Exploring the Bible

 In this chapter we will take a brief look at the extra seven books included in the Catholic version of the Old Testament. It should be noted, the Protestant Bible did not exclude these books because they feel they are false or inaccurate. They were excluded because they were not considered to be Holy Scripture. These books offer a very unique and helpful insight into the time between the Testaments. These 400 years are otherwise silent. It is fascinating to see some of the details and events contained in these extra books of the Bible. Others in this grouping were written well before this information void took place. Baruch - written sometime during the 6th century B.C. - the author is thought to be Baruch, but this is highly debatable. The Book of Baruch encouraged the people to be pro-Babylonian. Not only did he consider resistance futile, but he felt it was God’s desire that the people be in exile. Baruch lived in the 6th century B.C. and was the scribe or secretary for the pr...

The Dead Sea Scrolls contained all but one of the Books from the Old Testament. In all there were some 225 copies of various biblical books found in the caves above and around Qumran. This however, was only a portion of the scrolls discovered in the caves.  The scrolls which were not Books found in the ancient Hebrew Bible fall into two categories. The first is Non-Biblical Compositions. The second classification is Documents and Letters.  Most of the Documents and Letters were found in cave 5/6 which came to be known as the Cave of the Letters. Here they found fifty-five documents. Fifteen were military letters stored in a leather waterskin. There were also thirty-five financial documents that were apparently the personal archive of a refugee named Babatha. The final five documents belonged to Eleazar, the son of Shmuel. These were contracts found in a leather purse and one hidden inside a reed. The Non-Biblical Compositions have been broken down into at least ten different ...