For somewhere he has spoken about the seventh day in these words: "On the seventh day God rested from all his works." – Hebrews 4:4

Today's Scripture Reading (June 24, 2024): Hebrews 4

As a bit of a political junkie, I sometimes pay attention to things that everyone else discards as unimportant. So, during the jury deliberation regarding former President Donald Trump's Hush Money trial, the jury sent several questions to the judge. One was that they wanted to hear the rain analogy that the judge gave during the jury instructions again. The judge's analogy said it was okay to make certain inferences about the evidence presented in the case. For instance, if you go to bed and it is not raining, and you get up, and the sun is shining, but the road is wet, and people are wearing raincoats and carrying umbrellas, you can make the inference that it rained during the night, even though you didn't see the rain. (A good friend of mine saw the reporting and asked, "What in the world does that have to do with the former President paying off a porn star?" but I understood the judge's point.)

So, later, the jury wanted to hear the judge's instruction on the rain again. In a move that I admit mystifies me, the jury didn't have a written copy of the instructions. They couldn't find the rain analogy on page seventeen, paragraph two, and read it for themselves. They had to have it told to them one more time by the originator of the analogy, the judge himself.

The original biblical books were very different from the Bible that we have in our possession. For one, it wasn't a single book but a series of scrolls. I always find it interesting when I visit a Jewish Synagogue and the Rabbi takes the scroll required for the service out of the cabinet and then parades it around the room, inviting the worshippers to touch the scroll with their worship shawls or prayer books. The scrolls are often huge and rolled out on a table as the reader for the service begins to speak out the scripture in front of the congregation, often in a sing-song manner. Our Bibles are smaller; as a result, the whole of scripture, from the beginning of the Hebrew Tanakh to the Revelation of the Christian Testament, can be held in our hands.

The original scripture was broken down into books, but not into chapters and verses. They were scrolls; in some cases, several books could be combined into a single document, as is true for the minor prophets; all twelve books were placed on one scroll. Another example is the Ezra-Nehemiah complex, which combines two books into one scroll.

As a result, biblical writers sometimes don't specify where a passage is found. One commentator accused Ezekiel of not knowing what was in the Tanakh when he commented on the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah. While I disagree with his conclusion, I have to admit that it is possible.

And so, the author of Hebrews writes, "For somewhere he has spoken about the seventh day in these words: 'On the seventh day God rested from all his works'" (Hebrews 4:4). Somewhere. For us, it is a quick internet search that reveals that "somewhere" was Genesis 2:2. But the author of Hebrews didn't have a way of quickly looking it up, or even the division of chapters and verses that we have today.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Hebrews 5