Summaries of the Books of the Bible

The Law

Genesis

The book of beginnings. It falls into two very uneven halves. The first eleven chapters cover the whole world in broad strokes. God makes heaven and earth. A man and a woman disobey in a garden and are sent out of it. Cain kills his brother Abel. People live for centuries. A flood drowns the world, and one family survives it in a boat. Then people build a tower at Babel, and God scatters them and confuses their speech. These chapters explain how things came to be as they are: why work is hard, why birth hurts, why we speak different languages, why we die. From chapter twelve the scale narrows sharply. The rest of the book follows one family through four generations. God calls Abraham out of Mesopotamia and promises him land, children and blessing. That promise is the thread the whole book hangs on. It is repeated, put at risk, and never quite kept inside the book itself. Abraham and Sarah have no child into old age. A son is promised, and Sarah laughs. He is born, and later God asks for him back on a mountain, then stops the knife. Isaac is a quiet man between two loud ones. His son Jacob is a cheat. He buys his brother\’s birthright for a bowl of stew and steals his blessing with a disguise. Then he is cheated himself, and marries the wrong sister, and works fourteen years for the one he wanted. One night he wrestles a stranger by a river and is given a new name, Israel. His twelve sons become the twelve tribes. The last quarter is one long story. Joseph is his father\’s favorite, and his brothers hate him for it. They sell him into Egypt. He is jailed on a false charge, and then made governor of the country because he can explain Pharaoh\’s dreams about a coming famine. When the famine drives his brothers to Egypt for grain, he tests them hard before he tells them who he is. The family settles there. Genesis ends with Jacob blessing his sons, and with Joseph dying rich and asking that his bones be carried home one day. No book is expanded more often by the writings in this volume. The two books of Adam and Eve pick up the garden story where Genesis drops it. Genesis gives Enoch four verses — a man who walked with God and was taken — and the Book of Enoch, printed here in full, is built on them. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs give each of Jacob\’s sons the deathbed speech Genesis fits into a single chapter.

Exodus

Israel has grown large in Egypt, and is now enslaved. A new king orders newborn boys killed. One is hidden, floated down the river in a basket, and raised in the palace. That is Moses. As a grown man he kills an Egyptian overseer and runs to the desert. Forty years later God speaks to him from a bush that burns and is not burned up, and sends him back. Moses argues, on five separate grounds, and loses. He returns with his brother Aaron and demands that Israel be let go. Pharaoh refuses and doubles the work. Ten plagues follow: water turned to blood, frogs, gnats, flies, dead livestock, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the death of every firstborn son. Houses with blood on the doorposts are passed over. Israel leaves in a hurry, is chased, and crosses a sea that opens in front of them and closes behind. Moses and his sister Miriam sing about it. The desert section is short, and sets a pattern. The people complain. Bitter water is made sweet. Bread appears on the ground each morning, with a double batch before the sabbath. Water comes out of a rock. A battle is won while Moses\’ arms are held up by two men. His father-in-law visits and tells him to stop judging every case himself and appoint deputies. At Sinai the book changes completely. It stops being a rescue story and becomes a covenant. The mountain smokes. God speaks the Ten Commandments aloud, and the people are so frightened they ask Moses to listen for them. Then comes case law: rules about slaves, injuries, damage, theft, lending, and festivals. Then long, exact plans for a tent to worship in — the ark, the table, the lampstand, the curtains, the altar, the priests\’ clothes. The building is interrupted. While Moses is on the mountain, Aaron makes a golden calf, and the people worship it. The covenant is broken almost as soon as it is made. Moses smashes the stone tablets. Three thousand die. Then he pleads for the people, asks to see God\’s glory, and is shown as much as he can survive. New tablets are cut. The tent is built exactly as described. The book ends with God\’s glory filling it so thickly that even Moses cannot go in. The Letter of Aristeas, printed here, tells how these five books first left Hebrew. It is part record and part legend: seventy-two translators brought to Alexandria to put the Law into Greek.

Leviticus

A handbook for worship, written mostly for priests. It is the book readers give up on first. Its logic is simple, though. A holy God has come to live in the middle of an unholy people, and that has to be managed carefully. The first section sets out five offerings and how each is done. The burnt offering is burned whole. There is a grain offering, and a peace offering that is shared as a meal. The sin offering covers wrongs done by accident. The guilt offering requires paying back what was taken, plus a fifth. Then Aaron and his sons are made priests over seven days. On the eighth day two of them offer fire they were not told to offer, and die for it, and their father is told not to mourn in public. The middle of the book sorts things into clean and unclean. This is not about hygiene or about sin. It is about what may come near the holy place. The rules cover which animals may be eaten, childbirth, skin disease, mildew in cloth and in the walls of a house, and bodily discharges. In every case there is a way back in. Priests act as inspectors: they look, they wait, they look again. At the center is the Day of Atonement. Once a year the high priest goes into the innermost room. The holy place itself is cleaned. One goat is killed. Over a second goat the priest confesses the sins of the nation, and it is driven out into the desert carrying them. The last third pushes holiness out of the sanctuary and into daily life. The reason given is that the people are to be holy because God is. The rules are practical. Use honest weights. Pay a worker the same day. Do not curse a deaf man or trip a blind one. Leave the edges of your field unharvested so the poor and the foreigner can eat. Love your neighbor as yourself. Every seventh year the land rests. Every fiftieth year debts are cancelled and land goes back to the family that lost it. The book ends with blessings for obedience and a much longer list of curses. The whole sacrificial system is argued against directly in the Epistle of Barnabas, printed here. That letter reads every offering and fast as a picture of something else, and says Israel took it literally by mistake.

Numbers

Two head counts frame a generation that does not survive the book. Israel is counted at Sinai and organized into a marching camp, with the tent of worship in the middle and three tribes on each side. The Levites are given their jobs. The people are sent off with a blessing. The complaints start almost at once. First about hardship. Then about the food: they are sick of the bread from heaven and remember the fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions and garlic they ate in Egypt. Moses tells God he cannot carry these people alone, and seventy elders are given a share of his spirit. His own brother and sister challenge him, and Miriam is struck with a skin disease for a week. Then comes the turning point. Twelve scouts go into the land for forty days and come back with enormous fruit and a frightening report. Ten of them say it cannot be done. Two disagree. The people decide to pick a new leader and go back to Egypt. That refusal costs them forty years, one for each day the scouts were gone, and every adult of that generation dies in the desert. The middle of the book is rebellion and its cost. Korah and two hundred and fifty men challenge the priesthood, and the ground opens under them. The people blame Moses for the deaths, and a plague follows. Aaron\’s staff sprouts overnight to settle who is chosen. Moses loses his own place in the land by striking a rock he was told to speak to. Snakes come among the people, and a bronze snake is put on a pole for the bitten to look at. The strangest part belongs to Balaam. He is a foreign fortune teller hired by the king of Moab to curse Israel. His donkey sees the angel in the road when he does not, and then speaks to him about it. When he finally opens his mouth to curse, he blesses instead, four times. Laws are mixed in throughout: on vows, on daughters who inherit when there is no son, on cities where a killer can flee for safety, and on the offerings for each festival. The book ends with a second head count of the new generation, the choosing of Joshua, and two and a half tribes settling east of the river on condition that they cross over and fight first.

Deuteronomy

The last speeches of Moses, given on the plains of Moab. His audience were children when the covenant was made. They are about to cross into the land, and he is not going with them. The first speech goes back over the desert years. It starts with the refusal at Kadesh that cost the last generation everything, and it insists that this audience saw it and is answerable for it. The second speech is the longest, and gives the law again — which is what the book\’s name means. The Ten Commandments are repeated, with one change: the sabbath is tied to the escape from Egypt rather than to creation. Then the rules are applied to a settled farming life the desert generation never knew. There is law here about one place of worship, about telling a true prophet from a false one, about kings who must not pile up horses or wives or silver, about courts and witnesses, about war, about cancelling debts every seventh year, about gleaning and wages, about a runaway slave who must not be handed back, and about widows, orphans and foreigners. The reason given for that last group is that the people were foreigners once themselves. At the center is the command to love God with all your heart, soul and strength, and to teach it to your children all the time — at home, on the road, at bedtime, in the morning. Israel came to say these words daily. Much of the book weighs the cost of loyalty against the cost of turning away. It sets this out as blessings and curses, and the curses run three times longer: siege, hunger, exile, and a people scattered among nations where they find no rest. The choice is put as plainly as it can be — life or death, set in front of them that day. The book closes with Joshua appointed, a long poem, a blessing on each tribe, and Moses climbing Mount Nebo to look at the land. He dies there. He is buried in a valley, and no one knows the grave. The shape of this book — a leader\’s last speech, turning a life into advice for those who outlive him — is the shape the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs take up twelve times over.

The Historical Books

Joshua

The taking and dividing of Canaan, in two halves that read very differently. The first twelve chapters are campaign. Joshua is told, over and over, to be strong and brave. Two scouts go to Jericho and are hidden by Rahab, a prostitute who has heard what happened at the sea and asks that her family be spared. The people cross the Jordan on dry ground while the priests stand in the riverbed holding the ark. Twelve stones are taken out of the river and set up, so that children will ask what they mean. Jericho falls after six days of silent marching and a seventh with trumpets and a shout. Then Ai is lost. The defeat is traced to one man who took silver, gold and a coat from what was supposed to be destroyed. Once that is dealt with, Ai is taken by an ambush. The Gibeonites hear what is coming and trick Israel into a treaty by arriving in worn-out clothes with moldy bread, claiming to be from far away. When the trick comes out, the treaty is kept anyway. Five southern kings attack them, and are beaten in one long day. A northern alliance falls next. A list of thirty-one defeated kings closes the fighting. The second half is not war but paperwork, and much of it is lists. The land is divided tribe by tribe, with boundaries traced from landmark to landmark. Caleb, one of the two scouts who trusted God forty-five years earlier, claims the hill country he was promised. The daughters of Zelophehad claim their share. Six towns are set aside as places of refuge for anyone who kills by accident. Forty-eight towns go to the Levites, who get no territory of their own. The eastern tribes go home and build an altar by the river, which nearly starts a civil war until they explain that it is a memorial and not a rival place of worship. Joshua ends with two farewell meetings. The old leader admits that much of the land is still not taken. He warns that marriage into the local peoples and their gods will undo everything. He tells the people to choose whom they will serve. They promise loyalty. He tells them they cannot keep that promise. They make it again. He dies at a hundred and ten, and Joseph’s bones, carried all the way from Egypt, are finally buried.

Judges

One cycle, repeated until it wears out. The book covers the years between the conquest and the first king. The pattern is stated at the start and then run six times. Joshua’s generation dies. Israel worships the gods of the land. A neighboring people oppresses them. They cry out. God raises up a judge — a military leader, not a courtroom judge — who rescues them. The land is quiet until that judge dies. Then it starts again. What makes this more than repetition is that each turn is worse, and the rescuers get worse along with the people. Othniel takes four verses and has no faults. Ehud is left-handed, hides a short sword where nobody checks, and kills a Moabite king alone in his room. Deborah is a prophet who judges under a palm tree; she summons Barak, who refuses to go without her, so the victory goes to a woman, and the killing blow is struck by another woman with a tent peg. Gideon threshes wheat in a winepress because he is afraid, tests God twice with a fleece, wins with three hundred men and trumpets and torches hidden in jars, turns down the crown in words, and then makes a gold object the nation worships. His son Abimelech murders seventy brothers to make himself king, and dies when a woman drops a millstone on his head. Jephthah is the son of a prostitute, thrown out and then called back to lead, who promises to sacrifice whatever comes out of his house to meet him. It is his daughter. Samson is last and least disciplined. He kills a lion with his hands, sets a riddle at his own wedding, burns the Philistines’ fields using foxes and torches, and tells Delilah the secret of his strength on her fourth try. Blinded and set to grinding grain, he pulls a temple down on himself and three thousand others. The last five chapters have no judge at all. A man sets up a private shrine and hires a wandering Levite as his own priest, and the tribe of Dan steals both. Then a Levite’s concubine is raped to death at Gibeah. He cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends them through Israel. The civil war that follows nearly wipes out one tribe, and the survivors are supplied with wives by two methods as bad as the crime. The line repeated through these chapters is the book’s verdict: there was no king in Israel, and everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

Ruth

A short story in four scenes, set in the time of the judges. It is placed against that book on purpose: same period, same lawlessness in the background, and ordinary people behaving well. Famine drives an Israelite family from Bethlehem to Moab, which was enemy country. The father dies there. The two sons marry Moabite women, and within ten years both sons die too. Naomi is left with two foreign daughters-in-law, no husband, no sons, and no way to live. She hears the famine has ended and starts home, telling both women to go back to their mothers and marry again. Orpah does. Ruth refuses, in the speech the book is known for, and ties herself to Naomi’s people, Naomi’s God and Naomi’s grave. They reach Bethlehem with nothing, at the start of the barley harvest. Naomi tells the women of the town to stop calling her by her name, which means pleasant, and call her bitter instead. Ruth goes out to glean. Gleaning was the legal right of the poor to take whatever the harvesters dropped. She works, as the narrator carefully points out, in a field that happens to belong to Boaz, a relative of her dead father-in-law. He notices her, finds out who she is, and quietly tells his workers to let her work safely and to drop extra grain for her. Naomi sees an opportunity. She tells Ruth to wash, dress, and go to the threshing floor at night, after Boaz has eaten and drunk. Ruth uncovers his feet and lies down. When he wakes, she asks him to spread his cloak over her as a redeemer — a relative who buys back family land and takes on the widow with it. He agrees, but says a nearer relative has first claim. The last chapter is a legal scene at the town gate, in front of ten elders. The nearer relative is happy to buy the field until he hears that Ruth comes with it, and that any son would carry the dead man’s name rather than his own. He backs out and hands over his sandal to seal it. Boaz takes the duty on. The book ends with a baby, the women of the town naming him, and a line told to Naomi: her daughter-in-law is worth more to her than seven sons. A short family list runs from Boaz to David. That is what turns a quiet story about gleaning rights into national history, and puts a Moabite woman in the royal line.

1 Samuel

The move from judges to kings, told through three lives that overlap and push each other aside. It opens with Hannah, who has no children and is taunted for it. She prays at the shrine at Shiloh so hard that the priest Eli thinks she is drunk. Her son Samuel is handed over to the shrine as she promised. He grows up there while Eli’s sons steal from the offerings and sleep with the women who serve at the door. God calls Samuel by name in the night, and his first message is against the household that raised him. Later the ark is carried into battle like a good luck charm and captured. Eli’s sons are killed. Eli falls backward and dies when he hears. The ark causes so much trouble among the Philistines that they send it back on a cart. Israel then asks for a king, so as to be like everyone else. Samuel takes it personally and is told it is not about him. He warns them exactly what a king will do: take their sons for his army, their daughters for his kitchens, the best of their fields, and a tenth of everything — and one day they will cry out and get no answer. They say they want one anyway. Saul is a tall young man out looking for lost donkeys. He is anointed privately, chosen publicly by lot while hiding among the baggage, and proves himself by rescuing a besieged town. Then his reign comes apart in two scenes. He offers a sacrifice himself instead of waiting for Samuel. Later he spares an enemy king and the best of the livestock after being told to destroy everything, and explains that the animals were meant for sacrifice. Samuel tells him obedience matters more than sacrifice, says the kingdom is taken from him, and never sees him again. David, the youngest of eight brothers, is anointed in secret while Saul is still on the throne. He joins the court as a musician who can calm the king’s black moods. Then he kills the Philistine champion Goliath with a sling, after trying on armor that does not fit and taking it off again. He becomes a commander. The women sing that Saul has killed thousands and David tens of thousands, and from that moment Saul watches him. The last third is a long chase through the wilderness. Jonathan, Saul’s own son, stays loyal to David against his own interest. Twice David finds Saul helpless — once in a cave, once asleep in camp — and twice refuses to kill him, taking a piece of his robe and his spear to prove he could have. David survives by pretending to be mad in a foreign court and by taking service with a Philistine king. The book ends with Saul, getting no answer from God, visiting a medium at night and being told he will die tomorrow. He dies on Mount Gilboa with three of his sons, falling on his own sword.

2 Samuel

The reign of David, and the book least willing to flatter him. It opens with a man bringing news of Saul’s death and claiming to have finished him off, expecting a reward. David has him executed, and writes a lament for Saul and Jonathan. He is made king over Judah at Hebron. Seven years of civil war follow before the northern tribes accept him. He captures the fortress of Jerusalem, which belonged to neither side, and makes it his capital. He brings the ark there — on the second try, after a man is struck dead for steadying it on a cart — dancing in front of it in a way his wife Michal despises. When he offers to build a temple, he is turned down and given something else instead: a promise that his house will last. That promise is the one the rest of the Old Testament keeps coming back to. The hinge of the book comes in the spring, when kings go out to war and David stays home. He sees Bathsheba bathing and sends for her. When she is pregnant, he calls her husband Uriah back from the front and tries three times to get him to sleep at home. Uriah refuses while the army is in the field. So David sends him back carrying the order for his own death. The prophet Nathan tells David a story about a rich man who took a poor man’s only lamb, lets him pass sentence on himself, and then says the sword will never leave his house. Everything after that reads like the sentence being carried out. The child dies. Amnon rapes his half-sister Tamar. Two years later her brother Absalom murders Amnon and runs. Brought back, Absalom spends four years standing at the city gate telling everyone with a complaint that no one will hear them, and then raises a revolt that drives his father barefoot and weeping out of Jerusalem. The war ends with Absalom caught by his head in a tree and killed against the king’s direct orders. David’s grief is so public that his commander tells him he is shaming the men who saved his life. A second revolt follows. Then a famine. Then a plague, after David orders a census he was told not to take. It stops at a threshing floor he buys at full price, refusing to offer God something that cost him nothing. That floor becomes the temple site. The last chapters gather two psalms and a list of David’s warriors and what each of them did. Psalm 151, printed here among the wider apocrypha, is David’s own short account of being the youngest son, taken from the sheep and anointed, and cutting off the giant’s head with the giant’s own sword.

1 Kings

Solomon, and the split that follows him. David is old and cannot keep warm. His son Adonijah declares himself king, and Nathan and Bathsheba move fast to get Solomon crowned instead. David’s deathbed instructions are half religious advice and half a list of old scores. Solomon settles them. Asked in a dream what he wants, Solomon asks for a listening heart to govern with, rather than long life or money, and gets the rest as well. He proves it in the case of two prostitutes claiming one baby. He proposes cutting the child in half and watches which woman flinches. Most of his reign is building. The temple takes seven years, and is described down to its cedar, its gold, its two bronze pillars and a huge basin resting on twelve oxen. He dedicates it with a long prayer, asking that God listen when people pray toward this house — including foreigners who come because they have heard of him. His own palace takes thirteen years. His wealth becomes a byword: a fleet, imported horses, an ivory throne, and a state visit from the queen of Sheba, who arrives with hard questions and leaves with nothing to say. The account undercuts him as it goes. The building is done with forced labor. The seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines are political deals, and shrines are built for their gods on the hill facing Jerusalem. When he dies, the northern tribes ask his son Rehoboam to lighten the load. Rehoboam takes advice from the men he grew up with instead of his father’s counselors, promises to make it heavier, and ten tribes walk out. Their new king, Jeroboam, sets up golden calves at Bethel and Dan so his people need not travel to Jerusalem. From there the book runs two kingdoms side by side, judging every king by whether he kept worship clean, and pointing readers to fuller records elsewhere. The second half belongs to Elijah. He appears with no introduction to announce a drought, is fed by ravens and then by a widow whose flour and oil never run out, and raises her son. On Mount Carmel he faces the prophets of Baal, proposes two bulls and no fire, and spends an afternoon mocking them while they shout and cut themselves. Then he soaks his own altar and it burns. Right after this triumph, threatened by Jezebel, he collapses under a bush and asks to die. He is fed, and sent to a mountain, and learns that God is not in the wind, the earthquake or the fire, but in a low whisper. The book ends with Ahab taking Naboth’s vineyard through a judicial murder arranged by his wife, and dying in battle in disguise, hit by an arrow fired at random. Solomon’s name was the natural one for later writers to borrow. Three works in this volume are credited to him — the Wisdom of Solomon, the Psalms of Solomon and the Odes of Solomon — and none is his.

2 Kings

The fall of both kingdoms, told without much hope of another ending. Elijah is taken up in a whirlwind, with chariots and horses of fire. Elisha, who asked for a double share of his spirit, picks up the fallen cloak and strikes the river with it. His miracles are more domestic than his master’s: a widow’s single jar of oil fills every container she can borrow, so she can pay a debt and keep her sons out of slavery; a son is promised to a kind woman at Shunem and later brought back from the dead; poison is drawn out of a shared pot; a hundred men are fed from twenty loaves; a borrowed axe head floats. Naaman, a Syrian commander with a skin disease, is insulted at being told to wash seven times in a muddy river and has to be talked into it by his own servants. Elisha’s servant Gehazi takes a payment behind his back, and takes the disease with it. In the north, dynasties rise and fall with growing violence. Jehu drives his chariot like a madman, wipes out Ahab’s family, and traps the priests of Baal in their own temple. Every king is weighed and found wanting. Assyria finally takes Samaria after a three-year siege, deports the people, and settles foreigners in their place. Here the story stops and explains, at length, exactly why it happened. Judah lasts about another century and a half, and produces two reformers. Hezekiah survives an Assyrian siege in which an enemy officer stands outside the wall and taunts the defenders in their own language. He takes the threatening letter into the temple and spreads it out. Josiah is crowned at eight. During temple repairs a book of the law is found; he tears his clothes when it is read to him, then destroys the shrines, burns the equipment of Baal, and keeps a Passover unlike any since the judges. Neither reform outlives its king, and both are followed by sons who undo them. Babylon comes in three waves. First the leadership is deported, then more, then the temple and palace are burned and the bronze pillars broken up for transport, with an inventory of what was carried off. A governor left behind is assassinated, and the last of the people run to Egypt. The book ends quietly and strangely. A captive king, thirty-seven years into his imprisonment, is let out and given a seat at the Babylonian table for the rest of his life. The Story of Ahikar, printed here, belongs to this Assyrian world, set at the court of Sennacherib and the king who followed him.

1 Chronicles

The same history told again, for the people who came back from exile, and told for a different reason. It opens with nine chapters of family lists, running from Adam through the tribes down to the returned community. That is dry reading now. It was the whole point then, for families who had to prove a claim to land, to a place in a tribe, or to the priesthood. Judah and Levi get the most space, which shows what the book cares about: the royal line and the temple staff. The story proper deals with Saul in one chapter and moves straight to David, who fills the rest. What is put in is deliberate: the crowning at Hebron, the capture of Jerusalem, lists of his warriors and of the men who came over to him, the bringing of the ark — with the failed first attempt explained as a failure to follow the right procedure, and the second done properly by Levites carrying it on their shoulders — the song sung that day, the promise about his house, the wars, and the census and the threshing floor. What is left out is just as deliberate. The seven years of civil war, Michal’s contempt, Bathsheba, Uriah, Amnon and Tamar, Absalom’s revolt and the fight over the succession are all simply gone. This is not exactly a cover-up. It is a different subject. The book is not asking what sort of man David was. It is asking how the worship of the returned community came to be organized as it is. So in place of the missing material come long chapters listing the temple staff: twenty-four groups of priests, Levites assigned to music with their instruments named, gatekeepers given their gates by lot, treasurers, officials and judges, army divisions rotating month by month, and stewards of the royal herds, vineyards and olive groves. The last section has David collecting gold, silver, bronze, iron, cedar and cut stone in huge quantity, handing Solomon the plans for everything down to the weight of individual dishes, charging him in public, and leading the assembly in thanks for what has been given. He dies old and satisfied, and the temple he is not allowed to build is completely prepared.

2 Chronicles

The story runs from Solomon to the exile, still watched from inside the temple. Solomon’s reign is given over almost entirely to the building, the furnishing and the dedication of the house. The site is identified with the mountain where Abraham was tested and with David’s threshing floor. The dedication ends with fire falling and the glory filling the building so that the priests cannot go in. The queen of Sheba visits. The wealth is counted. The foreign wives and their shrines are not mentioned at all. After the kingdom splits, the northern tribes almost vanish from view. This book follows Judah alone, and measures each king by how he treated worship. The result is reported at once, and visibly — victory or defeat, building or ruin, health or disease. The pattern is so consistent that it becomes the book’s argument. Kings who seek God do well. Kings who abandon him are handed over, and are usually warned first by a prophet nobody listens to. That focus leaves room for a good deal the books of Kings skip. Asa removes his own grandmother from her position for making an obscene image, and later jails the prophet who criticized his foreign alliance. Jehoshaphat sends officials around the towns with the law book to teach it, appoints judges with a speech about bribes and impartiality, and meets an invasion by fasting, praying, and sending the singers out in front of the army. Uzziah is struck with disease for going into the sanctuary to burn incense himself. Hezekiah reopens the temple doors his father had shut, and holds a great Passover a month late so people have time to get clean and travel. And Manasseh — the worst king Judah had — is taken to Babylon with a hook in his nose and bronze shackles on his legs, humbles himself there, prays, and is brought home. The earlier account does not tell that story at all. The end comes fast. Josiah dies at Megiddo after ignoring a warning from a foreign king. After him the messengers are mocked until there is no remedy. The temple is burned, the walls pulled down, the survivors deported. The land keeps the sabbath years it was denied, for seventy years. Then the book ends not with the exile but with the decree of Cyrus, and an invitation to go home. The Prayer of Manasseh, printed here among the wider apocrypha, is the prayer this book says he prayed and does not give.

Ezra

The return from Babylon and the rebuilding of the temple, in two movements about sixty years apart. The book says nothing about the gap. It also switches language partway through: the letters to and from the Persian court are kept in Aramaic. In the first movement Cyrus issues a decree letting the exiles go home and rebuild, and returns the temple vessels Nebuchadnezzar took, counted out item by item. A large group goes up under Zerubbabel and the priest Jeshua. A full chapter lists who came back — by family, by town, with the singers, gatekeepers and temple servants, and a note about three priestly families who could not produce their family records and were kept out until a ruling could be made. That was the live question, which is why the list is there. They rebuild the altar first and start sacrificing before any foundation is laid, keeping the festivals while afraid of the people around them. When the foundation goes down, the priests blow trumpets and the people shout — but the old men who saw the first temple weep out loud, and from a distance nobody can tell the two sounds apart. Opposition follows. It comes first as an offer of help, which is refused, and then as obstruction. Officials write to the Persian king, the archives are searched, the city’s history of rebellion is quoted, and the work is stopped by force for years. It starts again under the preaching of Haggai and Zechariah. A fresh search of the archives turns up Cyrus’s original decree in a fortress at Ecbatana, and the second temple is finished and dedicated. In the second movement Ezra, a priest and a scholar of the law, comes up from Babylon with another group and a letter of wide royal authority, carrying a large sum of money. He calls a fast at a river rather than ask the king for soldiers, because he had told the king that God protects those who seek him and is ashamed to go back on it. When he arrives he is told that the returned community, including priests and leaders, has married into the surrounding peoples. He tears his clothes, pulls out his hair, and sits stunned until the evening offering. Then he prays a confession that never once says they. The book ends in the painful business of separation, conducted in the rain, with a list of the men involved, and no comfortable resolution. 1 Esdras, printed here, retells this same period in Greek in a different order. It also adds a scene Ezra does not have: three young bodyguards of the Persian king arguing about what is strongest in the world — wine, the king, or women — with the winner answering that truth beats all of them.

Nehemiah

The rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls, and the sorting out of the people inside them. Much of it is written in the first person, and reads like a personal memoir. Nehemiah is cupbearer to the Persian king when his brother arrives from Judah with bad news: the survivors are in trouble, the wall is broken down and the gates are burned. He weeps, fasts and prays for days. Then, looking visibly unhappy in front of the king — which was dangerous — he is asked what he wants, and asks for leave, safe conduct, and timber. He arrives and tells nobody why he has come. He inspects the ruins at night with a few men, turning back where the rubble is too deep for his animal to get through. Then he calls the leaders together and splits the work up by family and by section, so each group builds the stretch in front of its own house or trade. A whole chapter names them, gate by gate: the perfumers, the goldsmiths, the district rulers, and one man’s daughters. The wall goes up in fifty-two days under constant pressure. There is mockery from Sanballat and Tobiah. There is a threatened attack, which has the workers building with one hand and holding a weapon in the other. There are four invitations to a meeting in a village, which Nehemiah turns down by saying he is doing a great work and cannot come down. There is a prophet, secretly paid, who tries to frighten him into hiding in the temple. And there are letters written to be leaked. The second half turns inward, and the real crisis is internal. The poor are mortgaging their fields and selling their children into slavery to buy grain and pay the king’s tax. Nehemiah is furious, makes the nobles give the fields back and cancel the interest, and shakes out the fold of his coat as a warning. He also refuses the governor’s food allowance for twelve years, and feeds a hundred and fifty men at his own table. Then Ezra reads the law aloud from a wooden platform, from daybreak to noon, with Levites moving through the crowd explaining it. The people weep, and are told the day is holy and they should go and eat, and send food to anyone who has nothing. They keep the festival of shelters, which had not been done that way since Joshua. They confess their whole history in a long prayer, and sign a binding agreement. The book ends without heroics. Nehemiah goes back to the king, returns later, and finds the agreement already broken. Tobiah has been given a room in the temple courts. The Levites have gone back to their farms because nobody paid them. Wine presses are running on the sabbath. Merchants camp outside the gates. Children of mixed marriages cannot speak the language of Judah. He throws the furniture out, shuts the gates, confronts the offenders physically, and asks God to remember him for good.

Esther

A story of survival in the Persian court, told with real comic skill. It is the only book in the Hebrew canon that never mentions God, prayer, the law or Jerusalem. It opens with a display of imperial wealth: a banquet lasting a hundred and eighty days, then another lasting seven. The king orders Queen Vashti brought out so his guests can look at her, and she refuses. His advisers panic that the example will spread to every household in the empire, and she is removed by a decree that cannot be undone. A search for a replacement gathers young women into the harem for a year of beauty treatment. Esther, a Jewish orphan raised by her cousin Mordecai, is chosen, and keeps her people secret because he tells her to. Mordecai, sitting at the gate, overhears a plot against the king, reports it through Esther, and the matter is written down and forgotten. Haman is promoted above every official, and is enraged that Mordecai will not bow to him. Told that Mordecai is a Jew, he decides to destroy not the man but the whole people. He casts a lot to pick the date, and buys the king’s agreement with an enormous payment and a vague description of a people whose laws are different. Sealed letters go out to every province ordering the killing of all Jews — young and old, women and children — on one day. Then the king and Haman sit down to drink, while the city outside is thrown into confusion. Mordecai puts on sackcloth and sends Esther a copy of the decree. She objects that going to the king uninvited is punishable by death. He replies that she should not imagine the palace will save her, and that she may have reached her position for exactly this moment. She fasts three days and goes in. What follows is a reversal so exact it is almost mathematical. She asks only for a banquet, and then for a second one. The king cannot sleep and has the records read to him, discovers Mordecai was never rewarded, and asks Haman — who has just arrived to request Mordecai’s execution — what should be done for a man the king wants to honor. Haman, assuming he is the man, describes a grand procession. He is then made to lead Mordecai through it. At the second banquet Esther names him, and he is hanged on the gallows he built. Because the first decree cannot be cancelled, a second one lets the Jews defend themselves. They do. The rescue is fixed permanently in the feast of Purim, named after the lot Haman cast, and kept with feasting and gifts to the poor. This volume prints the Greek additions under their own title, as the Rest of Esther. They supply the prayers of Mordecai and Esther, the text of both decrees, a dream and its meaning, and the open mention of God that the Hebrew text so pointedly leaves out.

The Books of Poetry and Wisdom

Job

A prose frame around a very long poem, about why good people suffer. It refuses the easy answer more stubbornly than any other book. The frame sets up the problem. Job is upright and rich, and offers sacrifices in case his children have sinned in private. In a scene in heaven, an accuser asks whether Job serves God for nothing, and is allowed to take everything away. Four messengers arrive one after another, each cutting off the last. Raiders take the oxen and donkeys. Fire kills the sheep. Raiders take the camels. A wind knocks the house down on all ten of his children. Job tears his robe and worships. A second permission lets his body be attacked. He sits in ashes scraping his sores with a piece of broken pot, while his wife tells him to curse God and die. Three friends travel to see him, do not recognize him, and sit with him for seven days without speaking. That is the last clearly good thing they do. Job breaks the silence by cursing the day he was born, and the poem starts. It runs three rounds. Each friend speaks and Job answers. Their position hardens as they go. Eliphaz begins gently, describing a vision in the night. Bildad argues from tradition. Zophar is rude from the start. All three believe the same thing: God is fair, suffering follows sin, so Job must be hiding something. By the third round they are inventing crimes for him — taking clothes from the poor, refusing water to the thirsty. Job answers them and then turns to God. He says three things they cannot accept. He is innocent. The wicked plainly do well and die comfortable. And he wants a hearing — someone to referee, someone to tell him what he is charged with. A poem about where wisdom can be found interrupts the cycle. Job closes with an oath, listing what he would deserve if he had done any of it. Then a fourth man, Elihu, who has been listening and is angry with everybody, adds six chapters arguing that suffering can teach rather than punish. Then God answers out of a storm, and the answer explains nothing. It is two speeches made almost entirely of questions. Where were you when the earth was made? Have you been inside the storehouses of the snow? Can you tie up the stars? Who feeds the raven? Do you know when the mountain goats give birth? Did you give the horse its strength? Then come long descriptions of two huge creatures nobody can tame. Job never learns why he suffered, and stops asking. He says he had heard of God before and now his eye sees, and drops his case. The frame closes quickly. The friends are told off for not speaking rightly about God, as Job did — which is startling, given some of what Job said — and have to ask him to pray for them. His fortunes are doubled. He has ten more children. The daughters are named and the sons are not. He dies old.

Psalms

The songbook and prayer book of Israel: a hundred and fifty poems, gathered into five collections, each ending with a burst of praise. The range is wider than any other book. There are hymns about creation and about God’s acts in history. There are thank-you poems for particular rescues. There are royal psalms for a coronation, a wedding, a battle. There are songs about the city of Zion, and travel songs sung on the way up to the festivals. Some read like Proverbs. Some are liturgies with parts for different voices. One long poem about the law runs to a hundred and seventy-six verses, arranged in twenty-two alphabetical sections. But the biggest single group is complaint, and that surprises readers who expect a comfortable book. About a third of the psalms are laments, and they are blunt in a way later piety has often found awkward. They accuse God of sleeping, of forgetting, of hiding his face, of having thrown his people away. They ask how long, over and over, and get no answer on the page. They demand to know why the wicked do so well. Most turn toward trust before the end. One does not, and its last word is darkness. Several ask for terrible things to happen to enemies, and the collection keeps them rather than tidying them away. The poetry works by pairing rather than rhyme. A line is said, and then said again in different words, or sharpened, or turned around. That is why psalms survive translation better than most poetry. Many carry headings crediting them to David, and some tie a psalm to an episode in his life. Others belong to temple singers, or to Moses, or to nobody named. A few give musical directions that were already a mystery when they were first translated. The order of the whole collection moves from complaint toward praise. It opens with two psalms about the two ways and the anointed king, goes through the great laments of the middle books, and ends with five psalms of pure praise. The last one calls for every instrument, and then for everything that breathes. This volume prints Psalm 151 among the wider apocrypha, and two more collections among the pseudepigrapha: the Psalms of Solomon, written in anger after a Roman general walked into the sanctuary, and the Odes of Solomon, which may be the oldest Christian hymn book we have.

Proverbs

Practical wisdom, put together from several separate collections and aimed at the young. The stated purpose is to give sense to the simple and knowledge to the youth. The first nine chapters are not proverbs at all. They are long speeches from a father to a son, and they work by one contrast. Two women call out in the streets of the same city. Wisdom shouts in the public square. She was there when the world was made, playing and delighting in it, and she offers life. Folly sits at her door calling to anyone walking past, offers stolen water and bread eaten in secret, and her guests are already dead. In between run warnings about another man’s wife, whose words are smoother than oil, about guaranteeing a stranger’s debt, about the ant and the lazy man, and about the seven things God hates. From chapter ten the form changes completely. The proverbs are short, stand alone, mostly two lines, and are barely ordered at all, so reading the book straight through does not work well. The subjects are ordinary. Speech comes up most: the value of a soft answer, of keeping quiet, of a word said at the right moment, and the damage done by gossip and flattery. Then money, honest scales, bribes, and the mixed blessings of both wealth and poverty. Then work and laziness, with the lazy man turning on his bed like a door on its hinge. Then anger, patience, and the fool who goes back to his folly like a dog to its vomit. Then friendship, drink, difficult spouses, and raising children. These sayings are general rules, not promises. That is why Job and Ecclesiastes can be read as arguments with them. Later sections gather thirty sayings of the wise, more sayings copied out by Hezekiah’s officials, and the words of Agur, with his numbered lists — four things never satisfied, four small things that are wise, four with a stately walk. Then come the words of King Lemuel, which are actually his mother’s: warnings about wine and women, and an order to speak up for people who cannot speak for themselves. The book ends with an alphabetical poem about a capable wife who buys a field, trades, spins, feeds her household before dawn, and gives to the poor. This tradition runs straight on into three works printed here: Sirach, the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Story of Ahikar, whose long section of advice from a counselor to his ungrateful nephew is older than either.

Ecclesiastes

The notebook of a teacher who tried everything and found none of it solid. The word he repeats is usually translated vanity, but it means something closer to vapor or breath: real, but impossible to hold, and gone while you are still describing it. It opens the book, closes it, and turns up about forty times in between. The Preacher describes an experiment. He tested pleasure, wine and laughter. He built houses, planted gardens and orchards, dug reservoirs, bought servants and herds, piled up silver and gold, hired singers, and denied himself nothing he wanted. It was all vapor, and chasing wind. Then he tested wisdom itself, and found that although wisdom beats folly the way light beats darkness, the same end comes to the wise man and the fool, and neither is remembered. He says he hated life, and hated his work, because he has to leave it to a successor who may be an idiot and who did nothing to earn it. Around this run observations that make the book unlike anything else in the Bible. There is a time for everything, set out in fourteen pairs. God has put a sense of forever into people without letting them work out what he is doing. Oppression goes on and the oppressed have nobody to comfort them, so the dead are better off than the living, and those never born are better off than either. Two are better than one. A poor wise young man beats an old foolish king. Money never satisfies anyone who loves it. The same thing happens to good people and bad, which the Preacher calls an evil. Wisdom beats weapons, but one sinner destroys a great deal of good, and a little folly outweighs it like dead flies in perfume. The conclusion is not despair. It is restraint, and it is repeated. Eat your bread. Drink your wine. Wear white. Enjoy your work and the person you love, because these are given to you. Throw your bread on the water. Sow in the morning and keep working in the evening, because you do not know which will succeed. The book ends with a poem about old age as a house falling apart — the grinders stopping because there are few left, the women at the windows growing dim, the almond tree in bloom, the grasshopper dragging itself along. Then an epilogue praises the Preacher for arranging his proverbs with care, warns that there is no end to the making of books, and closes with a charge to fear God and keep his commands. The Wisdom of Solomon, printed here, answers this book directly. It puts a version of the Preacher’s logic — life is short, chance rules, take what you can — into the mouths of the ungodly.

Song of Solomon

A set of love poems traded between a woman and a man, with a chorus of the women of Jerusalem breaking in now and then. The woman speaks first, speaks most, and makes the first move more often than he does. That is unusual for ancient poetry of any kind, and is one reason the book has attracted so much interpretation. There is no plot, and no certain way to tell who is speaking where. The poems move by association through desire, invitation, absence and reunion. She asks to be kissed, and explains that she is dark because her brothers made her work in the vineyards. They praise each other at length in long lists of images taken from farming and from buildings — goats on a hillside, a tower of ivory, a pomegranate, a horse among chariots, doves by running water. These strike modern readers as odd. They were meant as extravagant compliments. Spring arrives in a famous passage: the rain over, flowers out, and the dove heard again. Twice she goes looking for him at night through the streets. The first time she finds him. The second time the watchmen beat her and take her cloak. A wedding procession of Solomon passes with sixty guards around it. Near the end she asks to be set like a seal on his heart, and the poem says love is as strong as death and jealousy as hard as the grave, that its flashes are flashes of fire, that floods cannot drown it, and that a man who offered everything he owned for it would be laughed at. God is never mentioned. Neither is Israel, or law, or temple, or sin. The setting is gardens, vineyards, orchards, spices, mountains and springtime, and the language is physical throughout, without embarrassment. Jewish tradition read the book as the love between God and Israel. Christian tradition read it as the love between Christ and the church. Both readings kept it in the Bible. It has also been read as exactly what it looks like: a celebration of desire between two people, written down without apology and with no moral attached. The Odes of Solomon in this volume borrow the same imagery and turn it to the love between the soul and God.

The Prophets

Isaiah

The longest of the prophets, and the one the New Testament quotes most. It falls into two clearly different parts, and readers have argued for centuries about whether one man wrote both. The first thirty-nine chapters speak to Judah in the eighth century, under pressure from Assyria. The opening is an accusation. Here is a nation careful about worship — new moons, festivals, plenty of sacrifice, hands raised in prayer — and careless about justice. God says he is sick of the festivals, that their hands are covered in blood, and that they should learn to do good, seek justice, defend the orphan and take up the widow’s case. A song follows about a vineyard whose owner does everything right and gets sour grapes. Then six curses on people who buy up house after house and field after field until nobody else has room, who call evil good, and who let the guilty off for a bribe. In the year King Uzziah died, Isaiah sees God high above him, cries out that he is a man with unclean lips, is touched on the mouth with a coal from the altar, volunteers to go, and is told nobody will listen. He walks barefoot and stripped for three years as a warning against trusting Egypt. There are messages against Babylon, Philistia, Moab, Damascus, Egypt, Tyre and others. The section ends with a story: Sennacherib’s army surrounds Jerusalem, his officer taunts the defenders in their own language from below the wall, Hezekiah takes the threatening letter into the temple and spreads it out, and the siege lifts. From chapter forty the voice changes completely and speaks to people already in exile, decades later. It opens with comfort and a road through the desert. Its main argument is that the God who made the world and measured the sea in his hand is not in the same category as an idol. That gets a long mocking description: a man cuts down a tree, burns half of it to cook dinner and keep warm, and bows down to the other half. Cyrus is named outright as God’s tool for setting the exiles free. Running through these chapters are four passages about a servant. He brings justice to the nations without shouting in the street. He is given as a light to the nations. He does not hide his face from spitting. And he is despised, wounded for others, silent in front of those who shear him, and buried with the rich although he had done no violence. The closing chapters look further still. Everyone who is thirsty is invited to come and buy without money. Fasting is redefined as loosing the chains of injustice and sharing bread, not bowing the head like a reed. Foreigners and eunuchs are welcomed into a house of prayer for all peoples. And at the end there are new heavens and a new earth, where crying is not heard, babies do not die, people who build houses live in them, and the wolf and the lamb eat together.

Jeremiah

Forty years of warning given to a nation that would not listen, by a man who did not want the job and said so repeatedly. The book is not in date order, which makes it hard going, and it mixes poetry, sermons and stories about the prophet told by someone else. Jeremiah is called before he is born. He objects that he is only a boy. He is told he will be a walled city against kings, priests and prophets — and he is, against all of them. The early messages use marriage as the image. Israel followed God in the desert like a bride, and has since behaved like a wild animal in heat. The nation has done two things wrong: walked away from a spring of fresh water, and dug cracked tanks that hold none. He preaches in the temple gateway that the building guarantees nothing — that people cannot steal, murder, sleep around, lie under oath and burn incense to Baal, and then stand in this house and call themselves safe. That sermon nearly gets him killed, and is quoted at his trial. His messages are often acted out. He buries a linen belt until it rots. He smashes a clay jar in front of the elders. He wears a wooden yoke on his neck until a rival prophet breaks it off him. He is forbidden to marry, or go to funerals, or go to parties, as a sign of a time coming when there will be no weddings and no mourning. And with the Babylonian army at the wall, he buys a field from his cousin, weighs out the silver in front of witnesses, and has the deed sealed in a jar — because houses and fields will be bought in this land again. He pays for all of it. He is beaten and locked in the stocks by a temple official. He is tried for his life. He is dropped into a cistern and left sinking in the mud until a foreign court official hauls him out with rags for padding under his arms. He is accused of desertion for telling people to surrender, which he does openly and often. A king takes the scroll he dictated, cuts it up with a small knife as it is read to him, and burns it piece by piece. Jeremiah dictates it again, and adds more. Running through the book are passages usually called his confessions. They are complaints addressed to God. They accuse him of tricking the prophet, ask why the wicked do so well, and curse the day he was born. Mixed in with all this is the promise that after seventy years the exiles will come home, and that God has plans for their good. And there is the passage the book is best known for: a new covenant, not like the broken one, written on the heart, so that nobody will need to teach a neighbor to know the Lord. Jerusalem falls in a chapter of grim detail. A governor is murdered. The survivors run to Egypt, dragging Jeremiah with them, and tell him plainly that they intend to go on burning incense to the queen of heaven, because things went better for them then. Messages against the nations close the book. Two works printed here belong to him. Baruch is written in the name of the secretary who took his dictation and read the scroll aloud in the temple. The Epistle of Jeremiah is a letter warning exiles about the idols they will see in Babylon, and this edition gives it its own title.

Lamentations

Five poems mourning the destruction of Jerusalem, written by someone who saw it. They are built under strict rules, and the rules are part of the point. Four of the five run through the Hebrew alphabet, a letter per verse. The middle poem does it three times over, three lines for every letter. It is the most tightly controlled writing in the Bible, about the least controlled circumstances imaginable. The fifth poem has the right number of verses but drops the alphabet, as if the form finally gave way. The first poem treats the city as a widow sitting alone, once great among the nations, crying in the night with nobody to comfort her. That phrase comes back five times. Her roads mourn because nobody travels to the festivals. Her priests groan. Her enemies are now on top. The second poem turns to what God has done, in a hard run of active verbs, and refuses to blame Babylon for any of it. The poems do not look away from what a siege does to people. Children faint in the streets and ask their mothers for bread. The nursing baby’s tongue sticks to the roof of its mouth. Those killed by the sword are called better off than those dying slowly of hunger. Priests and prophets are killed inside the sanctuary. Elders sit silent with dust on their heads. Young men grind at the mill. And twice, terribly, the poet records that women boiled their own children. What makes the book hardest is that none of this is protested as unfair. It is confessed as deserved — the fault of the nation, and especially of prophets who saw false visions and never named the sin. Then, at the exact center of the middle poem and nowhere else, the tone lifts. For about ten lines the poet says God’s mercies are not used up, that they are new every morning, that his faithfulness is great, that he is good to those who wait, and that he does not enjoy causing pain. Then the lament picks up again as though nothing had happened. The book ends by asking God to restore them as before — and then adds a condition that leaves the door open rather than shutting it: unless he has rejected them completely. There is no answer.

Ezekiel

A priest deported to Babylon five years before Jerusalem fell. His visions are the strangest and most physical in the prophets. The book is carefully dated all the way through, and it turns on the fall of the city: everything before is judgment, everything after is rebuilding. It opens with a storm out of the north. He sees four living creatures, each with four faces and four wings, moving with wheels full of eyes that go in any direction without turning. Above them is a platform, a throne, and a figure like glowing metal and fire. He falls on his face. He is commissioned by being handed a scroll covered on both sides with mourning, and told to eat it. It tastes like honey. He is warned nobody will listen, made a watchman who is answerable if he fails to warn, and struck dumb except when he is given words. His messages are usually acted rather than spoken, and the acts are extreme. He draws Jerusalem on a brick and lays siege to it with a toy army and an iron plate. He lies on his left side for three hundred and ninety days, then on his right for forty. He eats rationed bread cooked over dung. He shaves his head and beard with a sword and divides the hair into thirds — burned, chopped, scattered. He packs a bag for exile in daylight and digs through a wall at dusk to carry it out. He shakes while he eats. And when his wife dies suddenly, he is forbidden to mourn her, as a sign of a grief past mourning. In a vision he is carried by a lock of hair to Jerusalem and shown what is happening inside the temple: elders burning incense to carved images in a hidden room, women weeping for a foreign god, men with their backs to the sanctuary bowing to the sun. Then he watches God’s glory leave the temple in stages, pausing at the threshold, then at the gate, then on the mountain east of the city, as if reluctant. There are long picture-stories too: two eagles and a vine, an abandoned baby girl raised and married and turned unfaithful, two sisters, and a funeral song for Tyre as a magnificent ship broken up at sea. After the city falls, a survivor arrives with the news and the tone changes. Shepherds who fed themselves instead of the flock are condemned, and God says he will do the shepherding himself. A heart of stone is swapped for a heart of flesh. In the best-known vision the prophet is set down in a valley full of dry bones and asked whether they can live. He is told to speak to them. The bones rattle together, grow sinew and flesh and skin, and then breathe. The book ends with nine chapters in which a man with a measuring rod shows him a future temple and measures every gate, room and wall exactly. The glory comes back in by the gate it left by. And a river runs out from under the doorway, getting deeper as it goes — ankles, knees, waist, then too deep to cross — with trees on both banks whose fruit never fails and whose leaves are for healing. This kind of vision is the direct ancestor of the Book of Enoch and of 2 Esdras, both printed in this volume.

Daniel

Two halves in two different styles. The book is also written partly in Hebrew and partly in Aramaic, switching mid-sentence and back again several chapters later. The first six chapters are court stories, and each is a test of loyalty under a foreign king. Four young Judeans from good families are taken to Babylon for three years of training. They ask to be excused the royal food and propose a ten-day trial on vegetables and water, after which they look healthier than anyone. Nebuchadnezzar demands that his advisers tell him both his dream and its meaning, on pain of death. Daniel is given it: a statue of gold, silver, bronze, iron and iron mixed with clay, smashed by a stone cut without hands that becomes a mountain. Three of the four refuse to bow to a golden statue. They tell the king their God can save them, and that they will not serve his gods even if he does not. The furnace is heated seven times hotter, kills the men who throw them in, and they walk about inside it with a fourth figure. Nebuchadnezzar dreams of a great tree cut down, and is driven out to live like an animal until he admits heaven rules. At a feast where Belshazzar is drinking from vessels looted from the temple, a hand writes on the plaster wall, and Daniel reads it: numbered, weighed, divided. And under Darius, officials who cannot find any fault in Daniel’s work engineer a law against praying to anyone but the king, knowing his window faces Jerusalem three times a day. He is thrown to lions. The king spends a sleepless night and comes at dawn to ask whether he survived. The last six chapters are visions, and they are much harder. Four beasts come out of the sea — a lion with eagle’s wings, a bear with ribs in its teeth, a leopard with four heads, and a fourth too dreadful to name, with iron teeth and ten horns, among which a small horn comes up talking big. Thrones are set out. An Ancient of Days sits down, his clothing white as snow and his hair like wool. One like a son of man comes with the clouds and is given a kingdom that will not end. Then a ram and a goat, a prayer of confession, an answer about seventy weeks, and a long final vision of wars between kings of the north and south, a desecration of the temple, a time of trouble, and many who sleep in the dust waking up — some to everlasting life and some to shame. Daniel is told to shut the words up and seal the book. He says plainly that he heard and did not understand. This volume prints the Greek additions under their own titles. In Susanna, a young Daniel interrupts an execution and questions two elders separately about which tree they saw the crime under, catching them in a contradiction. Bel and the Dragon holds two detective stories against idol worship, one solved by scattering ash on a temple floor to show footprints. And the Song of the Three is sung inside the furnace.

Hosea

A prophet of the northern kingdom in its last decades. He is told to marry a woman who will be unfaithful, so that his household becomes the message before he says anything. Three children are born, and each name is an announcement: one recalls a massacre, one means not pitied, one means not my people. When the marriage fails, he is told to go and love her again, and buys her back for silver and barley. The rest of the book applies that to Israel. Its treaties with Assyria and Egypt, and its worship at local shrines, are described throughout as adultery and as a prostitute’s fee. Its loyalty is compared to morning mist and to dew that burns off early. The charges are laid out like a court case. There is no faithfulness, no kindness and no knowledge of God in the land — only swearing, lying, murder, stealing and adultery, so that one killing follows another. Priests live off the people’s sin and are glad of it. The nation sows wind and reaps a whirlwind. It is like a cake left unturned. It runs to Assyria for a cure that cannot heal. What God wants is not sacrifice but loyal love, and knowing him rather than burnt offerings. What lifts the book above an indictment is the way the tone breaks. God speaks like a parent who taught a child to walk, picked him up, led him with kindness and bent down to feed him. Then he asks how he could possibly hand him over, and says his heart turns over inside him. The book closes with an appeal to come back, bringing words rather than animals, and a promise of healing and of dew, and of a people who will flower like a lily and take root like cedars. The last line notes that the wise will understand this and the discerning will know it.

Joel

A short book built on one disaster. A locust swarm has come in four waves and stripped the country bare. The vine is dried up. The fig tree has withered. The grain is gone, the seed has shriveled in the ground, and the cattle wander because there is no pasture. With the harvest destroyed there is nothing left to offer, so the temple itself goes quiet. Joel calls everyone to mourn: the priests, the farmers, and even the drunkards, who should weep for the loss of the new wine. He calls a fast, and tells them to bring in the whole population, including nursing babies, and to fetch the bride and groom out of their rooms. He tells them to ask whether anything like this ever happened in their lifetime or their fathers’, and to tell their children so it is remembered four generations on. Then he reads the plague as a warning of something bigger, the day of the Lord. His description of the invading army deliberately blurs with the insects: they run like war horses, leap over the mountaintops with a noise like fire in dry stubble, climb walls, and come in through windows like burglars, each keeping to its own lane. The earth shakes in front of them and the sun and moon go dark. The call is to come back with fasting and weeping, and to tear hearts rather than clothes. The second half is the answer. The years the locusts ate will be paid back. The threshing floors will be full and the vats will overflow. And God’s spirit will be poured out on everyone — sons and daughters, old and young, and male and female slaves named specifically. That is the passage Peter takes up at Pentecost. The book ends with the nations called to a valley of decision, where plows are beaten into swords, and with a spring flowing out of God’s house.

Amos

A herdsman who also looked after fig trees, from a town in Judah, sent north to Israel during a stretch of unusual prosperity. He is the earliest of the prophets whose book we have. He opens with judgments on the neighboring nations for war crimes — Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, Moab — each in the same wording. His audience would have cheered every one. Then he uses the same wording on Judah, and then on Israel itself. The whole passage was a trap, and it shuts. The charges against Israel are about money and courts, not religion. They sell honest people for silver and the poor for a pair of sandals. They grind the face of the poor into the dust. They lie down beside altars on clothing taken as security for loans. They tax the poor’s grain to build stone houses they will never live in. They lie on ivory beds, eat lambs from the flock, drink wine by the bowl, and are not the least bit troubled by the state of the country. They wait impatiently for the sabbath to end so they can get back to trading with short measures, heavy weights and rigged scales. The wealthy women of Samaria are addressed as fat cows telling their husbands to fetch another drink. Against this Amos sets a religion God says he hates. He will not accept the festivals, will not look at the offerings, and refuses to listen to the songs. What he wants instead is justice rolling down like water, and right living like a stream that never dries up. Five visions follow — locusts, fire, a plumb line, a basket of summer fruit, and the Lord standing beside the altar. They are interrupted by the priest of Bethel, who reports Amos to the king and tells him to go home and earn his living prophesying in Judah. Amos answers that he was never a prophet or the son of one. He was a herdsman, and was taken from following the flock. After a famine that is not of bread but of hearing God’s words, the book ends with a short promise of rebuilding and replanting.

Obadiah

The shortest book in the Old Testament — twenty-one verses, and one message, aimed at Edom. The Edomites were descended from Esau, which made them Israel’s closest relatives. That is the wound underneath the poem. Their land was high and rocky and easy to defend, which is the target of the opening taunt: a people who live in the cracks of the rock and tell themselves nobody can bring them down, and who are told that even if they built their nest among the stars they would be brought down from there. The charge is not idol worship, which is usually the complaint elsewhere. It is what they did on one particular day. When Jerusalem was sacked, Edom stood back and watched while strangers carried off the wealth and drew lots for the city — and was no better than one of them. Then they gloated. Then they boasted. Then they came into the gate to look at the ruin. Then they joined the looting. And finally they stood at the crossroads to cut down anyone escaping, and handed over the survivors. The poem repeats the phrase in the day of eight times, building the whole accusation around timing. The punishment matches the crime. Edom’s allies will trick them as they tricked others. The men they made agreements with will set a trap under them. The wise men and soldiers they relied on will be no use. And what they did will be done back to them, landing on their own heads. At the end the poem widens from Edom to all nations, promises that the exiles will get back the land they lost, and closes in a single line with the kingdom belonging to the Lord.

Jonah

A story rather than a collection of messages, four short chapters long. It is the only prophetic book in which the prophet is the problem and everyone else behaves well. Sent to preach against Nineveh, the capital of an empire famous for cruelty, Jonah goes down to the docks and buys a ticket in the opposite direction. A storm threatens to break the ship up. The pagan sailors each pray to their own god, throw the cargo overboard, and find Jonah asleep below deck. When the lot falls on him, he tells them to throw him in the sea. They refuse, and row hard for land, and only when they cannot manage it do they pray for forgiveness and do what he asked. The sea goes calm and they offer sacrifices. A great fish swallows him, and he prays a psalm of thanks from inside it — in the past tense, as if already rescued. Put back on dry land, he goes and preaches the shortest sermon in the Bible: five words in Hebrew, announcing destruction in forty days, with no reason given and no way out offered. The whole city repents, from the king down, and even the livestock are dressed in sackcloth, which is either devotion or a joke at foreigners’ expense and is probably both. God changes his mind. This makes Jonah furious, and the last chapter is the point of the book. He admits he ran in the first place precisely because he suspected this would happen — because he knew God was kind, patient and quick to relent, and he did not want to look like a fool. He asks to die. He goes out east of the city, builds a shelter and sits down to watch. A plant grows over him and he is delighted. A worm kills it and he asks to die again. God asks whether he is right to be angry about a plant he did not grow, which came up overnight and died overnight. Then he asks whether God ought not to care about a city of a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left — and also a great many animals. The book ends on that question, unanswered.

Micah

A country preacher from the lowlands of Judah, working at the same time as Isaiah, going after the powerful in both kingdoms. The book swings between judgment and hope in cycles, which can make it feel abrupt. The charges are about money and courts, and they are specific. He describes men lying awake at night working out how to take something, and doing it at daybreak because they have the power to. They want fields, so they seize them. They want houses, so they take them. Women are pushed out of their homes. Rulers who ought to know what justice is hate good and love evil. Judges decide for a bribe, priests teach for a fee, and prophets tell fortunes for money — promising peace to anyone who feeds them and declaring war on anyone who does not. He says flatly that Zion will be plowed like a field and Jerusalem will become a heap of rubble. A century later that line was quoted at Jeremiah’s trial, to argue that a prophet who says such things should not be executed for it. Set against all this are some of the best-known passages in the prophets. The mountain of the Lord’s house is lifted above the hills, and nations stream to it and beat their swords into plows and their spears into pruning hooks, so nobody trains for war any more and every man sits under his own vine and fig tree with nobody to frighten him. And a ruler is promised out of Bethlehem, a small town among the clans of Judah, who will shepherd his people. The book ends in a courtroom. God calls the mountains as witnesses and asks what he has done to wear his people out. The question of what to bring him — burnt offerings, calves, thousands of rams, rivers of oil, a firstborn child — is answered with the summary Micah is remembered for: do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.

Nahum

One long poem about the fall of Nineveh, and in effect the sequel to Jonah. The city that repented in that book has not stayed repentant. Here there is no call to repent at all, and no message addressed to Nineveh — only the announcement that it will be destroyed, which happened about a century and a half later. It opens with a hymn careful to hold two things together: the Lord is slow to anger and very powerful, and he will not let the guilty go. He comes in whirlwind and storm, and the mountains shake. Then the poem turns to the siege and stays there, and what it does best is speed. Shields are red and the soldiers are in scarlet. Chariots flash like fire and race through the streets. The river gates are opened and the palace washes away. The city empties while people shout at each other to stop, and nobody turns back. There is the crack of the whip, the rumble of wheels, galloping horses, bouncing chariots, flashing swords, and heaps of dead so high that people trip over the bodies. Nineveh is addressed as a lion’s den, where the lion killed enough for his cubs and filled his cave with meat. Then as a woman who sold nations with her charms, and whose skirts will be pulled up over her face. Nahum asks whether she is any better than Thebes, which also sat by a river with water all around her and was carried off into exile anyway, with her infants smashed at every street corner. Her merchants are compared to locusts that settle on a wall in the cold and fly off when the sun comes up. There is no comfort here for Nineveh, and none is intended. The comfort is entirely for the people the empire crushed, and the book is honest about that. It ends with a question — who has not felt your endless cruelty — and expects no reply.

Habakkuk

A conversation rather than an announcement, and unusual because the prophet argues back and is not told off for it. Habakkuk starts by complaining about what is happening inside Judah. How long must he shout about violence and get no rescue? Why is he made to look at wrongdoing? Why are ruin and fighting everywhere, and why has the law stopped working and justice come out crooked? The answer is that God is doing something Habakkuk would not believe if he were told. He is raising up the Babylonians — a bitter, fast-moving people who march across the earth taking homes that are not theirs, whose horses are quicker than leopards and meaner than wolves at dusk, and who laugh at fortresses and pile up dirt ramps and take them. That produces a much harder second question, and it fills the rest of the first section. How can a God whose eyes are too clean to look at evil use a nation worse than the one being punished? Why are people treated like fish in the sea, with nobody in charge of them, dragged out with hooks and gathered in a net? And is the conqueror going to go on emptying his net forever, and offering sacrifices to it — worshiping the gear that made him rich? Then the prophet says he will take his stand on the watchtower and wait to see what God says to him, and what answer he gets to his complaint. The reply tells him to write the vision plainly on tablets, big enough for a runner to read as he goes past. It says the vision is for an appointed time and will not lie, and that if it seems slow he should wait for it. And it says the righteous will live by faith — a line the New Testament comes back to three times. Five curses on the plunderer follow: on piling up what is not his, on making his house safe by robbery, on building a town with blood, on getting his neighbors drunk, and on telling a piece of wood to wake up. The book closes with a psalm, musical directions and all, remembering God’s appearances in storm and battle. It ends with one of the strongest resolutions in scripture: even if the fig tree does not blossom, the olive crop fails, the fields grow nothing, the flock is gone and the stalls are empty, he will still be glad.

Zephaniah

A prophet from the reign of Josiah, whose family line is traced back four generations in the opening verse — unusually far, and possibly to show royal descent. He announces the day of the Lord in the widest terms found anywhere in the prophets. The book opens with a sweeping statement that God will wipe everything off the face of the earth: people and animals, birds in the air and fish in the sea. The order deliberately reverses the order of creation. Then it narrows to Judah and Jerusalem, and the targets are named. Those who bow on their roofs to the stars. Those who bow to the Lord and swear by another god in the same breath. Those who have simply stopped looking for him. Officials and judges. Prophets who are reckless and priests who treat holy things as ordinary. And above all the comfortable — described as wine left to thicken on its own sediment — who tell themselves that God will do nothing, good or bad. The day is described as a day of anger, trouble, ruin, darkness, trumpets and shouting, in which silver and gold will not buy anyone out. The middle section turns outward: Philistia, Moab, Ammon, Cush and Assyria. Nineveh is left as dry as a desert, a place where herds lie down and desert birds roost on top of broken columns, and everyone walking past hisses and shakes a fist. Jerusalem is then addressed again as a city that listens to nobody, takes no correction and trusts no one, whose officials are roaring lions and whose judges are evening wolves that leave nothing until morning. The last chapter changes completely, with no warning. What is left is a small group who are humble, take shelter in the Lord’s name, do no wrong, tell no lies, and have no deceit in their mouths. They graze and lie down and nobody frightens them. Their shame is taken away, the lame and the outcast are gathered in, and the book ends with God himself in the middle of the city, quieting his people with his love and singing over them.

Haggai

Four dated messages delivered inside a single year — the shortest prophetic campaign in the Bible, and the one with the clearest result. The people had come back from exile, laid the temple foundation, and then stopped work for about sixteen years, worn down by opposition and discouragement. Haggai’s first message quotes their own excuse back at them: that the time has not come to rebuild. Then he asks whether it is really the time for them to live in paneled houses while that house lies in ruins. He tells them to look at how things are going. They plant a lot and harvest little. They eat and are never full. They drink and are never satisfied. They put clothes on and never get warm. And whoever earns wages puts them in a bag with holes in it. The response is immediate and almost unique among the prophets. The governor, the high priest and all the people listen. Haggai delivers a single sentence saying God is with them. Their spirits are stirred, and work starts again twenty-three days later. The remaining messages deal with discouragement rather than disobedience. Some of those present are old enough to have seen the first temple, and are asked how this one looks by comparison. The answer is: like nothing. They are told to take heart and keep working, because God’s spirit is still among them, and because he will shake the heavens and the earth and the nations and fill this house with splendor. The silver and the gold are his anyway. And the glory of this later house will be greater than the first. A third message puts a question of ritual law to the priests — whether holiness or uncleanness spreads more easily by contact — and applies the answer to the people. The book ends with a personal word to the governor Zerubbabel, who is told he will be like a signet ring.

Zechariah

A contemporary of Haggai, pushing the same rebuilding by completely different means, and one of the strangest books in the Bible. It splits sharply down the middle. The first eight chapters are eight visions received in one night, each reported with an angel standing by to answer questions. A man on a red horse among myrtle trees reports that the patrols have found the whole earth quiet — which is the problem, not the solution. Four horns are broken by four workmen. A man goes out to measure Jerusalem and is told to run back and say the city will be too full for walls, because God will be a wall of fire around it. The high priest stands in filthy clothes with an accuser at his elbow, and is given clean ones. A gold lampstand with seven lamps is fed directly by two olive trees, and the message attached is that the work will be done not by force and not by strength but by God’s spirit, and that nobody should look down on small beginnings. A scroll thirty feet long flies over the country. A woman called Wickedness is shoved into a basket, a lead lid is dropped on her, and two women with stork’s wings carry the basket off to Babylon. Four chariots go out to the four winds. Around these run instructions: give honest judgments, show kindness and mercy, and do not squeeze the widow, the orphan, the foreigner or the poor. And a promise: old men and old women sitting in the streets again with walking sticks, and the streets full of children playing. The last six chapters are undated messages in a very different voice, harder to place and much quoted later. A king comes, victorious and humble, riding a donkey. A shepherd asks for his wages and is weighed out thirty pieces of silver, which he throws into the treasury. A shepherd is struck and the sheep scatter. A spring is opened for washing. And in a final chapter the nations gather against Jerusalem, the Mount of Olives splits in half, running water flows out summer and winter, and the survivors of the nations come up year after year to keep the festival — ending with the startling picture of even the horses’ bells and the cooking pots being marked as holy.

Malachi

The last book of the Old Testament in the Christian order. It is written to a community whose temple is rebuilt, whose walls are up, and whose enthusiasm has completely drained away. Nothing dramatic is happening, and that is the subject. It works by argument. God makes a statement. The people answer with a question that is half innocent and half cheek. Then the charge is pressed home with evidence. Six of these exchanges make up the book. It opens with God saying he has loved them, and the people asking how. The priests are told they treat his name as worthless, and ask how. The answer is that they are putting blind, lame and diseased animals on the altar — and they are asked whether they would dare offer the same to the governor, and whether he would be pleased. Someone who shut the temple doors rather than light useless fires would be doing better. Then the people are told they have worn God out, and ask how. By saying that everyone who does evil is fine in his sight, and by asking where the God of justice has got to. They are charged with treachery: divorcing the wives of their youth, the wives they made promises to. They are charged with robbing God, and ask how — in tithes and offerings — and are told, uniquely in the prophets, to go ahead and test him on it and see whether he does not open the windows of heaven. And they are charged with saying hard things about him, and ask what they said: that serving God is pointless, that there is no profit in keeping his rules, and that the arrogant are the ones who do well while people who test God get away with it. The answers promise a messenger to clear the way, who will arrive suddenly at his temple and will be like a refiner’s fire and like strong soap, sitting over the silver and watching it. And a book of remembrance is written for those who feared the Lord and talked with each other. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible close with the sun of righteousness rising with healing in its wings, and with a promise that Elijah will come before the great and terrible day, to turn parents’ hearts to their children and children’s hearts to their parents.

The Gospels and Acts

Matthew

The gospel most concerned to show Jesus as the fulfillment of Israel’s scriptures, and the one the early church used most. Its shape is deliberate: five big blocks of teaching, each ending with the same formula, set inside a story. It opens with a family line from Abraham through David, arranged in three sets of fourteen, and including four women with irregular stories. The birth account is told from Joseph’s side and turns on four dreams. He is told to marry Mary, then to run to Egypt, then to come back, then to settle in Galilee. Astrologers from the east follow a star and stop to ask directions at the palace, which sets off the killing of the infants at Bethlehem. John the Baptist appears in the desert. Jesus is baptized, then tested for forty days, and starts work in Galilee. The first and biggest block of teaching is the Sermon on the Mount. It holds the beatitudes, salt and light, six sayings that take a command and push it inward — from murder to anger, from adultery to the look — and instructions to give, pray and fast in private. It has the Lord’s Prayer, treasure in heaven, the birds and the flowers set against worrying, the speck and the plank, the narrow gate, false prophets known by their fruit, and two houses built on rock and on sand. The other four blocks give instructions to the twelve as they are sent out, seven parables about the kingdom, teaching about life together with a hard story about an unforgiving servant, and a long speech about the end that includes the ten bridesmaids, the talents, and the sheep and goats sorted by what was done for the hungry and the imprisoned. Between the blocks the argument with the religious authorities sharpens over sabbath, purity and authority, until it breaks out in seven curses on people who measure out herbs for the tithe while ignoring justice, mercy and faith, and who wash the outside of the cup. The passion follows the familiar course, with details special to this gospel: Judas bringing the silver back and hanging himself, Pilate washing his hands, a guard posted at the tomb, and an earthquake. It ends on a mountain in Galilee with the order to make disciples of all nations, and a promise to stay with them. The two short paragraphs about the birth are the seed of three works printed here — the Protevangelion and the two infancy gospels — which name Mary’s parents, add a midwife, and carry the story into a childhood these pages leave blank.

Mark

The shortest gospel and probably the earliest. It is written at speed and reads that way. Its favorite word is immediately, used more than forty times, and it jumps from scene to scene with almost no linking. There is no family line, no birth story, and in the oldest copies no resurrection appearance. It starts abruptly with John the Baptist and the baptism, gives the temptation two verses, and dives into healing, exorcism and argument around the Sea of Galilee. Inside two chapters Jesus calls fishermen, teaches in a way people remark on, drives out an unclean spirit, heals a fever and a skin disease, and forgives a paralyzed man lowered through a roof. That sets off the arguments that run through the rest of the book — about forgiveness, about eating with tax collectors, about fasting, and about picking grain on the sabbath. Two things stand out. The first is secrecy. Jesus keeps telling people he has healed, and the spirits who recognize him, to say nothing. He teaches crowds in parables and explains them privately. The second is how badly the disciples do. It is relentless. They do not understand the parables. They panic in the storm. They miss the point of both feedings. They argue about who is greatest right after he predicts his death, and ask for the best seats right after he predicts it again. The hinge falls at the exact middle. Peter says he is the Christ, and is told off moments later for refusing the idea that the Christ has to suffer. From there the road runs to Jerusalem with three predictions, each followed by a disciple getting it wrong and a lesson about being last of all and servant of all. The passion is the longest section in proportion, and it spares nobody. The disciples sleep in the garden. All of them run. One young man gets away naked, leaving his clothes behind. Peter denies him three times, exactly as predicted. The only person who says who he is at the end is the centurion at the cross. The oldest copies end with women coming to the tomb, finding it open, being told he has risen and gone ahead to Galilee, and running away frightened and saying nothing to anyone. The fragments of Papias printed here preserve the oldest surviving claim about how this gospel came to be: that Mark, who never heard Jesus himself, wrote down what he remembered of Peter’s preaching accurately, though not in order.

Luke

The most polished of the gospels, and the first half of a two-part work finished in Acts. It opens with a formal preface addressed to a named reader. Many people have written accounts, the author says. He has looked into everything carefully from the start, and writes so his reader can know how solid the story is. The birth narrative is by far the fullest, and is told mostly from the women’s side. It weaves together the births of John and Jesus, with announcements to Zechariah and to Mary, a visit between Elizabeth and Mary, and three songs that became part of Christian worship for good. It sets everything in dated political context — a census, an emperor, a governor — and gives shepherds instead of astrologers. It is also the only gospel with a story from the boyhood: a twelve-year-old left behind in the temple. Luke pays steady attention to people at the edges. The poor are blessed and the rich warned. Women appear constantly, including the ones who paid for the work out of their own money. Samaritans are treated kindly three separate times. Tax collectors and disreputable people are the ones who respond. Meals run all the way through: he is criticized for who he eats with, teaches at the table again and again, and at the end is recognized in the breaking of bread. Prayer and the Holy Spirit turn up at every stage. A long middle section, nearly ten chapters, follows a journey to Jerusalem and holds parables found nowhere else — the good Samaritan, the rich fool building bigger barns, the great dinner, the man who counts the cost before building a tower, the lost sheep, the lost coin, the prodigal son and his sour brother, the shrewd manager, the rich man and Lazarus, the widow who wears down a judge, and the Pharisee and the tax collector praying side by side. The passion has details of its own: a hearing before Herod, the women of Jerusalem weeping, a criminal promised paradise, and a prayer of forgiveness from the cross. It ends with the walk to Emmaus. Two disciples talk about the crucifixion with a stranger who explains the scriptures to them, and they only realize who he is when he takes bread and breaks it. Its birth narrative, like Matthew’s, is filled out at length by the infancy gospels printed in this volume.

John

A gospel that works differently from the other three at almost every level: different timeline, different vocabulary, different miracles, and long speeches in place of short sayings and parables. It opens before creation rather than at a birth, with the Word who was with God, was God, made everything, and became flesh and lived among us. The public ministry is built around seven signs, each followed by a long discussion of what it meant: water into wine at a wedding, an official’s son healed from a distance, a man paralyzed for thirty-eight years at a pool, five thousand fed, walking on water, a man born blind, and Lazarus raised after four days in the tomb. Around them run the statements where Jesus says who he is — bread of life, light of the world, gate, good shepherd, resurrection and life, way and truth and life, and true vine. The big conversations have no parallel anywhere else. Nicodemus comes at night and is told about being born again, and takes it literally. A Samaritan woman at a well at noon is asked for a drink, and the talk moves through living water, her marriages, and which mountain is the right one for worship — after which she goes and fetches her whole town. A man born blind is questioned by officials who will not accept the obvious, and is thrown out for saying so. That scene is very funny. Almost a third of the book covers one evening. Jesus washes the disciples’ feet and tells them to do the same for each other. Judas leaves, and the writer notes that it was night. Then comes a long farewell speech promising the Spirit as their advocate, giving love as the mark people will know them by, warning that the world will hate them, and comparing their coming grief to a woman in labor. It ends in a prayer for everyone who will believe later. In the passion Jesus is in charge throughout. The arresting party falls back. The exchange with Pilate about kingship and truth runs long. He carries his own cross and announces that the work is finished. The last chapters give Mary Magdalene mistaking him for the gardener, Thomas refusing to believe without touching, and a breakfast on the shore where Peter is asked three times whether he loves him. The purpose is stated near the end: these things are written so that readers may believe and have life. The Gospel of Nicodemus, printed here, takes this gospel’s Pilate material and its named minor characters and builds a full trial story out of them, with a descent into hell attached.

Acts

The sequel to Luke, written for the same reader, and the only surviving account of what the church did in its first thirty years. Its plan is set out in the opening scene. The disciples ask about restoring the kingdom to Israel, are told the timing is not theirs to know, and are promised power to be witnesses in Jerusalem, then Judea and Samaria, then to the end of the earth. That is the order the book follows. At Pentecost the Spirit arrives with a noise like wind and what looks like fire, and pilgrims from all over the empire hear the disciples in their own languages. Peter preaches and three thousand join. The Jerusalem section shows a community sharing what it owns, meeting in homes and at the temple, healing people — and running into trouble immediately. There are arrests, a night in custody, an order to stop talking, and a flogging. A couple drop dead over a lie about the price of a field. Greek-speaking widows complain about the food distribution, and seven men are appointed to handle it. One of them, Stephen, gives a long survey of Israel’s history and is stoned to death, with a young man named Saul minding the coats. The persecution that follows scatters the believers, and so spreads the message — which is this book’s running irony. Two conversions turn the story. Saul, traveling with arrest warrants, is blinded by a light on the Damascus road and told he is persecuting the one he serves; a very reluctant disciple is sent to restore his sight. And Peter, shown a sheet of unclean animals three times in a trance, is sent to the house of a Roman officer named Cornelius, and watches the Spirit given to Gentiles before they are even baptized. He then has to explain himself in Jerusalem. The question of whether Gentiles must become Jews first is settled at a council, with a short list of requirements and a letter. The second half follows Paul on three journeys, and reads like a travel diary with a sharp eye for local detail. A businesswoman is converted by a river. An exorcism destroys a slave girl’s owners’ income and gets him jailed, where an earthquake opens the doors. He gives a speech to philosophers in Athens about an altar to an unknown god. A two-year stay in Ephesus ends in a riot of silversmiths. A young man falls asleep during a long sermon and drops out of a third-story window. Arrested after a riot at the temple, Paul is held two years, appeals to Caesar, and is shipped to Rome through a storm and a shipwreck on Malta. The book stops without an ending, with him under house arrest, seeing everyone who comes, and preaching with nobody stopping him. Three works printed here carry it further: the Acts of Paul and Thecla, the letters of Paul and Seneca, and the letters of Clement, written from the church in Rome that Acts leaves Paul reaching.

The Letters

Romans

Paul’s longest and most organized letter, written to a church he had neither founded nor visited. He wants to introduce himself, and to line up support for a trip to Spain. It is the closest thing he wrote to a sustained argument. He starts by showing that everyone is in the same trouble. Gentiles push away what creation makes obvious about God, and are handed over to the results of their own choices. Jews have the law, teach it, and break it, and circumcision turns out to be a matter of the heart. So nobody is put right with God by keeping rules, and nobody has anything to boast about. Being put right comes through trust instead — as it did for Abraham, who was counted right with God years before circumcision existed, which makes him the father of believing Gentiles as much as Jews. From there Paul follows the results. Believers have peace with God, and can even be glad about suffering, because it produces endurance, and endurance character, and character hope. Adam brought death; Christ brings life. Baptism means dying to sin, so grace is not permission to carry on — a slave obeys whichever master he reports to. Then comes the famous passage about the divided self, which does not do the good it wants and does the evil it hates. And then the release: no condemnation, the Spirit as proof of adoption, praying for us when we run out of words, creation itself groaning like a woman in labor, and nothing in death or life, height or depth, able to cut anyone off from God’s love. Three hard chapters then wrestle with why most of Israel has not believed. Paul says he would be willing to be cut off himself if it helped. He argues from the potter and the clay, and from the idea of a remnant. He insists the rejection is neither total nor permanent. And he uses the picture of branches broken off an olive tree and wild branches grafted in, warning the grafted branches not to get arrogant about it. The last section is practical. Offer your bodies as a living sacrifice. Use whatever gift you were given. Love without faking it. Bless people who persecute you. Leave revenge alone. Pay your taxes. Love is the whole law kept. And then a long, patient treatment of the strong and the weak arguing over food and holy days, in which each side is told not to look down on the other. It closes with travel plans, a collection for the poor in Jerusalem, and a long list of greetings naming more than two dozen people, many of them women. Ignatius wrote to this same church while being taken to die in its arena. His letter, printed here, begs the Roman Christians not to pull strings to save him.

1 Corinthians

A letter to a talented, quarrelsome and badly behaved congregation in a rich port city. It answers both a verbal report and a written list of their own questions, and it tells us more about what an early church actually did than anything else we have. He deals first with what he has heard. The church has split into groups named after their favorite teachers. Paul answers with a long argument that God picked what looks foolish and weak in order to embarrass the wise and the strong, and that the man who plants and the man who waters are nothing next to the one who makes it grow. Then a man is living with his father’s wife, and the church is proud of how tolerant it is being. Then members are suing each other in pagan courts. Then some are visiting prostitutes and defending it with the slogan that everything is permitted. The rest answers their questions in order. On marriage and singleness he gives advice for the married, the unmarried, the widowed and those married to unbelievers, and is careful to say which parts come from the Lord and which are his own judgment. On meat that has been offered to idols, he argues that an idol is nothing, that knowledge puffs people up while love builds them up, and that a right you genuinely have should be dropped rather than damage somebody else — and he backs it with a chapter listing the rights he has given up himself. On worship he takes up head coverings, and then the Lord’s Supper, where wealthier members were eating their own food early while poorer ones went hungry. Three chapters on spiritual gifts describe a body whose parts cannot tell each other they are not needed, and rank clear speech above ecstatic speech, because the church should be built up and visitors should be able to follow. At the center of those chapters comes the description of love, without which every gift is just noise — love that is patient and kind, keeps no score of wrongs, and never ends. The letter closes with the longest treatment of resurrection in the New Testament. If the dead are not raised, Paul says, the preaching is empty and so is the faith. He lists the appearances, compares the buried body to a bare seed, and ends in a hymn about death losing its sting. Roughly forty years later Clement wrote from Rome to this same church about this same problem — a congregation split into factions — and his letter is printed in this volume.

2 Corinthians

The most personal and least tidy of Paul’s letters, written after a painful visit and a severe letter that cost him a great deal to send and that has not survived. The relationship is strained throughout, and the tone keeps shifting. He opens with trouble and comfort, and explains a change of travel plans that had been taken as unreliability. He asks them to forgive and take back whoever caused the offense, and describes his own worry while waiting for news. A long middle section defends his ministry rather than his doctrine. It is a new agreement of the Spirit, not of letters carved into stone. Moses wore a veil; these faces are uncovered. The treasure is carried in clay pots, so it is obvious the power is not his. He is squeezed but not crushed, puzzled but not in despair. He talks about a tent and a building from God, and about being an ambassador with a message of reconciliation. Two chapters organize the collection for the poor in Jerusalem. He argues from the Macedonians, who gave more than they could afford and begged for the chance. He is careful about the handling, sending named representatives so nobody can question where the money went, and insisting the gift be ready in advance so it does not look squeezed out of them. The last four chapters change tone sharply. He answers rivals he calls super-apostles, who have questioned his credentials and mocked the way he looks and speaks. He boasts under protest, calls it foolishness, and then boasts about the wrong things entirely: prison, five floggings, three beatings with rods, a stoning, three shipwrecks, a night and a day in open water, danger from rivers and bandits and his own people and foreigners and false friends, sleepless nights, hunger, cold, and daily anxiety about all the churches. He finishes with an escape from Damascus in a basket lowered through a window. Then he mentions a vision obliquely, in the third person, and a thorn in the flesh he asked three times to be rid of — and was told instead that grace was enough, and that power works best in weakness.

Galatians

The angriest letter Paul wrote, and the only one with no thank-you paragraph. He goes straight from the greeting to astonishment that they are abandoning the message so fast, and curses anyone preaching a different one — twice, in two sentences running. The crisis is that teachers have arrived telling Gentile converts they must be circumcised and keep the law to count as full members. Paul answers first with his own history, because his authority is being attacked along with his message. His commission came directly, not through Jerusalem. He did not go up to consult anyone for three years, and then only briefly. The leaders there added nothing to him and recognized his work with Gentiles. And when Peter came to Antioch and ate with Gentiles until certain people arrived from James, and then pulled back and took Barnabas with him, Paul confronted him in front of everyone. Then the argument proper. Did they receive the Spirit by keeping the law or by trusting? He appeals to Abraham, counted right with God by trust and given the promise four hundred and thirty years before the law arrived. He describes the law as a guardian put in charge of an heir who is not old enough yet — necessary, temporary, and not the point. There is a picture-story about Hagar and Sarah. And there is a blunt warning: accept circumcision and you are obliged to keep the entire law, and Christ is no use to you. The conclusion Paul draws is social as much as theological. In Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female. But freedom is not an excuse to please yourself; it is the reason to serve each other. The letter ends by setting the works of the flesh — a long and unflattering list — against the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. He signs off by pointing out how big his handwriting is.

Ephesians

A circular letter rather than a reply to a crisis — the earliest copies do not name Ephesus — and the calmest of the letters under Paul’s name. It has no opponents, no local scandals and no news. It splits evenly: three chapters of theology, three of conduct. The first half is mostly praise and prayer, and the sentences are long even for Paul. It sets out a plan formed before the world was made, to bring everything in heaven and earth together under Christ. Readers are described as chosen, adopted, bought back, forgiven and sealed with the Spirit as a deposit. The central claim is put in social terms. People who were dead have been made alive by grace through trust, not by anything they did, so nobody can take credit. And the wall between Jew and Gentile has been knocked down. The two are made one new humanity. Strangers and outsiders are now fellow citizens, built together into a temple with Christ as the cornerstone. Paul calls this the secret entrusted to him, and prays that they will grasp how wide and long and high and deep it is. The second half spells out what follows. Unity is kept through the different gifts given to build the body up until it grows up. The old self is taken off like a coat and the new one put on. The specifics are ordinary and practical: tell your neighbor the truth, do not go to bed angry, let the thief get a job so he has something to give away, and don’t let rotten talk out of your mouth. Then come instructions for households — wives and husbands, children and parents, slaves and masters — introduced by a call for everyone to submit to everyone, with the longest section aimed at husbands. It closes with the armor of God — belt, breastplate, boots, shield, helmet and sword — for a fight described as not against flesh and blood. Ignatius wrote to this same church on his last journey, and that letter is printed here.

Philippians

A warm thank-you letter written from prison to the congregation that supported Paul most steadily, and which had just sent him a gift by the hand of a man who nearly died on the trip. The word that keeps coming back is joy, which is worth noticing given where he is. He reports that his imprisonment has actually helped the message along, since the whole imperial guard now knows why he is in chains, and other believers have got braver. Some are preaching out of rivalry, to make trouble for him. He says only that Christ is being preached either way, and he is glad. Then he thinks out loud about his own death, weighing whether he would rather go and be with Christ or stay for their sake, and decides he will stay. At the center is a hymn, probably older than the letter. Christ did not treat equality with God as something to hold onto, but emptied himself, took the form of a slave, and obeyed all the way to death on a cross — and was then lifted up and given the name above every name. Paul quotes it not to settle an argument about doctrine but to make a plea for humility, because two women in the congregation have fallen out, and he names them and asks the church to help them sort it out. He warns sharply against teachers pushing circumcision, and lists his own credentials — circumcised on the eighth day, a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee, blameless under the law — only to write the whole lot off as a loss. The last chapter tells them to be glad, to be gentle, to stop worrying and pray instead, and to think about whatever is true, honorable, right, pure and admirable. He thanks them for the gift carefully, adds that he has learned to be content both well fed and hungry, and says he can do anything through the one who strengthens him. Polycarp’s letter to this same church, printed here, was written a lifetime later and quotes this one.

Colossians

Written to a church Paul had never visited, founded by a colleague, and aimed at a teaching that mixed strict rules, angel worship, attention to spiritual powers, and claims to inside knowledge. His method is not to argue point by point. It is to make the readers’ picture of Christ so large that the alternative looks small. An early hymn presents him as the image of the invisible God and the firstborn of all creation, the one in whom and through whom and for whom everything was made — including thrones, powers and rulers, which is exactly the territory the rival teaching was interested in. He holds everything together, and he is the head of the body. Paul then describes his own hard work for churches that have never seen his face, and says he wants them to have full confidence and to know God’s secret, in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden. The argument turns on one claim: the whole fullness of God lives in Christ bodily, and believers have been filled in him. So nothing is missing that an add-on system could supply. The practical result is freedom. Nobody should be allowed to pass judgment on questions of food and drink, or festivals, new moons and sabbaths, which are a shadow of what has already come. Nobody should be disqualified by someone insisting on self-denial and angel worship and dwelling on his visions. Rules that say do not handle, do not taste, do not touch look wise and severe, and are of no use at all against actually wanting things. What replaces them is not another rule but a change of direction: look up, put to death what is earthly, strip off the old self with its habits and put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience — and over all of it, love, which holds everything together. Household instructions follow, and unusually detailed personal greetings. The letter tells the Colossians to swap letters with Laodicea. This volume prints an Epistle to the Laodiceans, almost certainly a later attempt to supply the letter that instruction implies had gone missing.

1 Thessalonians

Probably the earliest of Paul’s surviving letters, written within months of a visit cut short by trouble. It is unusual for how little it corrects. Most of it is relief. Timothy has come back with good news about a young church under social pressure. The first three chapters look backwards: how they received the message and turned from idols, how their example spread, and how Paul behaved while he was with them. That last point is pressed hard and defensively, which suggests people were talking about him after he left. He did not come with flattery or as a cover for greed. He was not looking for praise. He was gentle, like a nurse looking after her own children. And he worked night and day so as not to be a burden to anybody. He describes being torn away from them, trying repeatedly to get back, and being anxious until Timothy returned. The practical section is short and general. Stay away from sexual immorality and control your own body honorably. Increase in the love you already show. Make it your ambition to live quietly, mind your own business and work with your hands, so that outsiders respect you and you depend on nobody. The best-known passage answers a specific grief rather than a theoretical question. Some believers had died before Christ came back, and the congregation was distressed, apparently afraid they had missed out. Paul tells them not to grieve like people with no hope, and says the dead will be at no disadvantage at all and will rise first. He adds that the day will come like a thief at night, and that they are children of the day, so it should not catch them out. The closing instructions come as a burst of short commands. Respect the people who work among you. Warn the idle. Encourage the timid. Help the weak. Be patient with everyone. Be glad always. Pray without stopping. Give thanks whatever happens. Do not put out the Spirit’s fire. Do not sneer at prophecy. Test everything, and hold onto what is good.

2 Thessalonians

A short follow-up to the same congregation. They are still under pressure, and now unsettled by a claim that the day of the Lord has already come. That claim may have been spread in a letter forged in Paul’s name, which is why he points out at the end what his own handwriting looks like. He opens by praising their endurance, and promises that God will deal with the people troubling them and give relief to the troubled. The language here is considerably fiercer than in the first letter. The main business is the correction. The day cannot already have come, because certain things have to happen first: a rebellion, and the appearance of the man of lawlessness, who sets himself above every god or object of worship and takes his seat in God’s temple claiming to be God. Paul reminds them he told them all this in person. He mentions something currently holding the man back — described once as a thing and once as a person, and never explained, because the readers evidently knew what he meant. Every reader since has had to guess. The lawless one will show up at the right time, will come with false signs and wonders, and will be finished off by the breath of the Lord’s mouth. The letter closes with a blunt instruction about idleness. Some in the church had stopped working, apparently because of what they expected to happen soon, and were living off other people and interfering in their business. Paul points to his own example — working night and day and paying for his own food, though he says he had every right to be supported — and lays down a rule: anyone unwilling to work should not eat. People who ignore it are to be noted and avoided, though he adds that they should be warned as family and not treated as enemies.

1 Timothy

The first of three letters written to individuals left in charge of organizing churches. It is about order rather than argument. Timothy has been stationed at Ephesus to stop certain people teaching something different and spending their time on myths and endless family trees. Paul says that produces speculation and quarrels rather than faith, and a lot of confident talk from people who do not understand what they are saying. He sets out qualifications for overseers and deacons, and what stands out is how unremarkable they are. Above reproach. Faithful to one wife. Level-headed. Sensible. Respectable. Hospitable. Able to teach. Not a drunk. Not violent, but gentle. Not quarrelsome. Not in love with money. Running his own household well. Not a recent convert, in case it goes to his head. And well thought of by people outside the church. Deacons are to be tested first, and get a similar list. Nothing in either list is about being impressive. Then come instructions on praying for kings and everyone in authority, so the church can live quietly; on conduct in worship, including a much argued-over passage about women teaching; on which widows the church should support and which have families who ought to be doing it; and on elders, who deserve double honor, must not be accused without two or three witnesses, and are to be corrected publicly if they keep on sinning. Timothy is told not to let anyone look down on him for being young, to watch himself and his teaching — and, in a single practical aside, to take a little wine for his stomach. Money runs through the whole letter. People who teach for profit think religion is a way to get rich. Being content with food and clothing is called great gain. The love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some have wandered away from the faith chasing it and stabbed themselves with a lot of pain. And the rich are told not to be snobs or to pin their hopes on something so unreliable, but to be rich in good deeds, generous, and ready to share.

2 Timothy

The most personal of the three, and traditionally the last thing Paul wrote. He is in prison again, and this time expects to die. The letter reads like a handover. He begins by naming Timothy’s grandmother and mother and the faith he got from them, and tells him to fan the gift he has back into flame, since God did not hand out a spirit of cowardice but of power and love and good sense. Around that runs one steady instruction: hold onto the pattern of sound teaching, guard what has been put in your care, and pass it on to reliable people who will be able to teach others. That is a chain of four links in a single sentence. The pictures he uses for it are all about sticking at it rather than succeeding: a soldier who does not get tangled up in civilian business, an athlete who competes by the rules, and a farmer who gets the first share because he did the work. He warns of hard times coming, and of teaching picked for how pleasant it sounds, when people will collect teachers to suit themselves and stop listening to the truth. Timothy is told to preach whether the moment is convenient or not, to keep his head, and to put up with hardship. Scripture, he says, is breathed out by God and useful for teaching, for correcting, and for training people to live well. What gives this letter its weight is how much of it is circumstantial. Names appear on both sides. Some deserted him when he was arrested. One man was ashamed of his chains; another was not, and searched Rome until he found him. A coppersmith did him a lot of harm. At his first hearing nobody came to support him, and everyone deserted him. He says only Luke is with him. He asks Timothy to come before winter, and to bring Mark, and to bring the coat he left behind at Troas, and the books — especially the parchments. Looking back, he says he has fought the good fight, finished the race, and kept the faith. The Acts of Paul and Thecla, printed here, is set among these same churches and names Demas and Hermogenes, two of the men these letters treat as deserters.

Titus

A short letter to a colleague left on Crete to finish what was unfinished and to appoint elders town by town. It covers much the same ground as the first letter to Timothy in about a quarter of the space. The qualifications for elders are close to those given there: blameless, faithful to one wife, with children who believe and are not running wild, not arrogant or hot-tempered or drunken or violent or greedy, but hospitable, fond of what is good, sensible, upright and self-controlled, and holding firmly to the message so he can both encourage people and answer those who argue against it. The urgency comes from teachers who are upsetting whole households by teaching for money, and who Paul says must be silenced. He quotes a Cretan writer’s own unflattering line about Cretans, and remarks that the man was right. Most of the letter is about what each group in the congregation should be taught. Older men: level-headed, serious, sound in faith and patience. Older women: reverent, not gossips, not heavy drinkers, and teachers of what is good so they can train the younger women. Younger men: self-controlled, with Titus setting the example in how he lives and speaks. And slaves: honest, and not answering back. The reason given each time is the same, and it is worth noticing. So that God’s word is not discredited. So that opponents have nothing bad to say. So that the teaching looks attractive. The concern is entirely with how the community looks from outside. Two short summaries of salvation anchor the practical advice. Both insist it came through mercy and not through anything we did right, and both move straight from that to the good deeds it ought to produce. The letter ends by telling Titus to avoid stupid arguments, family trees and quarrels about the law, and to have nothing more to do with anyone who keeps causing splits after a first and second warning.

Philemon

The shortest of Paul’s letters — one page, to one man, about one awkward situation. It is the only surviving example of him handling a private problem in writing. Onesimus is a slave belonging to Philemon. He has left, and the letter does not say whether he ran or was sent. He has reached Paul in prison, become a Christian, and made himself useful. Paul is sending him back, and writes ahead to shape how he will be received. A returned slave could expect to be punished severely, and Paul is asking for something with no legal force at all. The letter is a small masterpiece of gentle pressure. He opens by praising Philemon’s love and the encouragement he has given others. He says that although he is bold enough to order him to do what he ought, he would rather ask — as an old man, and now a prisoner. He plays on the slave’s name, which means useful, saying he used to be useless and is now useful to both of them. He calls him his own child, whose father he became in prison, and says that sending him back means sending his own heart. He says he would have liked to keep him, but did not want to do anything without permission, so the favor would be freely given rather than forced. He suggests the separation may have happened so that Philemon could have him back for good — not as a slave now, but as a dear brother. He offers to pay anything owed, writing that line in his own hand, and then remarks that he will say nothing about Philemon owing him his own life. He says he is sure Philemon will do even more than he asks. And he asks for a guest room to be got ready, which means the answer will be given face to face. The letter was also read aloud to the whole church meeting in that house. What actually happened is not recorded anywhere.

Hebrews

Anonymous, and closer to a sermon than a letter. It has no opening greeting, no named author and no named recipients, and calls itself a word of encouragement at the end. Its Greek is the best in the New Testament. The argument builds by comparison, and keeps building for thirteen chapters. God used to speak through prophets and now speaks through a Son who reflects his glory. That Son is greater than angels. He is greater than Moses, the way a builder is greater than the house. The rest Joshua gave was not the real rest, which is still ahead. And the whole priestly system is replaced. Christ is a priest in the line of Melchizedek — who turns up in Genesis with no family tree, and to whom Abraham paid a tithe — rather than by descent from Levi. It is a permanent priesthood, held by someone who does not die and needs no replacement. He makes one offering once, instead of the same offerings over and over. And the repetition is itself the proof that the old ones never finished the job: worshipers cleaned up once and for all would stop feeling guilty. The tent, the covenant and the offerings are treated all through as a sketch of the real thing. Woven into the argument are five warnings, and they are severe. Against drifting away from what you heard. Against a hardened heart, like the people in the desert who never got in. Against falling away after being shown the truth. Against deliberate sin after knowing better. And against refusing the one who is speaking. These give the book its urgency, and they read as written to people under pressure who are thinking of going back. The eleventh chapter surveys people who lived by faith — Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Moses, Rahab — and then a rush of names and nameless others who conquered kingdoms and were also tortured, mocked, sawn in two and left destitute, and who all died without receiving what was promised. The book then tells readers to put down every weight and run the race in front of them, with that great crowd of witnesses around them. It closes with practical instructions about welcoming strangers, remembering prisoners, marriage, contentment with what you have, and going outside the camp. Clement’s letter to Corinth, printed here, draws on Hebrews more than on any other New Testament writing.

James

Practical and blunt, and closer in style to Proverbs and the Sermon on the Mount than to Paul. There is almost no doctrinal argument. It moves in short bursts from subject to subject, held together by one concern: that faith should show up in what a person actually does. That concern is put most sharply in the line that faith without works is dead. He illustrates it with someone who tells a hungry, badly dressed person to go in peace and keep warm and eat well, and gives them nothing — and adds that demons believe God is one, and shudder. The formula has caused trouble alongside Paul, but the two men are using both words differently. James means by faith a bare agreement, and by works the conduct that shows it is real. Paul means by works keeping the law as a way of earning standing. The letter opens with trials that build endurance, with asking God for wisdom without wavering, and with a reversal of ordinary status in which the poor are lifted up and the rich wither like a wildflower in the heat. It says not to blame God for temptation, describes desire giving birth to sin and sin to death, and compares someone who hears and does nothing to a man who looks in a mirror and forgets what he saw. It attacks favoritism with a scene: a well-dressed visitor with gold rings gets a good seat, and a poor man in filthy clothes is told to stand or sit on the floor. A famous passage on the tongue compares it to a bit in a horse’s mouth, a rudder on a big ship, and a spark in a dry forest — and points out that people bless God and curse other people with the same mouth. Later sections trace quarrels back to cravings, warn against making plans as though tomorrow were guaranteed when life is a mist, and turn on rich landowners whose unpaid wages are shouting. The letter ends with instructions about patience, about not swearing oaths, about prayer, about calling the elders to anoint the sick, and about going after someone who has wandered off. Its interest in the double-minded man, unsteady in everything, runs straight on into the Shepherd of Hermas, printed here, where being of two minds becomes almost the whole subject.

1 Peter

A letter to scattered congregations across five provinces of what is now Turkey. They face hostility from neighbors rather than organized persecution by the state — slander, exclusion and abuse rather than courts — and from the first sentence they are addressed as exiles and strangers. That image governs the whole letter. Its purpose is to make suffering make sense and be bearable. It is short compared with what comes after. It is a test of faith more valuable than gold, which is also tested by fire. And above all it follows a pattern: Christ suffered unfairly, did not hit back, and left an example. The readers are told what they have become, in a rush of phrases lifted from the Old Testament and applied to a mixed group of Gentile converts. A chosen people. A royal priesthood. A holy nation. God’s own people. Living stones built into a spiritual house. Once not a people, and now God’s people. The practical instructions all turn on how the community looks to people watching it. Live well among the Gentiles, so that those who badmouth you end up seeing your good deeds. Accept the authority of the institutions over you, and so shut up the ignorance of fools. Then instructions to slaves; to wives, including those married to unbelievers, who may be won over without a word by how they live; and to husbands, told to be considerate and respectful so that their prayers are not blocked. Beauty is located in a gentle and quiet spirit rather than in braided hair and gold. The letter’s most quoted instruction is to be ready at any moment to explain the hope you have to anyone who asks — and to do it gently and respectfully, with a clear conscience, so that people who abuse you end up embarrassed. It insists that if they suffer it should be as Christians, and not as murderers, thieves, criminals or nuisances. It closes with instructions to elders: look after the flock willingly rather than because you have to, not for the money, and not by throwing your weight around. A greeting is sent from Babylon.

2 Peter

A short, forceful letter written with the author’s death in view — he says he knows he will be putting his body aside soon. It is almost entirely about teachers who have come in from outside. The first chapter grounds its authority in two things. One is eyewitness testimony to the transfiguration, said to have been heard on the holy mountain. The other is the prophetic word, described as even more certain, and as never having come by human decision, since no prophecy is a matter of private interpretation. Around these is a chain of qualities to add to faith — goodness, knowledge, self-control, endurance, godliness, affection and love — with the note that anyone lacking them is short-sighted to the point of blindness. The second chapter is a sustained attack, and its wording overlaps so closely with the letter of Jude that one is almost certainly using the other. These teachers bring in destructive ideas, exploit people with made-up stories, chase after sensuality, sneer at authority and are not afraid to slander. They promise freedom while being slaves of corruption themselves. Examples of judgment are piled up: angels who sinned, the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, and Balaam, who loved his fee and was told off by a donkey. The images are contemptuous — springs with no water, mist blown about by a storm, animals born to be caught, a dog going back to its vomit, and a washed pig going back to the mud. The third chapter answers people who point out that nothing has changed since their ancestors died. The reply is that they are deliberately forgetting the flood, that with the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day, and that what looks like delay is patience and an unwillingness to lose anyone. The day will come like a thief. The letter ends by admitting that Paul’s letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which unstable people twist — as they do the rest of the scriptures.

1 John

Written against a group that had left the congregation — the letter says they went out from us but never really belonged to us. It is built around three tests that keep coming back, rather than a straight-line argument, so it spirals rather than advances. The first test is what you believe. Anyone who denies that Jesus Christ came in a real body is not from God. The point is pressed from the opening sentence, which piles up physical verbs: what we heard, what we saw with our eyes, what we looked at and touched with our hands. Spirits are to be tested, because plenty of false prophets have gone out into the world. The second test is how you live. Anyone who says he lives in him ought to walk the way he walked. Anyone who says he is in the light and hates his brother is in the dark. And settled, habitual sin does not fit with being born of God. Yet the same letter says, apparently without noticing any tension, that anyone who claims to have no sin is fooling himself — and that if we admit our sins, God is faithful and fair and forgives them. The third test is love for other believers, and this is the one the letter presses hardest. Love is not to be words and talk but action and truth. The argument is blunt: anyone who has money, sees a brother in need, and shuts his heart against him cannot claim God’s love lives in him — and anyone who does not love a brother he has seen cannot love a God he has not seen. The letter says God is light with no darkness in him at all, and that God is love — and defines love not as our love for God but as his sending. It warns against loving the world, treats the appearance of antichrists as the sign of the last hour, and states its purpose plainly: written so that people who believe may know they have eternal life, and so that their joy may be complete.

2 John

A short note of thirteen verses from a writer who calls himself simply the elder. It is addressed to a chosen lady and her children, which is almost certainly a congregation and its members rather than a woman and her family, since the letter keeps sliding between singular and plural and sends greetings at the end from the children of her chosen sister. It starts warmly. He loves them in the truth, and so does everyone who knows the truth. He was delighted to find some of them living by it. He repeats the command they have had from the beginning, to love one another, and is careful to point out that it is not a new one. Then comes the occasion, and it has a hard edge. Many deceivers have gone out into the world who will not admit that Jesus Christ came in a real body. The readers are told to watch themselves so they do not lose what they have worked for. Anyone who runs ahead of the teaching instead of staying in it does not have God. The instruction that follows is the difficult part: do not take such a person into your house, and do not even greet him, because greeting him means sharing in his work. That has to be read against a world where traveling teachers lived entirely on private hospitality, so putting one up was not politeness but paying for his mission — and where a house was where the congregation met. He closes by saying he has a lot more to write but would rather not use paper and ink, and hopes to come and talk face to face, so that their joy may be complete. The Didache, printed here, takes the same problem and turns it into procedure: how many days a traveling apostle may stay, what he may ask for when he leaves, and the point at which he should be treated as a fraud.

3 John

The shortest book in the Bible, and the only one given over entirely to a falling-out between named individuals in one congregation. Like the letter before it, it comes from the elder, and it deals with the same machinery of traveling teachers and hospitality — but from the other side, because here the problem is a refusal to take people in. Three men are named. Gaius, who receives the letter, is praised for looking after brothers who are strangers to him. They have reported his kindness back to the church, and he is asked to send them on their way in a manner worthy of God, since they set out for the sake of the name and take nothing from unbelievers — which makes anyone who supports them a fellow worker for the truth. Diotrephes is the opposite. He likes to be first. He will not accept the elder’s authority. He spreads malicious talk about him. He refuses to welcome the travelers himself. And — the sharpest detail — he stops people who want to, and throws them out of the church for trying. The elder says that if he comes he will bring up what the man is doing, and adds the general remark that whoever does good is from God and whoever does evil has not seen God. Demetrius, probably the man carrying the letter, is vouched for by everybody, by the truth itself, and by the elder, whose word Gaius knows is good. It ends exactly as the second letter does: much to write, but a preference not to do it with pen and ink, and the hope of talking face to face soon. Together the two notes are the clearest surviving glimpse of how the earliest congregations kept in touch with each other — and of how easily one determined man could block it.

Jude

One chapter, twenty-five verses, written in a hurry. The author calls himself a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James. He says he was keen to write about the salvation they share, and found he had to write about something else instead: defending the faith that was handed over once and for all. The subject is people who have slipped in unnoticed and turned grace into permission to do whatever they like. He piles up examples of judgment: a people rescued from Egypt and later destroyed, angels who abandoned their proper place and are kept in chains, and Sodom and Gomorrah. He compares the intruders to Cain, to Balaam who took the money, and to Korah who rebelled. He accuses them of polluting their bodies, rejecting authority, insulting what they do not understand, and understanding only by instinct, like animals. The images come fast, and are among the most vivid in the New Testament. They are hidden rocks at the shared meals, where they eat without a second thought. Shepherds feeding only themselves. Clouds with no rain, blown along by the wind. Autumn trees with no fruit, dead twice over and pulled up by the roots. Wild sea waves foaming up their own shame. Wandering stars, for whom the deepest darkness is being kept. He calls them grumblers and fault-finders who follow their own desires, loud boasters who flatter people when there is something in it for them. Against all this the readers are told to build themselves up, to pray, to keep themselves in God’s love, and to be merciful to people who are wavering — snatching some out of the fire, and showing mercy to others carefully. The letter closes with one of the finest closing blessings in the New Testament, to the one who can keep them from falling. Two of its examples come from outside the Hebrew Bible: an argument between the archangel Michael and the devil over the body of Moses, and a prophecy quoted by name as the words of Enoch, the seventh from Adam. That quotation, treated as authority, is the single strongest reason for a book like this one to exist — and the Book of Enoch it draws on is printed here in full.

Revelation

Revelation

A vision received on the island of Patmos. It is the only sustained work of its kind in the New Testament, though the form is well represented in this volume, and almost all its imagery is borrowed from Daniel, Ezekiel and Zechariah rather than invented. It opens with letters dictated to seven churches in the province of Asia, and this is its most concrete section. Each follows the same shape, and each is uncomfortably specific. Ephesus has left behind the love it started with. Smyrna is poor, and is told it is rich. Pergamum lives where Satan’s throne is. Thyatira puts up with a teacher the letter calls Jezebel. Sardis has a reputation for being alive and is dead. Philadelphia has very little strength and has held on anyway. And Laodicea is neither hot nor cold but lukewarm, and says it is rich and needs nothing while being wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. Then a door opens in heaven, and the rest comes in sets of seven that overlap rather than follow one another. A scroll sealed seven times can only be opened by a Lamb that looks as though it has been killed. The seals release four horsemen, and then earthquake and silence. Seven trumpets bring hail, a burning mountain, a star called Wormwood, darkness, locusts with human faces, and cavalry. Seven bowls pour out sores, blood, scorching heat and darkness. Between the sets come interludes. A woman clothed with the sun and crowned with stars is chased by a dragon waiting to eat her child. There is war in heaven. A beast comes out of the sea and a second out of the earth, and everyone is made to take a mark, with a number given as a puzzle. The earth is harvested. And a city called Babylon, gaudy and drunk, falls — mourned by kings and by merchants, specifically because nobody will buy their cargo any more. The cargo is listed, and the list ends with human bodies and souls. The last chapters move fast. A rider on a white horse. The dragon chained up. A thousand years. A final attack. Judgment in front of a great white throne, with books opened. And then a new heaven and a new earth. The vision ends with a city coming down out of heaven, measured and described in gold and jewels. It has no temple, because God is its temple, and no sun or moon, because the Lamb is its lamp. The river of the water of life runs down the middle of the street, with the tree of life on both banks, and its leaves are for healing the nations. And the gates are never shut, because there is no night there. Its closest relatives are printed in this volume: the visions of Enoch, the hard questions of 2 Esdras, and the visions of the Shepherd of Hermas.