The Bible

Naaman had very fixed ideas about what it takes to get a miracle.

Joram was King of Israel (i.e. the ten northern tribes) in the middle of the ninth century BC.

Read

Persian star-gazers hasten to Israel for the birth of a royal heir, but find that King Herod has had his fill of them.

According to Pliny the Elder (23-79), a Roman contemporary of St Paul, ‘magi’ were believed to be followers of Zoroaster, interpreters of dreams, worshippers of the stars and secret knowledge, not to mention conjurors and charlatans.

Read

David’s scheme to steal another man’s wife succeeded, but he could not keep his secret from everyone.

David was King of all Israel early in the 10th century BC. Through Bathsheba, he was a forefather of Jesus, but the marriage was the result of a stratagem unworthy of a King.

Read

Smarting for his outraged ‘rights’, Cain lost his reason — but not God’s pity and love.

Abel and his brother Cain were the sons of Adam and Eve. Theirs is a universal tale of what long-nursed envy and a sense of outraged ‘rights’ can lead us to do; but it is also an allegory of the deteriorating relationship between Judah and the ten tribes of northern Israel in the 8th century BC.

Read

The King who condemned him to the den of lions felt far worse about it than Daniel did.

Nebuchadnezzar II was King of Babylon (near to modern Baghdad) in the 6th century BC. Many Jews lived there, after Jerusalem was conquered by the Babylonians 587 BC.

Read

Prince Belshazzar’s disrespectful behaviour left him facing the original ‘writing on the wall’.

Belshazzar was a prince in Babylon (near what is now Baghdad, Iraq) in the 6th century BC. While his father King Nabonidus was away, Belshazzar had the government of the Empire in his father’s stead.

Read