Bible Review

For a handy table of scriptural references in Messiah, see Jacobi, The Messiah Book, pp. 104–113.

Hamish Swanston, “Handel” in Outstanding Christian Thinkers (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1990), pp. 92–98.

Messiah received its American debut in New York in 1770. To alleviate over-crowding, early audiences were exhorted to leave their hoop skirts and swords at home! Nowadays, we just have to turn off our beepers and cell phones.

Quoted in Peter Jacobi, The Messiah Book: The Life & Times of G.F. Handel’s Greatest Hit (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), p. 30. The rest is juicy, too: “verily an English ‘Solyman [Suleiman] the Magnificent’; who never walks abroad without a train of footmen at his heels, and…with a scented sponge ‘neath his nose, lest the breath of the vulgar herd should contaminate his sacred person.”

Due to the limits of my own expertise, the following comments will be confined to selections drawn from the Old Testament.

Handel deserves particular credit for popularizing the Old Testament and its Apocrypha in a string of oratorios: Alexander Balus, Athalia, Belshazzar, Deborah, Esther, Israel in Egypt, Jephtha, Joseph and His Brethren, Joshua, Judas Maccabaeus, Samson, Saul, Solomon and Susanna. It is not surprising that, even in Handel’s day, his work was especially popular among Jews.

Quoted by Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting.

See Cynthia Hahn, “Joseph Will Perfect, Mary Enlighten and Jesus Save Thee,” Art Bulletin (1986), pp. 54ff.

See Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting.