Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast,

The Whole Council of God. Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies, and it's an Orthodox

priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

So now we're going to move on to the first biblical ode,

which is here in chapter 15. For folks who don't know about the biblical odes, there are nine of them.

There are nine biblical odes. This is nine of them. There are nine biblical odes.

This is the first one.

Second one is in Deuteronomy 32.

They go through the Old Testament.

The ninth one is the only one that's in the New Testament.

The ninth one is from Luke chapter one.

It's the Magnificat, the Him of the Theototokos, that she sings about giving birth to Christ.

So those nine biblical odes have been sung in the church, and have they been the basis for morning prayers for the Matins or Orthro service since at least the beginning of the

4th century. And here's how we know that for sure. Codex Sinaiaticus, which is a Bible from St. Catherine's

monastery, I'm now Sinai, at the end of the Old Testament has the nine biblical odes bound together, like

pulled out of their places and bound together for use in worship. Right. And that's from

first half of the fourth century. So early 300s.

And I doubt that was like they just started doing that, meaning it goes back, right?

Well before that too.

Right.

And this makes sense.

Right.

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