Cif beliefReligion This article is more than 15 years oldDeuteronomy 26:5
This article is more than 15 years oldMark VernonMark Vernon: 'A wandering Aramean was my father', like a great work of art, has an ineffable beautyThe question: What lesson, or carol, would you like to hear at Christmas?
The reading I would like to hear at Christmas isn't on the official list. In fact, I'm not sure when you can hear it read in churches. The absence is an oversight, for it is one of the oldest texts recorded in the Bible. It is Deuteronomy chapter 26, verse 5: "A wandering Aramean was my father."
It sounds obscure but hearing it always makes me shiver. Maybe I can explain why. This fragment of text carries the echo of a very old tradition. It is more ancient than the Bible itself, and was gathered up and incorporated into the Book of Deuteronomy because it was already of great antiquity.
Scholars reckon the phrase was the confession of the early Israelite tribesman. It was a kind of cultic signifier, expressing a sense of belonging; a phrase around which a people could form. "A wandering Aramean was my father." It goes back to at least the 12th century BC, and probably a lot further. The name "Aram" has been found in one of the oldest examples of writing, the Mari texts of the 18th century BC. That would date the phrase to at least 2000 BC and probably before.
Semi-nomads of the Fertile Crescent would have composed it. If it was uttered by these ancestors of the Hebrews, that makes it one of the oldest phrases we can know human beings have breathed. It is a relic of pre-history, a fossil from our past.
That Biblical scholarship can bring such texts to life is one of its greatest triumphs. As Karen Armstrong argues in her book, The Bible: A Biography, it is why Christians who say they are Bible-believing have little to fear from criticism. The books of the Bible, and the assorted texts of which those books are composed, were remembered only because they spoke of something which was itself beyond the text. Strictly speaking, the Judeo-Christian "people of the book" are not people of the book at all: they are people who look beyond the words of the book to a deeper truth and reality.
Sociologists will tell you that religions are powerful providers of identity and unity. That is why this text is so powerful. "A wandering Aramean was my father." It is a thin thread back to a memory that is almost lost. Christmas is an excellent time to hear such texts read, in the context of a liturgy, amidst candles and shadows. The performance brings it back to life.
Don't ask me what it means; like great art it doesn't literally mean anything much. Rather, it is a piece of history, "a fable agreed upon" as is said. And what a fable!
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