Alfie and the Magi - Monday Morning Memo

Adoration of the Magi with Alfie the Elf, by Litvinov Oleg Arkad’yevich.

You will notice Babylon in the background. It is widely agreed by scholars that the wise men – the magi – were from Babylon. If you read the book of Daniel in the Bible, you will see that Daniel, a Jew, was made the head of the wise men by King Nebuchadnezzar during the Babylonian captivity.

During this time, Daniel foretold the coming of the Messiah in a specific number of “weeks” of years. He spoke of 70 “weeks,” 490 years in all. This is why the wise men knew exactly when to begin looking for the sign of the Messiah. Daniel, their most famous leader, had left them detailed instructions many centuries earlier.

Daniel ch 9, verse 25: “Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and sixty two weeks.”

– Indy Beagle

NOTE: If you are a math nerd and want to go deep down a whole other rabbit hole, be aware that there are two interpretations of the “70th week” spoken of by Daniel. One of these contends that the 70th week is in the future: some say it is the 7-year Great Tribulation foretold by John in the Book of Revelation. The second view argues that the 70th week has already been fulfilled.

Me? I don’t care. My interest is satisfied in knowing (1.) who the wise men (wise-ards, wisards) were, and (2.) how they knew when to scour the skies for a sign of the Messiah. – Indianus Beaglus

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One day in the mid-two-thousands, a teen-ager named Amy waited to hear the voice of God. She was sitting in a youth Bible-study group, surrounded by her peers, and losing patience. Everyone else in the group seemed to hear God speak all the time, but Amy had never heard Him, not even a peep. Her hands didn’t shimmer with gold dust after she prayed, as others claimed theirs did, and she was never able to say, with confidence, “The Holy Spirit told me to do it.” She went home that evening, determined to try again the next day. A few years passed and she still heard nothing. She began to wonder if something was wrong with her. “God didn’t talk to me,” she wrote later, in a blog post. “I was afraid that meant either he wasn’t there, or I wasn’t good enough.”

Amy, the eldest of five siblings, was homeschooled by evangelical parents in the suburbs of Alberta, Canada. (She asked that I use only her first name.) She was bright, and happy, and remembers days spent reading “David Copperfield” aloud with her siblings. It was only when she left for college—Ambrose University, a Christian liberal-arts school—that aspects of her childhood began to strike her as peculiar. Amy remembers her parents telling her, when she was six, that her grandparents were going to Hell because they weren’t Christians. She grew up believing in creationism, and was startled to feel persuaded by the evidence for evolution in her college textbooks. She grappled with the “problem of evil”: If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, how can he allow so many terrible things to happen?

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- Anna Russell, The New Yorker, Aug 30, 2024