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Solomon recommends taking lessons from one of God’s smallest but most hard-working creatures.
The Book of Proverbs is traditionally ascribed to Solomon, son of King David, and himself King of Israel early in the tenth century BC, though as with the Psalms some of it was compiled from the works of other authors, and some is of later date. The following passage was translated into English for the Authorized Version of 1611, and the result is quite masterly.
David, fresh from another close encounter with Saul’s men, shares his advice for living a charmed life.
Psalm 34 is said to have been written as a thanksgiving by David, when he was on the run from the madness of King Saul. He took refuge with Achish (Achimelech or Abimelech) the King of Gath, and to ensure that news of him did not get about, passed himself off as a harmless lunatic. This extract comes from the elegant translation made in 1535 by Yorkshireman Myles Coverdale.
When Rhoda, maid to John Mark and his mother, said Peter was standing at the gate, nobody in the house believed her.
St Peter was imprisoned during the purge of Christians ordered by Herod Agrippa in AD 44, during which St James, brother of St John the Evangelist, was executed. Peter’s miraculous jailbreak is a tale into which another evangelist, St Mark, also comes; but the star of Luke’s superbly crafted account is Rhoda, the scatterbrained maid.
Three servants are engaged to invest their master’s money in the markets.
Jesus, now in Jerusalem, has been telling his disciples about the kingdom of heaven, perhaps better translated as ‘the reign of heaven’. He reminds them that this heavenly reign has begun and is getting wider, and that at some point in the future — he never says exactly when — God will require us to produce something to show for the errands he has sent us on, however small.
Naomi lost her husband and two sons in Moab, and returned to Bethlehem with only one comfort in her bitterness, her daughter-in-law Ruth.
In all world literature, there can be few love stories to rival the story of Ruth and Boaz, set in about 1100 BC as a very early episode in the back-story of King David. Their tale has all the best ingredients: a determined heroine, a manly yet sensitive hero, a leap of faith, disappointments, misunderstandings and sexual tensions — and of course, a happy ending.
A prophet-for-hire agreed to help Balak, King of Moab, try to do something about the flood of Israelites pouring into his kingdom.
The story of Balaam and his ass, told in the Book of Numbers, is set in the late thirteenth century BC, some forty years after the Israelites escaped slavery in Egypt. Now they were massing in Moab on the eastern side of the Dead Sea, ready to cross the River Jordan into their Promised Land; but Balak, King of Moab, was feeling far from hospitable and already had a plan for moving them on.