The Bible
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘The Bible’
Even before he was born, St Dunstan was marked out to lead the English Church and nation to more peaceful times.
In 793, Vikings swept across Northumbria and extinguished the beacon of Lindisfarne, symbol of England’s Christian civilisation. Much of the land lay under a pagan shadow for over a century, but St Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of King Edgar (r. 959-975), helped to rekindle both Church and State.
A February celebration for which the faithful have brought candles to church since Anglo-Saxon times.
Candlemas is the English name for a Christian feast also known as the Presentation of Christ, the Purification of the Virgin, and the Meeting of the Lord. It is kept on February 2nd, forty days after Christmas, and in Anglo-Saxon times was a night of candle-lit processions and carol singing almost on a par with Easter.
Even as Moses is in the presence of God receiving the Ten Commandments, the people down below are already breaking the first of them.
Moses has brought the Israelites out of servitude in Egypt into the hard wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. God has given them manna to eat and water from dry stone, but their hearts fail them when Moses goes up into the quaking, cloud-capped, lightning-crowned Mount Sinai, and does not return for over a month.
Moses comes down from Mount Sinai with a constitution for a holy nation, to find it already broken.
The Israelites have tired of waiting for Moses to come down from Mount Sinai, and have made themselves a golden calf for a god in place of the God of Moses. But Moses now has returned, bearing two stone tablets inscribed with a law for his people, and he is not pleased to see it has been broken already.
Since the Israelites could not bear seeing Moses go to the mountain, the God upon the mountain came down to the Israelites.
Moses’s long absences on Mount Sinai are putting too great a strain on the Israelites, so instead of demanding that Moses come to the mountain, God comes down to Moses, meeting him in a makeshift temple at the mountain’s foot.
Spies are sent out to scout the Promised Land, but their report shows that Israel is not yet ready to inherit it.
After fleeing slavery in Egypt, the Israelites have been living in the empty wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. On Mount Sinai itself, God has met with their leader Moses and given his people a law to live by and a promise of a land of their own. In the meantime, however, life in the desert is punishingly hard.