Finishing the Apocrypha (Project Gutenberg etext #124)

I finished the Apocrypha last night, as I expected I would.

The prayer of Manasseh was pretty pedestrian. "Oh, God, I am a really awful person, and don't deserve forgiveness, but you're going to forgive me anyway because us Jews are your chosen people and you don't want us to look bad. Thanks, bro."

The only remaining book was "Bel and the Dragon". It's another Daniel story, with three parts. The first part is a detective story. Daniel deprecates the Babylonian god Bel (probably Ba'al), saying that the idol is just an inanimate object. "But then how does Bel eat all those offerings we leave for it?" asks the King. Daniel makes a wager: if he cannot demonstrate that Bel does not eat the offerings, Daniel will be put to death for blasphemy against Bel, but if he can show that Bel is a fraud, the priests of Bel will be killed. Daniel uses a clever stratagem and succeeds.

The Babylonians also worship a dragon god; this story is a little less coherent. In particular, it is bizarrely unclear whether the dragon is an actual living creature, a mechanical simulacrum, or another idol. Daniel "feeds" it some bizarre mixture and it bursts, showing that, whatever it was, it wasn't a god.

Still, deicide wasn't condoned. The third part is a retelling of the famous lion's den incident; this time Daniel is thrown to the lions for wrecking the dragon, while in the Book of Daniel proper it's for refusing to stop praying to God and pray to King Darius instead. It's the Daniel story that was so nice, they told it twice.

Now I get to read the Gene Stratton-Porter's sequel to Freckles. The sequel is more famous than the first book; it's The Girl of the Limberlost.