In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

7. Joining Creation’s Praise of God A Biblical and Christian Tradition It was often the habit of the man of God [the Saxon saint Benno of Meissen, d. 1106] to go about the fields in meditation and prayer: and once as he passed by a certain marsh, a talkative frog was croaking in its slimy waters: and lest it should disturb his contemplation, he bade it to be a Seraphian, inasmuch as all frogs in Seraphus are mute. But when he had gone on a little way, he called to mind the saying in Daniel: ‘O ye whales and all that move in the waters, bless ye the Lord. O all ye beasts and cattle, bless ye the Lord.’ And fearing lest the singing of the frogs might perchance be more agreeable to God than his own praying, he again issued his command to them, that they should praise God in their accustomed fashion: and soon the air and the fields were vehement with their conversation.1 The words in Daniel that Benno recalled are from two verses of the Benedicite, familiar to all medieval clergy and religious from its frequent liturgical use. It is the canticle that begins Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord; sing praise to him and highly exalt him for ever,2 and continues through thirty verses which each call on one category of God’s creatures to praise him. The last seven of these verses are addressed to humans, but all the others to non-human creatures from 1 Waddell, Beasts, pp. 71–2. The story can also be found in Bell, Wholly Animals, pp. 25–6. 2 Biblical quotations in this chapter are all from NRSV. the angels, through the heavenly bodies, the elements of the weather, the mountains, the plants, the waters, to all the living creatures of water, air and earth. The canticle occurs in one of the so-called Greek additions to the book of Daniel (3:52–90), where it is placed on the lips of the three Jews Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah (Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego) as they walk unharmed in the flames of Nebuchadnezzar ’s fiery furnace. As part of the Greek versions of Daniel, the canticle belongs to the canonical Scriptures of the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, but since it is not in the Hebrew and Aramaic version of Daniel it is not part of the canon for Jews or Protestant Christians. At the Reformation it joined the books Protestants called the Apocrypha, where in English versions it used, rather oddly, to be called ‘the Song of the Three Children’. But it did not cease to be known. In the Church of England, for example, it was given a prominent place among the canticles used in liturgy. Lynn White recognized that it did not fit his thesis of the dominant and disastrous anthropocentrism of the Judeo-Christian tradition, which he insisted had its roots in the Old Testament. He therefore hypothesized that it was composed by an Alexandrian Jew ‘who felt that there were spiritual values in Greek animism that should be reconciled with the rigid monotheism of his ancestral tradition. The result smelt a bit of heresy, so both the rabbis and the more rigorous Reformers rejected it.’3 This is quite wrong. The rabbinic canonical principle that only texts extant in Hebrew or Aramaic could be canonical meant that the Greek additions to Daniel were complete non-starters for inclusion in the Jewish Scriptures,4 quite irrespective of their content, while the principle of the Reformers that it was Israel who defined the Old Testament for Christians had the same effect. The Benedicite has never ‘smelt a bit of heresy’. We do not know where or when it was written, but we can certainly exclude the influence of ‘Greek animism’, because it is really nothing more than an elaborate expansion of Psalm 148, where just the same range of God’s creatures is exhorted to praise God, though fewer specific examples are given. The Benedicite makes no theological statement not already made in Psalm 148. There is no question that Psalm 148 belongs integrally to the Israelite/Jewish Living with Other Creatures 148 3 White, ‘Continuing the Conversation’, p. 62. 4 The Song of the Three has often been supposed to have had a Hebrew or Aramaic original and to have formed part of an edition of the book of Daniel in Hebrew/ Aramaic before its translation into Greek. This...

Share