Today’s Scripture Reading (July 26,
2014): Nehemiah 12
A story is
told of Alexander the Great leaving Gaza and heading for Jerusalem. And
according the story, when Jaddus the High Priest heard that the military man
was on the march, he went out himself to meet him on the field of battle,
dressed in all of his glory as the high priest. When he came upon the great
conqueror he invited him back into the temple and showed him passages in the
collected books of God that Jaddus believed referred directly to Alexander and
his reign. The result of this contact was that Jaddus was honored by Alexander
and was given many favors. The story has been called apocryphal, but there is a
bit of a ring of truth, especially when we consider how Alexander dealt with
Judah and Samaria. The bottom line is that the story (first told by Josephus
the Jewish historian) might not be true – but it also might be.
I recently
had a discussion with a friend with regard to the NIV translation (the
translation that I am using in this blog) of the Bible. The accusation against
the translation was that the translators have purposefully made changes in the
text so that the translations is without errors. The motive is a belief that
the Bible is inerrant – but it has been made inerrant not in its original
writing but in the work of the translators who worked with the original
writings. However, I am not buying the charge. And even if there are slight
changes in the text introduced by the translators, which there most definitely
is, a belief in inerrancy does not necessarily have to be the motive. The truth
is that well-meaning people have introduced changes and interpretations into
the scripture since the beginning. It is one of the reason that every
translation needs to go back to the earliest copies of the scripture available
in the original languages. Even Jaddus when he met with Alexander the Great had
his interpretation of what the Scriptures meant.
But it goes beyond
even that. This text is more evidence of someone tampering (in a well-meaning
way) with the Scripture. This passage is important because it gives us a list
of the first six High Priests who reigned in Jerusalem after the exile. Time
was normally told by the year of the king. We see this method of telling time
all the way through Kings and Chronicles. In an effort to ground an event into
a specific time period, it placed the even in a certain year of the reigning
king. But after the exile there was no king, and so there was a change made and
time was now told as a certain year of a particular high priest – and the high
priest, like the king, was a hereditary position – father passed on the
position to his son. This passage outlines the first six high priests after the
return of the exiles. And it is thought that the last priest, Jaddua, also went
by the name Jaddus.
But if that
is true, and the Jaddua of Nehemiah is the Jaddus who went out to meet
Alexander the Great on his way to Jerusalem, then some well-meaning scribe has
inserted names into this verse, because there is no way that Nehemiah would have
lived long enough to see the beginning of Jaddus’ reign. It is not that the
information is wrong, it just doesn’t seem possible that Nehemiah wrote it.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading:
Nehemiah 13
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