The Apocrypha
The Apocrypha (from the
Greek word meaning hidden or stored away) is made up
of those sacred books of Jewish scripture which the
translators of the 1611 King James Bible, the so-called
'Authorized' version, excluded from the Anglican Old
Testament. In this the translators followed the Hebrew
Bible which had come around 100 CE to place these books
outside the Jewish canon. But there exists an older
version of the Jewish scriptures, the so-called Septuagint,
the ancient Greek translation of around 250 BCE which
predates the later decision to keep certain well-established
books from the Hebrew Bible.
Many of these 'apocryphal' books
had been part of Jewish Wisdom literature, often considered
too holy or precious to be made commonly available.
That the Book of Tobit was certainly in use as a sacred
text among the Jews around the first century CE is confirmed
by its discovery among the Dead Sea scrolls finds at
Qumran. (Interestingly, other textual finds at Qumran
demonstrate tendencies towards the cosmology of Zoroastrianism,
which perceives human life as a struggle between twinned
forces of good and evil.) The Eastern Orthodox Church
still uses the older Septuagint translation for its
Old Testament, so the Book of Tobit remains in currency
there; as it does in the Catholic Bible, which, since
the Council of Trent, 1546, has included those books
which the Anglicans, following the lead of Martin Luther,
called 'Apocryphal. St Jerome's translation in the fourth
century, which became the so-called 'Vulgate', has Tobit
blinded by swallows' dung than sparrows'. In the context
of the story of Tobias's marriage, it is interesting
to note that both these birds have associations with
Aphrodite and other Eastern love deities.
Tobit, like Judith, or Esther,
or Susanna is an example of an edifying early novel:
the pious Jew who, against all adversity maintains his
integrity by observance of his religious tradition even
in exile and at the risk of his own life. That the tale
includes other, somewhat unJewish, elements may have
contributed to its removal from the Jewish canon.
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