Lessons in Omission: Why Are Some Chapters Missing in the Daily Office Lectionary?
Many folks accustomed to reading Bible-in-a-year plans delight to find that the Book of Common Prayer (2019) includes a Daily Office lectionary that leads the faithful Anglican to read through the whole Bible in a year—at least most of it. Those same folks are sometimes a little dismayed to find that several books are missing chapters (e.g., Joshua) and some are missing altogether (e.g., Chronicles). In fact, the whole Bible isn’t read in a year, but rather “the greatest part thereof.” A little history and explanation may help explain why this is the case.
Book of Common Prayer: History
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, in his preface to the first-ever Book of Common Prayer (1549), paints a picture of what Daily Office Bible reading had become in his day. The keeping of the Church Year and Saint Calendar (which grew ever larger in late-medieval piety) had led the Bible readings to be
Sponsored
. . . so altered, broken, and neglected, by planting in uncertain stories, Legends, Responds, Verses, vain repetitions, Commemorations, and Synodals, that commonly when any book of the Bible was begun, before three or four Chapters were read out, all the rest were unread.
Church of England, The Book of Common Prayer (London: Edward Whitchurche, 1549), The Preface.
Cranmer proposed a solution: a calendar of readings that “is plain and easy to be understood, wherein (so much as may be) the reading of holy Scripture is so set forth, that all things shall be done in order, without breaking one piece thereof from another.” That calendar of readings has been the backbone of the Prayer Book tradition ever since. Here it is as printed in the 1662 prayer book. The 1662 Daily Office lectionary guides readers through the New Testament thrice each year, except Revelation, and the Old Testament once each year.
Greater Emphasis on the Church Year
In the late 19th century, the Church Year received greater emphasis. The Daily Office lectionary required further revision (e.g., Monday of Lent II and Tuesday of Lent II, rather than February 1st and February 2nd). The revisers shortened the lessons to half a chapter rather than a whole chapter. The 1979 Book of Common Prayer (BCP) amended the Daily Office lectionary again. The readings became even shorter, much less continuous from day to day, and supplied only three lessons for the four lesson spots.
Ironically, the Daily Office lectionary had begun to resemble the very thing Cranmer was initially opposing. The new Anglican, trying to figure out what to read for “the Evening Prayer lessons for the Tuesday of the second week of Easter,” often resonates with Cranmer’s words in 1549: “Many times, there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out.”
Cranmer’s 1549 lectionary, carried forward into the 1662 BCP, is much simpler. It also contains several omissions:
- Omits the entire genealogical chapters (such as Genesis 37, Ezra 2).
- Eliminates the chapters in Exodus about the construction of the tabernacle.
- Has only four chapters of Leviticus to read.
- Omits the land allotments at the end of Joshua.
- Only nine of Ezekiel’s 48 chapters are included (leaving the most graphic Ezekelian descriptions of Israel’s idolatry unread).
- It never reads the Chronicles.
As well as omissions, the 1662 lectionary contains over 120 chapters from the Apocrypha.
Book of Common Prayer 2019
One of the overarching principles of the revision process that culminated in the BCP 2019 was to rely on the 1662 BCP as a foundation and anchor. Therefore, when it came to the Daily Office lectionary, the compilers made a radical (as in “to the root”) decision to return to a lectionary that resembled the 1662 lectionary in its calendar-year organization and its emphasis on continual reading through the books of the Bible.
When considering a straight adoption of the 1662 lectionary, three problems appeared:
- It seemed disproportionate to omit large amounts of the OT while keeping over 120 Apocryphal lessons.
- The length of the lessons (a whole OT chapter and a whole NT chapter) would strike many as too long.
- Anyone who could pray only one of the offices (Morning Prayer or Evening Prayer) would skip a chapter each day because the readings flowed continuously from morning to evening.
Prayer Book Revision Required
We needed a revision that solved these problems, and the result is the lectionary in the BCP 2019 that includes:
- Less than 50 Apocryphal lessons (a veritable “best of”).
- More chapters of every OT book than the 1662 lectionary.
- Reading the NT each year, with Revelation once, utilizing readings that are two-thirds the length of a chapter (as established by the 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer).
- Optional OT abbreviations for long chapters.
- Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer are on two different tracks so that, even praying only one, the readings still maintain continuity, and you can read the lectionary in its entirety on a two-year cycle (as indicated by the (I) and (II) in the month header).
In addition, while the BCP 2019 includes more of the Old Testament than the 1662 BCP, it applies the same principle of selective omission. The introduction to the lectionary (736) lists the books with missing chapters: Leviticus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Ezekiel. But for a few passages not duplicated in Kings, we omit the vast majority of Chronicles.
Omissions Explained
Including every chapter would have made the Daily Office too long, with lection breaks that did not coincide with the chapter divisions (which are so handy). It’s impossible to omit the entirety of the Apocrypha, since it has always been part of the Anglican Daily Office readings. Therefore, it necessitated omissions.
The nature of the Daily Office set the overarching principle governing the omissions: it is a public prayer service. It is not a private devotion, even though it is often prayed that way. The readings of Scripture must, therefore, be edifying. Every single member of the Prayer Book Task Force believes that God breathed out every word of Scripture, therefore, his inspired word. Passages were not cut for any doubt as to their inspiration. Rather, we discerned how each potentially omitted passage lends itself to edification upon a public hearing.
Where The Difficult Texts Went
Not-so-readily-edifying texts fell roughly into three categories:
- Lists and genealogies.
- Repeated content.
- Viscerally repugnant and lacking a plain salvation-history backdrop.
The land allotments of Joshua have their rightful place in the sacred text, and yield much to study, but to the parishioner stopping by Morning Prayer on their way to work, they are not often of great encouragement. While some genealogies that were cut in the 1662 lectionary were restored in 2019 (especially as they play a pivotal role in Genesis), others remained omitted. So much of Chronicles rehashes the same stories found in Samuel and Kings, and with limited lection “spots”, Cranmer’s decision to omit Chronicles made sense.
The last category only came to bear in one instance. Cranmer’s sensibilities demurred from reading Ezekiel 16 (it doesn’t appear in the 1662 lectionary), presumably considering children’s ears, and because it is a hard passage to edify upon a quick public hearing. While Scripture is full of “difficult” passages that Christians must faithfully receive (Genesis 19, for example, included in the lectionary), the sensitivities of the age seem to have shifted. The felt permission in the 16th and 17th centuries to omit Ezekiel 16 (included in the BCP 2019) transferred to Judges 19 (the rape and butchering of the Benjamite woman), which the 2019 BCP omitted.
How to Read the Omitted Portions
The Daily Office readings are not the total of an Anglican’s engagement with Scripture. Private reading (“Quiet Time”) is also a key part of Christian discipleship. Read the “omitted” OT passages, then or during biblical study.
The Rev. Matthew Brench has proposed another ingenious option: to include the omitted OT and Apocryphal chapters as Midday Prayer lessons. You can see that “unofficial” midday lectionary here. The Daily Office lectionary, in its simpler 1662 and 2019 forms, hopefully serves as a means of regularly presenting the vast majority of the Bible to the Christian’s ears, even with a few omissions.
And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding,
Colossians 1:9
Photo by Ben White on Unsplash.
The Daily Office Lectionary: A Rookie Anglican Guide
A lectionary is, in simple terms, a Bible reading plan. It tells you which scripture passages to read on specific days, and the Daily Office Lectionary guides you through the scriptures each morning and evening of the year.
Designed to be Read: The Architecture of the ACNA Daily Office Lectionary
The Daily Office Lectionary went through several layers of development during the five years of its existence in trial form.
