Conversations in Time: With Men and Women of the Bible

A.J. Pell is rector of Christ Church in Hope, B.C., and a lecturer in
the Anglican Studies Programme at Regent College in Vancouver.

In this intriguing book, Herbert O’Driscoll presents 16 characters who
“step from the world of the Bible into my time and world” and engage
him in conversations about their lives and their faith. We meet Abraham,
Jacob, Deborah, Delilah, Ruth, Michael, Joab, the Queen of Sheba,
Naaman, Amos, Isaiah, and Nehemiah from the Old Testament; and Caspar (a
name O’Driscoll assigns to one of the Epiphany wise men), Caiaphas,
Priscilla, and John the Evangelist from the New Testament.

In the prologue, O’Driscoll makes two promises to his readers. First,
he will free these characters from “the weight of our teaching and
moralizing that ... prevents us from meeting them as people.” Second,
he will “allow them to be themselves ... living the most human of
lives.” He cannot allow himself to keep the first promise, and so
almost every chapter has some moral or lesson, usually in the final
sentences, but occasionally in mid-chapter. For example, Ruth ends with
a plea to “use my story as a call to welcome immigrants into your
society,” and Amos tells us that “the crueler the realities that you
have to impart to people, the more you’ve got to give them some
hope.”

But O’Driscoll does keep his second promise, and that is what makes
this such a good book. People who are easy to vilify after so many
centuries (Caiaphas or Delilah) reveal their humanity to us in ways that
touch our sympathies. The dust of ancient realities enters our nostrils,
allowing us to encounter these biblical characters in more than one
dimension and challenging us to recognize the weakness in our heroes and
the admirable in those for whom our regard is lower. By the end of the
book, we see in each what crafty Jacob came to see in himself—the
person that God wanted each to be.