The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
God’s love proved to be bigger and stronger than all man’s wickedness.
In the 6th century BC, Jerusalem was captured by the Babylonians, and her nobility were deported to Babylon. In their exile, they studied their oppressor’s heathen mythology of a great flood, and turned it quite brilliantly into an allegory of Israel’s sins, the ‘flood’ of invasion, and their own Noah-like role in keeping Judaism alive until God restored Israel to her land.
Paris, prince of Troy, takes the not unwilling Queen of Sparta back home with him, and sparks ten years of diplomatic tension and ten of war.
The Siege of Troy is the heart of two of the greatest works of classical literature, Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. The details, especially the squabbles, sulks and strategems of the gods, are pure myth of course, but the strife between the Greeks of Achaia and the city of Troy may be rooted in fact; if so, a date around 1200-1180 BC is possible — just after the Exodus, in fact.
Mark Twain’s attention was drawn off people-watching for a moment by an extraordinarily lifelike machine.
At the World’s Fair in Paris in 1867, American novelist Mark Twain saw a remarkable ‘automaton’, a silver swan that seemed for all the world like a living thing. But the incorrigible people-watcher could not keep his attention fixed even on that.