Letters

A letter in Scripture is a written message sent from one named party to another — a king, an official, an apostle, or a congregation — which carries authority, conveys news, or establishes a relationship, and letters run from the court archives of the Old Testament to the epistolary books of the New. The text of 2 Kings 5:5 presents one such document as a diplomatic instrument: the king of Syria says, “Go now, and I will send a letter to the king of Israel,” and Naaman travels with silver, gold, and clothing alongside it. Nehemiah 2:8 likewise records a request for written authorizations — letters to Asaph the keeper of the king’s forest for timber, and, in the surrounding verses, letters to the governors beyond the River for safe passage. Historically, imperial Persian administration is widely understood to have depended on written and sealed authorizations of this kind, which is consistent with the picture the narrative gives, though the text itself makes no claim about administrative procedure.

Letters also appear as instruments of pressure and as material objects handled in worship. In Isaiah 37:14, Hezekiah receives the letter from the hand of the messengers and reads it, then goes up to Yahweh’s house and spreads it before Yahweh; the words of that letter, quoted in Isaiah 37:10–13, are an Assyrian taunt listing conquered cities and their gods. The text says what Hezekiah did with the document; one way to read the gesture is as an appeal that turns a threatening message into a prayer, laying the written word of an empire before the word of God.

In the New Testament, letters are both a literary frame and a social practice. Acts 1:1 opens a written work addressed to Theophilus — “The first book I wrote” — indicating a two-volume composition in letter-like preface form. Acts 23:26–30 preserves the body of a Roman officer’s message, “Claudius Lysias to the most excellent governor Felix: Greetings,” closing with “Farewell”; historically, this matches the standard Greek letter pattern of sender, recipient, greeting, body, and closing wish, which is well attested in surviving correspondence of the period. Paul presupposes another convention in 2 Corinthians 3:1 when he asks whether he needs “letters of commendation to you or from you,” and Philemon 1:1 shows the ordinary Christian opening — senders named, recipient named, greeting following.

Christian traditions read this body of material differently in emphasis. Most agree that the apostolic letters carry authority for doctrine and life, but they divide over whether the disputed letters (for example, those whose authorship is debated) should be attributed directly to Paul or to a later hand working in his name — a question historical scholarship and traditional attribution answer differently. Traditions also differ on how the occasional character of letters, written to specific situations, relates to their standing as Scripture for all churches, and on whether practices such as letters of commendation (2 Corinthians 3:1) are best understood as a continuing church order or as a feature of the first-century mission.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.