Bel and the Dragon

He also took out some chapters in Esther, and there's a precedent for having some hesitation, of course, because even someone like St. Jerome had hesitation over some of the Deuterocanonical Books and some of the chapters of Esther and some of the other chapters.

Like in Daniel, we read the story of Susanna and Bel and the Dragon way back there, if you can remember all the way back then.

But the Orthodox and the Catholic churches have discerned that these chapters are part of the canon, so they're part of the Deuterocanonical Books.

And so in order to understand the story fully, uh, chapters eleven and twelve are actually the first two chapters that we're going to be reading so we can get the chronological story of the Book of Esther.

Both the source of the original form of the legend of the fight between Ea and Apsu and Maduk and Tiamat and the period of its composition are unknown, but there is no doubt that in one form or another it persisted in Mesopotamia for thousands of years.

The apocryphal book of Bel and the Dragon shows that a form of the legend was in existence among the Babylonian Jews long after the captivity, and the narrative relating to it associates it with religious observances.

But there is no foundation whatsoever for the assertion which has so often been made that the two accounts of creation which are given in the early chapters in Genesis are derived from the seven tablets of creation described in the preceding pages.

It is true that there are many points of resemblance between the narratives in cuneiform and Hebrew, and these often illustrate each other, but the fundamental conceptions of the Babylonian and Hebrew accounts are essentially different.

Mm-hmm.

And it's called Bel and the Dragon, and when I looked into this, from what I could tell, this was in the Bible.

And I don't know why it's not in there anymore, but it was.

It's in some versions.

I think it's in the Catholic Bible.

That it's, it's a part of Daniel, and it's called Bel and the Dragon, and it's, um, I got the, the passage right here.

Um, when, when King Astyages was w- was laid to rest with his ancestors, Cyrus the Persian succeeded to his kingdom.

Cyrus the Persian.

So he believes that there's a superiority complex to having an organized group of men who are authorities over a text, and you land with them when there's ever a dispute amongst that category of people, and he always gave precedent to these Hebrews.

We see this happen even in the church because, for example, in 407, he wrote on the Book of Daniel, not his preface, but he actually wrote a commentary on it, and he gets to the section about Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, which is only in the longer recensions of Daniel.

And one of the things that he gets into those, those sections, he starts speaking about how there's this rejection of the 70 with the acceptance of the Theodotion text because the, the Septuagint does have Susanna, but it's a different form, and it's in a different location in the book.

But having this story about the three young men, Bel and the Dragon, that's only uniquely preserved within the Theodotion tradition.

And he makes this comment, which I found really, really interesting.

He talks about how the church particularly had chosen...