The Writings (or the Ketuvim in Hebrew) is a strange collection of books.
At first glance, it looks like a grab bag. It’s a smattering of history (1-2 Chronicles, Ruth, Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah), wisdom literature (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, Song of Songs), apocalyptic literature (Daniel), and poetry (Psalms, Lamentations). Maybe these are just the kids Moses and the Prophets didn’t pick to play on their team?
Perhaps that's why, after the time of Jesus, Christians reordered the Old Testament to make a bit more sense. However, the Ketuvim (Writings) lose their strange beauty in the modern Bible's order.
In the ancient order, the Ketuvim clearly emphasizes books written from the period of the Exile (1-2 Chronicles, Lamentations, Daniel, Esther, Ezra-Nehemiah). This creates an alternate context for the books. As we read them, we imagine Jews in Babylon and Persia struggling to remain faithful to Yahweh and make sense of worship apart from the temple and away from the land.
- The poetry takes on a new flavor: the songs written for the temple in Jerusalem are now sung in synagogues across the Empire. They are music for the scattered and the gathered.
- Wisdom literature takes on a fresh meaning: how can we live with the grain of God’s will while engrained in an idolatrous culture?
- The history books take on a new purpose: How do we explain our situation away from the land, enslaved under foreign occupation? How do we make sense of our ancestors’ failures and renew our covenant relationship with God? How do go forward when our attempts at renewal fail?
And these questions are not far from our own.
After all, we, too, live as “exiles” in a modern “Babylon” (1 Peter 1:1, 2:11, 5:13, Rev. 18). We, too, must learn to sing the songs of the heavenly Jerusalem while dispersed across the empires of earth. We, too, must seek to develop wisdom in an unwise age. We, too, must seek to make sense of the church’s sordid sacred history, perpetually seek renewal, and wrestle with our failures to produce it.
I can think of no greater collection of texts for exiles than the those originally written for them: The Writings. So make 2024 the year you opened the grab bag and found the treasures laid up for you there by God.
In these ancient words, we will find the messiah, and in him we find life.
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