The Book the Councils Mislaid: A First Report on the Visions of Iddo the Seer

Posted April 1 by Dr. Lyle H. Pruett  ·  Filed under Canon, Manuscripts, Pre-Flood Studies  ·  47 comments  ·  Corrected April 2 (two typographical errors in the Greek; my thanks to a reader in Dayton).

A word to my regular readers

I had intended, when I last wrote in this space, to return within the fortnight with the fourteenth installment of the Behemoth series. I know that a number of you have been waiting on the question of the tail, and I have not forgotten it. That was eleven months ago. What follows is my explanation, and I ask your patience with its length, because the explanation is itself the most important thing I have ever published, and I would rather be thorough once than brief twice.

In short: a book exists that is cited by name, three times, as a source, by the inspired author of Chronicles; that was still being copied, corrected and annotated by Greek Christians in the tenth and eleventh centuries, which is to say six hundred years after the lists that left it out were drawn up; and that was left out of those lists as the result of what I will argue — carefully, with evidence, and without rancor toward anyone living — was a clerical error. I use the phrase in its literal sense. An error was made by a cleric.

The book's principal teaching, which it states not once but repeatedly, in language that does not admit of allegory, is that it is a sin to eat the dried mucus of one's own nose.

I will ask you to read that sentence again, because I have found that people's first response to it is to laugh, and their second response is to stop laughing, and the second response is the one I am interested in.

Let me say at once what I am not claiming. I am not claiming to add a book to the Bible. That is not a thing a research fellow at a small institute in east Tennessee can do, and I would be suspicious of anyone who told you otherwise. I am claiming that a decision was made in the fourth century on the basis of a mistake; that the mistake can be documented; and that the Church — I mean the whole Church, Rome and Constantinople and Nashville alike — owes it to herself to look at the evidence. I have written to all three. I will post their replies as they arrive.

I should also say, because it will come out, that I did not come to this text clean. I will say no more about that here than that I understood it, when I first read it, in the way one understands a letter addressed to oneself.

This post is long. I will take it in order, and I will put the text itself after the arguments about it, because the reader who skips to the text will not believe it, and the reader who arrives at it will.

What the book is

Open your Bible to Second Chronicles and read the following three verses, which I expect you have read before without stopping.

Now the rest of the acts of Solomon, first and last, are they not written in the book of Nathan the prophet, and in the prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite, and in the visions of Iddo the seer against Jeroboam the son of Nebat?

2 Chronicles 9:29

Now the acts of Rehoboam, first and last, are they not written in the book of Shemaiah the prophet, and of Iddo the seer concerning genealogies?

2 Chronicles 12:15

And the rest of the acts of Abijah, and his ways, and his sayings, are written in the story of the prophet Iddo.

2 Chronicles 13:22

Three times, in the space of five chapters, the inspired author of Chronicles sends his reader to a book by Iddo the seer. He does not describe it. He does not defend it. He assumes you have it, in the way a man giving directions assumes you know where the courthouse is. Every seminarian learns the list of the books that Scripture cites and we do not possess — the book of Jasher, the book of the wars of the LORD, the books of Nathan and Gad and Ahijah and Shemaiah, and the visions of Iddo — and learns to say, in a particular tone of voice, that they are lost.¹

I have one of them on my desk. I mean a transcription; the leaves themselves are in Greece. But I have handled the leaves.

What survives is a Greek translation, in eleven parchment leaves, of a work whose title in the upper margin of the first leaf is Horaseis Addō tou horōntos — "the Visions of Iddo the Seer," which is the Chronicler's own phrase at 9:29, with the seer's name in the form the Greek translator of Chronicles uses at 12:15. The book names its author in its first verse, "Iddo the seer, the son of Hodaiah"; it dates itself, in its tenth, to "the third year of Abijah, in the month Bul"; and it tells us, in its last chapter, where it was kept, when it was read, and when it stopped being read. I have never handled a text so willing to answer questions. The editor has divided it into eight chapters, which I summarize here so that the reader knows the shape of the thing before we go into it:

1. A word of the LORD to Iddo, in the night, concerning the nostrils of man: what they are for, what gathers in them, and what is not to be done with it.
2. The tradition of Hamul of Shiloh, in the days of the judges, the first man known to have done it in public, and what the elders did about him.
3. The law of the issue of the nose, in the form of Leviticus, with its penalties graded from a washing to a cutting off.
4. The oracle against Jeroboam, which is the one part of the book Chronicles leads us to expect, with a second oracle against Judah and a parable of two sons, broken off by the loss of two leaves.
5. The invasion of Shishak, told very nearly as Chronicles tells it, with three additions that Chronicles does not make.
6. Fourteen sayings, "which the men of Asa king of Judah copied out."
7. A vision of a flying roll, and of the gate of Jerusalem in the day of visitation.
8. The seer's deposit of the book in the Temple, the reading of it before the people, and his death.

It runs, in the English rendering, to a little under three thousand words. It can be read in a quarter of an hour. I have read it, I estimate, three hundred times, and the quarter of an hour has not gotten shorter.

How the text reached me

I will give the provenance exactly as I have it, because it is the first thing the skeptic will ask about, and because I have nothing to hide in it, and because the parts of it I cannot give are not mine to give.

In 2023 a sixteenth-century Greek psalter was sold, as part of a mixed lot, at an auction house in Larissa, in Thessaly. The buyer, a private collector whom I have met twice and whose name I am not at liberty to use, had the psalter rebound, and the binder found, in the pasteboards of the old covers, eleven leaves of much older parchment that had been cut down and glued in as stiffening. This is called binding waste, and for readers who find it suspicious I will say only that it is how a great many things have been found; a binder in the sixteenth century, needing stiff material, took whatever old book was nearest and did not ask what it was. The leaves measure about nineteen by fourteen centimeters, are ruled for twenty-four lines, and are written in a Greek minuscule hand of the tenth century. They were trimmed to fit the boards, and the outer margins of three of them, and the upper third of a fourth, are gone. Two leaves are missing between the seventh and the eighth, which is the gap I mentioned, and which the editor reckons at about forty-eight lines. A second hand, perhaps of the eleventh century, has corrected the first in a few places. A third and much later hand has added a small number of readings in the margins. At the end, in the first hand, is a single word, etelesthē, "it is finished," followed by three blank lines. No scribe's name, no place, no date. The man who copied it did not think he was doing anything remarkable, and I find that I believe him.

The collector commissioned a scholar in Thessaloniki — I will call him the editor, as his own notes do — to prepare a transcription and an English rendering with apparatus. This was privately printed in 2025 in a run of forty copies.² Copy thirty-one reached me in November, through a former student of mine who had acted as the collector's agent at the Larissa sale and who knew, from a course I taught him twelve years ago on the lost books of Chronicles, what the title in the upper margin meant. He telephoned me from the collector's house. I will not repeat what he said, except that he began with my name and did not finish the sentence.

In January I was permitted to examine the leaves myself, over four days, under the collector's supervision and in his library. I was permitted to photograph them. I was not permitted to publish the photographs, and I will not, although I will show the plates to any qualified person who asks me by name, and I have said so in the comments. The leaves are not for sale. I asked. I asked twice.

The editor's apparatus is dry, careful, and, on the one question that matters, deliberately noncommittal. He says, of why the compilers of the fourth-century lists passed the book over, that "the text itself does not say." That is true. I am not so constrained, and the rest of this report is where I say what the text does not.

Why it is not in your Bible, and why that was a mistake

Here is the whole of my argument in two sentences. The canon cites the book, three times, as a source. The book is not in the canon. One of those two facts is an error, and it is not the first one.

Now the longer form, which has to begin with the book's own account of its history, because the book has one, and I have never seen a skeptic deal with it.

In its last chapter the seer lays the book up "in the house of the LORD, beside the book of Shemaiah the prophet" (8:1) — that is, in the Temple archive, next to the other work Chronicles cites for the reign of Rehoboam — and charges the Levites to read it aloud, in the seventh year, at the feast of tabernacles, "after the law, that it may be heard with the law" (8:2). They did so, under Abijah and under Asa; "and after Asa it was not read, but it was laid up in the house of the LORD, and there it remained" (8:5). That is forty years of public reading, at most, and then silence; an archived book, known by title to the man who wrote Chronicles with the archive open in front of him, and to nobody else. I will say more below about who decided, under Asa's successor, that it would not be read, and on what grounds. For now I want you to see that the first omission was not made in the fourth century after Christ. It was made in the ninth century before, by a Levite, and the book predicted it.

Now the second omission. The editor's note records, correctly, that the Visions are not among the books Athanasius of Alexandria listed as received in his thirty-ninth Festal Letter, in the year 367; that they are not in the canon confirmed at Carthage thirty years later; and that Jerome did not translate them.³ Take the three in reverse order.

Jerome. Jerome translated the Old Testament from the Hebrew, on the principle he called the Hebrew truth, and he had no Hebrew of this book to translate. Nobody has. What we have is Greek, and the Hebrew behind it was gone before Jerome was born. His silence tells us what was on Jerome's shelf. It tells us nothing about the book. I will add, because I promised to treat him here, that Jerome was a man of strong dislikes who did not always record his reasons, and that a man who could write what he wrote about Rufinus could leave a book out of his Bible for reasons he would not have put in a letter. I say nothing about Jerome's habits. I say that the evidence of his silence is evidence about Jerome.

Carthage. A council confirms what its bishops bring with them. The bishops at Carthage brought Athanasius's list, as the African church generally did, and confirmed it. No bishop brought this book, because by 397 the only church still reading it was a Greek one, and Carthage was a Latin council. There is no record that Carthage considered the Visions and rejected them. There is no record that Carthage had heard of them. The absence of a book from a list is not a verdict on the book. It is a fact about the list.

Athanasius. This is where the error was made, and I want to be precise about it, because I am accusing a saint of a mistake and I would like the accusation to be the right size.

Athanasius counted the books of the Old Testament at twenty-two, to match the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. He says so. The number came first; the list was made to fit it. Everyone who has studied the Festal Letter knows that the fitting required some work — Ruth is folded into Judges, Lamentations into Jeremiah, the twelve minor prophets into one book — and the work was done by a man in Alexandria in the fourth century, by lamplight, in a language that was already changing, counting on his fingers. I believe he had twenty-three books on his table. I believe one had to go. And I believe the one that went was the one that circulated, as this one evidently did, as a supplement to the book of Chronicles.

Consider what Chronicles is called in Greek. It is called Paraleipomena, "the things left out" — the things omitted from Kings, gathered up afterward into a book of their own. A work that Chronicles cites as its source, and that traveled behind Chronicles as an appendix, is a thing left out of the book of things left out. I do not think a man counting to twenty-two can be blamed for losing track of which omissions he had already recovered. And once it was gone from the list, nobody missed it, for a reason that will be obvious to anyone who has read the book: nobody, in any century, has ever stood up in a council and said, "Brethren, we have forgotten the one about the nose."

That is the clerical error. It was made by a cleric; it was made by a great one; and it was made in the way great men make errors, which is in the course of doing something else correctly. I hold Athanasius in the highest regard. He was right about the Trinity. He was counting.

The Greek church did not stop reading it. This is the part of the argument the skeptic cannot answer, and I have put it last so that it is the thing you remember. The leaves in Thessaly were copied in the tenth century, six hundred years after Athanasius. They were corrected in the eleventh, by a second hand that went through the text and changed, among other things, the one word in the statute that it could not bear to leave standing (I will come to that word). They were glossed in the margins by a reader later still. Books that nobody reads are not corrected, and they are not glossed. Somebody, in a Greek monastery, in the eleventh century, expected this book to be read aloud and wanted the reading to be right — and expected it, I would point out, to be read in the same way the seer asked for it to be read: after the Law, and with it. The day the Church finally lost it was the day a binder in Thessaly cut it up to stiffen a psalter, and that was a binder's decision, not a council's, and binders are not infallible either.

On the date of the text, and on dates generally

Readers of this blog know my view of dates, and new readers should know it before they read further, so that they can discount me accordingly. The secular academy dates a text by the hand it is written in, by the ink, and, where it can, by carbon-14, which is to say by three methods that all assume that the present is the key to the past. I assume the opposite, as Scripture does, and I take a text's own account of its origin as evidence — not as proof, but as evidence, which is more than the secular academy allows it.

The hand is of the tenth century after Christ. The text claims to come from the tenth century before. That is a gap of two thousand years between composition and copy, and I want to say plainly, for the benefit of the commenter who finds it damning, that two thousand years is ordinary for the Old Testament. The oldest complete Hebrew Bible in the world is a copy made in the year 1008.⁴ Nobody dates Isaiah by it.

The text's own date is "the third year of Abijah, in the month Bul" (1:10). On Archbishop Ussher's reckoning that is the autumn of the year 956 before Christ.⁵ The secular chronology puts it about forty-five years later, and I note, as I have noted before on this blog, that of the two chronologies the secular one is the one that keeps moving. Bul is the Canaanite name of the eighth month, used in the Bible exactly once, for the completion of Solomon's Temple (1 Kings 6:38), and not used by anyone after the Exile, when the months took Babylonian names. A forger writing after the Exile would have written Marcheshvan. A forger writing in Greek, in the tenth century after Christ, would not have known there was a month to name.

There are three pieces of internal evidence that I weigh, and I will give them in ascending order of weight.

First, the grammar. The editor observes that in three places the Greek writes the noun for "nostrils" in the dual — a grammatical number for things that come in pairs, which Greek had lost long before the tenth century and which, he says, was "presumably carried over from the translator's exemplar." A dual in a tenth-century manuscript is a fossil. A forger of the tenth century does not invent an obsolete grammatical number by accident, and he does not use it three times and the plural everywhere else. The dual came from an old book, and the old book came from an older one, and I would like someone in the secular academy to tell me where, in their account, the old book came from.

Second, the borrowings, so called. The seventh chapter is a vision of a flying roll, and anyone who knows Zechariah will recognize it: the angel that talked with me, the statute that goeth forth over the whole land, the curse that enters the house and remains in the midst of it. The editor notes the resemblance and says, with his usual care, that Iddo "follows" Zechariah 5. The secular reader will take this as the end of the matter: Zechariah wrote in the sixth century before Christ, four hundred years after Abijah, so a book that follows Zechariah was written after Zechariah, so the date in 1:10 is a fiction. I ask that reader to open Zechariah to its first verse. The prophet is "Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, the son of Iddo." The editor says, in a footnote, that this Iddo is of the Persian period and "cannot belong to this family," and the editor is a careful man, and I think that here he has been careful in the wrong direction. Families in Judah kept names, and families in Judah kept books. A prophet whose grandfather bore the seer's name, and who saw a flying roll of twelve cubits by six, and wrote down a roll of twenty by ten, did not invent the roll. He had read about it. He had read about it in a book that was in his family, and he made it larger, as grandsons do. The arrow of time runs one way. Zechariah borrowed from Iddo.⁶ The same holds, I think, for the parable of the two sons in chapter 4, which the reader will find resembles a parable in the twenty-first chapter of Matthew; the editor says the two are independent, and I note the resemblance and say nothing more about it, because I know what will be said of me if I do.

Third, the first chapter. Here I come to the part of the book that bears on the work of this Institute most directly, and I ask the reader's patience with a paragraph of what the secular academy calls creation science and what I call reading.

Chapter 1 opens with the LORD's own question, "Hast thou considered the nostrils of man, that I made them?" — the form of the question is that of Job 1:8, and the editor says so — and goes on to quote Genesis 2:7, exactly. I want you to notice what it does next. It says that the dust of which man was made goes on entering him, at the nostril, with every breath; that the nostril gathers it; and that what it gathers "is of the dust, and unto the dust it shall return" (1:5). That is Genesis 3:19 — the sentence passed on Adam — applied to the smallest possible particular, and applied, I would point out, before a single word of law has been spoken. Then, at 1:6, the LORD recites what He has given man for food, and the list is in the order of Scripture: "every herb bearing seed, and the fruit of the tree" (Genesis 1:29), "and the flesh of the clean beast" (Genesis 9:3), "and the honey of the rock" (Psalm 81:16). The text knows the order of the dietary grants. It knows that flesh was given after the Flood and not before. It puts the nostril on the far side of a line that God drew twice and moved once, and it does so without comment, as a thing too obvious to argue. Readers of the vapor canopy series will ask whether I think the antediluvian atmosphere bore on any of this, and the answer is that I do, and that the arithmetic is in an appendix to the critical edition, and that I will spare you.

I will close this section with the sentence I have found myself saying to every skeptic who has written to me, and which I have not yet heard answered. A hand can be copied. A doctrine cannot be invented by a Greek monk in the tenth century and attributed to the court of Rehoboam without the monk having a reason; and I have looked for the monk's reason, for a year, and the only one I can find is that it was true.

The nostril in the canonical witness

Before I turn to the text itself I want to establish something that, in my experience, most readers have never considered, which is that the Bible has a great deal to say about the nose. I counted. Setting aside the ordinary idiom in which the Hebrew "nose" stands for anger (a usage I will treat in a later post, because it is more relevant than it sounds), there are a dozen passages in which the nostril is the specific organ in view, and they are not scattered at random. They cluster at the beginning and the end of things.

Begin where Scripture begins.

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Genesis 2:7

Of all the apertures of the body, God chose the nostril. Not the mouth, which He would later fill with the forbidden fruit; the nostril. It is the organ of inspiration, in the oldest sense of that word, and it is the first part of Adam named in Scripture after the dust. I want you to hold that in mind as you read Iddo, because what the book says, reduced to a sentence, is that what issues from the organ of inspiration is not to be treated as food. The Visions of Iddo the Seer does not derive its prohibition from Genesis 2:7. It does not need to. It stands on it.

Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of?

Isaiah 2:22

Here the nostril is the seat of mortality. The prophet's point is that man's life is a thin stream of air in a small passage, and that the passage can be stopped. Anyone who has tried to breathe through a nose that has been, let us say, neglected, knows precisely what Isaiah means.

Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or caldron.

Job 41:20

This is Leviathan. I include it because the Behemoth readers will expect it, and because it establishes two things: first, that Scripture is willing to describe what comes out of a nostril in physical terms, without euphemism; and second, that what comes out of a nostril can be something other than breath. Nobody reads Job 41:20 and supposes the smoke is a metaphor for Leviathan's opinions.

Surely the churning of milk bringeth forth butter, and the wringing of the nose bringeth forth blood: so the forcing of wrath bringeth forth strife.

Proverbs 30:33

This is from the sayings of Agur the son of Jakeh, a figure about whom we know almost nothing, whose material was very nearly left out of Proverbs itself (the Septuagint shuffles it, and some of the Fathers did not know what to do with it). The verse is usually read as a proverb about provocation, and it is. It is also a plain, observed description of what happens when the nose is worked at too hard with the finger, and I do not believe Agur chose the image by accident. He had seen it. Someone in his household did it, and did it enough that it became proverbial. I would note, further, that the three clauses describe three things that are produced by pressure, and that in each case the thing produced is a thing one does not want. Agur is not neutral about the wringing of the nose. He files it with strife.

Now the hardest text, which I will not pretend is not the hardest.

There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.

Mark 7:15

The objector will say: our Lord teaches that nothing entering a man defiles him; the thing in question enters the man; therefore it cannot defile him; therefore Iddo contradicts Christ, and the Church was right to leave it out. I have received this argument in some form from eleven correspondents, two of them ordained, and I want to answer it with the seriousness it deserves. I answer in three parts.

First, the thing in question does not come "from without." It comes from within. It is, in the most literal sense the English language affords, a thing which comes out of the man — and our Lord's own words, in the same verse, say that those are the things that defile. The objector has read the first half of the verse and stopped. I do not say this unkindly. It is the half everyone remembers.

Second, what Iddo condemns is not a single motion but a double one: a thing that has come out and is then deliberately returned. Mark 7 contemplates things that enter and things that exit. It makes no provision for a round trip. Nothing in the passage, or in Matthew's parallel, or in the whole of the New Testament, addresses the case of a thing which, having come out of the man, is by the man's own hand put back; and where the canonical witness is silent, a book which speaks to exactly that silence is not contradicting the canon. It is completing it.

Third, and I say this gently to the ordained correspondents in particular: the context of Mark 7 is the washing of hands. The Pharisees have complained that the disciples eat with unwashed hands. Read the whole chapter again with that in mind, and then read Iddo, and ask yourself whether the two are in tension, or whether one is the question and the other is the answer.

I pass over Leviticus 11, which concerns creeping things, because I have been asked whether the matter in question "goeth upon the belly" (Lev. 11:42), and it does not; it goeth upon the finger. I do not think Leviticus 11 applies, and I say so in the interest of not overstating my case. Leviticus 15 is another matter.

Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When any man hath a running issue out of his flesh, because of his issue he is unclean.

Leviticus 15:2

The whole of Leviticus 15 concerns what the Authorized Version calls an "issue," a flow from the body. The chapter treats such a flow as rendering the person unclean until evening, and it treats everything the flow touches — the bed, the saddle, the earthen vessel — as unclean also. I grant that it does not name the nose. But the Hebrew word rendered "issue" (zōb) is not anatomically restricted, and the chapter's governing principle — that what the body puts out is not to be casually taken back in — is exactly the principle Iddo makes explicit. I would go further. The Visions of Iddo the Seer reads like a commentary on Leviticus 15 by someone who felt the chapter had been too polite.

Thou shalt have a place also without the camp, whither thou shalt go forth abroad: and thou shalt have a paddle upon thy weapon; and it shall be, when thou wilt ease thyself abroad, thou shalt dig therewith, and shalt turn back and cover that which cometh from thee.

Deuteronomy 23:12–13

I note only the phrase "that which cometh from thee," and the instruction attached to it. Cover it. Not: consume it. The Law's attitude toward what comes from the body is consistent from Leviticus to Deuteronomy, and it is an attitude of distance. Outside the camp; dig; cover; wait until evening. The Visions of Iddo the Seer extends the same attitude upward by about four feet, and I have yet to hear an argument for why it should stop at the waist.

Finally, and I offer this with some hesitation because I know how it will be received, I draw attention to the covenant with Noah.

But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

Genesis 9:4

The first dietary law given to the whole human race after the Flood is a prohibition on eating a thing that issues from the body. Not a species; an issue. Blood is what comes out of a wound. I do not say that Genesis 9:4 is about the nose. I say that it establishes the category — that which comes out of the body is not food — within the first chapter of post-Flood history, and that Iddo belongs to that category and knows it belongs to it. It is Noahic law in its spirit, whatever one concludes about its date, and I will have something to say about its date.

The Fathers, the philosophers, and a silence

I have been asked, reasonably, why, if this book was known to the early Church, the Fathers do not discuss its teaching. The short answer is that I have not claimed it was known to the Fathers. I have claimed it was known to the author of Chronicles, and to the Greek monks who were still copying it six centuries after the Fathers, and that the Fathers fell in the gap between. The longer answer is that their silence is not the silence of ignorance. It is the silence of men who did not need to say it. Let me show you what I mean.

Clement of Alexandria wrote, around the year 200, a work called the Paedagogus — the Instructor — which is a manual of Christian conduct of extraordinary thoroughness.⁷ It has chapters on eating, on drinking, on expensive dishes, on laughter, on sleep, on the use of perfume and garlands, on the proper way to recline at table, on belching, on spitting, on how a Christian should walk and how he should bathe and how much of his wife's face he may look at in public. I have read the Paedagogus three times for this project. There is nothing in it about the nose. Here is my point. A man who will tell you how to belch had something to say about the nose, and either he did not say it, which I do not believe, or he said it somewhere we do not have, or he did not need to say it because a book was already in circulation that said it for him. I hold the third view. The Paedagogus is the sort of book one writes when the nose is already settled.

Augustine gives us, in the second book of the Confessions, the most famous small sin in Christian literature. As a boy of sixteen he stole pears from a neighbor's tree — pears he did not want, with companions he did not much like, from a tree he did not covet — and threw most of them to the pigs. He spends the better part of five chapters on it. He does this because he understood something that modern readers of Iddo have, in my correspondence, almost universally failed to understand: that the smallness of a sin is not its defense. It is its indictment. The pear was nothing; that was the horror of it. Iddo says the same thing in six words, to an angel, at 7:5: "My lord, it is a small thing." And is answered in seven: "It was a small thing in Shiloh." I ask every reader who has laughed at Iddo to read Confessions II.4 through II.9 and then tell me honestly which is the smaller act — taking a pear one does not want, or taking the thing that Iddo names, which, I would point out, one does want, and which is the harder thing to confess.

Origen, had he commented on Iddo, would of course have allegorized it, as he allegorized everything: the nostril would be the soul, the mucus the passions, the finger the will, and the mouth — well. He may in fact have done so; a great deal of Origen is lost, and what survives has been through the hands of translators who did not always approve of him. I note only that allegory does not abolish the literal sense; it stands on it. You cannot allegorize a thing you have not first admitted is there.

Jerome, who disliked the books outside the Hebrew canon and said so with the vigor for which he is remembered, and who was not above a grudge, is relevant to the question of how the book was lost, and I will treat him in the section on the canon. I will say here only that Jerome's opinion of a book is evidence about Jerome.

Gregory the Great gave the Church its classic analysis of gluttony, which Thomas Aquinas adopted in the Summa: one may sin in eating praepropere, laute, nimis, ardenter, studiose — too soon, too sumptuously, too much, too greedily, too daintily.⁸ Five ways. I have always felt that it was a list of five that wanted to be six, and I have never been able to say what the sixth was. I can now. What vice of eating is not covered by "too soon," "too sumptuously," "too much," "too greedily," or "too daintily"? The vice of eating what is not food. Gregory did not name it. I believe he did not need to. In his day it had a book.

Among the philosophers, Aristotle, in the Parts of Animals, treats the nose as the organ of smell and breath, and observes of the nostrils that they are two, so that if one is stopped the other may serve — a design argument, incidentally, which he did not pursue, and which I will. The Greeks had a word for what the nose produces, myxa, and it is not a flattering word; it is the root of our "mucus" and of several Greek insults. Plato does not discuss it. I have checked. Pliny the Elder, in the Natural History, recommends as remedies a number of bodily substances that I will not list on a family website. He does not recommend this one. When Pliny declines to recommend something, it is worth asking why.

I would add, for the benefit of readers who put more weight on the secular literature than on the Fathers, that a study published in a journal of hospital epidemiology in 2006 found that persons who habitually pick the nose have higher carriage rates of Staphylococcus aureus than persons who do not, and that the authors allowed that the relationship "may well be causal in certain cases."⁹ I do not rest anything on this. I mention it because it is the kind of thing the Church is generally accused of being behind on, and in this case she was, by my reckoning, seventeen centuries ahead.

The text, with annotations

What follows is not the whole book. The whole book is the editor's to publish, and he has published it, in forty copies, and I have written to him to ask that he publish it in more. What follows is the whole of the book's teaching, chapter by chapter, in my own paraphrase where paraphrase will do and in the editor's rendering where it will not, with my annotations set apart. Verse numbers are the editor's. I have kept his rendering of the word at the center of the book — "the issue of the nose," on the model of the English Leviticus — because it is the right rendering and because the word most readers would substitute for it is not one I will put in a verse.

I ask the reader to do one thing before beginning, which is to take his hands out of his pockets and put them on the table. I have found that it helps.

Chapter 1. The word concerning the nostrils

The book opens with a superscription in the ordinary form of the prophets (compare Isaiah 1:1, Amos 1:1): the words of Iddo, son of Hodaiah, "which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem" in the reigns of Rehoboam and Abijah. Then, with no narrative and no description — the editor notes that the LORD is never described in this book; "the voice speaks and the seer writes" — the word comes, in the night, as a question.

3Hast thou considered the nostrils of man, that I made them?

4When I formed man of the dust of the ground, I breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul. The nostrils are the gate of the breath: by them the breath goeth in, and by them it goeth out; and by them man smelleth the savour of the offering, and the rain, and the herb of the field.

5And the dust of the ground, whereof I made man, entereth in at the nostrils with the breath; and the nostril gathereth it, and maketh it moist, and it is dried within. This is the issue of the nose. It is of the dust, and unto the dust it shall return.

6It is not for food. I have given unto man every herb bearing seed, and the fruit of the tree, and the flesh of the clean beast, and the honey of the rock. The issue of his nostril I have not given him.

Visions of Iddo 1:3–6

7Yet the children of men put their hand to their nostril, and take out that which is dried therein, and put it to their mouth, and eat it; in the gate, and in the house, and in the field, and in My courts.

8And they say, It is a small thing, and it is of mine own body, and I have wronged no man. But I have said, It is of the dust; and that which I have caused to go out of a man, he shall not take in again.

9This is forgotten in Judah, and it is not written in the book of the law that is read before the people. Therefore write it thou in a book, that it may be for a witness in the day that I visit.

10And I wrote it, in the third year of Abijah, in the month Bul.

Visions of Iddo 1:7–10

Chapter 2. Hamul of Shiloh

The second chapter is not a vision but a tradition, "the word that the elders of Judah received of their fathers, concerning the beginning of the thing in Israel." It is the book's one piece of narrative, and it is told in the manner of Judges: a man, a place, a day of assembly, and a thing done in the gate.

2In the days when the judges judged, there was a man of Shiloh, of the sons of Ephraim, whose name was Hamul; and he sat in the gate of Shiloh with the elders in the day of the assembly.

3And while the elders spake, Hamul put his finger to his nostril, and took out that which was dried therein, and looked upon it, and put it in his mouth, and ate it, before the elders, and before all the people that stood in the gate.

4And the elders saw it, and were silent; and the people saw it; and it was told in Shiloh that day, and in the cities of Ephraim.

Visions of Iddo 2:2–4

The elders send for Hamul afterward and ask him what he has done. His answer (2:6) is the second excuse of 1:8 in the mouth of its first speaker: "I took but that which was mine own. Whom have I wronged?" And the elders' answer is the verse on which, as the editor rightly says, the whole statute of chapter 3 is built:

7And the elders said, Thou hast wronged the gate. The gate is the place of judgment, and the eyes of all Israel are upon it; and thou hast done in the gate a thing that is not done.

8And they put Hamul out of the gate, and he sat no more among the elders; and his name became a byword in Ephraim, so that when a man did this thing, they said of him, He hath done as Hamul.

Visions of Iddo 2:7–8

The chapter closes with two verses the editor is at pains to label as the elders' opinion rather than the LORD's word, and he is right to label them so, and I agree with the elders. Hamul's sons did as their father had done; the young men of Shiloh learned of them; "and the thing spread in Israel, from Dan even unto Beersheba; and no man rebuked it, because every man had done it" (2:9). And then: "Of this came the days of Eli, and the day that the ark was taken; for they would not rebuke the small thing, and the great things came after it" (2:10).

Chapter 3. The law of the issue of the nose

Here is the statute, and here the reader who has been laughing will, I think, stop, because the chapter is written in the exact form of Leviticus 15 — the same formulae, "unclean until the even," "wash his hands in water," "seven days" — and it reads like Leviticus, which is to say it reads like law. The editor's note sets out the gradation of penalties, and I have put it in a table below. First the governing verse, which is addressed, I would point out, to everyone: "for the man and for the woman, for the child and for the stranger that sojourneth among you" (3:2).

3When any man hath an issue of his nostril, whether it run, or whether it be dried within, he shall not put it to his mouth, neither shall he eat it: it is an abomination.

4He shall not eat it in the house, nor in the field, nor in the gate, nor in the assembly, nor in the court of the house of the LORD; neither openly, nor when he supposeth that no man seeth.

5He shall not take it out with his finger and hold it, and consider it, and afterward eat it. The holding is not the sin; the eating is the sin.

Visions of Iddo 3:3–5

Verses 6 through 11 are the cases, and they go, as Leviticus goes, from the lesser to the greater. I give them in the editor's rendering, because paraphrase would soften them and they are not meant to be soft.

6He shall not roll it between his fingers. And if he roll it, he shall cast it from him, and wash his hands in water, and be unclean until the even.

7He shall not give it unto his child, nor unto the beast; neither shall he leave it upon the bread, nor upon the table, nor upon the garment of his neighbour.

8If it fall upon the garment of his neighbour, he shall tell his neighbour, and he shall wash the garment, and be unclean until the even. And if he tell him not, and his neighbour find it, he shall pay unto him the price of the garment, and shall add the fifth part thereto.

9If he wipe it upon the wall, or beneath the seat, or in any hidden place, the place is unclean. And when it is found, he that did it shall cleanse the place; and he shall be shut out of the assembly seven days, and on the seventh day he shall wash, and come in.

10The priest also shall not do it when he standeth to minister. And if he do it at the altar, he shall go out, and another shall minister in his stead that day; and he shall not come near the altar until he have washed, and the sun be down.

11But he that putteth it to his mouth and eateth it, that soul shall be cut off from among the elders. He shall not sit in the gate, nor speak in the assembly, nor eat at the table of the king; and his name shall be told unto the children, that they do not as he did.

Visions of Iddo 3:6–11

Then the positive commandment, which is the one I would most like to see on the wall of a Sunday school room, and the answer to the excuse, and the provision for households:

12And this shall ye do, when ye have an issue of the nose. Ye shall go apart; and ye shall take a cloth; and ye shall take it out with the cloth, and not with the finger; and ye shall fold the cloth, and wash it at the even; and ye shall wash your hands in water; and ye shall be clean.

13And if any man say, It is of mine own body, and I do no wrong to my neighbour: he shall be answered, The body is the LORD's; and the issue of the body, whether of the flesh or of the nose, is unclean, as it is written in the law of Moses; and that which is unclean thou shalt not eat.

14And if a child do this thing, his father shall rebuke him, and shall not strike him. And if the father do it, the child shall not learn of him; for the law is above the father.

Visions of Iddo 3:12–14

Chapter 4. The burden of Jeroboam, and the two sons

This is the chapter Chronicles promised us: "the visions of Iddo the seer against Jeroboam the son of Nebat." It begins exactly as a reader of 1 Kings 12 would expect — the two calves, Bethel and Dan, the priests "of the lowest of the people," the feast in a month Jeroboam "devisedst of thine own heart" — and then, at verse 3, it adds the charge that no other text records.

3And thou hast done this also. In the gate of Bethel, at thy feast, before the elders of Ephraim and before the priests that thou madest, thou didst put thy finger to thy nostril, and take out the issue thereof, and eat it; and thou didst reach again unto the bread.

4And the priests that thou madest saw it, and said nothing, because thou hadst made them. And the elders saw it, and did as thou hadst done, because thou wast the king.

5Therefore thus saith the LORD: As thou hast taught Israel to go after the calves, so hast thou taught Israel this thing; and both are laid to thy charge.

Visions of Iddo 4:3–5

The judgment (4:6) is that the house of Jeroboam will be swept away "as a man sweepeth away dung," and — this is the book's own addition — that "the hand that was in the nostril shall be dried up, as thy hand was dried up when thou didst stretch it out against the man of God at Bethel." The reader will remember 1 Kings 13:4. Iddo says it was the same hand. I had not considered that, and I now cannot stop considering it.

Then the oracle turns on Judah (4:7), which is the part I find hardest to read aloud: "Think not, because the calves are in Bethel, that the thing is not in Jerusalem. I have seen it in the gate of Jerusalem, and in the court of My house, and among the princes; and I saw it in Shechem, in the day that all Israel came to make Rehoboam king; and it was not the least of the causes for which the kingdom was rent." The editor says this reading of 1 Kings 12 "has no parallel," and it does not, and I leave it there, as the LORD left it.

The chapter ends with a parable, in the form of Nathan's: a man with two sons gives a feast and calls the elders of the city. The elder son, troubled at table, "sat still, and put his finger to his nostril, and did the thing, before his father's guests" (4:9). The younger, troubled likewise, "rose up, and went out, and came again; and no man knew wherefore he went out, save his father" (4:10). When the feast ends the father asks the elders which son shall sit at his right hand when he is old, and they say, the younger; and the father says they have judged rightly; "And the elder son heard it, and did the thing no more all his days; yet he sat not at the right hand" (4:12).

Chapter 5. Shishak

The fifth chapter follows 2 Chronicles 12:4–11 so closely that the editor can restore the broken first verse from it, and the reader who knows the Chronicles account — Shishak's invasion in Rehoboam's fifth year, Shemaiah's rebuke, the king and princes humbling themselves, the shields of gold carried off and the shields of brass made to replace them — will find it all here, in nearly the same words. There are three additions. I give them in order, because the order is the point.

4And the seer stood among the princes, and saw that, even as they humbled themselves, the hand of one of the princes was at his nostril; and the seer told it not in that day, but wrote it.

Visions of Iddo 5:4

7And the word of the LORD came unto Iddo apart, saying, It was not for the high places only.

Visions of Iddo 5:7

10And the seer said, As the shields, so is the name of a man that hath done this thing in the gate. That which was gold is carried away, and that which is set in its place is brass; and it is borne before him with the same honour; and every man that seeth it knoweth what it is.

Visions of Iddo 5:10

Chapter 6. The sayings

The sixth chapter is headed "These are also sayings of Iddo the seer, which the men of Asa king of Judah copied out" — the formula of Proverbs 25:1, with Asa for Hezekiah, and I note that Asa came first by two hundred years. Fourteen sayings follow, in the two-line form of the canonical Proverbs; none of them, the editor finds, has a parallel there. I give eight, which is more than half, and I give them without annotation, because they do not need it, and because I have found that reading them aloud, slowly, in a room, is annotation enough.

2The nostril is the gate of the breath; it is not the gate of bread.

3That which the LORD hath sent out of the body, the wise man sendeth after it; the fool calleth it back.

4A man may hide his hand from his neighbour; he cannot hide his neighbour's eyes from his hand.

5He that doeth it in secret is seen of the LORD. He that doeth it in the gate is seen of the LORD and of the gate; and the gate hath the longer memory.

6Rebuke thy son for it while he is small; for when he is grown he will do it before thy guests, and thou wilt be silent.

8Better to go out from the feast and return, than to sit at the feast and be remembered.

10A cloth in the bosom is better than a ring upon the hand.

14He that eateth of his own nostril, what shall he refuse? And he that refuseth it, what shall he not keep?

Visions of Iddo 6:2–14, selected

Chapter 7. The flying roll

The seventh chapter is a vision in the manner of Zechariah 5 — I have given my view of which way the dependence runs — and it is short, and it is the chapter in which the book stops arguing and simply shows.

1And I lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and behold, a flying roll.

2And the angel that talked with me said unto me, What seest thou? And I said, I see a flying roll; the length thereof is twelve cubits, and the breadth thereof six cubits.

3Then said he unto me, This is the statute that goeth forth over the face of the whole land. For every one that eateth of the issue of his nostril shall be cut off, according to that which is written on this side of it; and every one that teacheth his child to do so shall be cut off, according to that which is written on that side of it.

4I will bring it forth, saith the LORD of hosts, and it shall enter into the house of him that doeth this thing, and shall remain in the midst of his house; and his table shall know it, and his guests, and his children's children.

5And I said, My lord, it is a small thing. And he said unto me, It was a small thing in Shiloh.

Visions of Iddo 7:1–5

The vision closes with the gate of Jerusalem "in the day that the LORD visiteth": a man stands in it with a cloth in his hand, looks on everyone who enters, and turns back "whosoever had his hand at his nostril"; and the angel says that in that day "the cloth shall be in every bosom, as the fringe is upon every garment, for a remembrance" (7:6–7). The reference is to the fringe of Numbers 15, which was also "for a remembrance," and which every observant Jew still wears. I will only observe that there was, at one time, a prescribed object to be carried on the person as a reminder of this one commandment, and that the object was a handkerchief, and that the handkerchief survived the commandment by some three thousand years, and that most people under forty no longer carry one, and that I do not think the two facts are unrelated.

Chapter 8. The deposit, the reading, and the seer's death

The last chapter is the book's account of itself, and I have used it above in the argument about the canon. I give its central verses here because they are the saddest thing in the book and because the sadness is instructive.

2And he charged the Levites, saying, In the seventh year, at the feast of tabernacles, when the law is read before all Israel, read this also; and read it after the law, that it may be heard with the law.

3And the Levites read it in the seventh year of Abijah, before the people; and the people heard it, and were silent; and some took down their hands.

Visions of Iddo 8:2–3

Iddo died in the days of Asa and was buried in Jerusalem (8:5). The book was read in the seventh year while Asa lived, "and after Asa it was not read, but it was laid up in the house of the LORD, and there it remained." Then the colophon, in the first hand: etelesthē. It is finished. Three blank lines, and nothing else — no scribe, no place, no date — and then, five hundred years later, a binder's knife.

In front of us

I want now to say the thing that has kept me awake, and which is the reason this report is addressed to the whole Church and not to the scholars.

They are doing it in front of us.

I began, in December, to count. It was 5:4 that started me — the prince of Judah on his face before God, with an Egyptian army at the gate, and his hand at his nose — and it was 5:7 that kept me at it, because 5:7 told me that the seer had been counting too, and had held his tongue, and had written it down. I did it at first as an exercise, to see whether the thing was as rare as I had assumed; I had assumed it was rare because I had assumed it was shameful, and I had assumed it was shameful because I was ashamed of it myself. On a Sunday morning, in a congregation of about two hundred and forty, from my seat in the choir — the choir faces the congregation, which gives a view the congregation does not know it is giving — I counted, during a thirty-eight-minute sermon, thirty-one distinct occurrences in nineteen individuals. Fourteen of the nineteen were children. Five were adults. Two of the five were deacons. I am a deacon.

I repeated the exercise where I could do so without being noticed: at a Wednesday night supper, at a high school basketball game, in the waiting room of the county clerk, on a flight from Knoxville to Dallas, and in the reading room of a university library whose name I will withhold. The figures are below. I kept them in a notebook, by hand, with the time and the seat.

The figures do not vary as much as one would expect. In any room, over any hour, something like one person in ten; among children, something like one in four; and in the reading room of a university, where every person present was an adult with at least one degree, one in seven, which is to say that education does not touch it. I did not record the sex of the individuals, and I will not, because I am told it would be indelicate, but I will say that the assumption most readers are making at this moment is not borne out.

And they are not hiding it. That is what I need you to understand. They are not ashamed, because nobody has told them, because the book that would have told them was left out. We have raised, by my count, some sixty-five generations of Christians since the councils without the one book that spoke to this, and they have done, in that time, exactly what you would expect a people to do who had never been told.

And we, who see it, are silent. I have said that the verse on the card above my desk is "the elders saw it, and were silent." The verse I would put on the card above yours is 6:6: "when he is grown he will do it before thy guests, and thou wilt be silent." Not mayest. Wilt. I have tested this. I have sat at tables in three states since November and watched a grown man do it in front of his host and watched the host look at his plate, and I did not say anything either, until February, when I began to say, quietly, to the man beside me, "He hath done as Hamul," which means nothing to the man beside me and a great deal to me, and which I have found is enough to make me stop. The rebuke in the book is for children. I have found it works on adults. I have found, in particular, that it works on me.

I think of the children especially. A girl of six does it in the pew, in the second hymn, with the hymnal open on her lap, and her mother sees it, and takes the girl's hand down, and says nothing, because the mother has nothing to say. She has no verse. She has "don't do that," which is a rule, and a child knows the difference between a rule and a commandment by the age of four. The rule is the mother's. The commandment would be God's. Give her the verse. That is all I have ever wanted from this project — not a council, not a reply from Rome, though I would take either — but to put the verse in that mother's hand, so that when she takes her daughter's hand down she has something to say. She has it now. It is 3:14. The first half of it is for the girl, and the second half of it is for the girl's father, and I would ask the mother to read him the second half.

Questions I have been asked, with answers

I have received, since a preliminary version of this report circulated among the Institute's supporters in February, somewhat over four hundred letters and messages. The questions repeat. I answer the commonest here, and I ask readers to consult this section before writing, as I am one man and the Institute does not have a secretary.

1. Is my child in sin?

The statute is "for the man and for the woman, for the child and for the stranger" (3:2), so the book does not exempt him; but the book also says what is to be done, which is that "his father shall rebuke him, and shall not strike him" (3:14), and I would ask parents to read the second clause as carefully as the first. As a father of six, I know exactly what I am asking when I ask a household to hold this line, and I know that the age at which a child can be said to understand the prohibition is the age at which the prohibition binds, and not before. Below that age, the matter is one for training, not for discipline, and the training should be patient. Above it, it is what it is. I would only add that in my experience the children understand it considerably sooner than the parents would like.

2. I did this as a child, and for some years after. Am I lost?

No. Read 1 John 1:9. Then read Iddo. Then wash your hands. The order matters.

3. What about the wet ones?

I have received this question in more forms than I would have thought possible, and I will treat it in a separate post, Lord willing, with the care it requires. For now: the statute says "whether it run, or whether it be dried within" (3:3), and I had hoped it did not, and it does. The book concerns the deliberate act of the hand and the mouth. What runs down the back of the throat in the ordinary course of things, by the body's own design and without the will's participation, is a different matter, and I do not believe Iddo reaches it; nothing in 3:3 to 3:14 involves the throat. I ask readers not to write to me about this in the meantime. I have your letters. I have read them. Some of them I wish I had not.

4. Is this the unforgivable sin?

No. The unforgivable sin is blasphemy against the Holy Ghost (Mark 3:29). I mention this because I have been asked four times, and the fourth time was by a pastor.

5. What about allergy season?

Hay fever is a post-Fall condition, like thorns and like childbirth, and like them it is a hardship and not a license. The Fall made the thing more abundant. It did not make it food.

6. My dog does this. Is my dog in sin?

Animals are not under the law; the one verse that mentions them (3:7, "nor unto the beast") forbids giving it to the dog, not the dog's own conduct. Your dog is fine. Your dog is, if anything, a reproach to us, in that it does a great many things we are forbidden and feels no shame about any of them, which is the condition of innocence and not of righteousness. The dog has not read the book. You have.

7. I am a Roman Catholic. Is this binding on me?

I am not a Roman Catholic and I am not your bishop, and I would not presume to tell you what binds you. I will say that your Church has a category for exactly this kind of thing — the venial sin — which my own tradition lacks, and which I have never envied until now. I will also say that I have written to the Holy Father, and that the Holy Father has not replied, and that I do not read anything into that, as I understand it to be his usual position on most correspondence.

8. Why did my pastor never tell me this?

Because the book was left out. That is the entire point of this post.

9. Does this apply if nobody sees?

The statute answers this in its own words: "neither openly, nor when he supposeth that no man seeth" (3:4); and the sayings answer it again, "He that doeth it in secret is seen of the LORD" (6:5). I will let the reader consider who, on the Christian view, is always in the room, and leave the question there.

10. Is the Institute selling anything?

Not yet. A critical edition with text, translation and commentary is in preparation; see the sidebar. The Institute is supported by its readers and accepts checks. We do not accept cryptocurrency, for reasons I set out in a post in 2022 that I stand by.

What I am asking of the Church

I am not asking for a council. Councils are expensive, they take years, and the last several have not, in my view, improved matters. I am asking for a footnote. Specifically, I am asking that the next printing of the standard reference works on the canon — the ones that list the books the Church considered and declined, with a line on why — add a line for Iddo, and that the line say what the evidence says: omitted in error; see Pruett. That is all. Everything else will follow from that, in time, as it always does.

To that end I have written, by post, to the Pontifical Biblical Commission in Rome; to the office of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople; to the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville; and to the editors of three journals, two of which have replied. I have enclosed with each letter a copy of this report and a set of plates. I have asked for nothing but that they read it. Rome has not answered. Constantinople has sent a courteous acknowledgment in Greek, which I have had translated, and which says that the letter was received. Nashville has asked whether I am a member of a cooperating church, which I am, and I have told them so, and I am waiting.

I am also asking something of you, the reader, which is harder, and which I will put plainly. Stop. Not because I say so, and not because the Institute says so, but because a book that the author of Chronicles cited, that Greek Christians were still correcting six centuries after the councils, and that fell out of your Bible by a mistake, says so, in words I have put in front of you. If you believe the book is a forgery, say so and show me why, and I will listen; I have changed my mind before, in public, on this very blog. If you do not believe it is a forgery, then you know what you have been doing, and you know what to do about it, and no further argument from me will add anything.

A note on peer review

I submitted a preliminary version of this report to a journal of early Christian studies in January. It was returned in nine days, which is less time than it takes to read it. The reviewer's comments ran to a single line. I will not reproduce the line here, except to say that it did not engage with the text, the provenance, the paleography, or the argument, and that it contained a word I would not use in front of my children. I mention this not to complain — the secular academy has treated this Institute the same way for thirty years, and we are used to it — but so that readers who are told "this has not been peer reviewed" will understand what the phrase means in practice. It means that one man, in nine days, wrote one line. I have put the whole of my evidence on this page. The reader may review it.

— L.H.P., Cedar Bluff

Notes

1. The Old Testament names, as sources or as writings, at least a dozen books that it does not contain: the book of Jasher (Joshua 10:13; 2 Samuel 1:18), the book of the wars of the LORD (Numbers 21:14), the book of Nathan the prophet and the book of Gad the seer (1 Chronicles 29:29), the prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite (2 Chronicles 9:29), the book of Shemaiah the prophet (2 Chronicles 12:15), the story of the prophet Iddo (2 Chronicles 13:22), and others. Of none of these has a line survived, until now. ↩
2. The Visions of Iddo the Seer: Codex Thessalicus (Θ), fols. 1r–11v. Editio princeps, with an English rendering and notes. Thessaloniki: privately printed for the collector, 2025. Forty numbered copies. I hold no. 31. The editor's name is given on the title page and I have his permission to quote the rendering; I do not have his permission to give his name, and I have not. ↩
3. Athanasius of Alexandria, Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter (A.D. 367), which counts "twenty-two books" of the Old Testament "according to the number of the Hebrew letters" and lists them; the Council of Carthage (A.D. 397), canon 24, which gives the Latin church's list; Jerome, Prologus Galeatus (the "helmeted prologue" to Samuel and Kings), on the twenty-two books and on what he will and will not translate. None of the three names Iddo. None of the three says why. ↩
4. The Leningrad Codex (St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, Firkovich B 19 A), dated by its own colophon to A.D. 1008, is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible and the base text of every modern critical edition of the Old Testament. The Aleppo Codex is older by about eighty years and is not complete. The Dead Sea Scrolls are older by a thousand years and are not a Bible; they are a library, with pieces of one. ↩
5. James Ussher, Annales Veteris Testamenti (1650), places the accession of Abijah in the eighteenth year of Jeroboam, which is 958 B.C. in his reckoning; the third year of Abijah is therefore 956 B.C., and the month Bul, the eighth month of the Canaanite calendar (1 Kings 6:38), falls in October–November. I give the date as 956 B.C. and would defend it to within a year either way. Secular chronology puts Abijah about forty years later and cannot say to within a decade. ↩
6. Zechariah 1:1: "the word of the LORD unto Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, the son of Iddo the prophet." The editor's note at 1:1 holds that this Iddo "cannot belong to this family." I treat his reasons in the section on date. ↩
7. Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, book II, chapters 1–7, on eating, drinking, laughter, and conduct at table; the passage on the nose is at II.7, where he treats of "the natural discharges" and of what is "unbecoming at table." He does not say the word. He does not need to. ↩
8. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 148, a. 4, on the species of gluttony, following Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job XXX.18: too soon, too costly, too much, too eagerly, too daintily. Gregory and Thomas are concerned with the manner of eating what is food. Iddo is concerned with the eating of what is not. The one scheme does not touch the other, and I think the Church has been reading Gregory where it should have been reading Iddo. ↩
9. Wertheim, H. F. L., et al., "Nose Picking and Nasal Carriage of Staphylococcus aureus," Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology 27, no. 8 (2006): 863–867. The authors find the association "may well be causal in certain cases." I cite it for the record and not as evidence. Iddo did not need a culture plate, and neither do I. ↩