Twenty-third Tuesday after Pentecost
It's been a strange day for me. Election days always have their element of the odd. My day is strange for other reasons. Last week, while we were in Manteo, I broke what I thought was a filling on the back of my upper right front tooth. The tooth also became loose. I got an appointment with my dentist for this morning at 8:00. The assistant x-rayed. The dentist took one quick look at the tooth. She said, "You split this tooth really badly. It cannot be repaired. It has to come out." She called the oral surgeon. He said he would take me at 11:15. The procedure took only a couple of minutes. I now look like the classic rube from Hicksville, like a heavier version of Buddy Ebsen on "Beverly Hillbillies." My dentist said, "It's a great time for me to look like this. Everybody is wearing masks anyway." We're now talking about an implant. We're also talking about a chunk of money. Does anyone have advice about implants? I could just go with a partial (I think that's the term), which would be a lot cheaper.
It's Tuesday, Bible study time. Please read Acts 8:26-40. This passage is exegetically loaded. We'll spend two days on it.
The Philip of this story is Philip the Evangelist (Acts 6:5). Philip travels from Jerusalem to Gaza, on the Mediterranean seacoast. It's the same Gaza as the present day Gaza Strip. The mode of travel is rarely mentioned in the NT. The norm is walking. Very few people among the Jews in Palestine would have enough money to own a horse. Some paintings of Paul's Damascus Road experience show Paul as falling off his horse when he heard the voice of the risen Christ. This was almost surely not the case. No horse is mentioned by either Paul in his letters or Luke in Acts, and Luke tells the story three times. OK, here's where I get to play scholarly debunker. In both of the birth stories of Jesus (Mt. 1-2, Lk. 1-2), no donkey is ever mentioned. Mary probably walked with Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem. I hope your not too disappointed.
In verse 27, we are introduced to the unnamed Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, the queen of Ethiopia. Candace in Ge'ez, the language of ancient Ethiopia (modern Ethiopians speak Amharic), is not a name but a title for the queen. The ancient empire of Ethiopia, like ancient Egypt, was usually ruled by men but had a few women rulers in its history. The other Ethiopian queen mentioned in the Bible was the Queen of Sheba, who visited Solomon's court 900 years earlier.
Having eunuchs as court officials was common in the ancient world. The original reason for this was that eunuchs were incapable of being sexually involved with the king's harem. The king could thus trust that any child born to any of his wives was not from an affair with a member of the court. As time went on, eunuchs were groomed for diplomatic work. Not having wives or children they could devote all their energy to serving their monarch (yes, there is a similarity to the reasons for clerical celibacy in Roman Catholicism).
The eunuch in our story was a high official in the Ethiopian government, in charge of the national wealth of the country. He was also a Jew. Ethiopia had a substantial Jewish population from ancient times to modern. The last Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie, was deposed in 1974, by a communist junta, the Deng. Under their rule minority Jews and majority Christians were persecuted. In 1991 Israeli airlifted over 14,000 Ethiopian Jews from Ethiopia to Israel. They did it all in 36 hours. The Communists were overthrown in 1996. Ethiopia is now a democracy.
Philip encounters this treasurer of Ethiopia sitting in his chariot, the chariot itself being indicative of the eunuch's wealth. The eunuch had come to Jerusalem on a worship pilgrimage, Luke says. I suspect he may have been doing some government business as well. Being a eunuch, the Ethiopian treasurer was according to the Jewish Torah ritually unclean. He would not have been allowed into the Temple.
We'll pick up our story there in our next Bible study.
Faithfully,
Christian
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