The Little Friar

This is my favorite spiritual: I'm reminded of it this morning because I was reading the book of Exodus and came to the first confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh. And I was surprised by something. I was expecting, because we all know this story, to find Moses walking up to Pharaoh and saying " Let my people go! " But that's not quite what you find in the first encounter between Moses and Pharaoh as recounted in Exodus 5.  What you get is this (Exodus 5.1): Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, "This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: 'Let my people go, so that they may hold a festival to me in the wilderness.'" Yes, we get the demand "Let my people go".  But it's not a demand to leave Egypt.  It's a demand for liberation and freedom to worship . The demand is this: "Let my people go worship". Pharaoh, we know, refuses and makes the Israelites work harder.  They have to continue makin...

Most Christians pay so little attention to that small Old Testament called Qoheleth , or "The Preacher", or more commonly Ecclesiastes .  More interestingly, I want to say that this small book has an interesting critique of America -- its culture, politics and economics.  That criticism is built around understanding two key Hebrew ideas that are at the heart of The Preacher's project:   Hebel  and yithron . Hebel  is most commonly -- and wrongly -- translated vanity .   Hebel  occurs 38 times in Ecclesiastes, so whatever it does mean it's important to the book's meaning.   Most of us have grown up with the King James-inspired school which translates  hebel  as "vanity".  Hence the famous rendering in the KJV of the opening lines of the Preacher (1.2): Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.  Following the KJV in translating  hebel  as "vanity" are the ASV, ESV, NKJV, RSV, and the NRS...