Old Document Review 'Book of the Bee'

The Book of the Bee is a collection of theological and historical texts compiled by Solomon of Akhlat in the thirteenth century(est1222). The book consists of 55 chapters discussing various topics including the creation, heaven and earth, the angels, darkness, paradise, Old Testament patriarchs, New Testament events, lists of kings and patriarchs, and the final day of resurrection.

I have to say upon the reading of this book I am very intrigued as its like it gives partial history that complies with the Bible yet it gives additional information on many topics. For example Chapter XXXII is a history on how all the prophets died, listing some as dying in peace and others who were killed or assassinated. This is strange to me because when I researched the biblical perspective of the 12 minor prophets, very little is actually known about many of them, so, this collection of histories of their demise is very interesting to me and I wonder where the original content comes from. It may be that the author collected various beliefs or maybe he simply published a copy of some earlier document concerning the prophets.

In many places this book attempts or succeeds to fill in the missing facts from the Bible, including for example the details of the wise men who came to visit Jesus after his birth, this document names 12 kings who made the journey to visit him (please note the bible does not provide a quantity of visitors only that there were three gifts).

I have had my own theory about the authorship of Revelations for a while now knowing that there was still some debate on the matter. In Chapter XLVIII it is said when the disciple was on Patmos that he himself had a disciple called John who later became the bishop of Ephesus, and that he was the author of the Book of Revelations and that everything he had written down he had heard from John the disciple.

Furthermore there is a chapter dedicated to the end of times and another dedicated to the Antichrist, yet these are written with the ideal that there will be peace after tribulations, that cities will be rebuilt and everything will continue on except in peace.