 signifies the elevation of spiritual truth to agreement with external truth. This process might give us a fuller mental picture of the meaning of “let us rise up.” The Lord is calling for a battle to be waged against Edom’s arrogance. Where does arrogance reside and draw its life? The heart or affections is where it (hides) lives. The affections correspondently are called she, her, woman, etc. To battle “her” represents to call on and use the Lord’s power against the affections of the hells. See AC 1663-1664 and AE 817 [7] for illustrations of wars and battles. “Behold, I will make you small among the nations;” Do we need derived doctrinal quotes to perceive this meaning? Do we not feel in our hearts what the Lord is predicting? Edom, with its smug self-assurance, will be brought into a low state. Like a giant balloon, its conceited air will be expelled in an instant. In the Lord’s presence, Edom cannot stand tall. “You shall be greatly despised.” There is a law of the Lord stated in the literal sense of Obadiah. “As you have done, it shall be done to you.” (1:15) The Edomites despised good and truth and fervently loved falsity. What is loved becomes one’s life. Therefore, the enlightened, the nations called to do battle against Edom, will “greatly” despise the falsities of Edom’s way of life. In effect, the hatred the Lord’s army felt for Edom is not the ugly face of war but a shining face that reflects a holy fear to protect the Lord’s Word from those who would profane and mock it. “The pride of your heart has deceived you…” Pride is called “the love of self.” (AC 1306) Pride comes about when the external man develops self-confidence bolstered and inspired by false reasonings. (AC 1585 [4]) Pride enjoys and attempts to have a dominating power over others. (AC 8678) Pride seeks to have its own way and tolerates others to the degree they favor its self love. (AE 518 [34]) “You who dwell in the clefts of the rock, whose habitation is high…” This passage is well covered in the Passages from the Writings. “You who say in your heart, ‘Who will bring me down to the ground?’” Do we hear arrogance? Do we hear pride? Do we hear mental giants bragging about their reasoning abilities? This passage is dripping with contempt to and for the Lord and His Word. There is a challenge in these words that cannot be missed or excused. The Lord faced the most grievous temptations the hells could bring to bear. They mocked Him from the beginning of His ministry in the wilderness to the cross. “You saved others, now save yourself.” Hell is full of contempt and rebellion. Here in the literal sense, we see it clearly stated: Who will bring me down? PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

The passage in P&P pulls all of the above together beautifully. “…those who are in self-intelligence, and who pervert the literal sense of the Word…they are to be combated, because they imagine themselves more intelligent than the rest…” We are called to be brave soldiers in the Lord’s army. We need to despise the life of evil because it loves falsity and hates truth: it favors self and hates the Lord.
The choice is plain. It’s Edom’s way or the Lord’s way. The outcome is not debatable. Edom will be made low in spite of its pretentious bragging. No matter how cleverly Edom lays out its strategy, it will fall. Edom’s height on the mountain will not save it from the Lord’s presence. Wherever the Lord brings good and truth, evil and falsity cannot remain in His presence.

READ AND REVIEW

Read the selection from P&P again.

Read Obadiah 1:1-3 again.

QUESTION TO STIMULATE REFLECTION

Have you ever met, read, or heard someone who imagines they are more intelligent than the rest of the human race? How does that person relate to other people? How do other people relate to him or her?
Did you try to wage a mental battle against their thinking? What was the outcome?
Hiding up in the mountain gives the person up an advantage on the one below who is climbing up the mountain. Those on top can cause an avalanche of stones to advance on the persons below. They can use poles, javelins, arrows, or hot oil to push people backwards. What does this tell us about hell’s imagined defense against the truth of the Lord?
What about the other side of this issue? Is there confidence in these verses that the up-hill battle can be won with the Lord’s help? Give examples.
The confederation of nations, the brotherhood of the will and understanding being called by the Lord, is a force to fight with against hell. What ways can you see this happening in the church? What about in daily life?
If a modern-day prophet were to give us a report on what we are doing to the literal sense, do you imagine we might hear some strong words of condemnation? How do we treat the Lord’s Word as an organization? As individuals? What informs our choices about the Word?

8.3 Obadiah 1:4-5

“Though you ascend as high as the eagle, and though you set your nest among the stars, from there I will bring you down,” says the Lord.

“If thieves had come to you, if robbers by night- Oh, how you will be cut off! – Would they not have stolen till they had enough? If grape gatherers had come to you, would they not have left some gleanings?”

PASSAGES FROM THE WRITINGS

Prophets and Psalms

“…That they defend falsities through natural light [lumen], but that they will perish, and the very falsities with them, vers. 4, 5…” Arcana Coelestia 10582 [8] “The subject here is those who exalt themselves above all others, believing that they are more learned than the rest of mankind…. This is meant by holding the height of the hill, and mounting on high as an eagle, and setting his nest among the stars, and yet being brought down.”

Apocalypse Explained 410 [5] “In Obadiah i. 3, 4…pride of learning which is from self-intelligence, and falsity…destroying the church…are compared to an eagle because the eagle from its lofty flights signifies the pride of self-intelligence; so, too, a ‘nest for habitation’ is mentioned, and ‘to set it among the stars’ signifies in the heights where those dwell who are in the knowledges of truth, for the knowledges of truth are signified by ‘stars.’ ”

Arcana Coelestia 3901 [7 & 8] “In Obadiah 1:4 by ‘eagles’ signifies rational things that are not true…by ‘eagles’…is signified falsity induced by reasonings, which is induced from the fallacies of the senses and external appearances.

Apocalypse Revealed 649 “Hence it is, that (to gather grapes)…by these things the Lord’s operation from the good of His love by the Divine truth of His Word is signified.” Obadiah 1:4-5 is cited among many other passages.

Apocalypse Explained 920 [5] “In Obadiah 1:5… ‘Grape-gatherers’ signify falsities, and ‘thieves’ evils, which lay waste the truths and goods of the church; but ‘destroyers’ signify both falsities and evils; that ‘they would leave no clusters’ signifies that there are no goods because there are no truths. But ‘to gather the vintage’ signifies to gather for uses such things especially as will be serviceable to (the person’s) understanding …”

Arcana Coelestia 5135 [8] ” …in Obadiah 1:5… ‘grape–gatherers’ denote falsities which are not from evil; by these falsities the goods and truths stored up by the Lord in man’s interior natural (that is, remains) are not consumed, but by falsities derived from evils, which steal truths and goods and also by wrong applications employ them to confirm evils and falsities.”

Arcana Coelestia 8906 [3] “…a thief…is falsity, which will then take possession of the whole man, both of his will and of his understanding, and thus will take away all truth and good. The like is signified by a ‘thief’ in Obadiah 1:5.”

Apocalypse Revealed 164 “…good without its truths is not good, only merit-seeking or hypocritical; but evils and falsities take it away like a thief. This is done gradually in the world, and completely after death, and also without the man knowing when and how…. Since the taking away of good and truth from them that are in dead worship is done as by a thief in darkness …in the Word as in the following passages…” Obadiah 1:5 is among the examples cited.

True Christian Religion (TCR) 317 “Priests who minister only for the sake of gain or attainment of worldly honor, and who teach such things as they see or may see from the Word to be not true, are spiritual thieves; since they deprive the people of the means of salvation, which are the truths of faith. Such are called thieves in the Word in the following passages…” Obadiah 1:5 is cited.

Apocalypse Explained 193 [6] “In Obadiah 1:5…falsities and evils are called ‘thieves,’ and are said to ‘steal’; falsities are ‘thieves,’ and ‘robbers by night’; it is said ‘by night,’ because ‘night’ signifies a state of no love and faith.”

Apocalypse Explained 1005 This passage explains “His coming and Last Judgment” are meant when the Lord is referred to as a thief coming in the night. Obadiah 1:5 is cited.

DERIVED DOCTRINE

“Would they [robbers and thieves] not have stolen till they have enough? Would they not have left some gleanings?” Might these questions serve to show that Edom’s goal was to “steal till they had enough” but that as much as they wished to take it all, they couldn’t help but to leave some behind? What was left behind? AC 5135 [8] has what appears to be the answer. The Lord stores up “remains” in each person’s interior, and they cannot be consumed by self-love because they are kept in a secret place known only to the Lord. Hell is a robber and thief, but it cannot spoil what the Lord protects. “Remains, gleanings” will be left. That must drive the hells to a degree of distraction and despair. They cannot completely rid themselves of all connections with the Lord. PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Building on the last point in the derived doctrine section might help us pull things together. Edom saw itself as smarter than anyone else in the world. They polished their external reasoning with such brilliance that it impressed their sensual nature. They were able to bend truth with “wrong applications.” Was there anything they couldn’t do? Couldn’t they rob people of the truths if they put their minds to finding just the right blend of falsity? Edom believed so!
Edom did plunder good and truth. They hurt the people to whom they should have ministered, but the Lord still had their “remains” in His control. Why? When the insanity in hell is almost totally out of control, the Lord brings the hells back into order for the briefest of moments. In that “sane” moment, they return to a degree of clarity and feel shame for their actions. But then they lapse (leap) back into the falsities of self-intelligence. What does the Lord touch within them? He touches their gleanings, their remains, or their soul. He touches what could have been their greatest individual and unique potential. They could not rid themselves of the delights of innocence that were impressed on their memories of childhood. Not the smallest of them is lost. (AC 530 and 561) Edom might have forgotten them, but the Lord does not forget them. He knows where they are. He protects them to eternity.
These verses, like a Divine beacon, tell everyone that Edom’s natural light and its falsities will perish. Edom cannot extinguish the light of the Lord. He will not be robbed. Edom is not wiser than the Infinite Mind.

READ AND REVIEW

Read the selection from P&P.

Read Obadiah 1:4-5.

QUESTIONS TO STIMULATE REFLECTION

TCR 317 mentions priests preaching and teaching things they know are wrong and contrary to the Word. I wonder what contrary things might be taught in our day. I have tried to think how that might be true today. Can you identify with this portion of the prophecy?
If you were asked to share your views about the power of the soul, or remains, what points would be your favorite to highlight in your response?
Without feeling smug, is it not good to read that evil will be vanquished? The loud, bragging voice of the “intimidator” will be silenced. Its imagined strong defense in the caves of the mountains will be emptied of its arsenal.
Most of us have encountered bullies in our lives. How is hell like a bully? How do you vanquish a bully?
Our reading referred to the negative correspondence of eagles. In this case, eagles represent a pride in learning from self-intelligence. At the time I read that, I wanted to quote Isaiah 40:31: “…those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” AR 244 explains that eagles in this passage from Isaiah signify rising into knowledges of truth and good, and so into intelligence. This isn’t so much a question as it is a reminder that “good eagles” study with a purpose to learn and apply the good and truth we receive from the Lord.

8.4 Obidiah 1: 6

“Oh, how Esau shall be searched out! How his hidden treasures shall be sought after!”

PASSAGES FROM THE WRITINGS

PSALMS AND PROPHETS

“…that they are haughty and conceited, ver. 6…”

DERIVED DOCTRINE

“Esau shall be searched out!”

“There is frequent mention in the Word of Esau, and also of Edom; and by ‘Esau’ is there signified the good of the natural before the doctrinal things of truth have been thus conjoined with this good, and also the good of life from influx out of the rational; and by ‘Edom’ is signified the good of the natural to which have been adjoined the doctrinal things of truth. But in the opposite sense, ‘Esau’ signifies the evil of the love of self before falsities have been thus adjoined to this love; and ‘Edom’ signifies the evil of this love when falsities have been adjoined to it.” (AC 3322)

In this same number (AC 3322 [7]), we read “…by ‘Esau’ and ‘Edom’ are represented those who turn aside from good through the fact that they altogether despise truth, and are unwilling that anything of the truth of faith should be adjoined, which is chiefly owing to the love of self…“.

AC 3322 [8] tells us that “‘Esau’ and ‘Edom’ denote the evil of the natural man originating in the love of self, which despises and rejects all truth, whence comes its devastation.”

To be searched or to search represents an assessment by the Lord regarding the order of good in the spiritual man. If a person is receptive, the Lord helps order his or her natural. (AE 434 [13])

AR 140 focuses on the meaning of Revelation 2:23: “I am He that searchest the reins and hearts…” This is said “that the church may know that the Lord sees what truth and good every one has.”

“How his hidden treasures shall be sought after.”

It is interesting to read the Revised Standard Version’s (RSV) translation of this verse. “How Esau has been pillaged, his treasures sought out!” Let’s look at the correspondences for hidden gifts or hidden treasures. They signify the truth and good that were given without an individual’s knowledge. (AC 5664) Treasure signifies divine truth contained in the Word. (AE 840)

“Hidden” means to lose track of because good and truth were discarded. (AC 222) It also describes being hidden because of the protection of the Lord. (AC 8764) Hidden can mean a withdrawal of divine truth from those who are in falsities and evils. (AE 329 [27]) Hidden can represent a defense against influx from heaven by those who deny the Lord’s Divinity. (AR 339)

This last reference to “hidden” needs to be seen apart from the list above. AR 339 offers much to think about when we read that those who wish to be good “suffer a great deal at first,” while those who confirm and cover up (hide) falsities, “suffer much less.”

We should also reflect on the meaning of the words “pillage,” “plunder,” “take away,” and “empty” in this verse.

Putting It All Together

P&P sets the tone for what is at issue: it is a haughty and conceited spiritual state that the Lord visits. He comes to search out the reins and the heart of everyone. He visits the hidden treasures He gave us without our knowledge. These gifts were hidden for our protection. They do not remain dormant or passive. Like a vital power source, they contribute daily in thousands of secret ways. So the Lord also comes “to see.” Have we lost sight of the treasure through neglect or because we put up a defense against the influx of heaven? Did we lose it because we denied the Lord’s Divine Human? Did the treasure get layered over with a hardened heart?
In the parable of the talents, the one who buried his talent in the ground said he did so because he perceived the master as a hard taskmaster. Fear of his master led him to burying the talent lest it be lost. What happened to this man and his talent? It was taken from him and given to those who wisely invested their talent and earned a return for the Master.
There seems to be a bit of this parable in Esau’s hidden treasure being sought after. The evil perceive the Lord as someone who wants to plunder the hidden treasure. What they forget is that the Lord is the owner of the treasure. The hiding place of these gifts is to be known by Him. They are the ones who want to put the treasure in harm’s way through their haughty and conceited ways.

READ AND REVIEW

Read the selection from P&P.

Read Obadiah 1:6.

QUESTIONS TO STIMULATE REFLECTION

Please remember that the Writings teach that each truth has a myriad of avenues to follow. The summary offered above is but one little side trip. You must find and trace the spiritual sense, too. What other avenues would you like to pursue? Are you pursuing your own questions and insights along the way?
What do you think about the meaning of those who come to seek out Esau’s hidden treasure? Do they really represent the Lord’s good and truth coming in to see our internal state? Do we notice when the Lord does this? How might we know He is present?
The Writings teach us that the angels greet us in the World of Spirits with a question: What have you loved? That question is so powerful that it begins the opening process of the 3 steps a newly arrived spirit passes through. How ready are we to have our hidden treasures looked at? What might we tell an angel about what we love?
“Oh, how Esau shall be searched out!” These words are filled with reality, forewarning, and certainty. What else comes to mind when you read them regarding the haughty and the conceited?

8.5 Obidiah 1: 7

“All the men in your confederacy shall force you to the border; the men at peace with you shall deceive you and prevail against you. Those who eat your bread shall lay a trap for you. No one is aware of it.”

PASSAGES FROM THE WRITINGS

Psalms and Prophets

“…that they have no truths, ver. 7…”

DERIVED DOCTRINE

“…your confederacy…” The word “confederacy” implies that the Lord is forging an alliance, an allegiance, or confederacy that has a love for the Lord and genuine faith as its centerpiece. See AE 102 [2&3]. In the opposite sense, confederacy represents that which hates the Lord and forges an alliance against good and truth. Which sense is being expressed in this passage?

“…shall force you to the border…”

The correspondence of “border” is interesting. Let’s look at some representative teachings.

When worship is far removed from what is internal “it is said that they ‘removed them far away from their border.’” (AC 1151 [6]) In AC 1211, we learn that “…the borders to all cognitions that have regard to worship, whether external or internal, move in that direction, for all worship stems from faith and charity.” “In heaven every one has intelligence and wisdom, and has happiness, according to the sphere of extension…. From all this it can be seen what is signified in the spiritual sense by ‘in all thy border,’ that in good there must not be any falsity; for falsities are outside of the sphere…(falsities) begin where truths leave off…” (AC 8063)

“…the men at peace with you shall deceive you and prevail against you.” It appears that Esau felt at “peace” with his thinking, haughtiness, and conceit. In order to get into this mode of thinking, Esau needed “men” or an understanding that gave legitimacy or peacefulness to his life. That is, until the Lord visited his heart. Then his understanding and his consequent life were shown to be shallow, false, and self-centered. His “men” deceived him and in time were used to prevail against him. Consider what true peace is and what it does for us: “…when evils and falsities are removed and no longer infest, the Lord flows in with peace, in which and from which is heaven and that delight that fills with bliss the interiors of the mind…” (AE 365 [14]) “…peace signifies…the mind may not be borne hither and thither.” (AE 365 [18]) “Those who eat your bread shall lay a trap for you.” Eating represents to communicate, to be conjoined, and to appropriate. See AC 2343. Bread signifies love. To eat bread represents to communicate, conjoin and appropriate love. To lay a trap signifies having a plan or desire to destroy the love of a spiritual life. See AC 9348 [7]. “No one is aware of it.” If a conscience is silenced; if a watchman fails to warn the city; if the heart and mind are deprived of the Lord’s good and truth, then when the enemy comes, “No one is aware of it.”

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Imagine thinking that you are so right and everyone else is so wrong. Imagine believing you see things more clearly than anyone else. And then all of what you believed and did is exposed as not only empty but SO WRONG! Those who “appeared” to be your best friends are gone when you turn to them in your moment of need. They are not there to give approval. Instead, they are now on the other side providing incidents and intimate details proving what foolishness you participated in all of your life. No longer are you the trendsetter. On the contrary, you become the epitome, to eternity, of what not to be and what not to do.
Listen again to the words of P&P: “…they have no truths…” In effect, the Lord’s revelation of what IS showed up their what is not. They were spiritually, morally, and ethically bankrupt. It is a sad commentary on the heritage of Esau. “For Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the field …and he sold his birthright to Jacob.” A red stew or mass of pottage was the asking price. Not a good beginning for those who fell in love with their own wisdom and imagined they were wiser than all the people of the world.
So we have the story of Esau to awaken us, to alert our minds so we see the approach of the enemy and the traps set to snare us. More than that, we need to know that we do have someone to help us see and confront the enemy. The Lord will be with us, and He is aware of all things that hell wants to confuse us about.

READ AND REVIEW

Read the selection from P&P.

Read Obadiah 1:7.

QUESTIONS TO STIMULATE REFLECTION

Going back to the first quote from P&P, what two major evils brought Esau to its spiritual demise?
How many times have we felt that we were all alone with, seemingly, no one alert to our plight? Does this have to be the case? The Writings remind us that we feel alone during temptation, but the reality is just the opposite. The Lord is near and fighting for us. Will we believe it is so? What can we do to remind ourselves?
Breaking bread with the enemy is something we need to avoid. Do you remember the story about Peter on the night of the Lord’s religious interrogation? Where was Peter? He was outside warming his hands by the fire with those who were curious, neutral, or against the Lord. As finite beings, we find ourselves eating with those who would set traps for our spiritual life. How can we be better prepared to not be compromised with time/space values or antagonism regarding eternal ends?
Could this prophecy have another meaning about eating bread, falling into snares, and being alone? To the haughty and conceited, the Lord might be perceived as the One deceiving them. He seeks to share the bread of life with all. But those who reject Him and His Word see the Word as worthless and empty of help. Do you remember the words of Karl Marx? “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” He saw religion as a means to dull and confuse the people. It appears that Marx saw religion as a cruel and heartless trap.

8.6 Obidiah 1: 8-9

“Will I not in that day,” says the Lord, “even destroy the wise men from Edom, and understanding from the mountains of Esau?

Then your mighty men, O Teman, shall be dismayed, to the end that everyone from the mountains of Esau may be cut off by slaughter.”

PASSAGES FROM THE WRITINGS

Prophets and Psalms

“…that they will perish in the day of judgment, because they have oppressed the church, vers. 8, 9…”

Apocalypse Explained 448 [11] “…in the eighth verse of this chapter (Obadiah 1:8) it is said ‘I will destroy the wise out of Edom, and the intelligent out of the mount of Esau,’ meaning those who from the letter of the Word have confirmed themselves in such things as favor their loves.”

Doctrine of the Lord 4 In this passage, quote after quote from all the prophets are cited where by “that day”, “in that day”, and “in that time,” refer to the Coming of the Lord. Obadiah 1:8, 12-15 are used to illustrate this truth.

####b DERIVED DOCTRINE

“Then your mighty men, O Teman, shall be dismayed.” What is the correspondence of Teman? AE 400 [10] reminds us that when we read of Edom and the inhabitants of Teman, we are not to think of inhabitants but “the evils and falsities that are opposed to the goods and truths of the celestial kingdom…” “Mighty men” signifies those who are strong in faith. (AC 1179) “Mighty ones” signify those who love good. (AE 922 [2]) “Mighty” signifies a power in captivating lower minds. (AC 1179) In the negative sense, it appears that the mighty men of Teman represent those who were powerful in opposition to the Lord’s Divine Human, His love, and a life of faith. “…everyone from the mountains of Esau may be cut off by slaughter.” AC 3322 [8] explains the meaning of “the mountains of Esau” as the natural man, from self-love, rejecting and despising all truth. “Slaughter” signifies the Last Judgment, when the wicked will perish spiritually. (AE 315 [15]) Actually, this number uses “perdition and damnation.” Some strong words and bone chilling images.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

We need to use a notebook or pad of paper for a moment. Let’s first put down the direct teachings from the Word about the wise men “from Edom and understanding from the mountains of Esau.” Then let’s write out the second prophecy about “your mighty men, O Teman…everyone from the mountains of Esau….”

Before we begin making specific applications, circle every “from” you see in the two prophecies.

How are they being used? I am “from” Bryn Athyn, PA. The use of “from” in this instance helps to identify my place of residence. If I say I borrowed this book “from” the library, it helps to identify where I got the book and where it is to be returned. If someone runs away “from” home, that “from” indicates what they tried to leave behind—perhaps parental or jurisdictional control. If someone is tied down or blocked, we say they were kept “from” playing or completing their task. If someone changes, for better or worse, we note that they are long way “from” what they used to be. Again, in what sense is the word “from” being used in these prophecies?
In the positive sense, Edom represents wonderful things: the Lord’s human essence; His strength; His power or good of the natural principle. (AC 3322) If Edom operated “from” these spiritual things, the “from” would be significant and laudable. But that is not what happens here. There was movement away from their good beginnings. Shouldn’t we note this to see how far they had come “from” those principles? Instead of acknowledging the Lord’s essence, power, and good in the natural, they were using the letter of the Word to get away “from” the jurisdiction of the Lord to confirm themselves and their loves. They were not “from the mountain of the Lord,” but they were “from” the mountain of self-love.
Esau in the positive sense signifies the Lord’s infancy; the celestial good in the natural principle. (AC 3599 and AC 4239) These principles can lift a person into the mountains of celestial splendor. But that is not where Esau’s people stayed. They traveled from such beginnings, and now “everyone” from the mountains of Esau rejected and despised the celestial good in the natural principle. Could this be the reason their movement away from celestial good caused the words such as “slaughter, perdition, and damnation” to be used?

READ AND REVIEW

Read the selection from P&P.

Read Obadiah 1:8-9.

Questions To Stimulate Reflection

Did you look up the word “perdition”? If you did, were you surprised with its meaning and application to our lesson? Where else have you heard this word used?
Loss of one’s innocence, loss of solid foundational principles, is an issue in this prophecy. Growing up, maturing, moving from innocence of ignorance to innocence of wisdom is a step-by-step process. We move “from former states” into “newer states.” The Writings give us a look at the steps of faith: Historical, Persuasive, Blind, Hypocritical, and Spurious. All of these may be passed through, but an end must be in view. True Faith is the goal. This faith is FROM the Lord. Can you identify with any of these?
Misuse of the literal sense is a prevalent topic of the Writings. We are not perfect in our thinking process. Errors in judgment and application will occur. How might we avoid the extreme of being fearful to apply the literal sense of the Word and being careless with applications? How can we guard against and correct any errors?

8.7 Reading

A book about us, pages 45-50

8.8 Obidiah 1:10-14

“For violence against your brother Jacob, shame shall cover you, and you shall be cut off that you stood on the other side- in the day that strangers carried captive his forces, when foreigners entered his gates and cast lots for Jerusalem- even you were as one with them.

But you should not have gazed on the day of your brother in the day of his captivity; nor should you have rejoiced over the children of Judah in the day of their destruction; nor should you have spoken proudly in the day of distress. You should not have entered the gate of My people in the day of their calamity. Indeed, you should not have gazed on their affliction in the day of their calamity, nor laid hands on their substance in the day of their calamity. You should not have stood at the crossroads to cut off those among them who escaped; nor should you have delivered up those among them who remained in the day of distress.”

Passages From the Writings

P&P

“…that they destroy the church still more, and that this their delight, vers. 10-14…”

AC 10287 [14]

“Mention is also made of ‘foreigners,’ which is expressed in the original tongue by another word than ‘strangers,’ and by ‘foreigners’ are signified falsities themselves, as in these passages [Obadiah 1:11 is cited.] …‘to cast a lot upon Jerusalem’ denotes to destroy the church, and to dissipate its truths.”

AR 591

“By leading into captivity is signified to persuade others and draw them over so that they may consent and adhere to that heresy…and thus to lead them away from believing and living well…. By captivity spiritual captivity is here meant, which is to be seduced, and so led away from truths and goods, and to be led on into falsities and evils. That this spiritual captivity is meant by captivity in the Word, may be evident from the following passages…” Obadiah 1:11 is cited.

AE 811 [16]

“In Obadiah (1:11) ‘In that day aliens led his strength captive, and strangers entered his gates and cast lots upon Jerusalem’…this is said of Edom, which signifies the truth of the natural man, but here falsity; ‘the aliens that led his strength captive’ signify the falsities of the church destroying its truths, ‘strength’ signifying truth, since spiritual strength rests in truths; ‘the strangers who entered the gates’ signify falsities of doctrine destroying the truths through which entrance is given into interior truths; ‘Jerusalem, upon which they cast lots,’ signifies the doctrine of the church from the Word thus dispersed, ‘to cast lots’ means to disperse.”

AC 2851

“…[by] the gates to the New Jerusalem and the gates to the new temple…nothing else is meant than the entrances to heaven…. Hence Jerusalem is called the ‘gate of the people’ (Obadiah 1: 13).”

Derived Doctrine

“For violence against your brother Jacob…” Let’s look first at the meaning of violence.

Violence signifies filthy lusts to which those of the declining church had degenerated. (AC 621 [3]) Violence signifies that there is no longer any good-will. (AC 632) Violence signifies falsities and evils are against goods and truths. (AC 4502) Violence signifies the purposeful perversion of the truths of the Word. (AE 734 [17]) Violence signifies the adulteration of the good of the Word. (AE 730) Brother signifies the life of faith which is charity. (AE 746 [2]) Brotherhood signifies the conjunction of the goods and truths of heaven and the church. (AE 746 [20]) Jacob “represents various things…in the beginning the Lord’s natural as to truth, in progression the Lord’s natural as to good of truth, and at the end the Lord’s natural as to good. For the Lord’s glorification proceeded from truth to the good of truth, and finally to good…” (AC 4537) In addition to shame, we need to consider the correspondences of these synonyms too: embarrassment, disgrace, disappointment, dishonor, guilt, shame and nakedness.

Consider this quote from AR 705:

“By walking naked is signified to live without truths. By the shame of nakedness, or the secret parts, filthy loves, which are infernal loves…. Ignorance of truth is signified by nakedness, and infernal love by the shame of nakedness….A man can indeed live like a Christian without truths; yet only before men, but not before the angels. The truths which they should learn are concerning the Lord, and the precepts according to which they should live.” Who is doing the covering? Is it the Lord or is the Lord showing Esau’s true intentions to mask, cover, or veil over evil with respectability? AC 4859 describes veiling as truth obscured while pretending to be from good. Doesn’t this sound like a shameful cover-up plot being exposed by the Lord? “…you stood on the other side -…”

Is there any difficulty perceiving what is being said here? Standing represents obedience to the Lord’s truth. It means getting a fix on a spiritual goal or objective. In this case, Edom (Esau) is fixed on opposite things. They want to be disobedient and contrary. “In the day that strangers carried captive his forces…foreigners entered his gates…”

To help us see what is at stake and involved in this prophecy, let’s consider these teachings regarding strangers, foreigners, gates, and forces.

Strangers are those within the church who do not acknowledge the Lord. (AC 10169 [4]) Strangers signify evils and falsities that will destroy a church. (AC 10287 [5]) “Concerning strangers, a law was delivered, that if they would receive peace and open their gates, they [strangers or foreigners] should be tributary and serve (Deut. xii.; I Kings ix. 21, 22).” (AC 1097 [2]) Gates signify the teachings that introduce a person to the truths of faith. (AC 2943) In a work titled The Athanasian Creed, paragraph number 97, we read the following about forces:

“There are three forces inherent in every thing spiritual; the active, which is the divine love, or living force; the creative forces which produces causes and effects from beginning to end through intermediates; and the formative forces which produce (many things) from the ultimate substances of nature.” In AC 6343, “‘forces’ signify the power of truth…” “…and cast lots for Jerusalem-even you were as one of them.” To cast lots signifies to disperse (scatter) the truths of the church using falsity. (AE 863) What made this even more heinous is the fact that they appeared to scatter truths as members of the family. The Lord warned us about the enemies of the household. “…you should not have gazed on the day of your brother in the day of his captivity…”

The RSV translation of this verse reads, “you should not have gloated over the day of your brother in the day of his captivity.”

The message of the spiritual sense is reasonably clear. Esau enjoyed seeing Jerusalem seduced by falsity. Edom enjoyed pointing to the mistakes of Jerusalem but failed to “apply himself, and study [to find ways] to bend minds.” (AC 1949 [2]) The bending of minds means finding ways to amend and return to the truth of the Lord. Instead, Edom enjoyed the seduction and captivity of his brother. “…the children of Judah and the day of their destruction…”

Judah represents the doctrine from the Word relating to the Lord’s celestial kingdom—the celestial of the church. (AR 350) More directly, Judah represents teachings that dealt with Divine Love. Why is this so significant? Where there is no will (love), there is no learning, retention, or application. Judah being carried off to destruction was a serious issue, and yet Esau mocked and did nothing to help. “…nor should you have spoken proudly…”

To speak signifies to both perceive and to will. (AC 2965) Pride signifies love of self. (AC 2220) Pride extinguishes and suffocates the light of heaven. (AC 2959) Pride glues falsities together. (AR 421) “Laying hands on” in the positive sense represents conveying blessings, inaugurations, such as when we anoint priests to consecrate the office or use.

Here, they laid hands on their substance. Substance represents things pertaining to the will. The will is the very substance of a person. (AC 808) Hence Esau had no interest in blessing or passing on power. He wished to rob them of their very “substance,” their will. “…you should not have stood at the crossroads to cut off [block]…them who escaped…”

We have no correspondences for crossroad. We do for “the way.” “Way” signifies a desire to make a change of state.It means to abstain from some attitude toward truth and good. (AC 2333) “Way” signifies some doctrine by which one may be instructed or led into a deeper understanding of truth. (AC 2231)

These teachings help us to see the gravity of Esau’s transgression. He offered discouragement when an escape plan came to mind, blocking the attempt with reasons why this or that doctrine would not work. “…nor should you have delivered up those among them that remained in the day of distress.”

Those who remained may easily be seen as the “remnant” or “remains.” When a church nears its end, the Lord always preserves a remnant upon which to establish the new church. Esau wanted or hoped that small core would fail as well. Because Esau was in the family, we can feel the betrayal. He must have helped the enemy look for every “brother” so as to eliminate the church.

Putting It All Together

Read the selection from P&P again. “…they will destroy the church still more, and that this is their delight.” Can we review our notes and see that clearly? All of our references highlight the hellish glee Edom (Esau) had in watching and participating in the demise of Jerusalem and Judah.
What is sobering is that we probably found ourselves thinking of personal examples of similar things happening to us. We all have had the experience of wanting to make amends, make a change, to improve. Before we get underway, a voice in our mind throws “cold water” on the intention. Past efforts to change are paraded before us. With glee the voice mocks and asks us, “Who are you trying to kid?” It reminds us many times of past failures. That voice stands in the crossroad of our intention, blocking our effort to make a change.

Look back and notice how many times the Lord told Edom, “You should not!” Can we hear hell saying, “That is just like the Lord. He always expressed things in the negative. Negative phrases cause the mind to dwell on obsessive themes and ultimately retard our freedom.”?

The Lord is saying “you should not” specifically to the hells and not to us. The Lord calls us to His presence. Take My yoke. My burden, He says, is light. The “you should not” is a phrase we need to use. We can say to hell, “You should not assume that you can take from me the power of regeneration.” All that we have and receive from the Lord is freedom. It is hell that brings us the blockage. Hell stands in the way with its pride and tries to remove from us the light of heaven. Hell’s pride is the thing that tries to glue all kinds of falsity together. Prayerfully, we need to say with the Lord to hell, “You should not…” because the Lord says so. That, with a loving heart, “should” send them off and out of our way.

Read and Review

Read the selection from P&P.

Read Obadiah 1:10-14.

Questions to Stimulate Reflection

The Introduction section of this study called your attention to the cruelty of feet, heart, tongue, eyes, and hands. Do you think that series (which we just looked at) might be helpful to remember what kind of delight Esau (Edom) had in the destruction of Jerusalem? How can knowledge of this delight help us?
Do you have any ways to push or fight off the boastful phrases hell uses to block or discourage us? Do you have a verse or series of verses that stand the test and trials of hell? If not, do you think any of what we just studied might become one of your verses?
Were you asked to memorize verses from the Word when you were in school? Have you ever found that you have something memorized simply because you have read or enjoyed it frequently? What purpose can be served by memorizing passages?

8.8 Obidiah1: 15-16

“For the day of the Lord upon all the nations is near; as you have done, it shall be done to you; your reprisal shall return upon your own head. For as you drank on My holy mountain, so shall the nations drink continually; yes, they shall drink, and swallow, and they shall be as though they had never been.”

Passages From the Writings

P&P “…that ruin will come over them in the day of judgment, vers. 15, 16…”

AC 10011 [3] “That by the ‘head;’ is meant the whole man, is…evident from many passages in the Word…” Obadiah 1:15 is cited as an example.

AR 706 “Since it is the consummation of the age, that is, the end of the church, when the Lord’s coming and the beginning of a new church take place, in many places therefore the end of the former church also is signified by the day of the Jehovah…” Obadiah 1:15 is cited among many other references.

Derived Doctrine

“All nations…”

The word “all” gives us an insight into the extent and thoroughness of the consummation of the age that will occur prior to the beginning of a new church. “…as you have done, it shall be done to you; your reprisal shall return upon your own head.” So there is no mistake thinking this is the Lord getting revenge or retaliation, let’s look at a passage in AC 8223 [3]: It frequently happens in the other life that when evil spirits wish to inflict evil on the good…the evil they intend to others returns upon themselves. At the time this appears as if it were revenge from the good; but it is not revenge, neither is it from the good, but from the evil…they who are in heavenly love ought not to have delight in retaliation or revenge, but in imparting benefits….” “For as you drank on My holy mountain…” To drink, in the good sense, means to investigate and inquire how a truth may be conjoined or appropriated into ones life. (AC 1071 and AC 3089) In the opposite sense, it represents to investigate and inquire how to abuse the truths of the Lord instead of conjoining and appropriating them to life. Esau and Edom in the good sense had drunk of these things on the mountain of the Lord. But with the passing of time, self-love entered the “drink” and added falsities. (AC 3322) “All the nations drink continually; yes, they shall drink, and swallow…” The RSV has the following wording: “all nations round about shall drink; they shall drink, and stagger…” How are the words “swallow” and “stagger” similar in meaning? The RSV has a footnote indicating the Hebrew word for “stagger” comes from their word for “swallow.” So we are left with a temporary dilemma because the Writings teach that to swallow, or devour, signifies the extermination of useful knowledges by those (knowledges) which are useless. See AC 5217 and 5258. “And they shall be as though they had never been.” Does this portion of the text give us a clue that “swallow and stagger” might be talking about the same thing? Could this be about the vastation process the church will go through prior to the birth of the New Church? Before a new church can be built, an emptying-out process must happen. Some false concepts in the church are swallowed “hook, line, and sinker.” Some ideas of the dead churches were staggering, and minds became quite unbalanced and “drunken.” This is an interesting point to ponder, but remember that it is a derived doctrine so we must remain open to the possibility that it is a wrong view of what the Lord meant by “swallow or staggering.” Putting It All Together

There is a happy summation coming to Obadiah’s prophecy. The Lord is rounding up His angels, and the great day of “right winning out over evil” is at hand. This theme comes back to us often. We need it. Otherwise the hells will try to convince us that we are alone. The Psalmist felt the mocking of hell: “…they continually say to me, ‘where is your God?’” (Psalm 42:3) Our answer? “Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save.” (Isaiah 59:1) “With God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26) Edom’s end is at hand.
What happens to Edom is not the result of anger and retaliation from the Lord. It is a return of the evil and falsity Edom planted. It brings meaning to the literal sense when it says that we shall reap what we sow. For us, there is time to sow a new crop that will yield “some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.” (Matthew 13:23)

Read and Review Read the selection from P&P.

Read Obadiah 1:15-16.

Questions to Stimulate Reflection

What “staggering” drinks or concepts of “faith” does the world offer us to swallow? What, in hindsight, would have been harmful in your life if you had swallowed it? Put another way, can you recall something you wanted (badly) but were not able to get – only to find out later that not getting your wish was a blessing in disguise?
We all have to go through varying degrees of vastations. Vastation is that great emptying out of concepts formed by self-intelligence and self-love. Do you think we ought to pray for that process to come about in our lives? Would it be best to let the Lord show us the right time to face vastation? What comes to mind is that parable about the enemy coming to sow seeds of darnel while the owner slept. The owner of the field told his workers to wait until harvest time. If they had pulled the tares out too soon, they probably would have pulled out the good with the bad. Good idea? On the other hand, procrastination seems to be a common weakness when it comes to doing painful things. I wonder what little push might get us started on the task of regeneration?
P&P reminds us that “ruin” will come to those who knowingly abuse the letter of the Word. It doesn’t sound like much fun, does it? Hold on because the next section promises better news. Those who love the Lord will not lose but gain back all that Edom took away. Do you find your heart and mind refreshed with another “good” winning out over the bad story? Why is this comforting? How do we feel about regaining something precious that was lost? Think of real life examples.
The words in Obadiah 1:15, “as you have done, it shall be done to you,” remind us of the Lord’s Prayer. What do you think of when you reflect on these words? Are we subject to being treated the way we treat others? What motivations are in play when we act on this principle in real-life situations?

8.9 Obidiah: 17-18

“But on Mount Zion there shall be deliverance, and there shall be holiness; the house of Jacob shall possess their possessions. The house of Jacob shall be a fire, and the house of Joseph a flame; but the house of Esau shall be stubble; they shall kindle them and devour them, and no survivor shall remain of the house of Esau,’ For the Lord has spoken.”

Passages From the Writings

P&P “…that a new church will arise, ver. 17, in place of the former church, which has been condemned, ver. 18…”

AE 448 [11] “In Obadiah (1: 17, 18) ‘Esau and his house’ mean those who believe themselves to be intelligent and wise not from the Lord but from self; for in he eighth verse of this chapter it is said ‘I will destroy the wise out of Edom, and the intelligent out of the mount of Esau,’ meaning those who from the letter of the Word have confirmed themselves in such things as favor their own loves. ‘The house of Jacob and the house of Joseph’ mean such as are in good of life according to truths of doctrine, ‘house of Jacob’ meaning those who are in good of life, and ‘house of Joseph’ those who are in truths of doctrine; ‘mount Zion,’ where there will be escape and holiness, signifies love to the Lord, by which is salvation and from which is Divine truth. ‘The house of Jacob shall be heir to the inheritances of the house and mountain of Esau,’ and ‘the house of Jacob shall be to him a fire, and the house of Joseph a flame,’ signifies that in place of those meant by ‘Esau’ there will be those who are in good of life according to truths of doctrine. In the spiritual world this so occurs, that those who have been in the pride of self intelligence, and have confirmed themselves from the Word in such things as favor the loves of self and the world, occupy certain tracts and mountains, and make for themselves a semblance of heaven, believing that heaven belongs to them more than to others; but when the time has been fulfilled they are cast out of their places, and those succeed to them who are in good of life according to the truths of doctrine from the Lord….this makes clear what is signified in the internal sense by ‘the house of Jacob shall be heir to their inheritances, and shall be a fire, and the house of Joseph a flame, and the house of Esau for stubble.”

AE 405 [26] “Since a ‘mountain’ signified the good of love, and in the highest sense, the Divine good, and from the Divine good Divine truth proceeds, so ‘Mount Zion’ was built up above Jerusalem, and in the Word ‘Mount Zion’ signifies the church that is in the good of love to the Lord….” Obadiah 1:16-17 are among the verses cited.

Derived Doctrine

“…on Mount Zion there shall be deliverance…”

AC 5899 uses these wonderful words to explain Lot’s “great escape”: “…the significance of ‘escape’ (is) deliverance from damnation, which deliverance is effected by means of remains, that is, by means of the goods and truths stored up with man by the Lord.” AE 433 [8] explains that Mount Zion signifies the advent of the Lord and the establishment of the church among those who love the Lord and among those who are in the good of love. “And there shall be holiness…” What qualities bring one into a state of holiness? A clean heart and mind. AR 666 gives us this standard of what makes holiness: believing the Lord is the Word, the truth, and the enlightenment. “The house of Jacob shall possess [inherit] their possessions [inheritance].” A person will miss the spiritual realities “…unless one knows what is meant by ‘the house of Jacob’, ‘the house of Joseph’ and ‘the house of Esau’…” (AC 4592 [11]) “…‘the house of Jehovah’ is frequently mentioned as signifying the church wherein love is the principal; the ‘house of Judah’ as signifying the celestial church; and the ‘house of Israel’ as signifying the spiritual church. As ‘house’ signifies the church, the mind of the man of the church (wherein are the things of the will and of the understanding, or of charity and faith)…” (AC 710) AC 5550, AC 8770, and AE 710 [3] teach that the “house of Jacob” represents the external of the church. “Everyone recognizes that here ‘the house of Jacob’ was not to mean the Jewish nation or people, for the Lord’s kingdom included not merely that people but all throughout the world who have faith in Him, and from faith have charity.” (AC 3305 [3]) The house of Joseph represents “the spiritual kingdom”; “the good of the church”; “the spiritual man.” (AC 3969 [11, 12, 13]) The “house of Joseph” represents the “celestial things of the spiritual.” (AC 6521, 6526, 6554) “Possess,” “inherit,” “possession,” and “inheritance” are correspondential indicators of the return to “the first love” of the church. The inheritance promised by the Lord was never withdrawn; the people of the church lost sight of it. So this prophecy announces that their spiritual paradise will be restored and reclaimed. How? The “house of Esau” will have no survivors. “For the Lord has spoken.” “…the house of Jacob shall be a fire…the house of Joseph a flame” “…a fire (in the good sense) signifies the good of love. (AC 2799, 2804) AR 48 tells us that a flame signifies spiritual love, which contains charity and love of the neighbor. AC 934 [2] tells us that a flame signifies the celestial spiritual. “…the house of Esau shall be stubble…” To properly understand this verse, we must recall what the doctrines taught us about Esau. The “house of Esau” represented those who were in the pride of self-intelligence. They had confirmed themselves in such things as favored their own loves. Such spiritual attitudes are now likened to stubble. “Evil is like fire (infernal fire is nothing but love of evil) and it consumes faith like stubble, reducing all that pertains to it to ashes.” (TCR 383) “…every worker of wickedness shall be stubble, and the oven shall set them on fire.” (AE 540 [3]) “The expression ‘like stubble’ is used because complete vastation, that is, devastation is meant.” (AC 8285) AC 7131 explains why the Egyptians forced the children of Israel “to gather stubble for straw.” Essentially, the Egyptians were forcing Israel to accommodate truth to fit memory-knowledge experiences. “They shall kindle them and devour them…” Note that the word “kindle” expresses the same meaning as “inflame” or “burn.” Look above at the quote from TCR 383 to capture the essence of this passage.

Putting It All Together

Let’s begin with the goal of understanding two terms: the good of life and the truth of doctrine. Please don’t turn away from these terms as “doctrinal talk.” Look at ways these terms can come alive. For instance, try reading “love of life” where you see the words “good of life.” Now we have “the love of life.” Every love we have follows us to eternity. When the angels greet us in the spiritual world, they inquire or seek to find out what we loved most. Was it a love for the Lord and the neighbor, or was it a love for self and the world? Our loves will have varying degrees of application. Celestial love holds the Lord in the highest esteem. Spiritual love holds the Word and its truths in high esteem as the means for us to regenerate. There is a natural love that is essential for us to live and work within the world of natural uses. All three have a unified or common purpose: Eternal life. We want to live in heaven with the Lord as our source of joy and loving our neighbors more than ourselves.
Let’s try some transposing on the “truth of doctrine,” too. Doctrine is best seen or viewed as “that which points the way.” If we plan to take a trip, we pull out a map and choose what route to take. If we have plenty of time, we pick a scenic way. If we are in a hurry, we pick the most direct way. Regardless, we need a map to find the way. The Lord’s doctrine is a directional help. We need the “truth of doctrine” to point out our way.
On the other hand, the “house of Esau” works to ignore the good of life. In its place, it offers the “good of self.” Me, myself, and I are the essentials in the “house of Esau.” Others are accepted if and when they serve egocentric purposes. The doctrine of “the house of Esau” studies ways to take advantage of the neighbor.

Stubble is the way the Word pictures this for us. Stubble is the part of the stalk that is now void of fruit and is highly flammable and dangerous. Self-love, highly volatile, sparks when it is ruffled, and thus we have a kindling and destroying fire.

The Lord in the midst of this “stubble” calls us to calmness. Esau will have no survivors. Esau will not remain a troublesome force. How do we know this? The closing words of these verses say it clearly: “For the Lord has spoken.”

Read and Review Read the selection from P&P.

Read Obadiah 1:17-18.

Questions to Stimulate Reflection

Did you make note of the “houses” of Jacob, Joseph, and Esau? Think about the quote from AC 4592 [11] and the issue of spiritual realities.
How did you do with the “good of life and truth of doctrine” exercise? Don’t become a literalist with doctrine. The Lord offers various ways to express “good and truth.” Good is called Love. Good is called Esse. Good is called Substance. Good is called the First. Good is called Heat. (How many more can you add to this list?)

Truth on the other hand is called Wisdom. Truth is called Existere. Truth is called Form. Truth is called Middle. Truth is called Light. (How many more can you add to this list?)

What present things in life would you identify as stubble? Have you ever experienced the volatile nature of self-love? Have you ever felt that rush to judgment and said things that were hurtful and vindictive? What is our protection against this?
For those who would like to think that hell is not eternal, how would they explain the words “no survivors shall remain”?
“For the Lord has spoken” certainly puts things in perspective. The Lord is in charge. Esau, with its bragging nature, is not in charge at its own demise. It is kind of sad in one way, but positive in another way. What feeling came first, the sad or the happy? This might be a good time to talk about the expression “fear of the Lord.” Talk about the two sides of this “fear” and how it differs from other fears. Also think about the phrase, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” (Psalm 111:10)

8.10 Obidiah 1:19-21

“The south shall posses the mountains of Esau, and the lowland shall possess Philistia. They shall possess the fields of Ephraim and the fields of Samaria. Benjamin shall possess Gilead. And the captives of this host of the children of Israel shall possess the land of the Canaanites as far as Zarephath. The captives of Jerusalem who are in Sepharad shall possess the cities of the south. Then saviors shall come to Mount Zion to judge the mountains of Esau, and the kingdom shall be the Lord’s.”

Passages From the Writings

P&P “…that the new church will have an understanding of the truth, and those who are in the church will be saved, vers. 19-21.”

AC 4592 [11] “In Obadiah (1:18, 19)…names signify things (and it) is very evident here, as in other places, for unless it is known what is signified by…the ‘Philistines,’ the ‘field of Ephraim,’ the ‘field of Samaria,’ ‘Benjamin,’ and Gilead,’ and moreover what by ‘them of the south,’ by a ‘house,’ a ‘plain,’ a ‘mountain,’ and a ‘field,’ nothing here can possibly be comprehended; nor were the things done that are here historically related. But the man who knows what each expression involves, will find heavenly arcana therein. Here also ‘Benjamin’ is the spiritual from the celestial.”

AC 1197 [4] Philistia “signifies…no love and no faith…” in things that are spiritual and celestial. Obadiah 1:19 is cited.

AC 4117 [3] “Because Gilead was a boundary, it signified in the spiritual sense the first good, which is that of the senses of the body; for it is the good or the pleasure of these into which the man who is being regenerated is first of all initiated. In this sense is ‘Gilead’ taken in the Prophets, as in….Obadiah 1:19….”

AC 9340 [9] “In Obadiah (1:19)…the setting up of the church is here treated of; but real things are unfolded in the names; ‘they of the South’ denote those who are in the light of truth…‘the mount of Esau’ denotes the good of love…‘the plain of the Philistines’ denotes the truth of faith; ‘a plain’ also denotes the doctrine of faith…’ ‘Ephraim’ denotes the intellectual of the church…‘Benjamin’ the spiritual celestial of the church…and ‘Gilead,’ the corresponding exterior good….”

AC 1458 [4] “…‘the south’ signifies a state of light…‘the south’…signifies the intelligence which is procured by means of knowledges. These knowledges are celestial and spiritual truths, which in heaven are so many radiations of light…. In Obadiah (1:20)…‘the cities of the south’ denote in like manner truths and goods; hence the very truths and goods of which they are heirs: the Lord’s kingdom is here treated of.”

Derived Doctrine Please note that we have our work cut out for us in this section. AC 4592 [11] says, “unless it is known what is signified by [all the names in these verses]…nothing can possibly be comprehended…the man who knows …will find heavenly arcana….”

The difficulty is that I can only find correspondences for some of the names, which prevents us from using derived doctrine to understand them. Here are the names for which I found no explanation:

The RSV translation gives us “Negeb shall possess Mount Esau.”; “those of the Shephelah the land of the Philistines…”; “the exiles in Halah who are the people of Israel; and “and the exiles of Jerusalem who are in Sepharad.” The NKJV presents us with “the south” instead of Negeb; “the lowland possessing Philistia instead of Shephelah possessing it; and “captives” instead of “Halah” who are the people of Israel. Add to these translation differences the fact that here are no correspondences for Negeb, Shephelah, and Halah in the Writings. We can make some derived doctrinal applications for Zarephath when we read why Elijah was sent to the widow of Zarephath. Question: What are we to do about this void of correspondential information? Will it take away our ability to comprehend these verses? Will we lack the heavenly arcana promised?

Answer: “Let’s roll.” We will do the best we can with what is given and pray for the enlightenment the Lord promises to sincere and active seekers.

“And the lowland shall possess Philistia…” AE 449 [5] explains that “lowland” signifies good and truth in the natural man. 8”Philistia” signifies those who are in a faith separated from charity. (DP 326) 8”Philistia” represents those who have false ideas and use these ideas to reason about spiritual things. (AC 705) To “possess” denotes purifying truths from falsity. (AE 710 [16]) “…the fields of Ephraim…“and “…the fields of Samaria…” “Fields” represent the church as to good. The field of a church represents receiving the seeds of good and truth. (AC 3766) TCR 247 shares with us the positive and negative meanings of Ephraim. In the good sense, Ephraim represents “the understanding of the Word, from which and according to which the church is…. the church is such as is the understanding of the Word in it; excellent and precious if the understanding is from genuine truths out of the Word, but destroyed, yea, filthy if from those that are falsified.” AC 2466 [4] explains that Samaria signifies the church (as to good) in the affection of truth. Think of the Samarian woman at the well and her conversation with the Lord. “Benjamin shall possess Gilead.” Recall that the word “possess” denotes purifying truths from falsity. Gilead represents the “first good,” “the senses of the body,” and the “first things initiated.” (AC 4117 [3]) Benjamin represents the “spiritual from the celestial.” Put another way, Benjamin is the truth one gets from the Lord (love). What a wonderful way for us to picture the Lord possessing the senses of the body, the first loves we had as a child. All of the things we were initiated into (remains) will be taken over by the Lord and made new and clean of falsities. “…the captives of the host of the children of Israel shall possess the land of the Canaanites…” AC 7950 explains that “captive” signifies a mind in darkness about good and truth. AE 175 [12] describes “captive” as signifying evils that possess. AE 811 [27] has yet another interesting description, noting that those who bar others from truth and good will themselves be captive to falsities. Isn’t that what Esau did to Israel? “Canaanite,” in AC 1444, signifies the evil heredity from the mother in the Lord’s external man. AC 1573-4 explains that Canaanites represent evils and falsities in the externals of the regenerating person. Once again, start with the word “possess” as denoting purifying truths from falsity. How does this help us focus on the meaning of possessing the land of the Canaanites? “As far as Zarephath.” I Kings 17:9-24 tell the story of the widow of Zarephath. The Lord directed Elijah to Zarephath, in particular to the home of a widow. We are taught that the “brook dried up because there had been no rain in the land.” A widow represents those who have good that is without truth. The widow represents those who desire truth, but for whom the “brook dried up.” AC 9198 [2] explains that this story illustrates how the Lord and Divine Truth were less “well received and loved in people’s hearts within the church than outside it….” Because He was born a human being, there was scarcely any acknowledgment of Him as God in the people’s hearts, and they believed His Humanity to be like their own. Can we not see why “possession” had to go as far as Zarephath? The Lord’s possession (purifying) of such spiritual apathy must go as far as it needs to correct the problem. Otherwise, a new church cannot come to fruition. “The captives of Jerusalem…shall possess the cities of the south.” AC 1458 describes the “south” as meaning a movement into a clear state of the interiors that comes about when goods and truths give a greater light. “Then saviors shall come to Mount Zion to judge the mountains of Esau…” It is a curious thing that the plural, “saviors,” is used here. In most cases, we would expect Savior. Could this plural term refer to the trine of Love, Wisdom, and Use? DLW 230 states, “For love and wisdom without use have no boundary or end, that is, they have no home of their own…” If the saviors are to judge the mountains of Esau, it makes sense that these three would be present. Esau was full of self-intelligence and a life of self-service. Listen to this quote from AC 503: “The life of love…[is a life in the performance of uses] from use, by use, and according to use…there can be no life in what is useless, for whatever is useless is cast away.” So we can picture the perceptive “saviors” present at mount Esau, judging the merits of Esau’s love, wisdom, and use (or the absence thereof). “And the kingdom shall be the Lord’s.” One almost wants to say “Amen” following these words. Do we really need derived doctrine for this portion of our study? Not really. Our hearts feel the rightness and necessity of such a truth being stated before the forces of Esau. Putting It All Together

“The new church will have an understanding of the truth, and those who are in the church will be saved.” (P&P)
We often agonize over the size of our denomination. We equate size with rightness. The fact that other churches seem to be growing faster than the New Church bothers us. What really “hurts” is that some “doomsday cult” has a larger group of followers willing to gather on top of a mountain waiting for the final judgment day. How can such nonsense attract so many devoted (fanatical) followers in such a short time? We look at the Jones massacre in Guyana and the Waco Cult in Texas, and we wonder where we are missing the boat. How can anyone really believe what they say is the matrix of their doctrinal beliefs?
In matters of doctrine, we can’t seem to agree on much between ourselves and other New Church organizations and offer a hand of cordiality to them. Is there a sense of despair as we think of these things? I hope so. Let us use our knowledge of our church to focus on the Lord’s promise of resolution. He says that He will “possess” and purify truths from falsities. He will return to our “Gilead” state and possess the “first goods” and the senses of the body and will pull forth remains of innocence.

He will visit the “lowlands” to bring good and truth to the natural man. Next, He will possess and make the fields of the church productive again. The field of Ephraim will once again have an understanding of the Word; the fields of Samaria will have a thirst for the good of truth.

Self-interests will lose their appeal and haughtiness. Uses that are idle will be judged and removed. The Lord’s people will be “from use, by use, and according to use.” The “new church” will have an understanding of the truth and will be saved. The kingdom will be the Lord’s.

Read and Review

Read the selection from P&P.

Read Obadiah 1:19-21.

Questions to Stimulate Reflection

How much could we fill in the void of correspondences we had for names and places mentioned in the verses? Were we able to open some of the arcana in these verses? Did you feel a confidence building as we pushed on? What did you learn?
The stubble of Esau is still an issue we have to face every day. Television and magazine commercials tell us what we need. They tell us what the good life is, and they boldly tell us that “it doesn’t get any better than this.” Really? How can we take all of this with a degree of good humor and yet not buy into the “stubble” of it all?
To what degree should we become cautious of a “church family” member’s view of doctrines if it sounds like “doctrinal heresy”? What is the best or most charitable way to resist falsity? What is the best way to confirm whether it is indeed false?
How do we look for our “saviors”—LOVE, WISDOM AND USE—and try as hard as possible to keep them as our unified trine? Idleness will not endure. At the mountains of Esau, the judgment of the Lord’s saviors will perceptively sort it out. Do we wait for Providence to do this?
What is your feeling about this derived doctrinal view of the mountains of Esau?

8.11 Epilogue

A Summary of the Book of Obadiah

The following summary draws and expands on the outline given in Summary Exposition of the Prophets and Psalms.

Those who are in a state of self-intelligence will pervert the Word. We need to be watchful and ready to combat such overt perversion. How will we know the intent of those perverting the Word? It will become known in the attitude they express. They will imagine themselves more intelligent then the rest, including the Lord.

The followers of Esau will cleverly defend the falsities they love with the light of the natural world. Some “apparent” truths will be used illustratively with human prudence as proof. But such natural lumen will pale in the heavenly light of the Lord and with Esau’s spiritual demise, all attending falsities will dissipate, too.

Even though the Word warns of their end, Edom remains haughty and conceited. With delight, those in an Esau or Edom state will point out the deficiencies of the literal sense. Their conceit works hard to do damage to the church. For those who are in self-intelligence, there is a glee or delight in their subterfuge. Harm will slip in among those who are not alert to their falsity.

Evil might rule for a time, but the Lord will rule in the end. A new church will arise. This church will have an understanding of truth. It will love truth for truth’s sake. Those within this church will be saved.

“And the kingdom shall be the Lord’s.” (Obadiah 1:21)

9. Final Assessesment

9.1 Reading

A book about Us pages 59-73

9.2 Assignment

Respond to one of the following, your response should be a minimum of 1500 words…

In this course you have been encouraged to think of the Word as a unified whole and have been exposed to a couple of models as ways of framing its contents to support this.Say how this way of framing the Biblical text has impacted on your sense of Scripture as a whole.Do you think that such frameworks are able to assist people to connect with the text better or not, why?
Compare and contrast how higher criticism uses features of the Biblical text to support its view that the Bible is of a purely human origin with how the Heavenly Doctrines handles these same features as reflective of the divine style itself.

3.Discuss in w hat ways your work through the material of this course has impacted on your sense of the Biblical text.Say something about your sense of the meaning behind the statement that the Lord is the Word/the Word is the Lord?What has changed for you in this regard as you look back over this course?

Take a parable from the Gospels and drawing on your knowledge of correspondences and experience of inner spiritual processes write a short talk that brings out its main themes, spiritual meanings and applications.